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IS IT TIME FOR A NAP?

The Rev. J. Donald Waring
Grace Church in New York
The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
June 23, 2024

He said to them, “Why are you afraid?  Have you still no faith?  And they were filled with great awe, and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and sea obey him?”  (Mark 4:40-41) 

When I was growing up, my mother was always at the ready with her Kodak Instamatic camera.  The rotating flash cube that gave you four pictures would explode with blinding light, capturing forever moments you might want to forget in later life.  Take, for example, the greatest temper tantrum I ever threw.  One day, in August of 1965, when I was three years old, my parents took my older brother and me on a short trip to New Hope, PA.  New Hope is an historic town along the Delaware River that boasts shops, restaurants, and a canal connecting all the nearby communities.  In days gone by, horse-drawn barges on the canal would have hauled timber and other such heavy goods.  But by the 1960s the barges were merely tourist boats to ride.  What child wouldn’t want to climb aboard, you ask?  What could possibly go wrong, you wonder? 

Apparently, according to family lore, we waited our turn in line, watching people ahead of us getting onto the barge.  A huge horse, harnessed to the barge by a long rope, would walk on a path alongside the canal, and pull the tourists away out of sight.  Then the horse would bring the barge back for another group.  When the moment came for us to ride the barge, fear and panic seized me.  No way was I going to get on that boat.  I proceeded to pitch a fit that only a three-year old could.  Perhaps it was the horses.  Perhaps it was the water.  Perhaps it was the fact that no one seemed ever to return from the barge ride.  It kept coming back empty for more unsuspecting tourists.  No thanks, not for me!  I screamed, I kicked, I pleaded.  My father eventually carried me aboard.  My mother took pictures, and into the family photo album they went, complete with dates.  Mind you now, I’m not sure how much of this I actually remember, and how much I remember remembering.  But the pictures do not lie.  The boat and the water terrified me, and the temper tantrum was one for the ages.  

In today’s reading from the Gospel of Mark, we’ve heard how Jesus announced to his disciples that it was time to board a boat and head across to the other side of the Sea of Galilee.  Honestly, you’d think that the disciples would have caught on by now.  Every time Jesus told them to start rowing, they were in for trouble.  It was almost like a practical joke that he kept playing on them.  “Come on, boys, get on the boat.  No harm will befall you.  I promise.”  So there they went – the twelve disciples and Jesus in the middle of the night – the whole future of Christendom packed like a bunch of sardines in a rickety little fishing boat.  What a sight.  As luck would have it, they were headed into a storm – a big one.  It hit them fast and furious, and before they knew it the boat was filling with water and ready to capsize. 

But seriously, how big of a storm can blow upon a relatively small, inland, freshwater lake?  That’s right, the Sea of Galilee was and is a lake: not a sea like the Mediterranean, not even a lake like Superior, where the gales of November swamped the Edmund Fitzgerald.  Who’s afraid of a lake?  The fact is, after my tantrum at New Hope, to took to the water like a fish.  We belonged to a pool where I learned how to swim.  We rented a lake house where I water skied and fished.  We managed a few days on the Jersey Shore, where I developed a healthy respect for the ocean.  It’s true that on some level the ocean, with it rip tides and sharks, is always out to get you.  But lakes have no such thing.  Lakes are tame.  Lakes are mild.  So how frightened should the disciples have been of a storm on the Sea of Galilee?  It’s a lake.  Well, by comparison, you may recall six years ago, when a sudden storm blew across Table Rock Lake in Missouri, and caught a tour boat full of sightseers by surprise.  Rain, waves, and 80-mph winds hit the craft until it capsized and sank.  Seventeen people lost their lives in a storm on an inland lake smaller than the Sea of Galilee. 

Thus, the storm on the Sea of Galilee.  It would take all hands working together if they were to survive.  The disciples called out to Jesus, who was oddly enough, asleep in the stern.  “Teacher”, they said, “do you not care that we are perishing?”  Yes, he did care.  Jesus awoke, rebuked the wind and commanded the turbulent, angry sea to settle into a still, quiet calm.  It was a miracle that left such an impression on the disciples that they told and retold the story.  Obviously, they had no photographic record, but they remembered and remembered it.  For them it was the epitome of what it was like to be in the presence of Jesus.  Jesus was and is able to calm the storms of life.  Fear not.  Have faith. 

Now then, it’s all well and good to say that Jesus calmed a storm on the Sea of Galilee, long ago and far away.  But the fact remains that the storms around us still rage and swell.  We see dark and ominous clouds gathering over Ukraine, North Korea, and Gaza.  Here in New York City we fear increasing violence on the streets and in the subway.  Unsuspecting people are being shoved, slashed, and shot.  Come November we face a worrisome presidential election, the results of which will have ripple effects for good or ill across the world.  What can be done to control the storms?  Shall we take to the streets to rant and rave?  Shall we double down, strain at the oars, and count on our own efforts.  Ultimately, can we say about the message of human might and potential to bring order out of chaos? 

Let’s ask Job, the main character of our Old Testament reading today.  The story goes that Job was a pious and prosperous man.  He had a large and content family and wealth beyond anyone’s imagination.  Life was good, and he gave thanks to God every day.  Then the storm hit, furiously and relentlessly.  Invading armies attacked, killing his family and plundering his wealth.  In the midst of it all Job fell ill to a painful debilitating disease. He had no more control over his fate than the disciples had over their sinking boat.  But Job had friends who thought he could still manage to be the captain of his ship.  Friend after friend explained to him that bad things only happened to bad people.  They counseled Job that somehow he had offended God, and as punishment God brought the storms upon him.  They advised Job to repent.  Then God would restore his life to him.  Job could control the storm by repenting. 

Job disagreed.  He knew that he had no control over the storm.  He had done nothing to bring the storm upon him, and in like manner he could do nothing to send it away.  He couldn’t wish or explain it away. He couldn’t repent or hope it away.  He couldn’t even pray it away.  The notion that he could do anything about it was magical thinking.  Therefore, instead of repenting, he threw what might be called the Bible’s greatest temper tantrum.  He ranted and raged at God.  He cursed the day he was born.  Nothing could explain, tidy up, or control the situation. 

This past week, as I read through Job, I recalled the late author, Joan Didion, and her famous book, The Year of Magical Thinking.  Until December of 2003, Didion had led a life that many would find enviable.  She was a successful novelist and writer, who enjoyed a long and loving marriage to fellow author John Gregory Dunne.  The two would collaborate on writing assignments, and adopt a daughter, Quintana, who was the light of their lives.  Then the storm hit.  Quintana fell suddenly, mysteriously and dangerously ill.  On December 30^th, as Joan and John sat down to dinner in their apartment, John slumped over and died from a massive heart attack.  Didion wrote, “You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” 

In the months to come, as Didion faced Quintana’s illness alone, without the company of her husband, supportive friends surrounded her, in the way that Job’s friends surrounded him.  She wrote of how these well-meaning, highly successful people thought they could bring the situation under control.  They “believed absolutely in their own management skills.  They believed absolutely in the power of the telephone numbers they had at their fingertips, the right doctor, the major donor, the person who could facilitate a favor.”  Their initial instinct was that Quintana’s illness “could be managed.  In order to manage it, they needed only information.  They needed to know only how this had happened.  They needed answers.  They needed ‘the prognosis.’  I had no answers.  I had no prognosis.  I did not know how this had happened.”  The gist of the book seems to be that any notion of ultimate control we might harbor is magical thinking. 

