Christopher L. Webber's Blog, page 17

Saying “Thank You”

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber at St. Paul’s Church Bantam, Connecticut, on March 10, 2013. 

Long ago, when I was in seminary,  I remember going with some other seminarians  to a little shoe repair shop  just up Ninth Avenue from the seminary.  In olden days, I should explain,  people used to get their shoes repaired instead of throwing them out. So we took some shoes  that had long ago seen better days  and the cobbler, who was Greek  and spoke with a heavy accent,  told us to come back in a week. So a week later we went back and there were our shoes looking far better than before and we were told the price  and we paid  and the shoe maker started to hand us our shoes.  But as we reached for them he held them back  and said “Say Thank you.”  “Thank you,” we said. “No,” he said, “in Greek: Eucharisto.  You study Greek; why can’t you say Thank you in Greek?”

Thinking back, it occurs to me  that he might have been under contract  to the New Testament department  at the seminary  because he taught an unforgettable lesson.  Thinking back, it also occurs to me  that he might have been working  for the theology department  because he was teaching one of the most  fundamental lessons of the universe  and one we instinctively  teach our own children: say “Thank you.”  Every child beginning to talk  learns to say “Mama” and “Dada “ and then “Bye-bye,”  and then we move on to theology and tell them to say “Thank you.”

But theology isn’t easy,  and we find ourselves year after year  repeating the lesson:  Did you say “Thank you?”  “Now go back and say “Thank you.”  And how many Christmases are spoiled  by the requirement of writing thank you letters to distant relatives?  One day of happiness  and then days and days of nagging reminders:  “Write those thank you letters.”

I won’t tell you which of our children it was  who finally, dutifully wrote:  “Dear Grandma and Granddaddy,  Thank you very much for the two dollars you sent me for Christmas.  My other grandparents sent me five dollars.”

Very early on,  almost as instinctively as a mother bird teaches fledglings to fly, We begin to teach our children theology.  We teach them that saying “Thank you” changes things; that saying “thank you”  lies at the core of right relationships. We know it almost instinctively. We learn it with our first words.  And yet – being human, being fallen,  being always somewhat alienated  from the world we live in -  we never completely get it right.  Again and again we find out too late  that we failed to say “Thank you” to someone who wanted to hear it  or didn’t say it in a way that was heard  or assumed someone knew we were thankful  when they didn’t know.  And that also changes things.  Saying “Thank you”  changes relationships for the better.  Not saying “Thank you”  leaves relationships bent and twisted and broken.

We come here today simply to say “Thank you.”  The primary title given this service  in the Prayer Book is the “Holy Eucharist.”  The modern Greek pronunciation  of that ancient Greek word is “eph-karisto,”  as I learned from the cobbler,  but it’s the same word that we pronounce  as Eucharist in English.  And it means “Thank you.”  Holy Eucharist is “Holy Thank you.” Some parishes have always held that title up.  But the service itself has always said it Even when we called it something else whether we called it the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion or Mass, it’s all about “Thank you.” When we come to the critical point,  when the bread and wine are on the altar  and we are ready to go on, the priest says,  “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.”  “Let us say thank you to the Lord our God.”  And everyone responds, “It is right to give God thanks and praise.”  “It is right to say ‘Thank you’ to God.”  And then begins the longest prayer of the service  reciting the reasons  why it is right to say “Thank you” to God.

This service, the Eucharist,  is a kind of  “Thank you” letter from us to our creator,  a “Thank you” from ourselves  and from all the rest of creation  that hasn’t yet learned how to speak  or hasn’t yet learned the importance of these words. “We give you thanks because…” Follow the Prayer of Consecration today  with that in mind. Read through the alternative prayers of consecration sometime to see how they highlight our thankfulness to God in different ways.  And then notice how at the center of all of them  we give thanks for something  that you might think we should rather  ask forgiveness for:  the death of Jesus on the cross.

Thankfulness, we begin to see,  is not all ice cream and Christmas presents. Thankfulness embraces  the whole spectrum of human life,  the betrayals as well as the faithfulness,  the suffering as well as the joy,  the crucifixion as well as the resurrection. “For in the night in which he was betrayed …. he gave thanks…”  And so he did.  And because of it, we, too, begin to learn  to give thanks  for the whole of our existence  and to leave nothing out  however unthankful we may feel at the time. And notice that when we come to give God thanks  God gives us the best gift of all  and we go away more thankful than when we came.

I think it’s one of the best developments in the church,  in our common life,  that more and more often  when people come to marry,  they do so in the context of the Eucharist.  And what could be more appropriate?  What greater occasion could there be  to give God thanks?  And what better way to put things in perspective  than by remembering  that however much we love each other,  God loves us much more.  We begin a new life not centered on each other  but centered on God.  And what better way  to begin a lifetime of shared meals  than to share this meal  at which God himself is our host?

But even more, I think,  it’s one of the best developments  in our common life  that more and more often when someone dies,  we set the funeral service  in the context of the Eucharist.  What could be more appropriate?  What greater occasion could there be to give God thanks?  Here at the darkest moment of life  we are able to remember the promise  that death is not the end but the beginning.  And what better way to begin a new phase of life,  a new aspect of our relationship with each other,  than to share that life which is never divided,  by which we are bound together for all eternity?

So thankfulness, then, is not fundamentally  a matter of how we feel.  Sure, we’re thankful at weddings  and we may sometimes be thankful at funerals -  thankful for release from suffering,  thankful for a good life  we’ve been privileged to share -  but there are surely times  when none of that superficial thankfulness  is there,  times like that evening when a little group of friends  gathered in an upper room in Jerusalem  in an atmosphere of fear  and impending doom  and were told that death was imminent.  Why, then, would one give thanks?  Why would you give thanks when all you have hoped for  is about to be taken away?  Why would one give thanks when a child has died,  when a young man has died of AIDS,  when a young woman dies in childbirth?  Even, yes, even when children have been senselessly gunned down in a schoolroom. What is there then to give thanks for? Yet that is what Jesus commanded we do. And what could be more appropriate.  Indeed, what could be more essential? Isn’t it in fact, at those times most of all  that we know what it is to be thankful:  thankful that we do know  that in spite of all these events  there is a God who loves us  and cares for us enough to die for us himself,  that even in such tragedy  God can accomplish his purpose.

How, I often wonder, can people go on with their lives who don’t know that? The gospel of a God who loves us is exactly the good news  we need at such times  and for which we could hardly fail to be thankful  most of all when our need is greatest.  It’s easy to be thankful when the sun is shining  but not very meaningful.  It’s when we’re feeling harassed and defeated  and depressed beyond measure  that thankfulness is real,  that the gospel is real,  and that our work and our lives and our faith  are truly measured.

If you study the gospel carefully  you may notice that sometimes it says  Jesus gave thanks for the bread and the wine and sometimes it says he blessed them.  Sometimes it’s simply a matter of translation and sometimes it reflects two different words  that are almost interchangeable. But I think we tend to hear the words differently.  We have this notion that to bless things  makes them different  but to give thanks for things doesn’t.  I bless this medal and that makes it holy  but I thank you for giving me this medal  and that’s just being polite.  isn’t that how we think?  But that’s not the Biblical perspective.  In the Bible to give thanks is to bless:  it’s the same thing. You don’t bless the food,  you bless God for giving you the food.  Just as you don’t give thanks to the new bicycle  that Uncle Fred gave you for Christmas;  you thank Uncle Fred for his gift.

