LTS Christ Chapel January 26, 2010

“The Lord is my light and my salvation!” cries the Psalmist. “Whom shall I fear?”
“The Lord is the stronghold of my life,” he continues, “of whom shall I be afraid?”

The statement “do not be afraid” and all of its combinations – as it has been endlessly pointed out by almost every Christian inspirational author – is one of the most repetitious refrains in the Bible. There are countless assurances that fear is not necessary, that we shouldn’t feel fear…the list is endless. Yet, we still fear almost everything. From the littlest things to the biggest.

“Whom shall I fear?” crowed the Psalmist.

Well, the end of the world, for one. For another thing, every one else. Trust me. It’s on TV.

These days you can choose your apocalypse – and it makes for great viewing. Your world can end by roasting from the inside out, and you can survive it by making it to the Himalayas where ships are waiting. A new movie coming out suggest that the world will end in angels, as God sends forth an army to wipe the world clean of the stain of humanity.

OR, it can end in asteroids, freezing, pollution, climate change, or my personal favorite: zombies. Evil, stinky, zombies.

The end of the world has captured our cultural imaginations for as long as anyone can remember; it’s not a new phenomena. People have poured over esoteric texts, gone blind seeking word patterns or hidden messages, exhausted their intellects, capabilities, and self-respect trying to claim to everyone else that they know when the world’s going to end, and in particular, with a kind of juicy enthusiasm, who’s going to get killed in divinely terrific ways. These visions are intended to instill fear into the listener.

There’s always the post-apocalyptic visions, too – the ones that are designed to make us be afraid of everyone who’s so bad that Jesus doesn’t like them. The hugely popular and theologically bankrupt Left Behind series. A certain kind of popular theology lends itself to imagining what will happen to everyone God doesn’t like when God is angry.

It forms a shield between individuals, as well, in its depiction of the victims of tragedy as deserving of their fate, and therefore insulates them from the agony of identifying too closely with the wounded, mourning, homeless, and hungry fellow human beings. This is how people like Pat Robertson can declare the earthquake in Haiti to be the fault of the Haitians themselves – because their theology demands that God be directly responsible for all things, even horrible natural disasters. In their theology, there are only puppets in the hands of a vengeful God.

When you think of it, really, that sort of thinking is perpetuated all through disaster movies. There’s the deserving few left after the disaster, but they’re at the mercy of completely nasty humans who wish even more death and destruction on them. I suppose, stylistically, it makes a story of redemption, or tragedy, that much more poignant.

I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in bits and pieces; I confess that I didn’t have the tenacity to read it from cover to cover. The story of Man, who is trying to survive in a vicious post-apocalyptic world and protect his son Boy, while foraging for food and avoiding roving gangs of cannibals was not attractive reading for me. But there’s a scene in the movie that caught my eye, one that’s not in the book. Man and Boy take refuge in a shattered church; the fire between them offers some small light and heat beneath a looming, bright cross.

It shows a luminous love between a father who would sacrifice everything for his son, in a place where worship has been absent for years. Even in this time, the cross still speaks – not with eloquent wisdom, but with power.

The cross tells us of peace in a shattered world, abiding hope in hopeless times, and of love that transcends even the bonds of death.

In Haiti, a student at Wartburg Seminary was killed in the earthquake. As the buildings began to fall, he, his wife, and his cousin were at an school for boys. They became separated, and he was buried under a pile of collapsed concrete. Running out after the shaking stopped, his wife and cousin could here him singing, singing that ended after he sang out “God’s peace to us, we pray.”

The scenes of devastation in Haiti are endlessly described as ‘apocalyptic’. Prosperity gospel preachers the world over are calling it Haiti’s own fault, and even as we are stunned at the stories of death and destruction in Haiti we will still go and spend our money to look at movies of death and destruction. To look at an apocalypse to see who survives.

But paint a picture of an apocalypse where everyone lives forever, and you’ll see the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Our apocalypse – our revelation, as the word means in Greek – began with the death of Jesus Christ, and we live it out in his resurrection. We live in revelation, the very time of the Word made flesh: marked with the cross of Christ through our baptism, brought through death, and living in the promise of eternal life.

Christ comes and seeks us out, chooses us. Calls us from our lives saying simply, “follow me.” And we are led out into the same world of suffering and pain, anger and despair, but also we led into a world of unimaginable grace, mercy, and love, for all of the children of God.