Is that it, then: the storms rage and swell and we have no control?  What is the word of the Lord for us today?  What is the word of the Lord for Job, and for the disciples in the midst of their storms?  The word of the Lord is trust in God.  Have faith in Jesus.  The storms rage and swell, but the God of Jacob is our stronghold (Ps. 46).  In today’s Old Testament reading, God finally answers Job (38:1-11) out of the whirlwind, and declares who, in fact, is in control.  I might summarize God’s message to Job with a crude paraphrase: Job, this existence that I’ve chosen to share with you as a gift is a far bigger thing than you can either understand or imagine.  You just have to trust me.  I’ve got this, and you don’t.  I’m God, and you aren’t. 

Essentially, it’s the same message that Jesus delivered to the disciples in the little storm-tossed boat.  Trust in God.  Keep your eyes on Jesus.  We get so distracted by the obvious miracle of Jesus’ stilling the storm that I think we miss a miracle that is perhaps more meaningful, more accessible, and even more redemptive than the grand intervention.  What was Jesus doing in the midst of the storm that had everyone else utterly and completely terrified?  Jesus was sleeping.  Today I want to preach not so much Christ crucified, not so much Christ risen from the dead, but the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ asleep.  Apparently, he even managed to find himself a little pillow.  Jesus was taking a nap, something neither church nor society wants you to do.  The world seems to have a vendetta against sleeping.  We get up at the crack of dawn.  Why?  Why does anything begin before 8 am?  Then, we work, study, or celebrate until late at night, and to stay awake we drink all manner of caffeinated beverages in between.  In some circles it is a badge of honor to make it on four or five hours of sleep every night, or even better, to pull an all-nighter. 

The church has it in for sleeping, too.  We associate sleeping with unfaithfulness and spiritual sloth.  We have midnight masses, all-night vigils, sunrise services, and youth group sleep-overs.  We even have an entire liturgical season devoted to the virtue of staying awake: Advent.  Apparently, you’re not a true follower of Jesus unless your eyelids are propped open with toothpicks.  Who can take a nap and not feel guilty about it?  I’ll tell you who: Jesus.  Today Jesus is asleep in the back of the boat.  So today – perhaps just today – Jesus is not requiring us to still any storms, or save any worlds, or champion any cause.  It’s time for a nap.  Perhaps just today – Jesus is daring us to trust, and leave the saving to him, according to his own timetable. 

Jesus’ sleeping says to me that he simply was not then, and is not now worried.  He is not afraid of any storm’s power.  Indeed, he gave the storm a big yawn.  Jesus’ sleeping says to me that he has a perspective on the storms of life that the others do not – that I do not – perhaps that you do not.  The storms that we cannot control, but think we should, will never in the end be able to separate us from the love of God, or terminate any one of us.  We belong to Jesus forever.  He holds our souls in life. 

Jesus asked the disciples: “Why are you afraid?  Have you still no faith?”  Faith is this: trust in God, and keep your eyes on Jesus, who by the power of the Spirit moved over the waters at the beginning of creation, and has the authority to say to any storm, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped.” (Job 38:11) 

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MAKING ALL THINGS NEW

 The Rev. J. Donald Waring
Grace Church in New York
The Third Sunday after Pentecost
June 9, 2024

When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind.”  (Mark 3:21) 

For years now I have had on my shelves a funny little book that I take down from time to time for consolation.  The book is called Bad Days in History, by Michael Farquhar.  For every day of the year it gives you a short synopsis of some truly awful or unfortunate or even amusing event that occurred.  If you think that things are not going your way, read a few entries of Bad Days in History, and you’ll feel better.  I promise. 

Take, for example, May 29^th, a day I read about just a week or so ago.  May 29, 1913 was an especially bad day for the great composer, Igor Stravinsky.  Stravinsky’s new orchestral work and ballet, The Rite of Spring, was set to premier in Paris at the Theatre Champs-Elysees.  Stravinsky had labored for some years on the piece, and he already had a successful reputation with the particular dance company that would present it.  What could possibly go wrong?  Well, The Rite of Spring was different.  It was shockingly modern and revolutionary.  The notes were said to pulverize and pummel the audience, not soothe them. 

What is more, the choreographer of the ballet was a dancer named Vaslav Nijinsky, who brought to Stravinsky’s pounding notes not graceful performers in tights, but clog-dancing jumpers in peasant garb.  Soon into the very first piece the packed house began booing, hissing, shouting, and throwing things.  The theater manager had to turn up the lights to restore order.  The reviews the next day were scathing.  The Italian composer Puccini thought the music was as cacophonous as the choreography was ridiculous.  It is “the work of a madman,” he said.  The premiere was a complete flop.  Many assumed that Stravinsky had gone out of his mind. 

Strangely, one-hundred years later, critics today recognize The Rite of Spring as a bold, trailblazing piece that accomplished a creative leap in music and art.  Orchestras regularly include the music in their concerts, and dance companies are eager to attempt Nijinsky’s original choreography.  One never would have imagined it in Paris on May 29, 1913, a bad day in history for Stravinsky, and lovers of graceful, classical ballet. 

Today is not a bad day, but rather an especially good day in the history of Grace Church.  In addition to our parish picnic, we are on the brink of an endless summer.  Most importantly, though, we will hear the surprising tally of our capital campaign on the very day we said would be its culmination.  So it is a good day.  Nevertheless, when I first read through the Scripture readings appointed for today, it struck me that what we have here are a number of people having especially bad days. 

First up, Samuel, a prophet of the Lord and Judge over all Israel who sounds much in the mode of the booing, hissing ballet audience in Paris.  Samuel did not like the music he was hearing.  The time was approximately a thousand years before Christ.  For decades Samuel had been the leading figure to remind Israel of their identity as people in covenant relationship with Yahweh, and to call them back to faithfulness whenever they strayed.  Israel was not technically a nation at the time of Samuel.  They were a confederation of tribes with common roots in the Exodus.  They came together in common worship of Yahweh, and in times of emergency.  But now Samuel was advancing in years, and it was time to be thinking of who would come next.  Samuel’s sons had proved themselves to be inept and corrupt.  So the people began to wonder if the old way of organizing themselves could still address the needs of a new day.  Perhaps it was time for something different. 

Specifically, instead of a prophet presiding over a loose tribal confederacy, the people wanted a king ruling over a nation.  The request was more than a matter of orderly succession planning.  Palestine was becoming an increasingly populated and complex place.  Surrounding peoples had organized themselves into kingdoms, and they were stronger and quicker because of it.  Against such foes a tribal confederacy could easily be put down or wiped out altogether.  Consolidating themselves around a king was a matter of survival.  What is more, if Israel were ever to be a light to enlighten the nations, perhaps first they would have to become a nation themselves. 

Samuel didn’t like the idea of a king at all.  It was a bad day in history when the people said to Samuel, “Give us a king to govern us.”  In today’s Old Testament  reading (1 Samuel 8) we hear his magnificent blast against the inevitable evils of a big, bloated, bureaucratic government.  A king, he warns, will tax you into oblivion.  He will take your sons and daughters, he will take your crops and herds, he will take, take, take and leave you with nothing.  “You’re out of your mind if you think a king is a good idea,” might be a fair paraphrase of Samuel’s words.  Samuel makes valid and understandable points.  But I also hear in his complaint a knee-jerk resistance against a new form.  Samuel was caught in the tension between identity and relevance.  In the end he proved himself to be more adaptable than his initial booing and hissing suggested he would be.  He would serve as a bridge – albeit a reluctant bridge – between the old ways and the new, between the tribal confederacy and the monarchy.  It’s as if he decided that Yahweh might indeed be calling Israel to a new, larger, riskier, more complicated presence and ministry in the region. 