Here on Sunday at the altar,  we give thanks to God for bread and wine  and the life and death and resurrection  of Jesus.  But when you give thanks,  when you bless God for these gifts,  things are changed.  When you give thanks to God,  everything is changed:  bread and wine are changed,  you and I are changed,  sorrows and joys are changed,  the world we live in is changed:  because God is present and we know it. The bread and wine become the focal point  of a presence that enters our lives  and through us transforms the world.  Saying thank you changes things.  Blessing God changes things.  Try it. Try giving thanks to God for all God’s gifts,  even in the midst of pain,  even in the midst of things that you think you can’t bear. Let this Eucharist,  this focal point of our relationship with God  be the model and foundation  on which your life is built.  Give thanks;  lift up your hearts;  let the presence of Christ in you,  let thankfulness transform the world.

Extremism in Defense of Liberty

I guess it had to happen: as the right wing of the Republican party moved further and further to the right, they have finally come around to meet me on the left!  Yesterday I was listening to Rush Limbaugh on the radio (don’t ask!) and I agreed with what he was saying.  Senator Cruz of Texas, generally agreed to be the furthest right senator in Washington, had been questioning the Attorney General about the ability of the President to order a drone strike on an American citizen on American soil, and the AG couldn’t give him a straight answer.  Limbaugh was outraged.  So am I. Last night Senator Rand Paul of Tennessee, barely a  Republican at all, uncorked a filibuster to block the nomination of John Brennan to head the CIA to highlight the same issue.  The Constitution provides what the Declaration of Independence called “certain unalienable rights” and it does not give the President power to act as judge, jury, and executioner in depriving a citizen of those rights.  Why is this even an issue?  If extremists of any stripe have us so terrified  that we are willing to give up our fundamental freedoms to deal with them, then they have already won.   Senator Goldwater had it right years go when he said, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”  Some of us extremists need to let our representatives in Washington know that government in a democracy is a limited government.  No officer of the government ever has a right to ignore the restraints and limits that are in place to protect us from our government because no human creation is free of the fundamental human flaw called sin.  We are all too easily able to persuade ourselves of the purity of our own motives but someone else needs to be able to say “No” and we need to be willing – indeed compelled – to listen.

The Rock Was Christ

A sermon preached  by Christopher L. Webber at St Paul’s Church Bantam, Connecticut, on March 3, 2013.

When our ancestors came out of Egypt,  they wandered for years in the desert and often lacked food and water. Again and again, they complained to Moses  and Moses complained to God, and finally God told Moses  to strike a rock with his rod, and Moses did, and water gushed out  to satisfy the people’s thirst.  Then, the tradition is that that rock followed them  as a constant source of water  whenever the people got dry.

Now that tradition is not in the Bible  except second hand in this morning’s epistle which calls it a “supernatural rock”  and goes even further to say that the supernatural rock was Christ.  Well, any rock that follows you around  is supernatural, for sure. That’s not what rocks normally do, and living in Connecticut  we’ve seen plenty of rocks and know how rocks behave. A natural rock just lies there.  They may seem to move up out of the ground, but they say  it’s the frost that does that. Frost moves them up  and frost knocks them down out of walls and generally rearranges them  but otherwise a natural rock stays pretty much where nature put it.

But suppose you take one of those natural rocks  and put it in the hands of a great artist and suppose that artist carves it into the likeness of Abraham Lincoln sitting in a chair looking down at the tourists, or Rosa Parks sitting in a chair  looking out at the crowds.  Or suppose you take a supply of those rocks and form a wall  and carve into that wall  the names of soldiers killed in Viet Nam . Or suppose you take a piece of stone and  place it above the grave of someone you love and carve their name into it.  Is that still just a natural rock?  Can we treat it the way we treat any other rock, or have we made it something more?

There’s an ancient distinction  between the eye of the flesh, and the eye of the mind,  and the eye of the spirit. The eye of the flesh sees a rock:  rough, gray New England granite or limestone or sandstone – but rock, a natural rock, a part of the landscape, an obstacle to the spring plowing,  something to kick out of the way. Or maybe the natural eye doesn’t even see it because you’ve seen them all before and you don’t even bother to look. But the eye of the mind can see something more:  a collection of atoms of a particular type,  the product of volcanic action  or sedimentation  or some other natural process that shaped it and determines its nature. If you’re a geologist or scientist,  you’ll find that interesting and something to examine and study. But the eye of the spirit  sees not the natural stone carved in some way but Abraham Lincoln  or a man you grew up with or your grandmother  and is deeply moved by seeing their name or figure carved into it and would be outraged  if someone should come along and kick that stone  as you might normally do  to the same sort of rock any day in a field.

All rocks are not the same rock,  and some have eyes to see the difference. If you were told  that this rock I hold in my hand  is a piece of Plymouth Rock or a piece of the rock  that was rolled in front of the tomb of Jesus you might feel it had a holiness  that made it almost too special even to touch.

What all this leads up to is  a question: Can we draw any clear line  that separates different kinds of rock or that distinguishes a natural rock from something more,  so that we might even call it “super-natural?”  I’m really not sure that the terms  natural and supernatural are very useful. “‘Natural” implies that we can measure it, touch, taste, and feel it. Philosophers like to talk about physical and metaphysical,  but how useful is that? Is love natural or supernatural?  Where do you draw the line between natural sexual reproduction and a natural effort to propagate the species and even sacrifice for that purpose and the altruistic and self-giving love that moves the sun and the seven stars? Can you really draw a line between different aspects of the world God made and say this is natural and this is not? Can you ever say God is here and not there?  Or is it simply all one; is the universe simply -  as the name implies – a single entity in which we see some things  more clearly and easily than others but in which everything except God  is in fact created and very natural?

I’m getting into some pretty complicated stuff here  and I’ll have more to say about it next week because I want to say some things about the Eucharist, the Communion, The Mass, the Liturgy, because it’s our basic act of worship,  our family meal, the center of Christian life and we come at it  with all sorts of conceptions and misconceptions. Years and years ago,  I got an offertory procession introduced in the congregation I was serving – bringing bread and wine to the altar from the congregation – and one member quit because it was high church  and another member quit because it was low church.  That’s why it’s important, I think,  to be as clear as we can  about this whole idea, of natural and supernatural  because the bread and wine we receive at the altar  are sometimes thought of as supernatural and I think that misses the point. They are holy, yes, and special beyond doubt  but Christians have spent far too much time and energy debating  and condemning each other  for holding the wrong ideas about the exact meaning of this service and this food. And what happens when we debate and argue about it is that some people wind up  denying Jesus’ presence here at all because they feel a need to draw a line  between nature and super-nature and define how God crosses that line  to be with us and whether and how God can or can’t do it. But what if there is no line? What if, like the granite that becomes holy  when we use it for holy purposes,  the bread and the wine also become holy  because we put them on the altar and re-enact the Last Supper  and remember Jesus’ promise: This is my body; this is my blood.

In the middle ages, Christians were not satisfied  with that simple statement. They wanted answers for everything  so they tried to define how, and in what way, the bread and wine become  the body and blood of Christ. And I’m not sure you can do that  without crossing the line into magic. They asked how it happened and they got involved in definitions of transubstantiation and consubstantiation  and trans-signification but all they were trying to say was  “Jesus is really here: in this bread and wine  Jesus is really present.”  But once they got a definition of what happened that satisfied them they went on to ask  when it happened: at what moment does the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ.  They answered: When the priest says, “Hoc est corpus meum:” “This is my body.” And they said, `’Well, OK, but exactly when?”" And they answered:  “Between the two syllables  of the word corpus in the phrase ‘”Hoc est corpus meum.”  And out of that debate we got the phrase “Hocus pocus.” And that’s a pretty good commentary  on the value of that discussion.