Into our own revelation, we sing out “God’s peace to us, we pray.”

And the people of God respond, Amen.

Christmas Eve Sermon -- Merry Christmas!

It’s finally here – all the fluff and kerfuffle that comes with the season. If you haven’t already, maybe you’re about to go home and open the first present that sits under the tree. Just one tonight – the rest tomorrow.

Maybe your children are about to go to bed – what am I saying? – you’re about to try to coerce your

children or your grandchildren into their beds. Maybe you’re going to resort to bribery. I hope not threats. Hopefully, they’ll sleep long enough through the night that you can get a bit of rest before tomorrow. The big dinners, the big celebrations, the excitement. Christmas cards, Christmas letters…sometimes, don’t those Christmas letters just sound a little annoying?

Dear Friends, this year, we climbed Mt Everest, then went and holidayed at Maui. Out little boy Franky was handpicked by President Obama to create a universal education system, and our dear little Tracy was admitted into Queen’s University with a full scholarship. Such a little go-getter for a 13 year old!

Yeah, certainly Christmas has become the time when we can bask in the glow of a year well-spent.

But maybe that’s not you tonight.

One thing about Christmas is that it comes so soon after December 21, the day when there is only about seven hours of light, and 17 of darkness. Today’s slightly better, we’ve had about 7 hours and 5 minutes of daylight. But for many, tonight is the longest night.

The longest night spent in bed alone, remembering the past year and dreading the hours to come, hours when you spend every minute ticking off all those things you miss. Maybe it’s your spouse, a child, a parent, brother or sister. Maybe it’s the job you were told no longer needed you, and you spend the night panicking that the few toys under the tree won’t be acceptable to your kids who’ve gotten used to more.

Or maybe, there’s no tree, at all, and you’re here tonight longing for a present that is just for you, seeking some deeper meaning to this season that isn’t centered around getting more stuff.

One thing about Christmas, it can be as close to hell – as devastating a time as anything – as it can be close to heaven. It can be a time when our own darkness, our losses and mourning, all those fears and worries add up like bills that we’re going to get next month. And we can ill afford them, when the dark is long our night seems to be never-ending.

But a man named John knew that feeling. Knew what it was like to be buried in darkness, knew those long thoughts that keep us awake at night. So he wrote of a light, that can shine even in the midst of all that and that the dark cannot overcome. And that light John wrote about – even though he doesn’t name him in those first verses – was Jesus Christ.

We’re gathered tonight because of a birth – but also more. (We’re gathered here because Grandma said we had to, if we wanted dinner tomorrow.)

But there are other reasons we gather. We come together because for just this one night we can come together and remember something that we hold in common – our humanity. We think on all the joys and sorrows that make us who we are as a people, and we remember that one this night, on this longest night, God came to be with us. This little boy would come to be called Emmanuel, which means literally ‘God with us.” Not God above us, not God better than us, but God with us. And John was right. What came into being through that tiny baby was light.

That light is the light of all people – it shines in us, in our darkness – those things in our lives that drag us down, make us wonder if anything we do or if we are worth anything. But our darkness cannot overcome it – it’s why we call Jesus Christ “the light of the world”. We come in faith, seeking a part of Christmas – a part of the world -- that we think is hidden from view. But we find through John’s words that we have always had what we are seeking. We come seeking life, and find in faith that life has first found us.

Faith brings us here – faith that, in the midst of all this season and all that it has come to mean, our hearts are alive through Christ. This faith, as tiny or simple as it may be, that in the midst of all the darkness of our world a light shines, and that light is for us all.

draws you here tonight, I hope you have found it. Whatever sustains you in life, I hope you can bring it from this place. And if you have come seeking something to give you light in your darkness, I hope you find that that light was in you to begin with. Through faith in Christ – faith in one who was born just like us, a little tiny baby on this very night – I pray that you may have life, and that life has found you.

May this be so among us. Amen.

done.

I am finally done my last paper for this semester (see below).

I have been running non-stop since the beginning of August. I have put out around 300 pages of writing, and have read probably 12 thousand pages -- averaging 200 pages a night, most nights. I started classes a week after we lost the baby.