Next in the lineup of those having a really bad day are certain factions of the crowd in today’s reading from the Gospel of Mark (3:20-35).  Mark describes the scene as taking place at the home of Jesus.  We don’t know what Mark means by use of the word home, whether it was a place Jesus shared with his mother, brothers, and sisters, or a place he shared with his disciples.  Nevertheless, everyone seemed to be nearby, including great crowds of people who were eager to be near Jesus.  Why?  Because Jesus had been curing the sick, cleansing the lepers, and casting out demons.  Those who were lame leaped up at this word and practically began clog-dancing.  All good things, one would think. 

Strangely, these new manifestations of God’s power met with opposition.  The scribes who came down from Jerusalem didn’t like the new music at all.  They sat on the sidelines booing and hissing and declaring that Jesus must be possessed by Beelzebul.  “Only by the prince of demons could he be casting out demons,” is how they reviewed his performance.  Jesus silenced the scribes with a brilliant rebuttal that he concluded with a warning against falling into the unforgivable sin – blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.  What is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit?  Quite simply, it is to name the works of God as evil.  If you think that healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, and raising the dead are evil deeds, well, then you are in the mode of rejecting, even attacking any new thing, any good gift God sends down from heaven.  You are at cross purposes with God.  Make a life orientation of such a mindset and you’ll find yourself so deep in the habit that you can’t repent and be healed.  Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is unforgivable not because God can’t forgive it, but because the person committing the sin can’t or won’t repent.  They plug their ears and shout that they won’t listen, they won’t listen, they won’t listen to anything new. 

Resistance to the new works of Jesus came from more than the usual roundup of Biblical bad guys.  Among the unhappy crowd were members of Jesus’ own family.  Today’s reading from Mark gives us an intriguing look into the family of Jesus: his mother Mary, his brothers, and his sisters.  What comes clear is that they were anything but on board with the direction Jesus was taking with his life.  Does your family have troubles?  Well, then, read on in the Gospel of Mark for consolation.  In what can only be described as a bad day in holy family history, Jesus’ kin came to pull him out of the crowd, by force if necessary, because people were claiming that he had gone out of his mind.  Jesus’ brothers and sisters probably were annoyed with this older sibling of theirs and his new found celebrity status.  I can almost hear their thoughts.  He should get a job and a haircut.  Maybe trim the beard.  He should ditch the disciples, and pitch in with the family carpentry business. 

Eventually, it seems that certain members of Jesus’ family were able to transcend the constraints of their blood relationship, and trust that God was indeed playing a new song through Jesus.  Mary was active and present throughout his ministry, even at the foot of the cross.  James, the brother of Jesus, became an early bishop in the church.  For James it would take nothing short of the resurrection to convince him that God was bringing the great story of Israel to a climax in his earthly brother.  Frankly, the witness of James has always moved me.  I have two brothers whom I love and respect, but if one of them were to declare himself the Messiah I would not give up my day job without a resurrection. 

Did I just say resurrection?  I did.  In today’s reading from 2^nd Corinthians (4:13-5:1), the Apostle Paul declares that the resurrection of Jesus is central.  It is not only our greatest hope, but also the interpretive key to what God is up to in Creation.  The resurrection allows us to trust that God is working his purpose out in history, even making all things new through the days we might call bad.  We of all people should know that God is able to transform the terrible things that happen and the discordant notes we hear, and use them for good.  God doesn’t will or plan or in any way cause evil.  But God is able to transform it.  Indeed, we call the day of Jesus’ savage execution not bad, but Good Friday.  Why?  Because we discern in the self-offering of Jesus the love of God accomplishing a great, creative leap for human nature.  Out of Good Friday comes Easter Day, and in the risen Jesus we see a new creation, even your destiny and mine.  Today and every day, the invitation to you and me is to trust that God is able to raise up that which is cast down, and make all things new. 

To be sure, not every new song stands the test of time, not every movement is of God, and not every pioneer is blazing a trail toward righteousness.  But every so often someone comes along who changes everything.  Then we face the choice of whether to cling to the old or embrace the new.  As the Summer Olympics in Paris draw near, I think of a man named Dick Fosbury, a high jumper at the 1968 games in Mexico City.  In the early 1960s, high jumpers attempted to clear the bar using tried and true methods: either the Western Roll or the Straddle Technique.  The conventional wisdom was that the modes of high jumping had been fully explored.  Now it was just a matter of doing the same old thing better and better. 

When Fosbury was on his high school track team, he began experimenting with a new technique by which he flopped over the bar backwards.  Local sports writers covering high school track and field meets were not kind in their reviews of the new method, calling Fosbury “the world’s laziest high jumper,” and writing that Fosbury clears the bar “like a fish flopping in a boat.”  Soon the derisive moniker “Fosbury Flop” attached, and in college Fosbury’s coach persuaded him to return to the Straddle Technique.  But Fosbury pressed on, perfecting his new method and achieving greater and greater heights.  When he won the gold medal at the 1968 games, no one doubted any longer that he had taken a great creative leap in track and field.  Since then, nearly every successful high jumper has followed his lead, and used the Fosbury Flop. 

Likewise, God is working his purpose out, even through our flops and failures.  By faith we can reckon our bad days in history as slight momentary afflictions that prepare us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure.  Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, was despised and rejected on Good Friday, yet on Easter Day he opened to us a new way of being human.  His resurrection reveals God’s will for all humanity: that we should mount up with wings like eagles, that we should run and not be weary, that we should walk and not faint. 

Indeed, our destiny is to dwell in that kingdom where God raises up that which is cast down, and makes new that which has grown old, and brings all things and people to their perfection, from this time forth, even for ever. 

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LIKE A BIG PIZZA PIE

 The Rev. J. Donald Waring
Grace Church in New York
Trinity Sunday + May 26, 2024

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty.  (Isaiah 6:1)

The Scriptures assert that no one can see God and live.  Yet here we have the prophet Isaiah declaring, “I saw the Lord,” and surviving to tell the tale.  How about you?  Have you ever known a time in your life when you could almost say, “I saw the Lord?”  I have.  I was in my second year of seminary, agonizing over a paper on the topic of why an all-powerful, all-loving God would allow suffering.  For weeks I had thought and prayed and worked and wrestled with the relevant Biblical passages.  When the time came to write I had many things to say, not a word of which was my own.  I had many things to report on second-hand, but that was all.  I didn’t want to admit it, but “second hand” would have described much of my Christian faith at the time.  Like Isaiah before his vision, God had not yet granted me the grace of any divine revelation.  To be sure, I knew some things about God and the church.  But the case could have been made that I didn’t really know God. 

That all changed for me on a November evening in 1987.  As I sat at my desk working on the paper, following the clues, something completely unexpected happened.  Suddenly, like a wave washing over me, it all came together.  In a wonderful combination of both mind and emotion, Jesus made perfect sense to me.  I came to know the cross and resurrection of Christ as God’s gift to me.  I knew without a doubt that nothing in all of creation could separate me from the love of God.  An intense, urgent joy welled up within me.  I stood from my desk and paced back and forth in my tiny little room saying to myself, “Of course, of course.”  I walked around for the next several days with my feet a few inches off the ground.  The intensity of the experience faded, as mountain-top moments always do.  But it was profound enough that I will always remember it.  Since then I have been searching for words to describe the experience, but no words ever seem to capture it.

Today is Trinity Sunday.  Ever since medieval times the church has set aside one Sunday every year to observe and celebrate something people honestly have a difficult time observing and celebrating: the doctrine of the Trinity.  The Trinity is the church’s teaching about the nature of God’s personality – a subject that no human words can ever possibly capture.  But let me try to explain, very roughly, how we arrived at where we are. 