Let’s try to be practical.  We know instinctively what makes something holy. You take some material thing -  let’s say some rocks or bread and you shape those rocks or that bread  for your purpose  and you call together an assembly of people  and you bring on someone appropriate and you have a ceremony. Maybe you carve in stone the names  of Vietnam Veterans and call in the President and you have a ceremony  and then surviving veterans or family and friends of those who died  will go there and be deeply moved  and feel closer there to those who died than anywhere else.  Now, if we can do that,  can evoke that sense of presence in ordinary stone,  think what God could do not just to evoke but to make real  Christ’s presence in bread and wine.

But suppose the people remembered in our carved stone had died not on any battlefield  but simply of old age. Would the memorial have the same power?  I doubt it. Meaning and purpose and ceremony are all very well,  but there’s still something more  and we try to get at it when we use that strange word: “sacrifice.”  The word “sacrifice” comes from two Latin words that mean simply: “make holy.”  I think Abraham Lincoln had it right when he went to the battlefield at Gettsyburg: and said, “In a larger sense, we cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.”  To consecrate a battlefield –  requires a ceremony and an appropriate person  but also sacrifice. And to consecrate the bread and wine  requires not only a ceremony  and appropriate person  but also sacrifice. It takes a ceremony  and a priest and a congregation. Archbishop Crammer got that right  when he required  in the first English Prayer Book that there be two or three at least  to receive communion  or there could be no service  because Christian people  share in priesthood with the priest.  You have a priesthood without which the Eucharist can’t happen. This is not a magic act  in which a priest takes bread and does a hocus pocus and we then get a sacramental fill-up. That kind of thinking  is sacrilegious.

I think we know better. I think we know instinctively  that the presence of the holy God is focused in the eucharist in this bread and wine that we call holy  but that holiness comes about because of Jesus’ sacrifice and our faith  and the joyful celebration that occurs  when Christians gather and remember Jesus and know him to be present with us  and offer ourselves in God’s service. It’s like what happened that day at Gettysburg  and like what happened at the Vietnam wall but far beyond and above all our human memorials because here it is the living God  who takes this bread and uses it not simply to be remembered -  but to be present, to be here and to feed us and nourish us  and strengthen us,  and give us life: life now and life forever.

A Wandering Aramean

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber on the First Sunday of Lent, February 17, 2013, at St. Paul’s Church, Bantam.

Some years ago I inherited from my parents a fan-shaped chart like a stylized peacock’s tail that shows the family ancestry back, in some cases, eight or ten generations. My mother was the family genealogist and I learned from her that there are professional genealogists, tracers of lost persons, who, for a fee, will look through parish records, ancient cemeteries, crumbling documents of every sort in an effort to find out who your ancestors were. It’s a large and lucrative business. And it makes me wonder what it is about us that makes us so curious to know where we come from.

It isn’t anything new. Maybe you remember the story in “Roots” of how Alexander Haley found an old man in an African village who could recite the traditions of two hundred years. The “Reader’s Digest” produced a version of the Bible a few years ago that condensed the Bible primarily by leaving out all the “begats.” When you leave them out, you’ve left out a lot. A fair amount of the gospel is simply genealogies because thousands of years ago, in fact as long as we know anything of the human race, it seemed important to people to know where they came from, who their ancestors were.

Why? Why is it that we can’t be content to shape our own identity, to be who we are and be satisfied with that? What difference does it make to me that one of my great-grand-fathers was an architect in Australia and another was a French immigrant of Basque ancestry? As Christians, on the other hand, we very often do seem to identify ourselves simply in terms of a personal relationship with God, in terms of creed and baptism. I wonder if we’ve stopped to think that there might be another way.

In the Old Testament lesson this morning we read about a rite, a liturgy: God’s people are instructed to come with their offerings and state their identity in words like these: “My father was a wandering Aramean . . .” And that seems to suggest another dimension: that who I am is who my forebears were. Why does that matter either to God or to me?

Well, first, it is true that when we are baptized we become part of a community, a body; I am united through the people of Israel to Abraham and Isaac and Joseph and Moses and Joshua and the prophets.  My ancestry goes back to the apostles, and beyond them, back another thousand years and more. And we become part of this ancient community usually, long before we can affirm a personal faith. We are baptized into it long before we could possibly make an informed, competent choice.  We become part of a community which exists not just today in this place but world-wide and back through time over two thousand years. And this Christian Church again traces its ancestry back to a wandering Aramean. And when we come to communion, when we take part in the liturgy, we re-enact a drama which our ancestors in the faith have re-enacted through twenty centuries, a drama which goes back indeed some fourteen hundred years before that.

The Creed and statements of personal faith may get our attention, but perhaps more important still is the drama we take part in which is far older than the creed and shapes us far more powerfully by engaging not just our minds but our bodies, our emotions, our whole being. Sometimes, you know, on the 4th of July or Thanksgiving Day we dress up in the costumes of colonial times as a way of reminding ourselves of who we are. Much more powerfully, every Sunday, clergy dress in the garb of the Roman empire and we step aside from the world around us to remember that we are an ancient people called by God to work out God’s purpose in history. It’s a matter of who we are, of our identity, and it’s expressed in drama, in action, far more than in words and creeds.

Secondly, the identity we are given is not so much a matter of roots as rootlessness. What is our origin? Where do we come from? Well, if you trace it back, back to the Hebrew tribes, back to Abraham, you discover that we began as nomads, as wanderers. And the Bible asks us to see this not as a beginning to despise and reject but as something to cherish.

It’s another interesting aspect of human psychology that one generation may seek to reject its origins while the next generation seeks to reclaim them. American immigrants in the first generation try to Americanize themselves and forget their past but the next generation very often gries to reclaim it.  It’s the third generation that forms Irish-American and Italian American societies and goes on tours of their ancestral countries.  So, too, the first generations in the land of Israel tried to settle down and forget their wandering past and be like the Canaanites.  But they were given a formula to use when they came to worship that said: “Remember; remember who you are:” And why? Because there is something important in that rootlessness; something essential to who they were – and who we are.

Why, after all, didn’t God call a settled and prosperous people?  Apparently God wanted people without power or possessions.  And maybe there’s also something in us that remembers that rootless past and wants to go back and be like that again.  You can’t pack a thick mattress and place settings for twelve and wedding presents you don’t want but don’t dare give away on a camel. You can’t take it with you.  In the desert, you depend much more on your resourcefulness than on possessions.  So, look what happens    every summer:  there’s an enormous exodus to the wilderness, the mountains, the sea-shore, whatever desert we can find.  We seem to feel the need to slough off our rootedness, the security of a settled life, the comfort of possessions, and simplify our lives, experience again what we can learn from a time of wandering and homelessness and rootlessness, what it is to be called and chosen and led, what it is to be given a land, what it is to depend on God alone for life and leadership and land.

Have you ever stopped to think how many of the most popular recreations today are a kind of return to the desert? Well, they are, in the sense that nomadic people are limited in what they can carry, And what’s our rationale? What’s our excuse? Well, we say that we just want to get away from it all and “find some peace” and “a chance to be ourselves.” And we go even further than that in imitating our desert ancestors: we test ourselves. We take up mountain climbing and hang gliding, and white-water canoeing; we look for challenges and put our lives at risk. Why? To find out who we are; to get to know ourselves,

So, for the same reason, God called a nation of nomads, wanderers; people not tied to possessions, people not rooted in land. And he led them and tested them so they could begin to understand who they were: a people for God’s own possession. Their calling was not to possess but to be possessed, not to own but to be owned. That’s the second point.

