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Sermon
Synopses - May 2007
Sermons
at Trinity are usually ex tempore, that is done without
notes...Please
enjoy our "Sermon Synopses" or short summaries
of sermons preached at Trinity
Link
to Sermons Synopses for
additional summaries available from this year.
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Sermon for Sunday,
May 30, 2007
Text: Mark 10:32-45
Todd
noted how great the expectations were that the disciples
had for Jesus as the restorer of Israel, and how great
their disappointment must have been to discover that
Jesus was not going to be the restorer of Israel as they
had imagined it.
Todd quoted Simon Tugwell,
OP, in Ways of Imperfection, to speak to disappointment.
Christianity
has to be disappointing, precisely because it is not a
mechanism for accomplishing all our human ambitions and
aspiration: it is a mechanism for subjecting all things
to the will of God. The first disciples were disappointed
because Jesus turned out not to be the kind of Messiah
they wanted…
We may indeed say that Christianity
does direct us to the fulfillment of all our desires and
hopes: but we shall only say this correctly if we understand
it to mean that a great many of the desires and hopes we
are conscious of will eventually turn out to be foolish
and misconceived. It
is God who knows how to make us happy, better than we know
ourselves. Christianity necessarily involves a remaking
of our hopes. And our disappointments are an unavoidable
part of the process.
All Christian journeys of
any depth and integrity will involve disappointment, Todd
said. We must be disappointed,
in order that God can remake our hopes and desires in the
process of subjecting all things to his will. When
God has done so, then – in a mysterious way – we
will truly be happy.
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Sermon
for Sunday, May 27, 2007 – Pentecost
“I am not
going to go skydiving with the Trinity men’s group.” So
began Todd’s
sermon for Pentecost Sunday. Todd explained that
there was too much risk to his going skydiving, and nobody
would allow him to do it: his wife would say “no,” the
wardens would say “no,” the bishop would probably
say “no,” the search committee that just called
him would say “no.” “And, if I
imagined what it would be like, to walk across the tarmac
to the plane, on terra firma for what might be
my last time, to get onto the plane and fly up to ‘jump
altitude,’ and then to open the door to the fuselage,
to hear the howling wind and feel it tugging at my clothes,
sucking me relentlessly toward the door, and to look out
from the door of the plane onto the clouds below… Well,
I’m not sure I would want myself to go.”
It
is appropriate to consider risk and what might lead us
to take a risk on Pentecost Sunday. Pentecost
celebrates the giving of the Holy Spirit – that part
of the Trinity to whom we attribute God’s activity
in the world – and the scriptures show us that the
Holy Spirit is all about risk.
- Gen 1 – Even in creation,
the Spirit was risky: the
Garden of Eden was not foolproof. There was one
tree from which Adam and Eve were not to eat.
- Abraham and the Patriarchs – God riskily entrusted
his covenant to a dysfunctional family. Abraham
listened to a voice that told him to sacrifice his son. Jacob
lied and cheated to steal his brother Esau’s birthright. Joseph
was a spoiled rich kid who had everything save the good
sense not to lord his favorite-son status over his older
brothers.
- Jeremiah – God entrusted his message to one who
admitted that he could not speak, for he was only a boy. (Jeremiah
1:6)
- Isaiah – God entrusted his
message to one who admitted that he was a man of unclean
lips.(Isaiah 6:5)
- Mary – God sent his only
son to be born, not into a stable middle-class family,
but of an unwed teenage mother who at the time was
homeless
- Saul – God entrusted his
message to a Pharisee who had been a great persecutor
of the early Church.
As the baptized, those who have been “sealed by
the Spirit,” we also are to be people of risk. Unlike
skydivers, who risk death, we Christians are to be those
who risk life. “Many of us are afraid to die;
I suspect that all of us are afraid to live.” One
of the best quotes about living risky, fully-alive lives
comes from Emmanuel Cardinal Suhard, the wartime cardinal
of Paris:
“We are to live lives
that would make absolutely no sense if God did not
exist.”
In the scriptures, many lived lives that would have made
no sense if God did not exist:
- Noah – built the ark with
not a drop of water in sight.