I'm going to take some time to grieve. I've earned it. And then I'm going to take some time to rejoice, in new things, new beginnings, new hopes, new dreams.

conflicted

So I'm pretty conflicted, here at the end of term. I have one paper left.

On one hand, some part of my subconscious is hinting that a 20-page paper analysing "the relationship between justification and sanctification in terms of one's self-identity" is not the reason I came to Seminary.

And yet, a far deeper part, the part that has been molded and shaped and transformed by the ministry of my teachers, and studies, and all those to whom I'm come to know in my role as 'pastor,' I also know that this question in many ways reaches to the heart of what the proclamation of the Word is.

Because if we are justified by the Word of God, and all that God speaks as Word is holy, then we are already sanctified in God's word, because the Word is truth. It is this holy word that breaks down doors, throws open the shutters of fear, shatters the bolts of legalism and phariseeism, and frees us to be the people we were created to be.

Created in the image of God, forming the Body of Christ in whom we live, and move, and have our very being. We are justified by God's grace, as a gift -- and because that gift comes as God's prevenient grace we can never be more sanctified than we already are; because the Word spoken over us at baptism has brought us to the table. Our sanctification -- our holiness -- will be complete when we rest at the banquet feast that has no ending, in the presence of our Redeemer, in whose presence all things are holy, and whole.

John 1:3

All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.

Thirteen Sonnets, 1
I have been stone, dust of speace, sea, and sphere:
flamed in the supernova before man
or manmade gods made claim to have shaped me.
I have always been, will always be, I
am a pinch of earth compressed in the span
of a snail-shell: galaxies' energy,
the centre of the sun, the arch of sky.
I became all that all things ever can.
I will be here: I have always been here.
Buddha had to walk upon me: my snows
were not so kind, my ice was sharp as grass.
Upon me, even Christ encountered fear:
the nails were mine, the mallet mine, the blows
were mine. I grew the tree that grew the Cross.

- Michael Hartnett, from A Book of Uncommon Prayer, Theo Dorgan, Editor.

Remembrance Homily

Memory is a funny thing. We take it for granted so much, don’t we – we remember how to drive our cars, we remember how to follow the familiar routes in our houses, so much so that we could walk them blindfolded. We get so frustrated when we can’t remember the grocery list we scribbled down in the morning when we get to the store at 4 in the afternoon.

If you’ve worked in a people-intensive occupation, you know the panic and muck that builds up in your brain when you suddenly realize that you have to remember the name of 8 people you met and spent some time with a year before. You know they’re going to be disappointed if you can’t remember their names. So you wrack your brain trying to will their names to float through your grey matter. Doesn’t always work, though. Maybe doesn’t even often work.

Memory can make us relive every moment of stupid adolescent stunt with all the same emotions, as if we were actually there again. A familiar scent worn by a loved one can help us recollect favorite memories – or can curse us, when we can’t remember what they even looked like, past vague descriptions. In the middle to late 19^th century mortuary photography – the final posing of the deceased (children, spouses, criminals) – became popular as a way of immortalizing that person at their final moments, as if they had just closed their eyes in sleep.

But memory can also haunt us, and hound us to the ends of the earth. We have lost generations of young men, who have come back from Wars so haunted by the images of what they have seen that their brains are incapable of processing anything else. I once worked with a man just a few years older than I was – he was a bouncer in a bar, worked his way up to management, and he loved the lifestyle. The pounding music, throngs of people, the casual violence that he wore like a glove.

I asked him once, why he liked it so much. He replied that he had been a soldier, part of the UN peacekeeping force to Rwanda, except as he wryly observed to me, that was more like trying to keep pieces of people together, rather than a political peace. Having been ordered, under the threat of full military law, to stand still while he watched the aftermath of women and children being executed, had so deeply scarred him that the only thing he cared to do at night was stay awake. In sleep, the nightmares came.

But you know, we have clinical terms for stuff like that now. In the American Civil War, it was called Soldier’s Spirit. In WWI, Shell Shock. WWII, the term ‘combat fatigue’ was coined to describe it. My grandfather, along with tens of thousands of other young infantrymen, probably had another term for it, one that’s not repeatable from the pulpit. Nowadays we call it PTSD: post traumatic stress disorder. Treatable by drugs, counseling, therapy. As a society, we can file it away, forget about it.

