Skip links

Bill Countryman Talks About . . .

Scripture, Poetry, Gardens, etc.

Header Right

sermon

THE ANGEL AND THE SHEPHERDS

by Leave a Comment

L. WM. COUNTRYMAN

Preached CHRISTMAS 2019 at GOOD SHEPHERD BERKELEY Luke 2:1-14

I want to tell you the real story about the angel and the shepherds. Well, I don’t mean that Luke didn’t get it right in his Gospel. But he didn’t have room for all the details, and details do make a difference, after all.

He was right about the shepherds, of course. They were out in the fields, keeping watch over their sheep. There were rumors of wild dogs in the vicinity, so they had to be on the alert. They were sitting around the remains of a little campfire, which wasn’t doing much good against the nighttime cold out there on the hilltops. A couple of them were half-asleep. One of them was whistling. The others were wishing he would quit. They weren’t expecting any excitement—unless it took the form of that pack of wild dogs.

And then the angel appeared. They could tell it was an angel. For one thing he glowed, which your ordinary nighttime visitor doesn’t do. For another thing, he bobbed a bit and didn’t quite seem to be touching ground. Angels do that. They don’t experience gravity, you see, like us. Their natural tendency to stay in the same place, while the earth spins past them; and if they want to keep up with the earth’s movement long enough to have a conversation with one of us, they have a lot of very rapid calculating to do. So they shouldn’t be criticized if they bob and sway a little. It’s really quite amazing that they can do it at all.

So the angel appeared, looking sort of like so. This was an important gig, after all. The angel knew that. He wanted to get it just right, and he wasn’t quite sure what human beings expected of angels. So he’d done a lot of research in museums. And, being of a somewhat flamboyant turn of mind, he particularly liked the Mannerist painters. So he modeled his appearance on their style. The effect was quite good, really. He’d checked it in the mirror.

He knew he was cutting quite an impressive figure. But, just to make sure, he turned up the wattage a bit, till he was far and away the brightest thing around in the middle of the night; and he said to the shepherds, “Don’t be afraid!”

The shepherds just sat there looking straight ahead, not moving a muscle.

The angel was a little taken aback. He wondered if he’d gotten the language wrong. He did a quick mental check: “Let’s see: Judean hills, first century; yeah, these people have to know Aramaic. What is the problem?”

So he tried again—a little louder. “Don’t be afraid!”

Still no reaction—though one or two of the shepherds did seem to be looking a bit sideways at each other, trying to figure out whether anybody else was seeing what they were seeing or whether, as an alternative, they had just gone completely around the bend. They’d all heard tales about shepherds who’d gone crazy from being out by themselves too much, but they were village shepherds who stayed close to home and sat around the campfire together and it wasn’t supposed to happen to them. Still, you didn’t have glowing figures appearing to you every night telling you not to be afraid. Afraid of what? What had they missed out on that they should be afraid of? It all seemed a little suspicious.

Finally, the oldest of them, Jonathan, a man with a gray beard and not many teeth, worked up his courage and said, “All very easy for you to say! You go around the countryside glowing like that and nobody’s going to mess with you. We’ve got wild dogs here to worry about, ourselves—probably bears and lions, too, for all I know.”

“Oh,” said the angel—a little disappointed. This was a major gig, after all, and he’d been assuming that he’d have a fairly sophisticated audience. But he could deal with this.

“There’s big doings afoot,” he says, “stuff you’ll want to know about. And I’ve been sent to tell you.”

“We don’t need no big doings,” says another shepherd—Deborah, a middle-aged woman who was clearly not used to taking any nonsense off anybody, even if they glowed. “Big doings just mean more taxes and soldiers coming through stealing sheep. But thanks for letting us know. We’ll just stay out here and keep out of sight.”

“No, no!” says the angel. “This is good news. For, lo! [He’d been waiting to say that part; it was his favorite bit.] For, lo! I bring you good tidings of great joy, which will be for all the people. For today, a savior, who is the anointed Lord, has been born for you in the city of David. And you’re the first to know! You’ll be the first to go and see the baby.”

“Somebody’s got to stay here and look after the sheep,” says Deborah.

“Looking for some baby in Bethlehem in the middle of the night will be like looking for a lump of coal in a cave,” says Jonathan.

“Excuse me,” said the angel, “could we have just a little enthusiasm here? God is doing something very special tonight, and you’re the first to know. God is drawing closer to you human beings than ever before. This baby makes a difference.”

By this time, the shepherds were feeling a little sorry for the angel, who was clearly doing his best. So one of the younger ones said, “Well, we don’t mean any harm. And I’m sure it’s really a great honor. Can you tell us how to get there?”

“Sure!” said the angel, greatly cheered up. “Go into Bethlehem by the West Gate. Take the second left. Go around behind all those warehouses. Take the third right, past the house with the barking dog. (Don’t worry about the dog; he’s all bark, no bite.) Left down the alleyway. Third door on your right. It’s the barn behind the Starlight Motel. This is how you’ll know you’re there: you’ll find the baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in the trough where the animals are fed. ”

The shepherds politely nodded their heads, but none of them made a move as if to get up and go. Finally Deborah says, “What about the sheep?”

It took a minute or so because this wan’t part of the plan, but finally the angel said, “All right, I’ll watch the sheep.”

So the shepherds all got up and picked up their satchels and their sticks. And suddenly, there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and singing the Hallelujah chorus.

(Yes, I know. That isn’t what they were supposed to be singing. Luke got his information from the official program, which had them doing the Gloria in excelsis–the one by Vivaldi, I think. But they hadn’t had all the practice time they wanted and, anyway, they were very fond of Handel’s Messiah.)

So the shepherds went. They followed the angel’s directions, and they found the barn, just as the angel had promised. They knocked quietly, for fear of waking the baby, and a quiet voice invited them in. They opened the door and there was Mary, looking exhausted but happy, and the baby asleep on a pile of straw, and Joseph hovering around trying to be useful. And there were some cows and a couple of donkeys, who made the place warmer. And it was dark—just one little lamp.

And the baby was exactly that—a newborn like any newborn. It didn’t glow. It lay on the straw; it didn’t, you know, levitate just above it. And there were no jewels or other riches. And at first, the shepherds were a little disappointed. After the sound and light show they’d just seen, it seemed, well, a bit anticlimactic. In fact, the baby and his family looked very much like them.

But, you know, they had to think about it all. So this is how God comes close to human beings. The bobbing, glowing angels are just a prelude. The real wonder of the universe is a human life in deep communion with God. If you want to know about God, that’s where you have to look. The baby in Bethlehem is the supreme example, but, at any given moment, the revelation could take place in you, it could take place in me it could take place in those shepherds. It was enough, really, to give a person pause.

So they told Mary what a lovely baby she had and what an unusual announcement they’d gotten about the event, and they went back to their flocks pondering it all. And the angel slipped away into the early dawn.