By the time of Jesus, people certainly had come to experience, or at least suspect the existence of Almighty God, the creator of heaven and earth, the universe around us, and all things visible and invisible.  They looked at the star lit heaven, they stood upon the stable earth, they sailed across the deep salt sea, and they experienced God as much, much greater than they were.  They knew God as the transcendent One who dwelled in light inaccessible from before time and forever.  Then along came Jesus of Nazareth, and the impact of his life, death, and resurrection on people was such that they were certain God himself had visited them in this individual.  They experienced Jesus as God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, of one Being with the Father.  After Jesus came the Day of Pentecost, when God’s Holy Spirit descended upon the people, and filled them with such new life that they could only conclude this was yet a third unique visitation of divinity. 

So the experience of God was as Father, Son, and Spirit.  But which was God?  Or were all three God?  If all three were God, how could God be One, as Jesus, Moses, and the prophets had taught?  To put the whole mystery in the mouth of a Youth Confirmation student I once knew: “If Jesus was God, then who was in charge of heaven when Jesus was on earth?”  “Good question, young lady,” I replied.  “And thank you for asking.  Have yourself another slice of pizza, and maybe we’ll have time to deal with your question another day,” said I. 

Trinity Sunday, I’m afraid, is that other day.  The doctrine of the Trinity attempts to address the student’s questions – it attempts to summarize the human experience of God.  The Trinity states that God the Father is God, that God the Son is God, and that God the Spirit is God.  And yet they are not three Gods but One.  The One God exists in Three Persons and One Substance.  That’s where all the three-in-one and one-in-three talk originates.  And it’s right about now – right at this moment on Trinity Sunday every year – when your eyes should glaze over, and your minds wander far, far away.  The doctrine of the Trinity is incomprehensible. 

Do you know what?  Incomprehensibility is precisely the point.  The Trinity is not meant to be comprehended.  God is not meant to be understood.  God is meant to be experienced.  If the doctrine of the Trinity causes your mind to wander, it’s because you’re probably starting with the doctrine and then trying to get from there to the experience.  You’re putting the cart before the horse.  You’re putting the doctrine before the experience.  Instead, we start with the experience of God, and then comes the doctrine.  All Christian doctrine starts with an experience of the true and living God. 

Let me try to explain.  Imagine this hypothetical situation: You decide to go out to dinner one evening to enjoy your favorite food.  Feel free to substitute whatever dish you want here, but for the common good let’s say that your favorite dish is pizza.  In fact, the word pizza itself is somewhat sacred to you.  You say it with reverence.  The mere mention of the word causes you to pause, close your eyes, and anticipate your next trip to the pizzeria.  Well, the time has come and the pizza set before you is an absolute masterpiece to be devoured.  The experience of eating the pizza with friends fills you with delight. 

Now it so happens that you are a restaurant critic for a local food blog, and one reason why you went to this particular restaurant was to write a review.  So when you go home you sit down with your laptop and search for words to describe the pizza.  You do your best to find paragraphs and phrases and sentences to convey the reality of toppings and cheese and sauce.  But ultimately you know that mere words won’t do it.  A written or even verbal description of such a meal can hardly capture, let alone communicate, the experience of the actual substance hitting your taste buds. 

The next day people open your post and read what you’ve written.  Imagine that one person who has never before tasted pizza reads your review, studies it, analyses it, and without ever going to the restaurant or sampling a pizza, tries to become an authority on the pizzeria and the pizza.  But how much will that person know?  Not much, because the experience itself is lacking.  It’s all second-hand.  The doctrine of the Trinity in its fully developed form is a bit like your written review.  It is a verbal description of something that cannot be contained in words.  It is words and sentences and reflections based on the experience of the true and only God actually hitting your taste buds, or flying before your eyes, as in the case of Isaiah.  Without the experience, the words make little sense.

Jesus seemed to think this lack of experience was the problem of one named Nicodemus.  We have a conversation between the two recorded in today’s reading from the Gospel of John (3:1-17).  Nicodemus was a good man who eventually became a follower of Jesus.  John describes him as a Pharisee, which means he was a strict keeper of the Commandments.  He was a ruler of the Jews, which means he was a member of the Sanhedrin, the top seventy Jewish officials in all of Judaism.  He was a teacher of Israel – a rabbi who instructed other Jews in the ways of God.  Nicodemus knew about God,  He studied God.  He taught the subject of God.  He understood God as well as anyone assumed God could be understood.  But in the conversation he had with Jesus, Nicodemus learned that what he knew of God was all second-hand.  Nicodemus began the conversation by saying, we know.  What Jesus basically had to say to Nicodemus was: no, you don’t know God because you haven’t experienced God for yourself.  You haven’t been born anew, or born from above, or born again. 

 Nicodemus is like the person who tries to know all about pizza from your written review.  He is like the drama critic who has never acted in a play.  He is like the sports writer who has never played the game.  Imagine if Nicodemus were to live today and have you over for dinner.  You would sit around the dining room table reading cookbooks and discussing recipes and the nutritional value of food.  You might recite some of the recipes together, responsively by whole verse.  You might even set the recipes to plainsong or Anglican Chant and sing about the food, but you’d never get around to experiencing the food first hand.  Of course, we are being unfair to Nicodemus, but only to highlight a point.  Nicodemus had made a living out of studying and critiquing and analyzing God, but never actually experiencing and participating in God.  It was all second-hand.  He was so caught up in trying to understand, that he never got around to the experience itself.  He was putting the cart before the horse.  He was putting the explanation before the experience.  Such was his problem, said Jesus.

It can be our problem too if we aren’t careful.  Especially on Trinity Sunday, we can get so caught up in trying to understand God that we wind up missing or distrusting the experience of God.  How many genuine moments of divine revelation have we dismissed as coincidence, or discounted due to the cynicism of our age?  What Jesus had to say to Nicodemus is good news when you think about it.  His message is that you don’t have to understand God in order to enjoy God.  You don’t have to understand the wind in order to feel it.  You don’t have to understand the Eucharist in order to receive it and be nourished by it.  All we need to know is that we have a place at the table set for us.  Have yourself another slice of pizza.  God is to be experienced.  O taste and see how gracious the Lord is, proclaimed the Psalmist (34:8). 

A marvelous story is told of Karl Barth, one of the greatest Christian thinkers of the 20^th century.  From before World War One until his death in 1968 Karl Barth was a Protestant pastor and university professor of theology.  He wrote and taught with passion and conviction, and had a profound influence in the Christian world.  His massive work, Church Dogmatics, is a twenty-plus volume scholarly treatise dealing with all matters of belief and existence.  One of my professors in seminary, when he was a young man, had listened to Karl Barth give a lecture, and he reported that merely the way Barth said the word “God” conveyed the richness and the depth of the life time of thought he had given to theology.  Indeed, Barth had studied God.  He knew all about God. 

Toward the end of his life Karl Barth was being interviewed, and the question put to him was something on the order of, what have you learned in all these years?  How would you summarize your life’s work?  People braced themselves for a deeply profound, yet highly technical statement that would be inaccessible to anyone outside of an ivory tower.  The great theologian thought for a moment, and then responded: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

If you don’t understand God, relax.  Stay alert for moments of divine revelation when you might be able to declare, “I saw the Lord.”  The love of God is an experience waiting for you – like a big pizza pie.  Or in other words: when the Lord hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore! 