Third: this identity involves giving.  “When you have entered the land the Lord your God is giving you…and have taken possession of it and settled in it, take some of the first fruits…and put them in a basket … and say to the priest… ‘My father was a wandering Aramean”,and now I bring the first fruits of the soil…” (Deut.26:1 -10) Identity is found and claimed in the act of offering. And the point, I think, is not very different. If we seem to need to reclaim our identity from time to time isn’t it true that we also need to free ourselves of the final bondage of possession which is money. We cannot know ourselves so long as we are possessed by money.

The problem of human identity finally, it seems to me, is that our lives are shaped by whatever we value, by whatever gives us a feeling of security. And any material possession involves a lessening of human value a reduction of human potential. What I mean is that If I depend on my home, on my life insurance, on my bank account, I am dependent on something inhuman, something less than personal, something that diminishes me. And that’s why stewardship and tithing are so important. That’s why it’s far more important that we give significantly to God than that we meet a budget. We need to give.  It’s not because the church has to pay its bills, but we need to give because until we give, until we re-establish our freedom of our possessions, we cannot truly know ourselves; indeed, we cannot begin to be ourselves. We have to give to the point where we begin again to be insecure, place our lives at risk, because at that point we establish two things at once: our freedom of possession and our dependence on God. And then we know who we are: children of God who depend on God for life.  We learn our identity by giving. God calls us to be a people like him and God is above all, one who gives.

I heard a story once about a high valley in the jungles of New Guinea inhabited by two primitive tribes. Centuries ago, by accident or design, no one really remembers, one member of one tribe killed one member of the other and someone from the second tribe got revenge locked in a bloody feud as each attempts to avenge the injury done by the other. It’s a fertile valley, the soil is good, and the potential is there for both tribes to live well. But they have lived for centuries in fear and insecurity and indeed poverty because they have chosen to identify themselves in terms of that on-going feud. They’re imprisoned by that history and unable to realize the potential all around them. It’s a parable, of course, of the world itself which is also, in today’s terms, a rather small valley with enormous potential and with inhabitants who seem to see no other way to identify themselves than in terms of ancient feuds which neither side is able to forget or overcome. But more important, it’s a symbol of all the hundreds of ways everyone of us imprisons himself and herself in fears and false securities rather than accept our role and find our Identity in the Christian community, and an ancient drama, and the act of giving.

I heard another story recently of a woman, widowed relatively young, responsible for the up-bringing of several small children and dependent on a very meager income. But year after year she tithed that meager income to her church. Finally one year the elders of the church decided that they should do something about this and they went to her and said, “We’re grateful for all you’ve done but we think it’s too much to ask and so we want you to know that we’ve agreed to free you of any obligation to tithe.” And the woman said, “I want you to know that you have just taken away the one thing that gives my life meaning.”

And isn’t that a profound understanding of what it means to identify ourselves as Christians, as people? Who am I? Am I one who gets, or one who gives? Lent is a time for asking that question – and answering it this way: “A wandering Aramean was my father…” That is to say: I am one who finds identity in an ancient community, a community which has no roots or possession in this world. I know who I am by taking part in a repeated drama, by remembering and by giving. I identify myself with those who have followed the way of giving, the way of love, the way of Christ.

Syrup Season

Two feet of snow in some parts of the state got the headlines, but the more significant news is a projected week of temperatures right for the sap to run: above freezing by day, below freezing at night.  With two feet of snow out there this is a potential disaster for people on the roads – but just what we need for those whose thoughts turn to syrup at this time of the year.

With the snow this deep, I can’t even get to my best trees – but there are others.  There are trees I never tapped last year because there was so little snow that I could establish a sugar bush away from the road.  So, yes, I would prefer the larger stand of trees away from the road but we will make do with what we have.

What matters is that the first  buckets have been hung.  Syrup season is here.

GLORY

A sermon preached on the Last Sunday after Epiphany, February 10, 2013, at St. Paul’s Church Bantam by Christopher L. Webber.

Lets think about summer!  Well, why not? Spring will be here any day now. And summer isn’t long after that.

This gospel of the Transfiguration, Jesus and his disciples on a mountain top, reminds me of a summer a number of years ago when my brother and I and some of our children set out to climb Mt. Marcy which is in the Adirondacks, and the highest mountain in the state of New York  just over a mile high. We planned a three day trip: one day to get near the peak, a second day to climb it, and a third day to get back out. The first day was gray and overcast and as we got near our planned campsite it began to rain. A discouraging start But the next day was bright and clear. We reached the peak in time for lunch and it was one of those days when it really seemed you could see for ever. Vermont to the east, Canada to the north; except for the curve of the earth we could probably have seen Bantam to the south east. The next day it rained again and we hiked out through a drenching downpour. But we had that one perfect day on top of the mountain, and the memory of it still shines, still has a kind of glow.

Mountain tops are made for seeing. Hillary said he wanted to climb Mt Everest “because it was there.” But I think the real attraction of mountain climbing is that feeling of unlimited vision, that sense of having a totally new perspective on the world and its problems. You can see in all directions, and there’s a new, far clearer sense of the relationship between places – Canada, Vermont, Connecticut – and the relationship between ourselves and our world, and between ourselves, humankind, and God.

All of that is, as we say, “enlightening.” It’s not just that mountain tops are places of light of sunshine and clear air but I think we could say that they throw light on our world and on our own lives, showing us, revealing to us, a new, clearer understanding of life, of our lives, of meaning and purpose.

Now some such thing happened to three of Jesus’ disciples. They went with him to a mountain top – and something happened. They saw in a new way, in a clearer light, who Jesus was and what his life signified, and where it was going, and what they were being called to do. And then, for them, looking back, remembering, there was a kind of glow around that day, that moment. The figure of Jesus began to stand out more clearly, and especially in relationship to Moses and Elijah, to the law and the prophets, the working out of God’s purpose.

Now don’t misunderstand what I’m trying to say. There is a way of reading the Bible that sets out to remove the mysteries, to explain away anything out of the ordinary. “Well, the Bible says this, but what really happened was that.” That’s not my point. Light is, of course, a symbol. If you see a cartoon character with a light bulb above his head, you know that means, “I’ve had an idea.” We’re not supposed to take the light bulb literally. But we use that symbol because we do need light to see. You might get an idea in the dark, in the middle of the night, but you will need light to work it out, put it in practice. Without the light of the sun to see our world, life itself would be impossible There would be no vision, no understanding, no life at all as we know it. So light isn’t “just a symbol.” Light is the source of life; it is the source of ideas and understanding.

When we are told that Jesus on the mountain seemed to glow with a shining light, a transfiguring glory, you can picture that however you please, but the point remains the same: suddenly, for the first time, the disciples saw Jesus with a clarity that they would never forget. The Gospel of John is the only one that doesn’t describe this event, but much more emphatically than the others he says: “We have seen his glory the glory of the one and only Son who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” Light is the source of understanding, and the gospel is clear: Jesus is the light of the world; in him and through him we come to understand who we are and the meaning and purpose of life. And that is still true, whether we are there on the mountain top with the disciples or not. They saw a dazzling light and they began to understand. We need no dazzling light; Jesus still enlightens us today however we come to know him.