THE CONTAGION OF GRACE

by Leave a Comment

Preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California

Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, August 25, 2019

Proper 15C: Isaiah 58:9b-14; Psalm 103:1-8; Hebrews 12:18-29; Luke 13:10-17

If you were asked to make a list, from memory, of great healing miracles in the gospels, you probably wouldn’t include the story we just read. The Man Born Blind, yes, the Woman with the Hemorrhage, the Raising of Jairus’ Daughter. You probably wouldn’t think to add the Healing of the Women Who Was Doubled Over. That may be partly because it only appears in Luke’s Gospel, but partly, too, because we don’t get a very clear picture of her. Her name isn’t given—or any other details, even her age. All we’re told is that for eighteen years she’s been stooped over and completely unable to stand up straight. 

Well, whatever her age, eighteen years is a long time. She can’t see ahead of her without craning her neck. She can’t do the work she wants to be doing. She probably can’t pick up a child or a grandchild. If she’s talking with people, she can’t see their faces. If she’s at the market, it’s hard to measure the crowds around her and protect herself in the press of business. And, besides all that, there was the physical pain, the strained muscles, the aching joints that must have gone with her infirmity. She is a compelling example of the kind of physical suffering that can afflict us human beings during a lifetime.

She’s also a compelling image of all the other things that weaken us and cause us suffering, mental and spiritual as well as physical. Anthropologists figured out, over the past couple of centuries, that walking erect is the very thing that set our earliest humanoid ancestors on the evolutionary path that led to us, the existing human species. Being deprived of it is distressing in so many different ways—spiritual, emotional, physical. We can hardly help being moved by her trouble. It can evoke from us responses that range from wanting to help to a desire to distance ourselves. We may even feel a vague, but deeply rooted fear of contagion, of somehow “catching” her ill fortune.

But Jesus sees her and calls her over and touches her. He’s always doing that, isn’t he—touching people? Even the unlikeliest of people—lepers, for example. He never seems to worry about catching something from someone else, whether disease or simply misfortune. And from the moment he touches her, she can stand erect, and she begins to praise God. Yes, I should think so after the burden of those eighteen years was lifted from her! She could actually look Jesus in the face. She could see her family and friends. Her body was once again balanced and poised over the supporting legs, free of the constant strain. Lifting her head was no longer a painful struggle. It was pure delight to be praising God there in the synagogue, where it had all just happened. 

The local clergy, of course, were less happy. After all, no work was supposed to be done on the Sabbath, and here are people coming into the church (well, synagogue is the actual word; but you see what I mean) to get healed—certainly a form of work. And Jesus just encourages it by healings like this one—encourages the violation of serious religious standards. I’m guessing that the ruler of the synagogue would have liked to reprove Jesus directly, but that must have seemed a bit awkward under the circumstances. So he reproves the people instead: “Stop coming to be healed on the Sabbath; we can’t have that. It’s against the Law.” Not to mention that it was disrupting the service and confusing the decency and order that we clergy do tend to hold very dear. I feel a certain sympathy with my Jewish counterpart in this story, even while I rejoice with the woman who’s been given back her ability to stand upright in the human community.

Jesus’ response, of course, is one we find him making over and over again. He doesn’t make light of the Sabbath at all. But the central commandment of the law is love: Love God with your whole self! Love your neighbor as yourself! Love those around you. Even his critics water their animals on the Sabbath. What could be more fitting than for this woman to be set free from her infirmity precisely on the Sabbath. She gets to stand erect again and praise God for it. Churches and synagogues and laws and Sabbaths have their genuine value, but they’re not the central thing.

Isaiah was making the same point in the passage we heard earlier: Keeping the Sabbath isn’t primarily a matter not lifting things, not doing things. The Sabbath means not”pursuing your own interests, your own affairs.” It means “removing the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil.” It means “offering your food to the hungry and satisfying the needs of the afflicted.” 

Isaiah, in fact, goes on to say that this is what makes a nation great—to refrain from exploitation, to share with the poor, to meet the needs of those who suffer. It’s the society that receives with gratitude and shares with generosity that will flourish. This is a message that needs to be reaffirmed loudly and persistently in an age like ours that has sanctified human greed and brute force instead.

Then your light shall rise in the darkness, says Isaiah,

and your gloom be like the noonday.

The Lord will guide you continually

and satisfy your needs in parched places,

and make your bones strong;

and you shall be like a watered garden,

like a spring of water,

whose waters never fail.

We keep Sabbath not only by gathering and worshipping, but by acts of love, love for God and for our neighbor. And this isn’t just an arbitrary demand on God’s part, a duty imposed on us from above. It’s part of God’s gift of grace. This whole universe began with God’s original, pre-emptive, enduring act of creative love, a love God extends even to us. This love is a gift to us, a grace. And our love is a response to God’s love, a sharing in God’s love, even a participation in God’s love. It, too, is a grace. For this is what all love longs for, isn’t it? That the beloved will love in return and love those whom we love. Love, we hope, will be a kind of contagion, transmitted back and forth among all who are loved—a contagion of grace,a contagion to be caught by us from God and from one another.

Luke underlined this in some verses that come right after this story of the woman who was bent over—two little parables that we didn’t read aloud this morning, but we know them well: the mustard seed and the leaven. The mustard seed turns into a virtual tree with birds nesting in it! (Well, Luke exaggerates a bit in his enthusiasm!) The leaven leavens the whole batch of bread! The grace of God is like that! It spreads, it grows, it affects people and turns them into lovers, it changes things, it makes things new. It’s the gift of God’s love.

The writer to Hebrews offered it to us as an image of our future: not the thunder and lightning and legal demands of Mount Sinai—(God had to get our attention somehow!—but “the heavenly Zion with innumerable angels in festal gathering and the souls of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven.” The woman Jesus cured is certainly one of them—one of them already as she praised God in the synagogue. What grace leads us toward and promises to us is a whole world of rejoicing—a world where the contagion of grace, the contagion of love, drives out the contagions of sickness, fear, greed, arrogance, brutality—for ever.

It was already happening right there as the crowd rejoiced with this woman in her restoration. She wasn’t the only person graced by her healing. Others got a new view of God’s love, a new hope, a new confidence from it. We still do, two thousand years later. And we have the opportunity to keep the contagion of grace growing and increasing by the way we worship and we way we live. God, after all, has been present among us—is still present among us—for good. God is not done yet. And we are invited to be part of what God is doing, part of the contagion of grace.

THE JOURNEY FROM ONE AGE TO ANOTHER

by Leave a Comment

Sermon preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Berkeley

FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER, May 19, 2019

Year C: Acts 11:1-18; Psalm 148; Revelation 21:1-6; John 13:31-35

We’ve heard four wonderful readings from scripture this morning. And I want to begin with our Psalm, a great celebration the wonders of this world. We often think of the Bible as focusing only on humanity. But actually it begins with the creation of the whole great world around us. We human beings only come tagging along on Day 6. As science, too, would agree, the world did just fine without us for a very long time. 