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SPIRIT OF LIFE

 The Rev. J. Donald Waring
Grace Church in New York
The Day of Pentecost
May 19, 2024

But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them: “Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say.  Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning.  (Acts 2:14-15) 

A character from literature who often comes to my mind on the Day of Pentecost is Miss Havisham, from Charles Dickens’ novel, Great Expectations.  The story goes that many years ago, at twenty-minutes to nine on the morning of her wedding, Miss Havisham was one shoe shy of being dressed and ready.  In the dining hall of the house a great cake and feast awaited the guests.  The bride’s maids were ready to put on their gowns, and the household staff was making last-minute preparations. 

At twenty-minutes to nine, however, Miss Havisham’s hopes and dreams came to an abrupt end.  Just then a cruel note arrived from the groom, informing the would-be bride that the wedding was not to be.  At that moment Miss Havisham stopped her life.  She stopped all the clocks at twenty-minutes to nine.  She pulled the drapes over every window to block off all sunlight.  She vowed to spend the rest of her life sitting in her wedding gown – minus one shoe – among the rotting cake and yellowing decorations of a day that almost was. 

Miss Havisham’s chosen way of being turns her into a living corpse.  Years later a young boy named Pip is brought in to meet her, and he reflects on the encounter: Once I had been taken to see some ghastly waxwork at the Fair, representing I know not what impossible personage lying in state.  Once I had been taken… to see a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress, that had been dug out of a vault under the church pavement.  Now, waxwork and skeleton seemed to have dark eyes that moved and looked at me.  I should have cried out, if I could. 

You may be wondering: of all the people to think of on the Day of Pentecost, why Miss Havisham?  True, she’s fictional.  True, she’s a caricature.  But do you know her?  Have you met her?  Today we celebrate the gift that she and all of us need – God’s gift of the Holy Spirit.  In the reading from the Acts of the Apostles (2:1-21) we heard the account of what happened in Jerusalem.  It had been ten days since the risen Jesus had departed from the company of his disciples.  He was gone.  Whatever the Easter experience was, it was over.  At twenty minutes to nine, the disciples were huddled in a room with others who spoke different languages.  They had no purpose.  They had no fire.  Then came nine o’clock in the morning.  Suddenly a sound like the rush of a mighty wind filled the house, and they saw visions of divided flames of fire resting on each of them.  Everyone began speaking about the mighty works of God, but those who listened heard the proclamations in their own native language.  It was Peter who eventually stood up and declared that God has poured out his Spirit upon them. 

But what, you might ask, or more appropriately, who is the Holy Spirit?  The Holy Spirit is the Lord, the giver of life, as we affirm each week in the Nicene Creed.  The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ who was present and active at the moment of creation.  The Holy Spirit is God’s personality that powers and animates the whole creation.  The Holy Spirit is the mystery within you.  You lie on your bed on a sleepless night and you sometimes fleetingly grasp in yourself a presence that is more than yourself, distinct from yourself, yet impossible to disentangle from yourself and your history.  What is it?  Who is it?  Is it merely excess static from the firing of your own brain chemistry?  No, assuming you are not filled with new wine, chances are this is the Holy Spirit.  This is the Spirit of God whom Jesus promised to send.  This is the Lord, the giver of life, who has entangled and entwined his Spirit with your spirit.  This is the Spirit of God in you.  The Holy Spirit is the mystery within you. 

The Holy Spirit is the mystery within the church.  When God poured out the Holy Spirit upon the disciples in Jerusalem, they received new and abundant life that you will find in the church still today.  In fact, Pentecost is often called the Birthday of the Church, because it is the Spirit of Christ in our midst that makes us unique.  The Spirit gets us going and gives us purpose.  But where do we find the Spirit of Christ, and how do we share it with the Miss Havishams of the world?  Must it be a dramatic experience that overpowers your personality?  No, not at all.  My experience of the Spirit is a slow and steady process of God’s giving divine life to me.  I see – I detect – I experience the Holy Spirit in Christian community all the time.  Jesus promised that whenever two or three – or twelve or two-hundred of us gather in his name, he is in the midst of us.  I believe him.  By the power of the Spirit, he is here, lifting us up through the Christian community. 

I remember a time years ago when our youngest son, Luke, was a baby.  When Luke was born he required a number of complicated surgeries to correct a cleft lip and palate.  The procedures were emotionally draining for Stacie and me.  What is more, we had three-year old James who needed our attention.  We were exhausted beyond the normal fatigue of sleep-deprived young parents. 

One Sunday evening in Advent, the youth group of the church where I was the rector was sponsoring a spaghetti dinner.  They gave it the Advent theme: Christ is coming.  Be Ready.  Eat Spaghetti!  So the whole church gathered in the parish hall to eat spaghetti, as if eating loads of pasta was exactly what Jesus would want to see us doing were he to return.  Luke was eight-months old at the time, and we had him in our lap.  Another major surgery was about a month away.  Suddenly, a member of the church asked if she could hold the baby.  Then the person next to her wanted a turn, as did the next person.  Before we knew it, Luke was crowd-surfing through the spaghetti dinner.  I looked halfway across the large room, and people were holding him up, making him laugh, and passing him along. 

It was a moment of deep relief for me.  I saw our baby son not as one under the threat of another surgery, but as if he were walking in the air – flying through the air like the little boy in the British animated film, The Snowman  (listen for the song during Communion today).  I’ve always remembered the scene as a parable of Christian community at its best.  And I thought of it last weekend, when that baby, now all grown up, walked across the stage and received his college degree, with honors.  The Spirit of God lifts us up through each other. 

The Spirit of God is to be found in the Word – in the Scriptures.  What we say in the Episcopal Church is that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments contain all things necessary for salvation.  But not all things in the Scriptures are necessary for salvation.  Do you see the distinction?  It takes gatherings of two or three to discern and learn where the mind of God is in the passages.  Lately, we are studying four short books of the Bible: Ruth, Jonah, Titus, and Jude.  Last Wednesday twelve of us read Ruth together, and I was stunned by what a salacious tale it is.  Naomi, who is actually the main character, is a bitter widow who believes God has taken everything from her.  Yet God’s will is that she not wind up like Miss Havisham.  God works through imperfect people, and even Naomi’s schemes to bring her salvation.  Imagine: God works through imperfect people to bring about salvation.  That was our takeaway.  There was the will and the way of God.  There was the Spirit leading us into all truth.  We decided that the story was saucy enough to be made into a Hollywood film, starring Jennifer Lawrence as Ruth, George Clooney as Boaz, and Kathy Bates as Naomi. 

Where else in the church do we find the Spirit of the Lord?  The Spirit of the Lord comes to us through the water of Baptism, and the bread and wine of the Eucharist.  Indeed, we trust in the ancient wisdom of the church that the outward signs and the inward grace of the sacraments are inextricably bound together, whether we happen to feel it or not.  When we baptize Theo and William this morning, they will receive the Spirit.  When you receive the bread and the wine of the Eucharist today, the Spirit will come to you.  If your heart isn’t strangely warmed in the moment, relax.  The Lord of hosts is with you.  The Spirit of the Lord warming the church is not like a microwave oven.  The Spirit is more like a crock pot, or a slow cooker.  Slowly does the Spirit help us to grow into the full stature of Christ. 

That being said, sometimes the power and the presence of the Spirit will dawn on you.  On a recent, non-descript Sunday, when I was presiding at the Eucharist, reading the prayer of consecration, the Spirit of the Lord fell upon me.  It was sometime between nine and ten o’clock in the morning.  For an instant the full magnitude of what God was extending to us through the bread and wine became strikingly real: deliverance from evil, error, sin, and death.  Meanwhile the door to worthiness, truth, righteousness, and life – life eternal – is being held open for us.  I saw no flames of fire, nor did I feel any rushing wind.  But I knew for a certainty the truth of what we’ll sing in our final hymn: the Spirit and the gifts are ours. 

