Today we hear readings that offer confronting pictures of God’s demands on those who have every reason to think that they have done what is right. Amos’ criticism of ancient injustice (5:6-7, 10-15) and Jesus more poignant encounter with the rich young man (Mark 10:17-31) both pose questions of us about what God might require of us today.
My first trip to the Holy Land came within months of my becoming a Cathedral Dean as the North American Deans traveled to the Holy Land for their annual meeting. I was excited to be going, to be meeting people who served in the type of ministry I had just joined, and to see the places I’d read about for so long.
Today we celebrate the feast of St. Matthew. Hi, I’m Matthew.
As a fledgling New Testament scholar, I do research on the Gospel according to Mark. I argue that we should think of Mark, in its original 1st century historical context, not so much as a book with an author but as textual raw material or notes. For instance, the word used to describe Mark by several of its earliest readers is the same word that you might elsewhere translate as rough draft. This also fits with Mark’s less than stellar grammar and lack of clarity and conciseness (even though Mark is the shortest Gospel, his versions of stories are often the most longwinded of the Synoptic Gospels). It also supports that idea that Mark doesn’t have the unified authorial vision holding the whole narrative together, like we might expect of a modern novel. Or, as one prominent scholar on the Gospel of Mark put it to me once, “Out of all the Gospels, I like Mark the best because he doesn’t tell me what to do.”
The first time I ever gave out the consecrated bread during a Communion service came only a short while after I came to the Episcopal Church. I had Baptist minister for a couple years, had lots of preaching experience, and was in the ordination discernment process. It was an Anglo-Catholic parish but they also had a contemporary worship style service in the chapel each week that blended Anglo-Catholic commitments and spirituality with guitar and drums music.
Consider, for a moment, that you are the owner of a large home, one with many rooms to which God could come and knock on our door, seeking a home for Christ, as a Father might look for a home for his Son. Rent is cheap, I say. But God says, I don’t want to rent. I want to buy. So, I reply, I’m not sure I want to sell, but you might come in and look around.
On this All Soul’s Day we might consider heaven--what is heaven like? I would say that it is here now, and after we die. We find heaven now—in our interactions with others. In a sense we create our heaven or hell on earth through our actions, an interpersonal heaven or hell. Jesus’ life was difficult—sometimes our lives are beyond our control. We know deep in our heart that, with rare exceptions, our responses are not.
St. Francis was the preacher who said preach always, and if you must, use words. Francis preached through his actions, he taught by the life he lived—a life characterized by incredibly joyful abandon and total dependence on God.
St. Francis was the preacher who said preach always, and if you must, use words. Francis preached through his actions, he taught by the life he lived—a life characterized by incredibly joyful abandon and total dependence on God.
His name is Bill. He has wild hair. He is wearing a T-shirt with holes in it, jeans and no shoes. That has literally been his wardrobe the entire four years of college. He is brilliant--kind of esoteric and very, very bright. He became a Christian during college.
I’ve never met an angel. Or at least I’ve never seen an angel I knew was an angel. Perhaps it is true what some people believe: that the person who suddenly appeared out of nowhere when your car broke down on a lonely country road in the middle of the night—perhaps that was an angel after all. But I don’t know what I believe about all that.
This weekend I’ve been able to watch some of the U. S. Open Tennis. I rest in awe of the athleticism and skill of these players. While I don’t play often today, tennis was part of my life for many years. My ability to return the ball with some regularity is the result of group lessons when I was a child and some years of individual lessons as an adult.
For me this has been a wonderful summer. A time of coming together in worship week after week, of strengthening the ties that join us together, and of coming to know each other better. A time of growing in faith and love and trust. Part of the joy of summer has been the presence of children. In many parishes children disappear over the summer. Here they have been a constant presence.
The year after my ordination, I was privileged to be able to spend a few days on retreat at West Malling, an abbey of cloistered Anglican sisters on the what was the pilgrimage route to Canterbury Cathedral. I still can hear their voices as they sang the same words from Psalm 34 at the beginning of each office
Oh, magnify the Lord with me
Come, let us worship together.
We come together this morning to honor Ara Moses Baltayan and to commit his soul into God’s loving care. Ara’s friends and family tell me of a man who was a loving father and devoted husband who worked hard to provide for his family. He enjoyed photography and taking his sailboat out on the Sound. He was committed to the community and to serving it through Rotary—the international service organization for business and professional leaders. And then there was his connection with this place, this parish, Christ Church.