- Daniel – refused to bow down to Nebuchadnezzar’s
statue, even though penalty was being put in a den of
lions.
- The disciples – left a stable
existence as fishermen to follow Jesus, a stranger
whom they had just met
- The widow – put into the
offering box, not one, but both of her mites
- The early Christians – continued
to gather Sunday by Sunday to worship, even though
they knew it might cost them their lives.
We, too, are to do things that would make no sense, if
God did not exist:
- We are to “turn the other
cheek”
- We are to “love our enemies,
and pray for those who persecute us”
- We are to forgive, “not
seven times, but seventy times seven.”
- We are to “give, expecting
nothing in return.
- We are not to worry (Matt 6)
- We are called to waste a perfectly good Sunday morning
to gather and worship God
- We are called to set aside time during the week to
pray or read scriptures
Todd left us with a warning: If we keep coming back
here to worship, we risk living a life that makes no sense
if God does not exist. “We are a jump school. The
whole reason that we exist, the very reason that we baptize
people, is to prepare them to walk across the tarmac, get
on the plane, open the door, and to experience the howling
wind of the Spirit tugging at us, drawing us inexorably closer
to taking a leap of complete trust and faith… of living
a life that would make absolutely no sense if God did not
exist.”
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Wednesday,
May 23, 2007
Text: “I speak
these things in the world so that they may have my joy
made complete in themselves.” – John
17:13
Some books of the Bible
have certain words that I tend to associate with them. “Riches,” is
a word that pops out for me in Ephesians. When I
think of Acts, I think of “power.” When
I hear of 1 John, I think of “love.” (“And
what word do you think of as we read Mark for our Bible
study? – ‘Immediately!’”) When
I am reading John, the word “joy” is the word
that pops out for me. I know there are other words
that John uses more frequently and perhaps more prominently – “life” and “light,” for
example – but “joy” is the word that
first comes to mind when I think of John.
What does John
mean by joy, and how can we get it? Nowhere
in his gospel does John concretely define joy, and he is
rather opaque about telling us exactly how we can experience
it. From the context of the seven times John uses
the word “joy” (the Greek chara),
though, we can take a stab at piecing together what John
has in mind when he says “joy.” See John
3:29; John 16; John 17:13. Looking at the texts
surrounding chara, we can surmise that “joy” comes
from God, has to do with following Jesus, happens when
Jesus increases and we decrease, is like the birth of a
child, and has to do with asking questions and admitting
that we don’t know the answer.“But teacher,
I have kept all these since my youth...” – So
might those of us who come on Wednesdays say: “I
have done all these things; why do I not yet have joy?” See
John 16:24 – “Until now you have not asked
for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive,
so that your joy may be complete.” I can’t
tell you how many times my spiritual directory has asked
me – in response to my being puzzled or looking for
guidance – “Did you ask Jesus to shed some
light on that for you?” “Well, no, actually,” I
say sheepishly. I’m getting better at asking
God for what I need help with, but it’s hard to remember
to do such an easy thing. Likewise for those of
us who want joy: have you asked for it? “Until
now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask
and you will receive, so that your joy may be complete.” If
you would have joy, ask God.
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Sunday, May
20, the Seventh Sunday of Easter
Text: “That
they may be one as we are one, I in them and you in me,
that they may become completely one, so that the world
may know that you have sent me and have loved them even
as you have loved me.” – John
17:22-23
I have several hobbies that
I actually do (brewing beer, making bread), and others
for which it is my hobby merely to think about doing them. Beekeeping
is a “hobby” of
mine, something I have been interested in for some time
now, but have not actually done.
Somedays, I like to think
that John the Evangelist was a beekeeper. Look at
the language used in John, how “hivelike” it
is:
- Jesus as the great “Queen Bee” that gives
life to the whole hive: “Through him all
things came into being, and without him, not one thing
came into being.” (John 1:3). Notice
how the “Queen’s” retinue surrounds
him and follows him throughout the Gospel.
- Jesus the Good Shepherd is really
Jesus the Good Hive. The
bees find their way into the hive through him – “I
am the gate for the sheep” (John 10) – they
go out to find pasture, and they come in to be safe as
part of the flock
- The mission of the disciples in
John is to “go
and bear fruit, fruit that will last.” Bearing
fruit is what bees help to do. They go out to pollinate,
to help bear fruit and bring “life abundant” to
the world.