Sadly, Miss Havisham stopped her clocks at twenty minutes to nine.  What I would say to her is come, receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.  Come, be part of this community that will lift you up.  Come, immerse yourself in the Word and learn of the surprising ways that God works to save us.  Come, receive the bread of heaven and the cup of salvation.  Be filled with Christ’s heavenly benediction, so that he may dwell in you, and you in him.  For these reasons and more I am excited about Grace Church.  I’ve been here for twenty years, but I am now more excited than ever about the particular gifts we we have to offer to all sorts and conditions of people.  And yes, I am excited about our capital campaign.  I hope you will participate in it.  I hope that Grace Church is here for centuries to come.  Why?  Well, the church is hardly a perfect institution, but it is always poised toward divine possibility.  Nine o’clock in the morning is always at hand. 

Last week was Mother’s Day.  In addition to watching Luke’s graduation, I was admiring Stacie’s fierce love for our two sons.  Also I was thinking about my own mother, who died a few years ago, just shy of her 91^st birthday.  My father was an Episcopal priest.  He was always busy, always frugal.  My mother was his loving wife and faithful companion.  She always looked forward to retirement, when they could travel, go on cruises, see the world, and enjoy a leisurely life together.  Then, just a week before Dad was going to announce his retirement to the vestry, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died in his sleep.  My mother was a widow at 65.  Her grief was devastating.  All of her hopes and plans, dashed. 

Mom easily and understandably could have stopped the clocks at twenty minutes to nine, and spent the rest of her life bemoaning was taken from her.  But she did not.  After an appropriate season of mourning, she arose.  She threw open the curtains and started the clocks.  She downsized the house, moved close to two of her three sons, and immersed herself into being the unfiltered, unfettered matriarch of the family  She spent money in a way that Dad never would have allowed: taking the extended family on annual vacations that pulled us together and gave us memories we’ll never forget.  She allowed nine o’clock to come.  It didn’t look the way she expected it, but the last 25 years of her life were an incredible blessing.  I was always tremendously proud of the way she embrace life again. 

What was the source of her arising?  What it force of will?  Was it the power of positive thinking?  No, it was the quiet, steady gift of the Holy Spirit.  She believed in the Holy Spirit, who is the Lord, the giver of life.  She trusted in the Communion of Saints.  She looked for the resurrection of the dead – especially in herself – and the life of the world to come.  She was filled with the Spirit of God. 

That same Spirit of Life is available to you and me every day – to lift us up, to lead us into all truth, and to draw us into fellowship with the Father and Son.  In the kingdom of God, nine o’clock in the morning is always just at hand.  Wait for it!

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WITH CHARITY FOR ALL

 The Rev. J. Donald Waring
Grace Church in New York
The Sixth Sunday of Easter
May 5, 2024

Jesus said, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.  (John 15:12) 

Today’s readings from the First Epistle of John and the Gospel of John have me thinking about Abraham Lincoln.  Why?  Well, if you hang with me for a moment I’ll tell you why.  Most everyone knows that Lincoln was the 16^th and, by most estimates, the greatest President of the United States.  Serving just one term in the White House before an assassin’s bullet cut him down, Lincoln freed the slaves, won the Civil War, and saved the Union.  He was a towering statesman, whose speeches, though generally brief, were so profound that they almost immediately entered the American lexicon.  We still quote them today. 

Lincoln was complex.  Not only was he a statesman and a politician, also he was a theologian of sorts.  He infused his speeches with Biblical words and images.  He thought deeply about the will of God, and how Providence was working its purpose out through the Civil War.  His insights were, and remain, refreshingly astute and accessible, even applicable to our own day of division and discord.  Historians and biographers never tire in the effort to describe the greatness of Lincoln.  To those who would chronicle his life, the depth of his character seems inexhaustible, the breadth of his legacy expansive beyond reach. 

As an example of the endless quest to understand Lincoln, one has only to go to Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC, where he was assassinated on April 14, 1865.  The site, including the house where Lincoln was taken after the shooting, is now a museum as well as an active theatre and center for education.  In one of the buildings is an art installation representing many of the recent books about Lincoln, stacked atop each other.  It is a 34-foot tall, three-story tower of books, depicting nearly 7,000 volumes which, in fact, is just a fraction of the scholarly efforts.  The tower has a spiral staircase wrapped around it that you can climb.  As you ascend and descend you see book after book after book examining some new angle on Lincoln’s life and legacy.  I am not sure if they are still adding new volumes to the top of the tower, but if so you’ll find a very good one by Grace Church parishioner John Avlon.[1]  The books about Lincoln just keep on coming.  Soon they are going to need a bigger building. 

Let’s return now to the question of why today’s readings from the First Epistle of John (5:1-6) and the Gospel of John (15:9-17) started me thinking about Abraham Lincoln.  The answer is, quite simply, that these readings are like a tower of the word love.  It all began last Sunday when we heard from the lectern a portion of 1^st John (4:17-21) that occurs immediately before today’s passage.  In just 14 verses, the reader pronounced the word love twenty-seven times.  Today’s readings continue the theme, and add to the tower of love.  In just five verses of 1^st John we hear the word love five times.  In today’s eight verses of John’s Gospel we encounter the word love nine times. 

Clearly, we are meant to learn something about love.  But immediately, we must admit that we are delving into a topic that is more complex than Lincoln himself.  If you were to create a tower of all the books that have been written about love, I suspect you would need to hollow out a midtown skyscraper in order to contain them all.  A quick scan of my own bookshelves reveals such titles as Works of Love by Soren Kierkegaard, All About Love by bell hooks, The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis, and Love Wins by Rob Bell.  I’m sure I could find more if I looked.  Have owning and reading all these books about love made me a more loving person?  Perhaps that will be another sermon for another day.  Let’s just say, I’m a work in progress. 

In the meantime, what can we learn about love?  What can we learn about the love we’ve encountered forty-one times in the past two Sundays?   First, we might look at the word itself that we translate from the original New Testament Greek into the English word love.  New Testament Greek is actually better than English at expressing the complexity of love.  The Greek includes four different words for our one word, love.  The word in question today is agape (pronounced “ah-gah⸍-pay”).  In the King James Version of the Bible, translators often rendered agape as charity.  When Abraham Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural Address, and said “with malice to none, with charity for all,” it is likely that he had the New Testament concept of agape in mind. 

What sort of love is agape?  Well, agape, or charity, has little or nothing to do with “that loving feeling.”  It’s not about the love you would feel for a family member, for a friend, or for a lover.  So when Jesus commands us to love one another, he is not expecting us to conjure up warm, affectionate feelings for people we find rude or disagreeable.  Initially I take it as a relief that I don’t have to manufacture false feelings and put up a phony front.  But what, then, does Jesus mean when he commands us to have agape for one another?  What did Lincoln mean when he said “with charity for all?”  What I take them both to mean is this: to have agape for another person is to wish for, to pray for, and if the opportunity presents itself, to work for the well-being of that person, regardless of how you feel.  It is a willful commitment, not an emotional experience. 

Wish for, pray for, work for the flourishing of all people.  Live with charity for all.  How can you do it?  Do you even want to do it?  I’m not sure I always do.  Even if how we feel is not the point, still the command to have agape for every brother or sister is mentally and spiritually exhausting.  So here it might be helpful to learn a second characteristic of love that we find in today’s readings.  The authors of John’s Epistles and Gospel in particular write about agape love as if it were shaped like a cross.  It is cruciform.  As you know a cross is formed by two beams: one large vertical beam, and a second smaller horizontal beam.  When Jesus said, “this is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you,” he touched on the two dimensions of love that the beams of the cross represent.  Love one another is the horizontal beam of the cross.  As I have loved you is the vertical beam.  Perhaps a close examination of both beams will help us enter more deeply into God’s life and love. 