The Rev’d Matthew David Larsen
Christ Church, New Haven, Connecticut
Year B, Proper 13
So mortals ate the bread of angels, he provided from them food enough. And they said to him, “Lord, give us this bread always.” In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Google facts, a branch of Google that offers verifiable facts from the Internet, recently posted:
If the Earth stopped for one second, and you weren’t belt-buckled to the Earth, you would fall over and roll 800 mph due east—killing everyone.
It’s a Google fact.
From one perspective, nothing could seem more absurd; from another perspective, nothing could be more obvious. It was there all along but it all just depends how you look at it.
We find ourselves in the middle of long stretch in our lectionary in which our Gospel readings just won’t quit the feeding of the multitude. It’ll be a month before our Gospel reading talks about something else.
From a materialist perspective it is about a miracle of generosity feeding a proverbial boatload of people on a small amount of bread and fish. Viewed from another perspective, it is about something else altogether. Today, in a post-mortem after the great feeding, Jesus gets interviewed about what was really happening. He says, yes, it was about feeding people, but it was also about more than that. He tells us what was really happening.
The answer is that the feeding of the 5000 is incarnational. It is Eucharistic. And it is radically inclusive. Let me explain.
First, incarnational. In our Exodus reading, it is the LORD who rains down bread from heaven for God’s people in the wilderness. The people don’t care much for it, but nonetheless there is it. In the Psalm, it is the LORD who feeds mortals with the bread of angels. The people of God ate and were filled because the LORD gave them what they craved. The people who come talk to Jesus even cite this story and this Psalm to him. But in the context of the feeding of the 5000, it is Lord Jesus who gives the people bread to eat. Jesus is the bread and the Father is one who gives him. What is required of us is to believe in Jesus as the bread of life and in the one who sent him. We are to believe that God in Christ provides an abundant banquet even in the wilderness.
Second, the feeding of the five thousand is Eucharistic. The language in feeding of the five thousand is strikingly similar to the language of the Last Supper tradition. He takes bread, he gives thanks (the Greek is eucharistesas), he breaks the bread, and he distributes it. It sounds just like what Jesus did in the Last Supper, just like what we will do at the altar in a few moments. The word used to describe the broken fragments of bread collected after the feeding is a rare Greek word, klasma, and in early Christian literature it appears in all four versions of the feeding of the 5000 as well as in the earliest Christian Eucharistic liturgy, which is found in the Didache. Jesus does not offer food that will disappear, but food that remains to eternal life. This food is his body and his blood. Throughout the Gospel of John, characters often speak better than they know. Those who (probably sarcastically) respond to Jesus, rightly request of him, “Lord, give us this bread all the time!”
Third, the feeding of the five thousand is radically inclusive. Meals were places where social barriers were upheld. There is always a certain theater to meals. You are what you eat, but who you eat with also defines you. You did not just eat with anyone. Sharing a meal meant sharing fellowship, extending the right hand of hospitality. It meant acceptance, friendship, loyalty. Meals are often restricted by national boundaries, political boundaries, ideological boundaries. But when Jesus indiscriminately offers table fellowship to all who came to him, he offered full access to the Eucharistic life to anyone who wills. The only requirement needed is the sacrament of baptism, which is fully open to anyone who wants to share in the life of Christ, regardless of who they are. Out in the wilderness, at that meal Jesus doesn’t check their passport, he doesn’t care it they vote democrat, he doesn’t patrol about their sexual orientation, police their gender, look at the color of their skin, worry about their age, check their bank account, ask them to submit to an IQ test, write an essay about why eating with Jesus would be a benefit to their career path, or even ask about their theology. He basically doesn’t observe any of the normal barriers of meal sharing in his own day, or in ours. He simply says, everyone who comes to me will eat the bread of life, which I will give, which I in fact am, and everyone who eats the bread of life, which is given for the life of the world, will have eternal life. Anyone who comes to Christ in baptism is fully accepted at God’s table. Fully welcomed. Beloved.