John would be interested in an article
I read about three weeks ago in the New York Times “Science Times” page
about bees.
- Colony Collapse Disorder: Bees fly out of the
hive, but then become disoriented and are unable to find
their way home. Keepers find hives full of pollen
and honey, but with “nobody home.”
- John might not be familiar with Colony Collapse Disorder
among his bees, but he would recognize it from his fledgling
chuches:
- Notice in the Johannine epistles
the great attention paid to making sure the disciples
continued in the faith and were not disoriented by “deceivers.” “I
[am not writing] a new commandment, but one we have had
from the beginning.” “Be on guard… for
the many deceivers … who do not confess that Jesus
has come in the flesh” (2 John).
- And notice the great attention
given by John to the Last Supper and Jesus great farewell
speech, (five chapters!) making
sure that the colony would not collapse in his absence.
- Jesus tells them that they know
the Way “I
am the Way…” (John 14)
- Jesus makes sure that they know
his commandment: “This
is my commandment, that you love one another, just as
I have loved you.” (John 13)
- Jesus makes sure he is clear that
he is going away: “It
is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not
go away, the Advocate will not come to you.” (John
16)
In the final chapter of his Last
Supper account, Jesus prays for his disciples. Why does he pray that “they
may be one, as we are one…. That they may be completely
one?” (Wouldn’t it make more sense to
pray for faithfulness, or that the disciples complete their
mission?) What is so important about being “one?”
Image, also from the world of bees,
to explain. But
first, let me digress….
- Language of “one” reminiscent of the opening
lines of our Baptismal service, the gateway to our ritual
life: “There is one Body and one Spirit;
There is one hope in God’s call to us; One Lord,
one Faith, one Baptism; One God and Father of all.” à Purpose
of ritual is to make us “one,” to orient
us as to where we come from and where we are going. Helps
us know the “way.”
- Bees are creatures of ritual,
too. They “dance” to
orient each other to where the food is. (Has something
gone wrong with their dance? Have they forgotten
how? Perhaps they no longer understand what the
moves signify? Perhaps they can no longer translate
the symbols to reality outside the hive?)
- If we would avoid “colony collapse disorder,” we
must keep up our own “dance.” This
dance was imprinted upon us in baptism, its steps learned
at Confirmation. We dance this “dance” every
week at the Eucharist. This dance tells us where
we have come from and where we are going; it shows us
the “Way.”
** If you feel you have never learned this
dance, or would like to “brush up,” please
know that Trinity will shortly be prepared to help people
make re-affirmation of their baptismal vows. **
As summer approaches, we are apt
to fly off to the Cape or to Maine, or other destinations. I encourage you,
wherever you are, to seek out the nearest “hive” so
that you can continue in the dance. For your sake
and for the sake of the whole hive, it is important that
we all keep fresh on our “steps,” that we remember
where we have come from and where we are going, that we
keep schooled in the “Way.” If the dance
fades among too many of our members, we might become disoriented
as we are out and about, and our colony risks collapse.
In certain Native American tribes,
members do a rain dance to bring on rain. (Somebody somewhere has been dancing
a lot, lately!) The welfare of the whole community
depends on these tribe members knowing the dance and faithfully
doing it. For us Christians, the whole world is depending
on us knowing the steps to our “dance” and
faithfully doing them. Please, let us do our part. On,
then, with the dance!
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Wednesday,
May 16, 2007
Text: “I tell
you the truth: it
is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go
away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I
will send him to you.” – John 16:7
The Gospel
of John is a gospel in which the theme of incarnation looms
large: “The word became flesh and
dwelt among us,” writes John in the Prologue (chapter
1). In chapter 21 Thomas wants to physically
touch the wounds of the risen Christ. And in
the opening of John’s first epistle – “We
declare to you… what we have heard, what we have
seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched
with our hands, concerning the word of life” (I John
1:1) – we hear how the community of John passes on
what it has come to know physically in their bodies.