This coming Lent can be a time of growing light inwardly as well as outside in the returning sunshine if we take time for prayer, for Bible study, for worship, for service. However we use our time to come closer to Jesus’ life, we’ll have more light, more understanding, a clearer view of the meaning and purpose of life as a result.

You’ve seen, of course, pictures of Jesus, pictures of the disciples, pictures of the saints in which there’s a halo of light around their heads. Why do artists do that? At one level it’s only confusing, misleading.   In the returning sunshine of Lent, of spring-time, if we take time for prayer, for Bible study, for worship, for service – however we use our time to come closer to Jesus’ life – we’ll have more light, more understanding,  about what it is to be a saint.

What often happens, of course, is that we hear the word “saint” and we think about those halos and we look around and we don’t see any and so we conclude that there just aren’t any saints in the world anymore. But of course First Century people couldn’t spot saints by their halos anymore easily than we can today. But the pictures leave that sub-conscious impression that saints should glow, literally glow.  And they do glow, but not with a circle of fluorescent light. The saints are the ones we learn from, who teach us and show us what life can be like. And an artist can show that with a light bulb or a halo if he wants, but the glory of the saints is something far more valuable than mere kilowatts: it’s a depth of understanding, a faithfulness in service, that shines out in many ways in a dark world.

So where does literal language end and symbolic language begin?  I’m not sure it matters.  Think how we use words in talking about nuclear weapons, one of the most divisive issues of our day.

Isn’t it interesting that that one weapon, unlike any other in its destructive power and which, if our prayers are answered, will never be used again throws so much light on the human race and each one of us. The explosion of an atomic bomb has been described as “brighter than a thousand suns.” And in a strange way it does illuminate so much about us, about our national priorities, our fears, our deepest concerns. And that’s not entirely bad. It’s good to be forced to look very clearly at what the real issues are and how we should deal with them. It’s good to be forced to look at basic issues of human relationships: at the fears and insecurities and hostilities that divide us.

Certainly that could be true in our relationship with Iran and North Korea. There’s the potential for disastrous miscalculations and catastrophe.  But also, I think, the greatest potential evil the world has ever faced could be a means of salvation by forcing us to confront the evil and the potential for good: the potential evil if we continue to be ruled by fear and sacrifice all the good things of this planet, the lives and hopes of millions, to destruction instead of creation.  But at the same time there’s the potential for a whole new world if we finally recognize our need for each other and find ways to work together for the common good.  Then light will truly have dawned for us all.

And carry the picture one step further. It isn’t that blinding light that we fear in nuclear weapons; the destructive force is not the light but the heat and the shock waves. And so, too, in much of the debate over defense and nuclear arms, it’s light we need in order to understand; but it’s heat and power politics that we often get instead.

It seems to me that if we could learn in our local communities to seek only for light and avoid any use of anger and bitterness, of heat and force, then we would be on the right path for understanding and growth and life.

But that’s only one example, and maybe not the best simply because it does generate so much heat and power that it’s hard to see clearly, hard to analyze our own motives, hard to be patient and understanding and charitable. There might be simpler examples but this is one we do have to face, like it or not. Just as other generations have had to deal with civil war and slavery or world war and depression, so this generation still has to face this issue. And if we are faithful, if we can discipline ourselves to look only for light, it might be that we really could stand at a turning point in the history of the world and the final opening out of the full potential for which God made us.

Do you know the old story of the man who came to his bishop and said, “I want God to reveal himself to me; how can I find the revelation I need?” And the bishop said, “Go out at night and turn your face to the heavens and ask God for revelation and it will come.” So the man did it and came back to tell the bishop, “I went out at night as you told me and I turned my face to the sky and the rain ran down my face and my neck and I felt like a fool.” And the bishop said, “That’s not bad for a first revelation.”

The story of the Transfiguration tells us that as the glory of Jesus began to fade, Peter said something just as dumb.  He said. “Let us put up three shelters,” Maybe he thought they could stay there for ever just basking in the light. Luke’s gospel adds, “He did not know what he was saying.”   He knew he’d seen glory, but it would take time for the meaning to work its way down into the reality of his life.

So too for us. Week by week we come here and Jesus is  here and the glory breaks through in the prayers and liturgy and music and sacrament and we’re tempted to try to contain it within these walls. We’re reluctant to go back outside and try to walk by the light of that glory. We’re afraid to look at our world and our lives with the clarity Jesus could give; afraid to let that light shine and live by that light wherever we are. So maybe we need that “first revelation” of our own foolishness, our own weakness, our own dependence on a light that seldom breaks in on us in all its dazzling power, seldom sits above our heads like a halo, seldom completely overpowers us, Maybe it would help if we would settle – as St. Paul put it – for being “fools for Christ’s sake” content to follow an inner light that may set a different priority for us than for many others even of our friends and neighbors. And maybe what we need most to know is this, that the Transfiguration of Jesus didn’t stop when they came down the mountain nor did the light go out.

The artists who show Peter and James and John and the other followers of Jesus with halos, with a glow of light shining out of them are right. The light they had seen, the understanding they had gained, began to change their lives, and the glory of Jesus began to be seen in them  You see, the light of the Transfiguration, isn’t a one-time display but a center from which light spreads. And it continues to spread. And you and I, however slowly and dimly, are called to be part of that spreading circle of light. And if we respond with patience and faithfulness and offer ourselves, our lives, to spread that light, that gospel, that good news, then the Transfiguration will not be just a past event on a distant mountain but a future for all the human race. And that would indeed be glory.

Everything New

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber at St. Paul’s Church Bantam Connecticut on the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, January 27, 2013.

Do you know how many Episcopalians  it takes to change a light bulb?

“Change the light bulb?  My grandmother gave that light bulb!”

This church is named for St.  Paul but I wonder how often we stop to think about that and take him seriously as an example.  I’m sure you know the story.  Paul comes on stage as an Episcopalian –  well, he acted like one. He had gone to Jerusalem to learn authentic,  traditional, Pharasaical Judaism.  And that was the best.  The Pharisees were the people who tried hardest to do it right, follow the rules, and that’s why Jesus was hardest on them:  because they thought they could satisfy God by following the rules and Jesus wanted them to know it’s not about rules, it’s about love. Rules can be useful guidelines  but they can’t do more than get you started and if you just keep the rules,  you miss the point.  But Paul had given his life to the system  and here were these people, this new sect of Jesus’ people, tearing the system down, questioning the way it had always been done,  changing the light bulbs. No wonder he was upset.

But Jesus literally knocked him off his horse,  struck him blind – because he’d been blind – and turned him around.  And Paul spent the rest of his life,  as he says in this morning’s second reading:  “proclaiming the faith he once tried to destroy.”  He also spent the rest of his life trying to prevent people from becoming Episcopalians. Well, you know what I mean:  becoming the kind of Episcopalians who do exist in some parishes – certainly not this one because we’re named for St.  Paul – but the people who hang onto the old light bulbs  when they’re long burned out, or insist on the old incandescent bulbs  when they could help save the environment by getting those new ones that burn longer for less.

Everywhere Paul went he heard the same refrain:  “We’ve always done it this way; what right do you have to change everything?” And Paul could only say, “God turned me around;  God opened my eyes; God taught our ancestors a law to prepare us for freedom not slavery. We can’t put such value on the past  that it keeps us from moving on to the future that belongs to God.  God has new gifts to give us  if we can just open our eyes to see them and our hands to receive them.”