I think, the generation that’s going to come home from this war is going to face the exact same reaction that soldiers have experienced upon coming home since war became the hobby of governments. “Don’t say too much. Let the memory of this fade, because people don’t want to think about it, now that it’s over.” And they won’t. Because they’re soldiers. And soldiers follow orders.

As a people, our memory is very short. We don’t like to think of the ‘bad’ too often; we want to sweep it under the rug. That’s an old, old story that’s been repeated often, even as we read about our Savior.

The writer of the Letter of the Hebrews was, I sometimes think, the conscience of a people who wanted to twist the sacrifice of Jesus for their own gain. At times the writer argues like there’s some twisting of Christ’s words going on in his culture that he can’t stand. But some people stood to gain.

I can guess at what that gain was – priestly power, authority over others who ‘knew less’ than they did. The same reasons people sensationalize events now. So the writer to the Hebrews took the time to remind his readers – and listeners – what it was that was so important.

Christ died, once, for all, for the whole world. There is no one, not one single man, woman, child, that Christ did not die for. Christ bore the penalty for their sins – death, not just physical death, but the death of the soul – and then conquered it by His resurrection. He will come again, to save those who wait for Him.

Yet we forget that, too often. But the good news is that Jesus won’t forget, no matter what we do; we are not forgotten. No one is.

But as this is Remembrance Sunday our own history bears witness to the fact that too often, we do want Jesus to choose between His children. As Robert Runcie said, those who dare to interpret God’s will must never Him as an asset for one nation of group rather than another. War springs from the love and loyalty which should be offered to God being applied to some God substitute, one of the most dangerous being nationalism.

Nationalism is the belief that one’s own country is better than all others, and that domination is the prerogative of that nation.

Let me give that an illustration. There are all kinds of people around us. Rich people, poor people, skinny people, fat people, hungry people, full people. We all give our pennies to the treasury, out of love and obedience to God.

But some people begin to notice that if hold one penny back, then they have one penny they wouldn’t otherwise have kept. Besides, they’re still putting in lots of pennies, supporting the poor, the widows, the orphans. But pretty soon, they’re holding back 8 or 9 pennies out of every ten, only one goes to the treasury. It feels good – powerful – to have more pennies than anyone. And then they look around and notice – others have more pennies. Suddenly, their pile of pennies doesn’t look so big. But if they talk to their neighbor, who has also been keeping pennies out, they can form a group that’s more powerful than just that one other individual.

And pretty soon, they’re fighting each other for their pennies. But of course, by then, they’ve realized that the treasury holds far more pennies than they’ll ever have. So they figure out a way to get the pennies from the hands of those who’ll contribute all they have. Because by now, the treasury has become competition to them, and they don’t want that. They want everyone’s pennies. And people are willing to give all they have, all that they have to live, to the hoarders, instead of to the treasury.

And the stink of this is, it’s not the hoarders who pay the price. It’s not the people who make the hoarders the recipients of all their pennies; they’re fairly well rewarded. It’s the people who still honour the treasury – what is good, what is right, what is necessary – who pay the price, because to the hoarders, they are expendable.

Lest we forget. Lest we forget that the cost of war is borne by the soldiers, sailors, and air corps who have stood for – fallen for – and still stand for what is good and decent. It is borne by their mothers, their families, their friends. It is borne by us; we, who will grow old. Let us not forget that ‘blessed are the peacemakers’ who bear the cost of peace, and that is our responsibility to strive for it, pray for it, and to not despair in its seeming absence.

Let us not forget that to Christ, there is no one who is expendable, no one who is forgotten, no one who is unknown, no one who is left behind.

Let us remember that is the will of our Creator to hold all of creation in a single peace, and that on the last day at the sound of the last trumpet the dead in Christ will rise and the sea will give up her dead and at last, there will be peace. And no mothers will cry and no families will be torn apart, because all of creation will be joined together in praise of the Creator.

And that day, the guns will be silent, forever. Amen.

I'm still here....

and slowly slogging through things. I have a really heavy course load this semester, in exchange for a much lighter one next semester.

Six classes + work from one intensive in August (done!) + senior dossier + parenthood = one tired young man.

But I got contact lenses, so I really look tired now! Yay!
(actually I'm really loving not wearing my glasses all the time).