First, the vertical beam of the cross.  The strong verticality of God’s love is unmistakable in John’s Gospel and First Epistle.  Love starts with God in the very act of creation.  Then God sent his only Son into the world, and Jesus offered himself back to God, an atoning sacrifice.  No one has greater love than this.  God’s love descends and ascends to form the strong, supporting vertical beam of the cross.  In the Collect of the Day we pray that God will pour his love into our hearts so that we can offer it back again.  In last week’s Epistle John wrote that the only reason we love at all is because God first loved us.  God is the source of all love.  Theologians call God’s initial love “prevenient grace.”  Based on what John has written, we might go so far as to say that the presence of love in the world is a clue to the existence of God.  If someone asks you, please, to prove the existence of God, whom no one can see, you can point to the phenomenon of love as evidence – not proof, but evidence – of divine activity above and beyond natural processes.  God is love, and where true love is, God himself is there.  Understanding – believing – that God is love and that God loves you changes everything. 

Allow me to anticipate the objections you may encounter.  You will hear from a disappointed and disbelieving world that the presence of love is no clue to the existence of God.  In The New York Times this week was the obituary of a scientist who claimed to have isolated a love gene in prairie voles.[2]  Thus, he concluded, love is merely the product of firing neurons and brain chemicals that have resulted from the long, winding road of natural selection.  As such, whatever love is, we manufacture it in our heads.  It is an imaginary human construct.  But if the authors of John’s Epistles and John’s Gospel have it correct, love comes from beyond ourselves.  Love comes from God.  As a radio does not manufacture, but receives its signal from another source, so also have we tuned into the business of heaven when we wish for, pray for, and work for the flourishing of another.  Of course, the hard wiring of the brain is all essential to the process – but as the receiver, before being a transmitter.  Sometimes we are poor receivers, indeed.  Human sin can distort God’s signal beyond all recognition.  But God’s broadcasts never cease.  This is the strong, supporting vertical beam of God’s love, evident when Jesus said, “You did not choose me, but I chose you.” 

Second, the horizontal beam of the cross.  “This is my commandment, that you love one another.”  “Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”  If such love, practiced among us mortals, sounds unsustainable, if not unattainable, you’re right.  The horizontal dimension of love that Jesus commands is neither attainable nor sustainable by our own strength.  It is beyond human ability.  If your experience of love is that it falls apart, think about it this way: the horizontal beam of the cross cannot levitate in mid-air.  It needs an anchor.  It needs to be fixed to the vertical beam or else it falls to the ground.  In this light we might say that human aspirations and attempts to love, not fixed to God’s prevenient love, eventually die.  They exhaust our natural strength.  Even the marriage vow is qualified by the sobering final clause: until we are parted by death.  But when we can envision our love for one another to be in the shape of a cross, with the horizontal beam firmly fixed to the vertical beam, then we can begin to see how the fulfilling of Christ’s command to love is possible.  When our smaller attempts to love are grafted onto and extend from God’s prior love for us, then we abide in him and he in us.  Then we can begin to fulfill the command to live with charity for all. 

I remember one of the first times I took seriously the command of Jesus to love one another.  When I was in the 9^th grade my family moved to a new city.  For me the move meant leaving the top of the heap in my old school, and becoming virtually a nobody in a new, much larger school.  To make matters worse, a popular student went strangely out of his way to make my entrance into that place as difficult as possible.  He availed himself of every opportunity for a snub or a put-down.  We had several classes together in which I sat a few rows behind him.  Thus, I spent hours every week glaring with malice at the back of his head.  One day I even prayed a prayer that went like this: O God, don’t you just hate that kid as much as I do?  I wanted to hear God agree that I was firmly in the right, as God had given me to see the right, and say, Yes, Don, I really do hate that kid as much as you do.  You know me, Don, I’m all about the hate.  But God said no such thing. 

I am not a mystic.  I am not given to frequent visions.  Sometimes the Word of the Lord is rare for me.  But never before had I experienced the rapid and clear answer to prayer I did on that day.  Deep within my soul I discerned the Spirit of the Lord to say, No, I don’t hate that kid.  In fact I love that kid as much as I love you.  Imagine that: I love that kid as much as I love you.  I believe I truly heard the Spirit speaking to me, because such a thought was certainly not the product of my own brain chemistry.  My neural network could not have manufactured the idea.  It was the Spirit of truth who testified.  I did not choose love.  Love had chosen me.  Love had tuned me into the business of heaven.  The effect on me was startling, so much so that I’m telling you about it all these years later. 

What was the result?  The other student and I never became friends.  I don’t even remember his name.  But from then on, never again could I look at him with the same old eyes of hatred.  Never could I see him without remembering that God loved him as much as God loved me.  Never again could I see him as a foe, no matter what he said or did.  God had chosen me to leave malice behind, and walk in the way of charity. 

Jesus said, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 

[1] John Avlon, Lincoln and the Fight for Peace.  Simon &Shuster, 2022.

[2] Michael S. Rosenwald, Larry Young, Who Studied the Chemistry of Love, Dies at 56.  May 2, 2024.

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GIVE AND LIVE

 The Rev. J. Donald Waring
Grace Church in New York
The Third Sunday of Easter
April 14, 2024

Jesus stood among the disciples and said to them, “Peace be with you.”  They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost.  (Luke 24:36-37)

 Have you ever caught someone trying to swindle you?  I have.  Soon after graduating from college I set out to buy a car that would be my own.  I’d been driving the old family smasher for years at that point, compliments of my parents.  It was a 1969 Chrysler Newport that could seat about twenty.  It was time for something newer and smaller.  So I began saving money as I’d never saved it before.  I remember taking every paycheck to the bank and watching the numbers grow in my passbook savings account.  In fact, sometimes I would open up the savings book and just look at it: cradling it in my hands, pondering how far I’d come, and how far I still had to go. 

When I thought I’d saved enough for a good used car, I began checking the newspapers and shopping the lots.  One day I came across a car with a price on it that seemed too good to be true.  It was a late 1970’s model Chevy Impala – still the size of a yacht, but small and sporty compared to the old Chrysler.  “She just came in this morning,” said the salesman walking up to me in his plaid, polyester suit (it wasn’t long after the disco era).  “Why don’t you take ‘er out for a spin?” he added.  This I did, and drove the car to pick up a friend who came back to the lot with me. 

We began examining the car.  It was silver in color with no apparent scratches, dents, or rust.  Then we noticed some odd fixtures on the roof.  My friend said that these looked like what would hold a siren in place.  The Chevy was likely a former police car, driven hard and now prone to break down.  Not a good buy.  “No,” said the salesman with an absolutely straight face.  “This car has had only one owner, and that was a little old lady.”  We scratched our heads and continued examining the car.  Eventually we looked in the glove box and found there some papers belonging to the police department of a neighboring town.  A police car, indeed.  So we hopped in my Chrysler.  It was as big as a whale, and it was about to set sail.  The dishonest salesman tried to show me something else, but I would do no business with such a scoundrel.  I felt rather proud not to be so easily swindled out of my precious bank account.