It wasn’t an easy sell.  Somehow it never is. Do you remember a novel that got some attention over 30 years ago called  The Clan of the Cave Bear? It’s a story set in the time  when Cro-Magnon human beings were beginning to challenge the older Neanderthal species.  Neanderthal, if you ever studied the matter, had larger heads but most of their brain power was toward the back  and enabled them to remember  enormous amounts of information  but they only had a new idea  about once every hundred years.  The Cro-Magnon, on the other hand, like modern humans,  had more stuff up front  where you can imagine  new ways of doing things. The story has to do with a young Cro-Magnon woman  who gets taken into a Neanderthal tribe  for reasons I forget and causes endless trouble  by suggesting new ways of doing things – sort of like a new priest in an Episcopal church.  Because, lets face it,  there’s a lot of Neanderthal in all of us, including the priest, and it’s often the case  that the new priest’s new ideas  are often just some old ideas and habits he or she brought from somewhere else. It’s like the hymns I think everyone knows  because we sang them in the last parish I served. They’re not new to me and I’m not trying to change a thing  but one man’s Neanderthal is another man’s Cro-Magnon.

Now the point of all this is  to ask what St Paul might want to say to us not just here in Bantam,  not just in the Diocese of Connecticut not just in the Episcopal Church,  but in the Christian Church as a whole, world-wide, because God is doing new things  and challenging us in new ways  and holding onto old patterns, old customs,  old ways of thinking won’t do it anymore. Not that long back we were being told that the mega-church or the evangelicals were the wave of the future. Well, that wave has crested and is falling back  and they have less to hold onto than we do with 2000 years of history behind us.

Think how the church has changed in those two millenia. For almost three hundred years the church survived under persecution. Congregations met in homes and secret places and never knew when new orders would come  and new waves of arrest and torture and death. Then for a century or two the church  had the support of the Roman Empire and the challenge of prosperity and wealth. But then came the barbarian invasions and the destruction of the empire and a new era in which the church became  centered on monasteries that kept the faith and the ancient wisdom alive  in a world of chaos and insecurity. Then there were the great upheavals  of the Reformation and entirely new patterns of church life  with more emphasis on preaching and Bible study and less on the sacraments and there were wars between rival sects  and persecution. Just in my lifetime  we’ve had the great burst of church growth  after World War II and now a slackening off.  The Roman Catholic church  that once seemed to dominate the picture can’t find enough priests to keep all their churches open. They’ve closed a good many.  And then the evangelicals, as I said, also seemed the wave of the future  and now they can’t seem to get it right either. A lot of them lined up with the radical right  and became involved in partisan politics and that’s not what the church is about.  But anyway, here we are in another new era  and the traditional church, all the churches, are in trouble. There was a time when 90% of the population  claimed church membership  But the latest statistics show less than half  of all Americans enrolled in a church and it’s probably less than that  because some denominations haven’t updated their statistics in years.

It’s a new era,  and you can bemoan the loss of the old way or you can be excited about the opportunity. There was a day when you couldn’t do much  about evangelism because your neighbors all belonged to a church already.  Not any more. Now there are chances for evangelism and church growth everywhere if we are open to change,  to adopting new ways to get the message out. St Paul would have loved it.  He started out with a message for Jews: the Messiah has come and it’s a new world.  But it was mostly Gentiles  who were wanting to join up  and Paul told them they didn’t need to become Jews  to become Christians. You don’t have to keep kosher any more.  Can you imagine what that was like for Paul? All his life he had avoided shell fish and pork and now he didn’t have to.  God was doing a new thing and Paul learned new ways to serve.

Do you remember the fuss about the 1928 Prayer Book?  About the ordination of women? People said “We’ve never done it that way;  you’re just being trendy. Just because everyone else does it doesn’t mean we have to.”  Paul would have understood.  When they asked Paul about women wearing hats, he said, ‘What does everyone else do? We’re not here to change customs  or startle the horses.  We’re here to preach the love of Christ  and whatever works will be fine.’ When he got to Athens it was different again.  the people who came to hear him knew nothing about Judaism and Paul had to find a new message.  He started quoting the Greek philosophers instead of the Hebrew prophets.

The point is that you find ways to communicate  and you need to be clear first of all what the message is you want to get across.  It’s not about rules or customs  or how we’ve always done it. It’s about love.  It’s about forgiveness.  It’s about Jesus. It’s about God’s love for us  here, right here, in human life. And however you can get that across,  we need to do it. Volunteer to help with the soup kitchen  and food pantry. Give out free Bibles.  Organize a concert. Break down the walls.  Get people in.

They’re beginning to say that church buildings are a drag, they cost too much and take too much of our energy. Maybe so.  Some places it’s certainly true.  Do we need three Episcopal churches in Litchfield? That’s a really frightening question but I hope the answer is Yes. I hope the answer is that we can reach more people  if we have these historic buildings. But we need to ask.  And we need to demonstrate the value of this building by filling it. There are people out there who ought to be in here  and our challenge is to find them and bring them in.  And they will come if they see in us  a community that makes a difference in facing the future.

Are we doing that?  What are the issues?  It’s not about which light bulb to use, not who to ordain, not what Prayer Book we like best,  but what to do about climate change and violence in our society  and the growing disparity between wealth and poverty in this country.  If we still have the highest proportion of Christians of any industrlalized society why is our health care system toward the bottom,  why do we have more infant mortality and lower life expectancy?  Why are people in Canada six times less likely to die of gun violence than we are? Why are we forty times more likely to die of gun violence than the English? Why do we have more people in prison  than any other industrialized society?  As Christians, why aren’t we making a difference?  Why are we fighting about taxes and debt limits instead of how to use our resources to make life better for everyone?

It’s not my job to provide answers  but it surely is my job to ask questions: why isn’t church membership making a difference? What do we need to do differently?  Surely we need to be asking those questions and working in a peaceful way to find answers.  Paul knew there needed to be new answers  to new questions. He wrote to the Church in Corinth: “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! Everything old has passed away.”  Everything?  I wonder if St.  Paul really meant it. Didn’t he still read his Hebrew scriptures?  Of course, he did – but he found new meaning in them. But he wasn’t afraid of letting go  of whatever no longer served  only of failing to find ways to tell people that God loves them  and that God calls them. And that’s our message too.  If we call our church after St Paul we need to follow his example and seek new ways to share that message with the world.

Who Am I?

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber at St. Paul’s Church, Bantam, Connecticut on  January 13, 2013.

“One man in his life plays many parts,” according to Shakespeare: infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice, sage, and second childhood.  Shakespeare didn’t know about inclusive language, but if a man plays seven roles consecutively, a woman probably plays that many simultaneously: wife, mother, daughter, wage-earner, volunteer, and so on.  But who, in all these many roles, are we ourselves in our essence?  What is our true identity? I remember hearing that the cells of our body are all replaced every seven years. There’s not a single unit of my physical self that hasn’t been replaced many times. So who am I?  Who am I really? Behind all these various changes and varying roles I play, who am I really? What is my true identity

The gospel today has to do with identity:  who Jesus is, his identity.  He comes up from the water of baptism and a voice from heaven says: “You are my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” Jesus is proclaimed to have an identity rooted and grounded in God, the Creator and Source of life.    That is who he is.  And that means that to know who he is we have to know who God is – or, the other way around: that to know who God is, we have to know who Jesus is. He is the fullest reflection of the true and living God.  He is identified with God.

Now, the words identify and identity and identical are very close in meaning: to establish identity is always, to some extent to identify one with another. No two human beings are identical.  Even identical twins are never completely identical but all human beings, however dissimilar in race and sex and age and intellect still have a certain likeness to each other and if I ask you to go look for a human being, you will have some idea what to look for. and you probably won’t come back with a clock or a turkey or a Christmas pudding.  We can identify a human being.