The Psalm is a great, all-embracing hymn: it calls on every part of the world to sing God’s praises, starting with angels, sun, moon, stars. Then it moves down to the earth: sea monsters in the deeps of the sea, lightning, hail, snow, fog, mountains, forests, animals of every kind—and, bringing up the rear, us. We’re part of something much greater—the whole universe, praising God by its very existence. And we, too, are invited to add our voices, puny though they me be when compared to all the rest.

It’s all about the beauty and wonder of this world we live in. But we know that this beauty and wonder are admixed with other things as well. For one thing, the beauty of the creation stands alongside its vulnerability to destruction by human carelessness and greed. And in other ways, too, this is a world of sorrows as well as joys. We live in an age when, for some of us, human life has become more secure against things like famine and plague; but others are suffering severely. And none of us is spared the reality of deep disappointments, tears, pain, our own failings, and, ultimately, death. 

And we seem to be entering on an era in which the forces of destruction are renewing their influence. The demonic powers of hate and greed seem to be gaining renewed power. I don’t mean to take anything away from the praise and delight of our Psalm: I suspect everyone here has felt the joy and gratitude this Psalm gives voice to. But we have to admit that it stands alongside the other aspect of this world: the sorrows of our life. Neither reality erases the other. Both are part of our experience, and our Psalm voices the one side superbly well.

Then, in our reading from Revelation, we heard these words: “the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.'” But this doesn’t mean a rejection of the wonders of the first creation. Like Eden and like the world around us now, the New Jerusalem needs and rejoices in its trees and its river. But there’s one great change from old creation to new—the absence of anguish:

Death will be no more; 

mourning and crying and pain will be no more,

. . . . . . 

God will wipe away every tear from <your> eyes.

The Age to Come, as seen by John, is the same world that the Psalmist rejoiced in—with the exception that it is a world at last fully capable of unalloyed joy. Joy—that most elusive and unpredictable of human goods; not simple happiness, but elation, the state of being raised above ourselves in delight. 

And this comes about, we are told, because God has decided to make God’s home among mortals. God will be unfailingly present. God will wipe the tears from every eye. To the thirsty God “will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.”

Beautiful images. Powerful images. And, of course, images are the only language we have for talking about this New Creation, this Age to Come. We don’t live in it yet. Our human languages don’t have words for it. But when we reach deep inside ourselves, we know what we’re seeking: a life where suffering and grief no longer haunt us, where we can drink the pure water of life from the spring, where we know unalloyed joy. 

We don’t live in that Age, but can experience something of it even in this age—moments of the Age to Come breaking into our lives here and now. And we may sense that these are the moments when we are most truly ourselves. It’s not surprising that people have, for millennia, worked to live their lives in ways that point forward to this truly human existence. For it is not a question of simply waiting on the Age to Come to be revealed in full. The Age to Come is something we want to experience, in whatever degree possible, here and now as well. We want to live under that banner, in communities that acknowledge its values. But it can be hard for us to discern the path.

Peter offers us the perfect example: he had a very uncomfortable time discerning his path. The Holy Spirit had to twist his arm with that vision. And then twist it again. And then, just to make sure, twist it a third time. She told him that he would have to give up his revulsion for Gentiles, his revulsion at the idea of eating with unclean people—maybe eating unclean food. She prepared him to understand Cornelius’s totally unexpected message and risk the newness and strangeness of the Age to Come.

Cornelius was a “God-fearer,” a Gentile who found himself attracted to the faith of Israel. But he was also a Roman officer, who could not undertake to become Jewish. He was suspended between two communities that tended to despise each other. Romans looked down on Jews as a subject people. Jews, for their part, would not so much as eat in a gentile house because the food offered would not be pure. Cornelius had friendly relationships with the Jewish community. But we know from our own times that such friendly relationships are often fragile and dependent on the public mood. Just a few decades after this story, Jews and Romans would once again be at war with each other. 

And here’s Peter, under divine duress, going off to Caesarea with no idea what this is all about. He enters Cornelius’s house, stays there, eats there. And, finally, swept away by God’s generosity in pouring the Spirit out on this foreign household, he sees that, in God’s eyes, he and they belong to the same human family. And he acknowledges that by sharing with them the gift of baptism. It was one of those moments of surprise and elation that we call “joy.” It was the Life of the Age to Come breaking in on Peter’s own time and place and creating something new, a community where the barriers between people could and did fall. 

And, yes, there were other people in the Christian community for whom it was simply too shocking. They coiuldn’t accept it till Peter managed to convey to them something of the wonder and joy of that event. Luke tells us that their objections were overcome “and they praised God, saying, ‘Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.'” They, too, came to see that the Age to Come is at work here and now, working to reshape us and the world we live in.

Jesus summed it up just a few words. He acknowledged that there is no simple way to step directly from This Age into the Age to Come. “Where I am going,” he says to his disciples, “you cannot come.” They will have to go on living in This Age, even while longing for the Age to Come. But he also gives them a clear direction about how to find and travel the road thither: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” 

And, as Peter later learned to his astonishment, Jesus meant more than just “Love your fellow disciples, love your co-religionists, love the people in your little world.” Peter learned that he might have to find ways to love even people he had dreaded and avoided and thought ill of. We step from this Age to the Age to Come when we begin to figure out how to live in a loving way here and now. 

Daunting prospect—right?—trying to live with love in the difficult world we find ourselves in just now. And we fall down a lot. But sometimes, by the grace of God—perhaps even a little arm-twisting from God—we take a step forward; we learn what it is like to be citizens of the Age to Come in our own times. We enter the joy of this world: the wonders of the skies and the earth, of sea monsters and land animals and people of all sorts, even those very different from ourselves. We work for a world more truly humane, more deeply in accord with God’s love. And we practice loving one another, knowing that God loves us all and is waiting to wipe away the tears from all eyes and to offer us a glass of clear, cold water from the spring of life. 

That’s the vision toward which we hope to move. 

God foster us on the journey! 

WHEN A NEW WORLD BREAKS IN ON US

by Leave a Comment

Bill Countryman Good Shepherd Berkeley

SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER, April 28, 2019

Year C: Acts 5:27-32; Psalm 118:14-29; Revelation 1:4-8; John 20:19-31


Every year on the Second Sunday of Easter, we hear the same Gospel reading, which we commonly refer to as the story of “Doubting Thomas.” It’s a bit like a cup of strong black coffee after the bubbly effervescent quaff of Easter. Brings us right back down to earth, even as we continue singing “Alleluia.”

Actually, it’s a misnomer to call this the story of Doubting Thomas. It’s really the story of Doubting Everybody. And the story began with the Gospel reading we heard last week, where Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb and finds it open and empty. Jesus had spoken about his coming crucifixion and resurrection, but no one seems to have caught his meaning. Mary can’t imagine that he’s anything but dead. She tells Peter and John, and they doubt her story. Still, they go off to check, probably muttering to themselves, “Oh, she’s got the wrong tomb. Who could possibly have moved that stone?” But they find it as she said. In fact, they identify the linen wrappings left on the floor as the ones Jesus had been buried in. What can they do but trudge back in a state of perplexity and doubt.