Why then does Jesus in John
chapter 16 say that it is to his disciples’ advantage
that he go away? How
can a community that so values physical presence claim
it an advantage to be without its leader’s physical
presence?
John’s “Advocate” – what
is elsewhere in the Tradition called the Holy Spirit – is
John’s
answer to the problem of Jesus’ presence being limited
to a particular space (his body) and time (his earthly
life). The “Advocate” is Jesus’ surrogate,
who will be present everywhere and always for Jesus’ disciples
after Jesus’ physical death.
Today, we Christians
continue to value physical presence. Recall
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words in Life Together:
“Believers
feels no shame, as though they were still living too much
in the flesh, when they yearn for the physical presence
of other Christians. Humans were created
a body, the Son of God appeared in the body, he was raised
in the body, in the sacrament the believer receives the
Lord Christ in the body…. It is an unspeakable
gift… to live a common life with other Christians.”
Ways
in which John suggest that we disciples can continue to
manifest in ourselves the physical presence of Jesus are
1) “abiding” and 2) “sanctifying” ourselves. By
abiding (see John 15), John seems to mean continuing to
gather faithfully and being with each other – worship! By “sanctifying” ourselves,
John seems to mean living holy, Christian lives – “walking
in the light as He is in the light” (I John 1).
Like
in a science-fiction movie in which aliens need human bodies
to incubate their eggs, so does the gospel for John need
physical bodies to manifest the presence of Christ in the
world, to incubate and be bearers of the Word. I
hope that we might be faithful to “abiding” and
striving to live lives of sanctity, in order that we might
be the physical presence of Christ to a world in need.
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Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Gregory of Nazianzus, Bishop of Constantinople, 389
Our parish
of Trinity does not have a patron saint. But
if it did, Gregory of Nazianzus might be in the running. As
a staunch defender of the orthodox faith in the 4th century,
Gregory wrote much about the Trinity. Over the coming
years, I hope to delve more deeply into Gregory’s
work – I am a great fan of Gregory’s – but
tonight, let’s begin with a more manageable, lighter
side of Gregory.
In a letter written to one
Nicobulus – who
appears to have been a relative and favored protégé of
Gregory’s – Gregory writes about Nicobulus’ choice
of a wife, about whom Nicobulus previously wrote to Gregory. Nicobulus
was apparently a man of great stature:
“You joke about
Alypiana as being little and unworthy of your size, you
immense and monstrous fellow. For
now I understand that soul is a matter of measure, and
virtue of weight… Well, well! Rejoice
in your bigness and in your cubits, and be in no respect
inferior to the sons of Aloeus. (Otus & Ephialtes
were two Homeric giants who piled rocks in an attempt to
reach heaven and overthrow Zeus. They were struck
dead by Apollo.) You ride a horse, you shake a spear,
and concern yourself with wild beasts. But she has
no such work [and is much the domestic]. She has
rooted herself (lit., “fixed herself to the ground”)
in prayer, and by the constant movement of her mind has
constant communion with God. What is there to boast
about the bigness and stature of your body? Take
heed and listen!... Then you will say that soul is
not a subject for measure, and the outer person must look
to the inner. If you look at things in this way, you will
leave off joking and deriding her as little, and you will
congratulate yourself on your marriage.”
In this charming
letter, we see one of Gregory’s
great themes (and one of the recurring themes of his contemporaries,
Gregory of Nyssa and Basil of Caesaraea): the capacities
of the human soul to grasp the things of God are vast,
indeed infinite. One who prays is a very “large,” consequential
person indeed, and capable of great things!
I hope
that as we journey forward in the faith here at Trinity,
we hold Gregory of Nazianzus in our hearts. Not
only does Gregory have much to tell us about the Trinity
(to whom are parish is dedicated), but Gregory reminds
us that our souls’ capacity for the things of God
is vast, and if we but hold fast in prayer, we will be
capable of great things.
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Sunday, May 6, 2007
Text: “I
give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just
as I have loved you.” – John
13:34
The Walk for Hunger was
going by Trinity on Sunday. Todd
remarked how the walkers served to remind us that life
is a journey; we are all walking from our starting point
to our end.As Christians, we know that our journey begins
in love (God) and ends with love (God). And in today’s
Gospel reading, the evangelist tells us that our path in
between is love, too: “I give you a new commandment,
that you love one another.”