Oftentimes preachers get the reputation of being guilt-trippers and bossy. Sometimes it is hard not to, because the Bible itself is guilt-tripping or a little bossy. But today is not one of those days. Jesus says the work that God requires of us is this: just to believe in the one whom God has sent. To come to the table in faith that God will meet you there. To believe that the Father sent the Son and that the Son is the bread of life. To believe that all who eat this bread will have eternal life now. And for me it’s amazing: as we come to altar doubts and fears melt away, fading into the background. They’re just not that important in that place. And we find the bread of life was always already waiting for us there. So let us come to the altar like those who come to Jesus in this story and say, “Lord, give us this bread always.” Amen.
One of most incongruous, and sad, photos I brought back from the Holy Land when I visited in 2004 was of two Palestinian men, shepherds in an urban land, herding four scruffy looking sheep through the machine gun ringed Kalandria checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem.
Always, always, always think twice before accepting an invitation to one of Herod’s birthday parties. Incest, unjust imprisonment, murder, seductive dancing, potential pedophilia, deception, backstabbing, conniving, severed heads, rivalry, hatred, peer-pressure, crooked politics—our Gospel story has it all.
We know that we take on the mantle of Jesus as we choose to follow him. We respond to that demanding Jesus—calling us to use all we receive from him to overcome evil in our midst.
Trinity Sunday- The Revd Ann J. Broomell
Christ Church, New Haven
May 31, 2015
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Today we come to Trinity Sunday. Preaching on this Sunday often falls to the curate while senior clergy supposedly sit back and tick off the heresies. That being said, in reality we don’t especially want to take it on ourselves. Buddy Stallings, the rector of St. Bartholomew’s in New York City, is retiring this Sunday. He wrote this week in his blog that he has assiduously avoided preaching on Trinity Sunday throughout his ordained life, but had no choice but to do so this was his last Sunday in that pulpit. As I begin ministry among you as your Interim Rector, it seemed to me that I shouldn’t duck the opportunity either.
What are we to make of the Trinity which is so fundamentally a part of our liturgy, our prayer, our worship? Let me begin by telling you something about my sister, Susan, who spent a number of years teaching math to sixth graders. Sue had a bachelor’s degree in history with honors and then spent years developing her own business as a title searcher. Studying to become a teacher, she discovered that she had a gift when it came to teaching math. I was astounded. I do have a sister with an MBA. It is not Susan. Every math teacher I had ever known majored in the subject in college and emerged steeped in calculus and higher mathematical theory.
Apparently Sue was more able to communicate the curriculum than many others exactly because of her education and background. She looked at math as a non-mathematician and saw problem solving and equations as tools for living our lives. Because of this different perspective, she was very successful in helping other non-mathematically oriented students master the necessary concepts.
You might ask what this has to do with Trinity Sunday. There are so many descriptions of what the Trinity means, and explanations of why we have come to define God in this way—so many efforts to put labels on that which is ultimately without explanation, that whatever we hear may not have much of an impact on our lives. It may be most valuable to look at the Trinity from the point of view of a non-theologian and ask: What difference does it make in my life that I believe in the Trinity? What difference does it make what I believe about the Trinity?
One well known preacher commented that when we humans try to describe God it's like a bunch of oysters trying to describe a ballerina. (1) The descriptions abound but they’re not likely to lead to understanding of that which is pure mystery.
As you know, the trinitarian formula came into being as the early Christian church tried to sort out the different understandings of God that had begun to circulate. Those that weren’t accepted were labelled heresy. There was Modalism, Sabellianism, Arianism. Mystery remains. Throughout our history, people have found that describing the Trinity was no simple task.
Moving beyond efforts to articulate that which is unknown and unknowable, let me ask again: Why might it matter at all to you that the Trinity exists? What difference would it make in your life, in the lives of others?
I suggest that it does matter and it can make a difference. Soon after the early theologians decided that the best way to describe God was as three beings, three persons that are also one, the Trinity began to become considered a separate entity. God, the Trinity, became further and further removed from people.
Yet a distant God was not part of the early thinking about the Trinity. The Cappadocian Fathers articulated the concept of the Trinity as communion, a relationship between people. Basil of Caesarea wrote that “The Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are a fellowship, …in them are seen a communion that is indissoluble and continuous.” (2) It was a radical thought then and can be to our thinking now as well.