Mary lingers at the tomb weeping, but she stoops down to look into the tomb and sees twoangelssitting in it, one where the head of Jesus’ body had lain, the other at the foot. This is very strange. Death, according to the Torah, renders everything around it impure. Yet, here are two angels, utterly pure beings, sitting right where Jesus’ body had been. They ask her why she’s weeping, and she tells them. But her grief is so great she can’t bear to wait for a response. Instead, she turns away, only to run into someone she takes to be the gardener. 

We can easily understand it. She’s at a complete loss. She’s not only lost her beloved teacher; now she can’t even visit his burial place since the body has been moved. It’s not even too surprising that she doesn’t recognize him. After all, this can’t possibly be Jesus standing in front of her. But then, when he calls her by name, her entire world changes around her. All her existing presuppositions have been shattered. And she has set foot in a new age. All her doubts are caught up into an unimaginable sense of joy.

Mary told the disciples, who apparently doubted this part of her story, too. Yet, that very evening, a frightened little group behind barred doors for fear that the mob violence of Friday hadn’t quite exhausted itself, they, too, see Jesus standing before them. And they’re as disoriented as she had been. It was impossible, of course, but there he was—a being now of a different order, but still the same Jesus who had been crucified. He made a point of showing them his wounds so that they would know that. 

And, then, when the disciples told Thomas, who’d been missing from that gathering, he was as doubtful as they’d been, as doubtful as Mary had been before Jesus spoke her name. This is just the third round of doubt in these stories. But it’s also the climactic one, because here—on this very Sunday going on two thousand years ago—Thomas first gives voice to the true shock of the resurrection. 

People sometimes suppose that the story of Jesus’ resurrection was easier to believe in the first century than in our own time. They might say, “Well, people believed in miracles then. Even Elijah and Elisha were said to have brought children back to life. Jesus himself had done it. Ancient people were just more credulous than we. So what would kind of problem would this one be? It’s just more fabulous than the others?” 

No, actually, our own world is full of credulous people, too. It’s just that we exercise our credulity on the internet and conspiracy theories and such like. It’s clear in these stories that this array of first-century people were no more prepared to believe the resurrection than we would be. Jesus’ disciples were completely unprepared for what was happening to them even if he had mentioned it in his teaching. This was something that went far beyond the mere working of miracles. This was the beginning of a new world.

Thomas’s response to Jesus, as we heard, was “My Lord and my God.” It sounds at first, in English, as if Thomas is addressing Jesus with those titles. In Greek, it’s clear, actually, that he’s not. He may be saying “[You are] my Lord and my God.” Or it may be an exclamation, “My Lord! My God!.” Either way, it was an acknowledgement that God was truly at work, right there, right in front of Thomas, fashioning a new creation. Thomas realized that he was standing on the threshold of a world very different from the one he’d been living in. 

The disciples were living, of course, as we all inevitably do, in their past, in a world of limited possibilities most of which they’d already explored. Our past experience pretty much defines what we expect of the future. Yes, they’d seen miracles of healing, even performed some themselves. For most people in their day, it was just the only available form of healing. But the Risen Jesus wasn’t some minor aberration in an otherwise familiar world. He belonged to a different world altogether with different rules and different expectations. He showed up in locked rooms. He still bore the marks of the wounds that killed him, but was more alive than ever. His new world crossed paths with theirs, but wasn’t limited by their normal expectations. Above all, he embodied a world where love and hope are the driving forces, not fear and death. 

The world we’ve all been living in is a world where love and hope sometimes have a very difficult struggle just to survive. Fear and death keep reasserting themselves. In recent years, their power seems to have redoubled. It’s a big leap to get from a world shadowed by death and fear to a world lighted by love and hope. None of the disciples found it easy. Thomas was no different from the rest. But he understood better than anyone else what was going on. From here on, nothing would be quite the same. 

And what would it mean for us, doubters as we all are—even the most faithful of us—what would it mean for us to recognize that the world has changed around us? For some people it comes as a moment of illumination when we discover that the deep reality of life is different from the day to day rules we’ve been living by. The poet W. S. Auden told of a moment of being overwhelmed by an inexplicable awareness of God’s love for this world and its people. 

Others discover the power of this new world in acts of service, given and recieved. I’ve heard people say something like that when they talk about participating in the Friday lunches here. It may come to some of us in reading or study, in singing and worship, in the words of scripture or of a hymn. Maybe we see it at work in another person’s life and think, “There’s something important going on there!”

In Thomas’s case, it was Jesus standing in front of him with his wounds bared. And Jesus’ response to Thomas’s realization was something like this: “You’ve seen and understood and put your trust in this new age. Good. But the really lucky ones (Yes, that’s pretty much what “blessed” means here)—the really lucky ones are those who somehow just know.” And maybe some of us fit that pattern, too: the pattern of those blessed from an early age with awareness that the world of hope and love is the real world and the hostility and hate of this world will not, ultimately, prevail. But even for those lucky ones, there is still a lifelong opportunity to be surprised anew and move deeper into the gifts of the new world.

However you may discover this world, judge all the doubters in this morning’s stories kindly. Like all of us, they found it hard to escape the prison of their past, of the world they lived in, of their sometimes difficult experiences, of their long-standing assumptions.—hard to imagine a life of trust and hope and love, hard to take the long step of actually living as citizens of that new world. In fact, they probably sensed that it would probably get them in trouble here and now. But the new world was and remains an available choice. And it’s a choice that offers us new freedom and life.

FINE WINE AND OTHER GIFTS

by 2 Comments

A sermon preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd, Berkeley

Second Sunday After Epiphany, 1/20/2019

Readings (Year C): Isaiah 62:1-5; Psalm 36:5-10; 1 Corinthians 12:1-11; John 2:1-11.

Each year, on the Sundays after Epiphany, we hear gospel readings that tell of occasions when God shone with particular brightness through the life and ministry of Jesus. The marriage at Cana is a great example. It’s as if God’s creative power and imagination, the power and imagination that made this universe in the first place, suddenly blazed up again. Gallons and gallons of water becomes wine—and not just any wine, but the very best of wine! That’s an epiphany, for sure.

But there’s something else surprising here, too. In other miracle stories, the onlookers are all amazed, and there’s lots of talk and excitement. But in this story, almost nobody knows what happened. Mary knows. The servants who hauled the water in the first place and then ladled out the wine—they know. But the only thing anyone else knows knows is that the wine has suddenly gotten a whole lot better. 

It’s a wonderful story and a puzzling one, and we’ll come back to it later on. But first I want to turn our attention to the reading we heard from 1 Corinthians, where Paul tells us about gifts of the Spirit. It’s about epiphanies, too.