But the odd thing is that if I ask someone at a party who they are they will never tell me, “I’m a human being.”  We don’t think of that as an identity.  A stranger will never tell me who they really are.  They will probably give me a name and tell me where they are from and what they do for a living – but I still won’t know them.  Yet probably that’s the best they can do themselves because I would guess that most human beings have barely begun to think beyond that and probably do think of themselves primarily in terms of the roles they play – housewife, farmer, poet, teacher, musician, nurse, truck driver – in spite of the fact that the roles we play shift and change so that the daughter becomes a mother and the student becomes a teacher and the factory worker becomes a retired golf-player in Florida.  In those terms we have no deep and continuing identity. Nonetheless, I would guess that for many people, that’s as far as they have gotten – their identity is identical with the roles they play at the moment.

Sometimes, when people become concerned about their identity they go to a psychiatrist and they say, “I find myself more and more depressed, or unable to function properly, and I don’t       understand why I’m like that.” And then, at great cost of time and money, the psychiatrist will help that person delve into their experience of life and find out what childhood influences or life experiences have left them feeling that way – and perhaps, once they understand, they can escape from whatever role it is they have taken on unwillingly. But most often all that’s involved in that analysis has to do with roles – roles we have acquired or taken on without being aware of it – but still not with who we really are.

Who we really are is a much deeper question.  It goes beyond the roles we play to ask an ultimate question: in God’s eyes, who am 1? Why did God make me? Not only, Who am I?  But, Who should I be?  Why did God make me?  Not only, Who am I, but, Who should I be?  Who am I called to be?  And if we are willing to ask that question, it would be useful to remember how we acquired whatever roles and personality we have.

I think it is always true that we learn what we seem to be from others who call out from us a potential we had not yet realized. We learn to talk because people who know we have that potential talk to us. No human being learns to talk alone. We learn to read from readers, to do math from mathematicians, to be dentists or priests or insurance agents from others who show us how to be what we may have felt we could be, but can’t be until someone shows us how and helps us and guides us. But nonetheless we will – as Frank Sinatra said – do it my way. I will never speak exactly like those who taught me to speak or be a priest exactly like those who taught me to be a priest.  My identity will not be identical but unique – and in that uniqueness I think I am most likely to find the essence of who I am. It’s the difference not the sameness, the uniqueness not the identicalness, that has to do with my essential being.

When I learn a role something unique and unprecedented happens. I become a person unlike any other: not a bluebird building the same sort of nest all blue birds have always built or a deer scratching in the snow for acorns as deer have always done but something new and surprising – as parents are always surprised by their children. You teach them to talk and they say things no one else ever said. You teach them to walk and they go places you have never been. You teach them to think and they think thoughts that you have never thought.  They become – we become  – unique human beings who wonder what that uniqueness is and what it means.

Jesus at the Jordan was identified as the unique Son of God, one whose essential being is derived from God, bound up in God’s being. And ever since, people have been trying to avoid that and identify him in terms of others. Jaroslav Pelikan, who taught for many years at Yale, wrote a book a few years back, about the images of Christ that have dominated human thought in different eras: Jesus the prophet, Jesus the king, Jesus the judge, the suffering Christ, the man for others, the teacher, and all of them are true and all of them are incomplete and always there Is something more to surprise us and challenge us, something new and unexpected, and that’s because Jesus is who the voice said he is: God’s own Son, the Beloved, the one who reflects most fully and faithfully the unending and inexhaustible fullness of God.

So Jesus is identified at his baptism. And so we are identified at our baptism.  In the words of the old Prayer Book, we become “an heir of Christ, the child of God and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven.”  The same point in the new Prayer Book is made differently: the Godparents are asked to “help this child grow into the full stature of Christ,” a frightening and impossible task.

But that is our calling and our potential.  Only one who talks can teach us to talk and only God can evoke in us, call out from us, that Christ-like, God-like potential.

Even the first book of the Bible, however, knows that we were made in the image of God and that means that we have a potential beyond anything we alone can imagine. We can’t imagine or dream or envision the fullness of our potential but we can imagine some small part of it.  We can imagine what we have never seen: a world in which human beings work together and build together a society in which no one is hungry and no one is abused and no one is fearful or insecure.  We can be creative, we can love and respond to love. We can be like God and find an identity richer and fuller and deeper than we can still imagine: an eternal identity. We can imagine all this because this is what we have already been given in our baptism. Our task is to claim that identity, to fulfill the potential God has given us and become indeed the sons and daughters of God.

The Great Camel Mystery – and More

A sermon preached by Christopher L.  Webber at St.  Paul’s Church, Bantam, Connecticut, on the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6, 2013.

I want you to look carefully at the front of the Bulletin today. It’s the same cover we had at Christmas and the only difference is that today it’s appropriate. I haven’t always seen the cover in advance but I will from now on because they ought to be appropriate and camels on Christmas are like Easter bunnies on Ash Wednesday: it’s getting ahead of the story.  The kings were not there when Jesus was born. The kings came as much as two years later and they weren’t kings, they were magi, and they found him in a house, not a manger.  So we shouldn’t have had this Bulletin at Christmas.

But I made a special request that we have the same bulletin cover this week not only because this time it’s appropriate but also because the left-hand camel seems to have five legs and the middle one seems to have three. I didn’t notice it myself but I was asked about it and it seemed worth asking about.  Maybe you can explain it. We can talk about it downstairs afterwards. But I didn’t ask for this cover only for the joke – though I thought you might enjoy it – but because I want to talk about mystery and a five-legged camel is a simple way of getting into the subject.



A camel with five legs or three is a mystery, as I said, that we can discuss at the coffee hour but first I want to focus on some other mysteries about these visitors to Bethlehem: who were they, what were they up to, why do they matter, and maybe even were they real?  Is this a true story?

Let’s ask the last question first: is this a true story? I know there are lots of sceptics out there and some of them teach in our seminaries and therefore some of them preach in our churches. They’ll tell you that Matthew or a friend of his made this story up. They’ll suggest that it doesn’t seem likely that people of wealth and intelligence would follow a star for hundreds of miles and offer valuable gifts to an unprepossessing baby. They’ll point out that there are prophecies in the Old Testament that talk about a star and about kings coming to worship so probably Matthew made it up to show that Jesus fulfilled the prophecies.

Well, that’s one opinion and worth looking into. So I got out my commentaries; I have several books about Matthew’s gospel written fairly recently and by some of the most respected scholars. They aren’t fundamentalists.  They ask the hard questions.  And I want to ask hard questions too.  I want to know the truth whatever it is and I want to be able to tell you the truth. So I checked with the experts and they admit there are questions you could ask and aspects of the story that are puzzling but they also say it’s not at all impossible. Astrology was a very big thing at the time and astrologers were always looking for the next big thing. We know from the historical records that astrologers showed up in Rome in 66 a.d. to see whether Nero might be a divine figure, a god come to earth.  I suspect they took their gold and incense home with them.

But the point is that these things happened. So it’s not impossible. And if it’s possible and it’s in the Bible, I think that counts for a lot.  It’s also interesting that Matthew calls them “Magi” or “astrologers” – not kings. The Old Testament prophecies talk about kings, not magi, so if Matthew was making it up, why didn’t he make it fit better?  So let’s think about these people on their camels.  (By the way, Matthew never says they came on camels – five-legged or four-legged. The artists put them in later because the Old Testament talks about camels in one of the standard prophecies. Matthew didn’t pick up on that either. If he was out to create a story that fit the prophecies, he didn’t do a very good job of it.)