This week as I read through the 24th chapter of Luke, I recalled my experience on the used car lot.  The disciples of Jesus, on some deep level, must have felt swindled.  For three years they had given their all to following Jesus.  Their commitment to him had been the highest priority in their lives, overshadowing the pursuit of their livelihoods, the enjoyment of other friends, even their commitment to family.  I think we tend to underestimate how costly it must have been for them to break ranks with the cultural and religious expectations of their time and place and follow in the footsteps of Jesus.  To heed the call of an itinerant preacher to the extent that they did was to gamble not only with their integrity as persons, but also with their ultimate loves and loyalties.  How would I have responded to Jesus, had I been in the disciples’ shoes.  How much of myself would I have been willing to give?  True, most of us have placed our faith Jesus.  I suspect, however, that most of us also have hedged our faith to a lesser or larger extent.  Not the disciples: they’d risked it all.

We find the disciples today presumably late in the evening of the first Easter Day, probably in the same upper room where they’d eaten the Passover meal a few nights earlier.  Since three-o’clock the previous Friday afternoon, they must have been thinking that their three-year venture with Jesus had been a foolish gamble.  They’d put down everything they had, and they’d driven off the lot with a lemon.  Jesus had been publicly and shamefully executed, leaving them with nothing but dashed hopes, empty pockets, and a movement that was going nowhere.  It was all over.  Since that morning they’d been hearing reports from some women that the tomb of Jesus was empty, and that an angel of the Lord had said he was risen from the dead.  But Luke reports that the disciples regarded this as an “idle tale.”  In other words, file that one under “fat chance,” in the same folder as the mythical little old lady who owned the police car.  Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.  They were not going to be swindled again. 

So I ask you again: have you ever caught someone trying to swindle you?  My guess is you have.  You’ve learned to beware of swindlers.  They are everywhere.  Just this week I received a truly eye-popping email of the sort that I didn’t think made the rounds anymore: the old Nigerian government-official scam.  The sender claimed he was trying to transfer $75,500,000 out of his country, but needed a foreign account to make it happen.  Might we allow him to park the money in a Grace Church account?  If so, all I had to do was provide him with some baking details, and he’d cut us in for twenty-percent of the loot.  Who needs a capital campaign?  What could possibly go wrong, except – oh – everything?  What surprised me about this email is that its continued circulation indicates that it works.  Some poor souls are still falling for it. 

The world is also full of swindlers: financial swindlers and emotional swindlers.  The world is full of people and organizations who, if you let them, will drain you of faith, hope, love, and joy.  Family and friends, politicians, faith traditions, even professional sports teams can let you down.  Some years ago a lifelong fan and season ticket holder of the Cleveland Browns was dying prematurely from cancer.  He decided to write his own obituary, and his one request was that six players from the Browns serve as pallbearers at his funeral, and lower his casket into the grave.  Why?  So that the Browns could “let him down one last time.”  New Yorkers know the feeling.  Two NFL teams that play in the Meadowlands of New Jersey, and an MLB team in Queens are especially adept at tearing out your heart and letting you down.  So beware of emotional swindlers who will let you down, and financial swindlers who will leave you stranded by the side of the road.  Be on your guard at all times.  It’s no wonder why so many people are angry these days, and glare at the world with clenched fists.  Swindlers are everywhere, scheming night and day to take what you have. 

I have to wonder if the disciples were suffering from buyer’s remorse after the death of Jesus.  How could they not have felt drained and disillusioned?  Just before today’s Gospel reading, Luke reports that two travelers from the road to Emmaus had joined the disciples in the room where they were hiding.  The travelers brought with them another report of an encounter with Jesus alive.  It was as they were all trying to sort this out when today’s reading from Luke begins.  Jesus himself stood among them.  A logistical question immediately comes to mind.  How did Jesus get all the way there from Emmaus?  Not in a Chrysler.  Not in a Chevy.  On foot, trailing the two travelers?  No, in a new resurrection body, the likes of which confused the disciples.  They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost.  They were frightened, they doubted.  The most positive thing Luke has to say about them is that they disbelieved for joy.  Another reputable translation of the phrase is it seemed too good to be true.  If you’ve been around the block a few times you know that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.  Well, these disciples had been around the block.  In fact, all of the gospel writers testify to how guarded they were in those early days after the resurrection of Jesus.  How slow of heart they were to believe.  Fool me once: shame on you.  Fool me twice: shame on me! 

Luke describes how Jesus himself had a difficult time convincing the disciples that he was alive.  First he showed them his hands and his feet, presumably so they could see the wounds of his crucifixion.  He was no impostor standing before them.  Then he invited their touch.  If they didn’t believe their eyes, they could touch him and feel his bones and flesh.  Then he asked if they had anything to eat, and when they had given him a piece of broiled fish, he ate it in their presence.  Next he sat down with them for what must have been the most interesting Bible study class ever in history.  He opened their minds to understand the scriptures.  He showed them how Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalmist we not snake oil salesmen.  They had all pointed to the death and resurrection of Jesus, and it had happened.  They had told the truth.  The disciples weren’t being swindled.  God really had raised Jesus from the dead.  They could trust again. 

Finally, Jesus did something that alone should have awakened the disciples’ recognition: he sent them on a mission.  He sent them out to proclaim the possibility of repentance, and the promise of forgiveness.  Throughout the three years they had spent with Jesus, he never blessed them merely for their own comfort and enjoyment.  He’d never taught them merely for their own wisdom and fulfillment.  He’d never empowered them merely to pursue their own success.  Rather, he sent them out to spread the message of the kingdom of God.  He was always sending them out into this world of swindlers to give of themselves.  That trademark commissioning is exactly what he did again.  The risen Jesus took all this time and effort to reveal himself to the disciples not merely to assuage their grief, not merely to dry their tears, but so that all people might share in the new ride of his resurrected life.  Imagine: after all the disciples had been through, Jesus sent them out again to be witnesses of the resurrection. 

How about us?  Are we ready to hear the call of the risen Jesus, who sends us out to give of ourselves, even into this world of swindlers?  To say yes is to be risen with Christ, to share in his eternal priesthood, and participate in his work to make all things new.  Surely, you saw that one coming!  For the second sermon in a row, I’ve made a clever pivot from the Biblical message to the business of a capital campaign.  In my mind, however, it’s not a pivot at all to move between heaven and earth.  Spirit and substance are both part of God’s creation, and to be concerned about the former is to act in the latter.  To share in the risen life of Christ is to give of ourselves, and work to make all things new in this life, on this earth, at this time. 

Today we launch the public phase of our campaign.  Today, we hear the trademark call of Jesus to ready ourselves for a mission, and restore Grace Church for service in the kingdom of God.  As you consider your own participation, let me leave you with a parable I once heard that originates from the land where Jesus walked.  It’s called Two Kinds of Seas, Two Kinds of People, and it goes like this:

In Israel there are two seas.  One is fresh and abounding in fish.  Fields of green adorn its banks and children play along its shores.  Men and women build their houses near it and birds their nests.  Life is happier because it is there.  Further south there is another sea.  Here there is no splash of fish, no song of birds, no children’s laughter.  The air hangs heavy above its waters, and neither man nor beast will drink from it.  What makes the difference between these two seas?  Not the River Jordan which empties the same sparkling water into both.  Not the soil in which they lie.  Not the country that surrounds the two seas.  The difference is this: the Sea of Galilee receives but does not keep the Jordan.  For every drop that flows into it another drop flows out at the other end and continues down the Jordan to the other sea.  The other sea hordes its incoming waters jealously; it keeps every drop it gets.  The Sea of Galilee gives and lives.  The other sea gives nothing.  The other sea is called the Dead Sea.  There are two kinds of seas in Israel.  There are two kinds of people in this world. 

Here’s a secret that the world has always been slow of heart to believe: to give is to live.  It’s true.  He is risen.  We are witnesses of these things.