We’re familiar with the basic idea here.The Spirit lavishes all sorts of gifts on us when we’re gathered together as church—gifts that the church needs and, beyond just the church, gifts the world needs. And they all come from God’s Spirit, who is a generous—we could even say “profligate”—gift-giver. 

It’s easy to notice the people with the big, public gifts. This weekend commemorates Martin Luther King, Jr., who was certainly a great example. He had exceptional gifts of speech, of political savvy, of organization, of persistence, of bravery in a dangerous situation. And he placed them all at the service of the church and of the world, even at the price of his own death. 

Now, it may be easier to recognize the gifts of the Spirit in someone like Martin Luther King, Jr., but the same sort of thing happens, on a less dramatic stage, all around us. I’m very much aware how often I find myself blessed by the gifts of other people. People at Good Shepherd have been sharing the Spirit’s gifts with me for more than thirty years. It’s made my own life richer and more loving and hopeful, for which I’m deeply grateful. 

Everyone here has gifts to share. Maybe you’re quite conscious of what they are, maybe not. Maybe you’re even too modest to admit that you have any. Maybe you’re so impressed by other people’s gifts that you don’t properly esteem your own. Maybe circumstances just haven’t been quite right yet to let you see what your gifts are. But you can take it for granted that you have them because, as Paul says, that’s how the Spirit operates. And experience proves him right again and again. Remember that Martin Luther King didn’t change the world single-handed. It took the combined gifts of thousands of faithful people.

And these gifts of the Spirit are also gifts to us from Jesus—a way for Jesus to continue his ministry here and now. When we share our gifts with those around us, we become an epiphany of Jesus. Our gifts may seem a little humdrum compared to gallons and gallons and gallons of first-class wine. But they’re not. They, too, show the love of God being woven right into daily life and creating something wonderful in our very midst. 

Paul emphasized that the gifts of the Spirit are very closely tied to Jesus. Any prophetic spirit that couldn’t who say “Jesus is Lord” was automatically not the real article. Now, of course, it’s not really simple as having the right formula. Paul—Mr. “It’s the Spirit and not the letter”—certainly knew that. He was just responding to one form in which problems were arising in the church at Corinth.

The words can be used to cover something quite different from Jesus’ message of love. I’ve known people who shouted “Jesus is Lord” in loud voices and plastered it on the bumpers of their cars—not in order to share God’s love with the world but as a sign that they belonged to a religious in-group that was also burgeoning with political power and that they were confident that they were on the right side of everything—up to and including the Last Judgement. I think they’d forgotten Jesus’ Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, with its message about how surprised everybody is going to be at that day. 

What they missed was what is truly important in Jesus’ message: the love of God for everyone—a love that God hopes will inspire love in us, love for God and love for our neighbors. When we share our gifts with love, we become an epiphany. We give to others a glimpse of Jesus that is, at the same time, a glimpse of God. 

And just like the wedding at Cana, it won’t be visible to everybody. This isn’t a big, splashy epiphany. Jesus did that kind of thing, too. On the Last Sunday after the Epiphany, we’ll hear once again the story of the Transfiguration. Big, flashy epiphany, right? And, you know, it didn’t turn out all that well; the disciples couldn’t figure it out. 

What worked best for Jesus, as he brought the love of God to people, was the daily generosity of teaching and healing and feeding multitudes in the desert and dining with outcasts—even if, just for a nice change, he could also supply wine to a wedding feast that was running short. And most people never knew about it, but there were those servants who knew–knew that the house had been visited by God’s grace—and there was Mary, still coming to a deeper understanding of what God was doing in this child of hers. And that’s how the gift spreads. The blessing of being together in the church is that we get to see, in one another, Jesus’ epiphany still at work. 

The Jesus who revealed God’s power at Cana is present here today. This Holy Table is the wedding feast. And the Holy Spirit makes Jesus present here—both in the sacrament of bread and wine and also in the gifts she gives each of us to share with one another and with the world around us. Yes, we, when we are living in love, are an epiphany of God in our world.

TRUE KINGSHIP

by Leave a Comment

Bill Countryman Good Shepherd Berkeley
Christ the King, November 25, 2018
Year B: 2 Samuel 23:1-7; Psalm 132:1-13; Revelation 1:4b-8; John 18:33-37

King of Glorie, King of Peace,
With the one make warre to cease;
With the other blesse thy sheep,
Thee to love, in thee to sleep.

Let not Sinne devoure thy fold,
Bragging that thy blood is cold,
That thy flesh hath lost his food,
And thy Crosse is common wood.

King of Glorie, King of Peace,
With the one make warre to cease;
With the other blesse thy sheep,
Thee to love, in thee to sleep.
George Herbert, “L’Envoy”
[The form of the poem as I give it here, isn’t the original, but Edward Bairstow’s adaptation of it in his “Five Songs of the Spirit” for baritone, which I sang to introduce the sermon—with the great help of Randy Benway as pianist.]

Today is the Feast of Christ the King—and that word “king” is one that many—maybe most—of us here at Good Shepherd are not too happy with. There are good reasons for that. What does “king” even mean to people in the US two hundred and some odd years after we got rid of the whole lot? And isn’t it hopelessly tainted with assumptions of patriarchy—not to mention hints of violence and arbitrariness?
But I want to say today that we need to rethink our suspicion. I”m not going to propose that the US should replace our elected president with a crowned monarch. But I can’t help noticing that many, many people in the world today seem to have a great hunger to have some one significant person to lead them, guide them, tell them what their lives mean and what to do about it—someone to protect them, to make them feel better about themselves.
It seems to be a fairly basic human longing. And it can take a bad turn. Some of it is as trivial as the worldwide fascination with celebrities. Some takes the form of giving too much credit to the self-proclaimed experts that tell us what to eat and how to decorate our homes and how to raise our children and . . . you name it. But some of it has become very political and has sweeping consequences.

We’re living right now in a new and unexpected era of “strong man” governments. For a long time, we thought this sort of thing was restricted to third-world countries. But Mr. Putin in Russia and Mr. Orbán in Hungary have been making quite a career of it in Europe. And they have lots of wannabes trying to follow in their footsteps—including our current president. But don’t, please, think that this disease is limited to political conservatives. Leftists like Mr. Maduro in Venezuela and Mr. Ortega in Nicaragua play it, too. And the Ortegas seem to have become increasingly hard to distinguish from their right-wing predecessors, the Somoza family. And the rest of us now find ourselves wringing our hands and being perplexed and appalled that people would actually vote such regimes into office.
Of course, these “strong men” aren’t literally kings. (The word “dictator” comes closer.) Traditional kings, even in their heyday, were typically surrounded by political and social checks and balances—and by sacred ideals, as in David’s poem about the true king in our first lesson this morning:

One who rules over people justly,
ruling in the fear of God,
is like the light of morning,
like the sun rising on a cloudless morning,
gleaming from the rain on the grassy land.