There are many ways of
thinking about love. What
exactly does John mean by love? Jesus says, “Just
as I have loved you…” What did Jesus
do to show us love? Todd went through examples of
love in the Gospel of John:
- Jesus invites and beckons (Jesus calling
the disciples in John 1)
- Jesus mingles and meets us where we
are (Jesus at the Wedding of Cana in John 2)
- Jesus responds
to human suffering and need (Jesus
healing the official’s son in chapter 4; Jesus
healing the lame man at the pool of Beth-Zatha in chapter
5; Jesus opening the eyes of the man born blind in chapter
9)
- Jesus feeds (Feeding of the 5,000 in
chapter 6)
- Jesus the Good Shepherd tends and nurtures
(chapter 10)
The
ultimate act of love for John is Jesus’ dying
for us. “No one has greater love than this,
than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” --
John 15:13
Todd reminded us that laying down one’s
life for one’s friends is no idle ideal, to be done
only by Jesus; the Johannine community calls us to love
one another so much that we ourselves would lay down our
lives for one another: “We ought to lay down
our lives for one another.” -- I John 3:16
In
the United States today, it is unlikely that we will be
called upon to literally lay down our lives for each other. But
Jesus’ ideal is to infuse all that
we do, and we can in a way lay down our lives for each
other as we do the other acts of love demonstrated in John:
- When
we invite others into our community, we lay down our life
in a way because each new member who comes will change
our community.
- Our responding
to human suffering and need will lead us to give up
of our time and resources – a small,
though tangible, “giving up” of ourselves.
- Our tending and nurturing aging parents
or small children is in many ways a costly sacrifice,
a laying down of our lives.
On the one hand, it is easy
to make this journey of love; we were created to love,
and the more we live in love, the more we become the
persons God created us to be. On
the other hand, it is difficult to make a journey of love;
very few messages in the world around us support us as
we try to love one another.
We gather here every week for
Eucharist to find support in making our journey of love. Every
week in the Eucharist we remember and celebrate this central
act of love, Jesus’ giving himself up for us. And
we are called to take this love out into the world, to
be a “stream” of walkers setting up a current
in the world, gradually pulling and coaxing all of creation
back to it source in God, who is love.
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May
2, 2007 – Athanasius,
Bishop of Alexandria, 373
Athanasius was the
champion of orthodoxy during the 4th century debates
regarding the person of Christ. The
Arian party (led by Arius) insisted that “there was
when [Jesus] was not,” i.e., there was a time when
Jesus did not exist, therefore Jesus was not fully divine. Athanasius
adhered faithfully to the orthodox position staked out
at the Council of Nicaea in 325 that Jesus was “of
one substance with the Father,” i.e., was not only
fully human but fully divine.
What difference does it make
that Jesus was fully human and fully divine? Todd
said he was going to speak to the importance of the divinity
of Christ in terms of mirrors and reflections. Todd
quoted Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who said
that the purpose of human existence was to reflect God’s
glory back to God:
We are made so that we shall
reflect back to God the glory that belongs to God. We
are made to hold up to God a mirror to who he is and what
he is. We are most
truly our created selves when we are thus living in the
imaging of God, in relating to God.
If Jesus were not fully
divine, we would have seen an incomplete image of God and
could not have reflected back to God the glory of God. If
Jesus were not fully divine, then, we could not have fulfilled
our purpose.
Todd explained further with
an image / riddle that speaks to our reflecting back God’s
glory to God:
There is a man married to
an identical twin. For
over forty years, the couple had lived in the same place
as the twin, and the wife and her twin saw each other almost
every day. Now that the couple moved here to Boston,
the wife and her twin speak every day on the phone… each
going into the bathroom and looking in the mirror as they
speak.
Todd’s take on the image: As
we were created in the image of God, the twins share the
same image. Their
lives are intimately connected (like humanity and God). As
each looks into the mirror, they see an image that is at
once themselves and yet speaks of the other. God
looks at us to see his glory; we look at God to see who
we are, really. (“When he is revealed, we will
be like him, for we will see him as he is.” I
John 3:2)
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