The contemporary Roman Catholic theologian Catherine LaCugna raises this description of the Trinity as extremely valuable for us today. If God is relationship between persons, then God is a living active being. If we are made in God’s image through our creation, we, too, are about relationship with each other; then the goal of our lives is to become more relational each with each other. (3)
What if we were to use the image of a dance to describe the Trinity? I remember taking part in an evening of country dance. There were couples and singles, children and adults. We danced up and down in rows, in squares, step to step and partner to partner. Children and adults danced together—everyone could contribute fully. We moved back and forth from person to person with great ease, smiling as we bowed to this person, laughing as we linked arms and swung in a circle with another.
We can see our lives, and the life of the Trinity through this image of the dance. We can see the goal of our lives being in relation with each other rather than with a God beyond and unrelated to us. We discover God existing in relationship with us and among us. We see that God is active in our world, and that God draws us into activity as well.
When we know God as communion between people, our relationships with others take on renewed significance. Living lives of true communion we must reject unequal relationships based on sexism and racism; superiority or privilege; exploitation or dominance and control. (4) And those unequal relationships, so common in our world, then become sinful at a fundamental level because they are a rejection of community, of relationship, even a rejection of God. Making unequal relationships equal becomes a task that is ours to recognize and to change within our selves and beyond.
What if we saw the Trinity as the focus of our lives, community with persons as the ground of our being? As LaCugna writes: To live God’s life is to live from and for God, from and for others. To live as Jesus Christ lived would mean (making his life a model for our own). … To live according to the power and presence of the Holy Spirit (would mean)…responding to God in faith, hope and love; eventually becoming unrestrictedly united with God. (5)
Isn’t that what we pray each week in our Eucharistic prayer? Isn’t that what we ask for in our intercessions? Don’t the chances and challenges of our lives lead us to seek deepening relationships with God in and through people?
And what is a parish that lives a Trinitarian life? Our imagery as we describe ourselves reflects the Trinity: We are the People of God, the Body of Christ, the Temple of the Holy Spirit. We are energized by the life of God, we are the risen Christ in our world, we demonstrate the presence and work of the Holy Spirit. We interact with each other. We dance a holy dance. We bring that dance into the world. We seek to become a sign of God’s reign, the divine-human com-munion and the Communion of all creatures with each other. (5)
Of course we fall short. But we may want to join more and more actively in the dance. Do you try to stretch yourself reaching out to those you don’t know, seeing the relationship, the communion among persons as God? Do you look at the way you interact with the people you love, family and friends, colleagues, neighbors, co-workers and the way they interact with you, through the lens of equality, mutual benefit, relationship and love? What about the people you work with? Or today’s lepers and untouchables?
Listen to this ancient description of the Christian life from Dorotheos of Gaza: Imagine a circle marked out on the ground. Suppose that this circle is the world and that the center of the circle is God. Leading from the edge to the center are lines like the spokes of a wagon wheel. Each line represents a different way of life—different races, cultures, ways of being in the world. In their desire to draw near to God, the saints advance along these lines to the middle of the circle. The farther into the center they go, the nearer they approach one another as well as God. The closer they come to God, the closer they come to one another.
Such is the nature of love. The nearer we draw to God in love, the more we are united together by love for our neighbor. (6)
Take another look—our neighbor is not just those we know and care about so much today: those we know here at Christ Church, people who are part of our daily lives, people we know through our mission beyond the parish. Those near us on the spokes of the wheel are the people of the world, different as we all are, joined with us in our love of God. Drawing closer to God draws us closer to all people.
The Trinity does make a difference in our lives. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The one who creates us, redeems us and sets our souls on fire. Beings in relationship, with each other, with us and all the peoples of the world. When we see ourselves caught up in that relationship, in that love, our lives will change and this world will change as well. If God is relationship, if God is communion among people, if God is Being in Love, and you are made in God’s image, who, then, are you? Who then are we all?
Amen.
(1) Taylor, Barbara Brown quoting Robert Farr Capon. Barbara Brown Taylor, Home by Another Way, (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1999).
(2) Basil of Caesarea, Letter 38.
(3) Verhulst, Kari Jo. Sojonet.org Living the Word. May 26, 2002: God So Loves This World.
(4) LaCugna, Catherine Mowry. God For Us: The Trinity & Christian Life. New York: Harper Collins, 1991, p. 399.
(5) Ibid., pp. 400-401.
Op. cit.
(6) Johnson, Elizabeth. Friends of God and Prophets: A Feminist Theological Reading of the Communion of Saints. New York: Bloomsbury Academics, 1999.