Our current crop of strong men are nothing like this. They’re committed only to the narrow interests of their own factions. Their goal is not to unite people but to eradicate all opposition. They seek to dominate and reshape their communities with the tools of fear, suspicion, and hatred.

Against these developments, we can and do set the ideals of democracy, of justice, of human rights—ideals that match well with our Christian faith. But that may not be enough by itself. Abstract ideals aren’t always enough to sustain human beings, even the most rational of us. We need not just ideals but embodiment. We need to see ourselves and our hopes and our highest values embodied in a person.
The approaching seasons of Advent and Christmas should, in fact, remind us of that. Why? Because they proclaim how God’s boundless mercy and generosity have now come to us embodied in the person of the Christ—this person we celebrate today as our “King.” And Jesus is a king who presents the sharpest possible contrast to the strong men of our time. For our king rejects the strategies of fear, suspicion and hatred and founds this kingdom of which we are part on trust and hope and love.
Jesus makes all this clear in his audience with Pilate: “If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over. . . . But . . . my kingdom is not from here.” And this is the kingdom of which we are a part. This is the person we acclaim freely as our king. Say “monarch,” of course, if you prefer. I, too, like its ungendered character; I only fear that it summons up the image of a political office more than that of a concrete person who can help me know who I am and how I want to live in this world.

I know there is also a danger here—the danger of remaking Jesus in the image of the strong men around us. In fact, we Christians have done that again and again—invoking Jesus as our leader against heretics, against people of other religions, even against each other. Protestants and Catholics of the seventeenth century were mirror images of one another in their confidence that Jesus was on their side. And, as Abraham Lincoln ruefully observed, both North and South in the Civil War prayed to the same God and expected God’s favor for their cause.
So, yes, there’s danger in calling Jesus “king.” There is nothing so pure in our world that we humans can’t misuse it; we’re very good at that. And that’s why I began with that poem by George Herbert. “King of Glory, King of Peace.” We’re apt to think of “glory” as something military. But Herbert undercuts that idea and restores the truth of Jesus’ kingship. Jesus’ glory is shown in bringing peace, even at the cost of his own life
Herbert prays for Jesus’ kingship to become truly manifest among us and in us—prays that we will trust Jesus’ glory and power in a way that can make us, too, agents of peace. Otherwise, what good did it do to shed his blood, to let his body be hung up on the wood of the cross, to feed us again and again in this Holy Communion with his own life?
Sin would like to convince us that it was all for naught. Sin would like to convince us to take the way of the strong man, the one who deals in fear and suspicion and hatred. Sin would like us to believe that Jesus’ blood was wasted, that his life can no longer nourish us, that the cross was just ordinary wood.
But we are people of Jesus. We do not accept that. We belong to a kingdom of glory and peace, of love and mercy. We have a heritage that has again and again given life to true human community after times of destruction. And we will not dishonor our king. In fact, we will proclaim his kingship in our lives. Even if the word “king” may seem hopelessly tainted for many of us, let our lives continue to show the trust and hope and love—the allegiance—to which it points.

King of Glorie, King of Peace,
With the one make warre to cease;
With the other blesse thy sheep,
Thee to love, in thee to sleep.

Let not Sinne devoure thy fold,
Bragging that thy blood is cold,
That thy flesh hath lost his food,
And thy Crosse is common wood.

King of Glorie, King of Peace,
With the one make warre to cease;
With the other blesse thy sheep,
Thee to love, in thee to sleep.

BAPTISM: WHAT IT’S ABOUT, WHAT IT LEADS TO

by 1 Comment

Preached at Good Shepherd, Berkeley
EIGHTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST, JULY 15, 2018
Proper 10B: 2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19; Psalm 24; Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:1-13

Today we’re celebrating the Sacrament of Baptism for Naya and Marilyn and Charles. And one person asked me last week why we do this nowadays at a Sunday morning service instead of privately, at the convenience of families and friends—which used to be the custom for Episcopalians and Roman Catholics and, I think, a good many others.
The short answer is that the current edition of our Book of Common Prayer wants it this way. And this change was based on the sense that Baptism is an important event for the whole congregation, not just for the people being baptized today. It’s important to all of us because of what it tells us about our relationship to God and to one another—about the great gift Baptism gives us in sacramental form.
There are two great sacraments that shape all of Christian life: Baptism in which we’re given new birth and the Holy Communion in which we’re fed again and again with God’s own life. In the ancient church Baptism was a very big event, held only a few times a year and particularly at the Easter Vigil. But it would be hard to schedule it that way in our world, where our calendars are crowded with so many different demands. So the people who shaped our present Book of Common Prayer settled for any Sunday morning that would work! And this way it puts all of us who witness it today back in mind of who we are as people of faith and what it means to have been born again through Baptism.

So I focus this sermon today on two questions about Baptism: What is it about? What does it lead to? And by providence or good luck (it’s always hard to tell the difference) our reading today from Ephesians goes a long way to answer both those questions.
You may be thinking, “Funny, I don’t remember anything about Baptism in that reading.” And you’d be right. It’s not mentioned at all. But it gives us an account of Christian faith that explains Baptism very well.
So, first, what is Baptism about? Our passage from Ephesians puts it this way: God “destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will . . .” God did it only because he wanted to!
God “destined us for adoption as God’s children.” We were already God’s children by virtue of our creation. What does it mean to be adopted on top of that? It can’t mean that we are loved more than we were. Ephesians tells us, God “destined” us for this adoption. The love has been there all along. God has always wanted to draw us close in this way.
So Baptism doesn’t cause God to love us. It is, rather, the physical and spiritual touch of that love. The water of baptism is like the water of the womb that each of us floated in in order to be born into the human family. Baptism says to us as we emerge from this “bath,” “Here you are! You are one of us, one of family that has been chosen by God’s own love.”
Some Christians, at times, have thought that God doesn’t love the unbaptized. But that can’t be true. Our text says that God’s love brought us to this point, this adoption. God loved us long before any of us was baptized and doesn’t need Baptism to love us still.
So Baptism is about being a part both of God’s created family and of God’s adoptive family. God says to each person through this sacrament, “I made you from the beginning as my child, and with this water I make you twice my child—my child of deliberate, individual choice. With this water, I assure you of my love: I mark you as beloved.” And that’s what Baptism is about.