So it seems likely that magis came, astrologers came, people of wisdom and science came.  In terms of the times, they were people who wanted to know, who thought the stars might have answers. As I said a minute ago, I want to know also.  I want answers.  I want to understand.  So I have something in common with these strangers.  I want to know some things – but not everything.  I had the chance once to see what riding a camel is like for $5 and turned it down.  But usually anyway, I want to know.  I want answers I can trust.  So the first point I want to make after all this round-about lead in is just that: the gospel today holds up an example for us of students and scholars, you might even say of scientific investigators. It suggests that God has given us a reasonable gospel, a Bible that has reasonable answers to our questions, that we’re happy to have scientists checking out our claims.

Now, I grew up in the Episcopal Church so I’ve never known another kind of Christianity first hand.  Maybe I’ve missed something. Certainly there are other kinds of Christianity: kinds that rely on authority, for example; churches that say, “Don’t ask questions; just accept the answers.” And there are some at the opposite side that rely on emotions: that say, “Don’t bother to use your mind, just wave your arms and feel good.”  But neither of those is us.  We tend to stay calm and think about things. “There are other kinds of Christianity,” an Episcopal priest I knew years ago once said, “but this is the only one I understand.”

So I’m glad we have these magi at the beginning of the story. They came looking for answers, to see if their research was right. They didn’t know about black holes and spiral nebulae but they did the best they could with the means they had.  That’s all any of us can do: ask the best questions we can, get the best answers we can and then offer the best we have in worship.

Reason first, and then worship.  We also have a Prayer Book and a pattern of worship that enables us to offer God our whole selves.  That’s the great thing about our church.  Again, I’ve never experienced the other kinds first hand and I know they sometimes produce great saints and faithful witnesses, but I need to use my mind and I need to worship, I need to be able to respond not only with my mind but with my body. I need to stand to sing hymns and recite the Creed and I need to kneel at the altar.  I need to move, not just sit or even stand, but to act out my faith, to express it in a way that goes far beyond words or reasons. If I use only reason, I wind up with a dull faith that involves my head but not my heart; it’s incomplete. There are Christians like that, who are happy to go to church and hear a sermon and go home – They just want “something to think about”, especially in New England, and I try to provide it. But there are lots more who only get the heart part, who seem to leave their heads at the church door.  They don’t want something to think about so much as a place to stop thinking and worrying and just relax and feel good and go home feeling better about life. Nothing wrong with that either but it’s incomplete.

God gave us heads and hearts and we need to use them both. That’s what the story of the wise men says to me.  They give me a model of a faith that’s complete. They reasoned and worshiped: Not one or the other, but both. Reason can’t take you the whole way. There are always mysteries, and not just five-legged camels but the Trinity and the sacraments and the problem of evil.

The scientists can tell us amazing things about our universe but if they just put it all in a science journal and build another lab to investigate more questions they’ve missed something vital. You can look at the stars with the Hubble Telescope and see the beginnings of creation billions of years ago, you can build a Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and study the primordial form of matter that existed in the universe shortly after the Big Bang, and that’s really interesting, but it seems to me that the more we know, the more we need to worship.

Reason, then, and worship: those two are what I think the Episcopal Church and Anglican Communion are all about and those two are what I think the magi represent: the need to use our minds and the need to recognize that always when we really use our minds well we will come to the Mystery “that passes all understanding” and need to worship that Mystery we call God.

No human being ever used his mind better than St. Augustine but Augustine said: “If you understand, it is not God.”

G.K.Chesterton a hundred years ago said, “Reason itself is a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”

J.B.S.Haldane, an evolutionary biologist and Marxist who died fifty years ago said,  “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose.”

Dag Hammaskjold, the Secretary General of the United Nations in its early days said,  “God does not die on the day we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.”

And Alan Jones, former Dean of the Cathedral in San Francisco, said, “Faith, in the end, isn’t an argument. It’s adoration.”

That’s what the coming of the magi, the celebration of the Epiphany, says to me. We, like the Magi, are here to wonder and to worship.

God and the Flash Drive

A  sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber at St. Paul’s Church, Bantam, Connecticut, on Christmas Eve, 2012.

Do you all know what this is?  It’s a flash drive or some call it a thumb drive or a memory stick.  It’s something you can plug into your computer and you can copy files onto it.  I have no idea how it works but I think this tiny piece of metal and plastic holds more information than my brain.  It holds the entire Book of Common Prayer, at least half a dozen books, most of the letters and sermons I’ve written in the last ten years, and who knows what else?  How does it get in there?  I have no idea.  But it’s there. And you believe me, don’t you? We’ve learned to accept the miracles of science whether we understand them or not.

Christmas is about a somewhat similar miracle.  I understand it even less. But what Christmas tells us is that the Almighty God, the creator of heaven and earth, and the galaxies and black holes and qasars and all that stuff that scientists tell us is out there – though we’ve never seen it and some of it is invisible by definition – the creator of all that, who cannot be conceived or imagined or understood, came into this world, this tiny speck of cosmic dust, and into the womb of a young woman and was born as a helpless child. “God in man made manifest.”  That which we cannot see becomes visible. The One we cannot approach becomes approachable.

A thousand years before that, Solomon, king of Israel, built a temple, the greatest building the nation had ever seen, furnished with gold and ivory and bronze, as a place of worship and he dedicated it with elaborate ceremonies and said a prayer.  He said: “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, how much less this house that I have built!”  Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain our God; how much less this child?

Now, you know what this is, I’m sure.  It’s a wafer.  We sometimes call it “communion bread.”  Some churches use pita bread or even a regular loaf and break it into small pieces, but it’s the same principle and the same inexplicable miracle: that the God who created heaven and earth comes to us in this bread, is contained in this tiny piece of bread.

Some parishes, you know, have a tabernacle or aumbry, a special box or container near the altar where they keep some of the consecrated bread and wine to take to the sick and shut ins.  This church has one in the sacristy and we have lay eucharistic ministers who take the consecrated bread and wine to those who are shut in.

Years ago a priest I know was serving as chaplain to an Episcopal school that his son attended and one day his son got into an argument with another boy over whether Jesus was really in that box or not. “I know he is,” said the Chaplain’s son, “My father put him there.”

But you know, that is what happens.  God puts himself in our hands.  We come to the altar and take God in our hands.  The priest puts God there and we eat that bread and God comes into our lives to nourish and strengthen, to guard and to guide.

There’s a Christmas carol that puts it this way: “

Our God, heaven cannot hold him,

Nor earth sustain;

Heaven and earth shall flee away

When he comes to reign;

In the bleak midwinter

A stable place sufficed

The Lord God incarnate,

Jesus Christ.

“Our God, heaven cannot hold him” but in the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed. In the bleak midwinter your hands and heart suffice. How is it possible that my hands and heart could hold my own creator? I don’t know.  I can’t explain it. I can’t explain a flash drive either. But God goes out from this service in each of us.

This world cannot contain our God but there are places so far from God and so empty there’s room for more, there’s a need for much more of God’s presence and that presence depends on us.  God needs to go there in us..How could God renew the world through us?  It might seem impossible if we didn’t know how little room God requires: a virgin’s womb, a stable creche, a fragment of bread, a human heart. In and though us God still comes to bring peace to a world at war, hope to a world without hope, joy to a world that has all too little reason to rejoice;  this day, at this altar, in this bread, and most important of all, in you.