And what does it lead to? What difference, really, does it make to a human life? As to the details, there is, for each of us, a whole lifetime of answers to that question. But perhaps the most fundamental one is that it gives us this individual, personal assurance of God’s love. In Baptism, God touches each of us. There is no way that you can say to yourself, “Oh, that love-note was meant for someone else.” No, it was meant for you. To live in the remembrance of this loving touch can give us courage and hope and the power to love even in our most difficult times.
God, after all, doesn’t promise that there will be no troubles in life. What God does promise is to stand with us through them. That’s what our reading from Ephesians means by the phrase “through the blood of Jesus.” It’s not blood offered to God. It’s blood that God shed in God’s selfless determination to draw as close as possible to us in love—even to the point of sharing not just our life, but our death, not just our joys, but our sufferings.
And there’s also a dimension in Baptism that reaches beyond each of as an individual. That’s why Ephesians also speaks of God’s “plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in [Christ], things in heaven and things on earth.” Baptism, by touching us with God’s love, points us forward on a journey together, a journey toward the kind of world that God longs for, a world where we shall be united both with God and with one another—and with a world of beings greater and more wonderful that we can yet imagine, “things in heaven and things on earth.” It is a world of trust, hope, and love—and if its full realization lies beyond anything we can imagine in this life, its beginnings lie right here in this moment when we are touched by this water, the sign of God’s love for us.
“This,” as the last verse we read from Ephesians puts it, “is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s own people, to the praise of [God’s] glory.” Maybe it’s too vast a goal for us to imagine. But we can still move step by step toward it in our lives. Baptism marks us as God’s beloved and points us in this direction.

Our passage from Ephesians is beautiful and right on target. But I have to admit that I find the language a bit high-flown and hard to follow. I found myself longing for some better image to sum all this up for you. And, indeed, one came to me. It is a passage from the Song of Songs or Song of Solomon—that amazing little book of love poetry that lies right in the middle of the Bible like a key to the whole thing. One of the lovers says to the other:
Set me as a seal upon your heart,
as a seal upon your arm;
for love is strong as death,
passion fierce as the grave. (Song 8:6)
In Baptism, God sets you as a seal on God’s own heart, God’s own arm. And this love of God’s is stronger than any challenge you will ever face.

MUCH FROM LITTLE

by Leave a Comment

Sermon preached at Good Shepherd Church, Berkeley, June 17, 2018
Proper 6B: 1 Samuel 15:34-16:13; Psalm 20; 2 Corinthians 5:6-10 (11-13)14-17; Mark 4:26-34

We’ll be reading from the books of Samuel and Kings all summer this year. And they’re full of great stories. Admittedly, we’ll be getting a carefully pruned selection of them, made suitable for delicate ears on Sunday mornings. If you want the whole raw (and occasionally appalling) narrative, I’m afraid you’ll just have to read it in the Bible.
Now, today’s story didn’t need any cleaning up, but you need to know a bit about the political realities of the tenth century B.C. in order to understand exactly what’s going on here. The Middle East of the prophet Samuel’s day was a bit like the chaotic state of Syria and northern Iraq right now Every group in the population was engaged in an ongoing struggle with its neighbors—a struggle for power and sometimes a struggle for survival.
The Israelites were a loose coalition of tribes in the hill country of Palestine, under pressure from their richer and better organized neighbors, the Philistines, who had a group of city states on the coast. (The most important of their cities was Gaza—still a place of contention to this day.)
The Israelites were having a hard time defending themselves and finally admitted that they needed stronger leadership. They went to the prophet Samuel, their most widely respected leader, and demanded a king. Samuel thought it was a bad idea, but he finally gave way. And the lot for kingship fell on a warrior named Saul, who also happened to be the tallest and strongest man among the Israelites. But it wasn’t long before Saul did something that made Samuel so furious that he disowned him. (We won’t go into the details. It’s one of those stories that’s been edited out of Sunday readings—probably for good reason.)
But if Saul had lost divine approval, who was going to replace him? And how was that going to play out? God told Samuel that a replacement was already chosen and directed him to go anoint him as the next king. Samuel, of course, understood the risk. “Saul will kill me,” he says. He wasn’t speaking metaphorically. This was a bloody era.
So off Samuel goes to Bethlehem. And you will have noticed what kind of reception he got there: “The elders of the city came to meet him trembling, and said, ‘Do you come peaceably?'” Everybody had to be suspicious of everybody else. There were foes without and enemies within. And Samuel was powerful enough to make people very nervous.

But Samuel announces that he’s only come to make a sacrifice—which normally meant that there would be a feast. (Only certain parts of the animal, you see, would be burnt on the altar. The rest would be roasted to provide a sacred banquet.) And he invites the elders of the city to the feast, making a special point to include Jesse and his sons. And everything is proceeding as expected until Samuel starts making his way through the list of sons, starting with the eldest, Eliab, who made a very good impression. But, no, God wasn’t interested. And so on and so on, until he’s run out of sons. What sort of trick is God playing on him?
So he turns to Jesse and says, “Is this really all your sons?” And, no, it’s not! Even though the terrifying Samuel had specifically invited “Jesse and his sons” to the feast, Jesse hadn’t seen any reason to send for David, his youngest—just a boy, not old enough for important public gatherings. So who gets anointed as the next king of Israel? Some little shrimp who isn’t big enough to wield a sword, much less wage war on two fronts, one with the current king, the other with the Philistines! Really?
In the rest of the 1st Book of Samuel we got lots of stories about David’s adventures and misadventures between the time when Samuel anointed him as king and the time, years later, when he actually began to rule. There was danger. There was bloodshed. There was flight and periods in hiding. Would the shepherd boy have agreed to it all if Samuel had given him a choice? Maybe not. Jon and I were pondering the story this week, and he wondered how the older brothers felt about being passed over. Maybe relieved, actually.

Now, I’ve spent quite bit of time on this story—partly just because I think it’s very interesting. But also because there’s a connection with our other readings this morning—more of a connection than we have any reason to expect given that we’re actually just reading our way through each of these books—1 Samuel, 2 Corinthians, Mark’s Gospel—at this time of year. The people who created the lectionary made no effort to coordinate the readings with each other.
But just look what crops up in Mark’s Gospel! Jesus tells us that the reign of God is like a mustard seed. It was the smallest of all garden seeds, but it produces the biggest plant in the garden—big enough for birds to nest under it. And you think of that pipsqueak shepherd boy named David and how he changed the whole political climate of the area and even achieved a degree of peace and quiet that hadn’t been seen there for centuries—a shelter where the people could make themselves at home.
Or the other parable Jesus told: the reign of God is like someone who sows a field and then goes about the business of every day life until, lo! it’s ready for harvest. And you think of Samuel, probably shaking his head over the choice of David, but doing his job and leaving the rest to God.
We have a built-in human prejudice, I suppose, in favor of people who project strength and ability, even if, like Saul, they may not have all that much of either. And we want to see things changing visibly—dramatically even—and immediately. We live in an age where people have fallen in love with a picture of the reign of God as arriving with a thunderclap, a catastrophe, a sudden rapturing of the good and punishment of the evil. How odd to hear Jesus saying here, “You sow the seeds yourself—and then maybe you should take a nap and get on with your other chores.” I love the name that’s been bestowed in this parable: The Seed Growing Secretly. It’s not the less powerful just because it doesn’t make the front page. God’s methods are more subtle—and I dare say more lasting—than those of Mr. Trump.

And St. Paul offered us a key reminder into what all of this means for our own lives: “We walk by faith, not by sight.” Actually, of course, the truth is more like “We walk primarily by faith, not by sight.” Sight is important, too, and Paul was never one to ignore the realities around him. But the direction of our walk, the steadiness with which we take our steps, the central values that guide us in understanding and dealing with the world around us—these come from faith, from our basic sense of what life in this world is really about.
Some people don’t like this talk about “faith.” They would like to think that everything can be based on knowledge. But they actually have a faith, too—the faith that they can in fact see and know everything of importance. The older I get, the more improbable that seems. It stretches credulity. It would be truer, I think, simply to admit that everybody walks by faith—by a kind of broad sense of what the world is like, a big picture into which we fit what we can actually see at the moment. Sometimes, of course, what we see refuses to fit and then we may have to rethink our faith. But, for the most part it’s our faith that guides us and helps us interpret what we are seeing.
And faith makes an enormous difference, as the story of David shows. David eventually did become king and reigned for many years. He did it by becoming a hard-edged politician and guerrilla fighter—a master of what could be seen—but he also hung onto a larger sense of vocation that was connected to God. His faith helped him, unlike most hard-edged politicians and guerrilla fighters, to turn the corner when the right time came. He graduated from being a leader of insurrection to being, for the most part, a generous, just, peaceful monarch. Not many people since him have been able to make that transition.

We, too, can follow on the same path. Not the path of civil war, I mean. God spare us all that! But the faith that God’s love is the true shaping force in our world, the shaping form of true human lives, of lives worth living. And we all have parts to play as we walk in that faith—parts large or small, it makes no difference. After all, the smallest seed can produce the biggest plant. And we don’t even have to make it all happen. But we do need to plant the seed and tend it and rejoice in its growth.

HOW CAN WE THINK ABOUT THE HOLY SPIRIT?

by Leave a Comment

A Sermon preached on the FEAST OF PENTECOST, May 20, 2018, at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California
Scripture readings (Year B): Ezekiel 37:1-14; Psalm 104:25-35, 37; Acts 2:1-21; John 15:26-27 & 16:4b-15.

The Holy Spirit has to be one of the most difficult topics any one can talk about—right up there with quantum physics, it seems to me. In fact, it may be worse.
Why? Well, think about the word “spirit.” What is “spirit”? At its most basic level, it’s a breath of air: inspiration, expiration. Put more force behind it and it becomes a breeze, then a wind, then a storm. Think of it more metaphorically and it’s something we prefer to talk about in French—esprit—the quality of that enables an individual or a group to focus and summon energy for something and work effectively. Turn it back into English and it can be a indeterminate but powerful force for good or ill—a spirit of generosity, a spirit of malevolence. Give it yet a different turn and it becomes something that seems real, but also seems evanescent, unclear, uncertain—a ghost, maybe, or an apparition.
When we speak of God in terms of “Creator,” “Redeemer,” “Father,” “Son,” “Lover”, “Beloved”, we at least have a metaphor to work with. When we speak of God as “Spirit,” even the metaphor is something that you can’t pin down. You can’t form a picture of it, can’t get any sort of firm grip on.

And that’s just the way it ought to be. Because every time we Christians start to embrace the silly notion that we know all about God, that there is nothing more to understand, that the church as we know it is the final word, all we need to cure that attack of arrogance is to try thinking about the Holy Spirit.
To be sure, we’ve tried bottling the Spirit up in convenient packages called the Holy Scriptures and the Holy Sacraments. And that’s not untrue. The Spirit graciously consents to meet us in those places. The Spirit, after all, is God. And God is all for grace—grace, generosity, forgiveness, all the manifestations of that boundless love by which God created the universe and us in it, that love by which God still comes seeking us in season and out of season.
The only mistake here is if we begin to think that that’s all there is to the Spirit, as if the Spirit were very busy at baptisms and confirmations and ordinations and Eucharists—but spent most of her time (in Hebrew and Aramaic, Jesus’ native languages, “spirit” is a feminine noun, not masculine as in Latin) . . . . spent most of her time relaxing on the beach. No, the Holy Spirit, the Holy Breath, the Holy Wind blows around us all the time, everywhere we go, however little we may notice it.

Think of our first reading this morning, the famous story of Ezekiel in the Valley of Dry Bones. Have you ever wondered where all those bones came from? People of Ezekiel’s time would have known at once. In times of peace, the dead get properly buried. A whole valley full of bones could have only one explanation: war. These are the remains of an army so utterly defeated, a people so ground down by disaster, that there was no one left to bury them. It was a good image for how the people of Israel were feeling in Ezekiel’s day. God even says as much to Ezekiel, “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.'” In modern slang, “We’re dead.” And God tells Ezekiel to speak to the breath, the wind, the Spirit—it’s all the same word in Hebrew—and the Spirit will give this people new life.
What was the point of this vision? It’s to tell the people, “You are forgetting about God the Spirit, God the unknowable, God the unpredictable, God the Lover who is never ultimately defeated.” “I will put my breath, my spirit within you,” God says to the people, “and you shall live. . . . ”

But working with the Spirit is never a simple, straightforward matter. Jesus once said, “The Spirit/wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” (John 3:8) Sometimes the Spirit may even seem to disappear just when we most need or want or expect her. Our Psalm this morning reminded us of this:
All [creatures] look to you *
to give them their food in due season.
You give it to them; they gather it; *
you open your hand, and they are filled with good things.
You hide your face, and they are terrified; *
you take away their breath,
and they die and return to their dust.
You send forth your Spirit, and they are created; *
and so you renew the face of the earth. (Ps.104:28-31, BCP translation)
So many great saints have spoken about this reality. St. John of the Cross even gave it a name, “The Dark Night of the Soul.” There are apt to be times in any life when we feel that God has abandoned us, that the Spirit has gone missing. The challenge then is to remember that the love of God remains constant, even when we cannot sense it in the present moment. God does send the Spirit. God does renew the face of the earth.

And sometimes, when the Spirit makes her presence known, she takes us by surprise and launches us off in an unpredictable direction. That’s the story we heard from Acts about the feast of Pentecost, the fiftieth day after Easter, when Jesus’s followers were slowly pulling themselves together after Jesus’ crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension and trying to figure out what they needed to be doing. “And they were all together in one place”—all of them, not just the Twelve, but everybody. “And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.”
Storm and lightning! The Spirit created a commotion. She effectively forced the disciples into talking with other people about Jesus and who he was and what he taught and what it meant for them. And the people who heard them were caught by surprise, too, and stuck around to listen. They heard that Jesus represented God’s great love for God’s people and that his resurrection foreshadowed God’s ultimate victory over sin and hatred and all kinds of human violence.
The Spirit can whisper quietly when she wants to. But she can also make a loud noise when that appeals to her. And she made a very loud noise that day.

So we can’t expect to pin the Spirit down once for all. We can’t limit her. We can’t channel her in the directions we would prefer. We can’t even imagine predicting her. And that’s scary, isn’t it? What if she goes away, and we are left feeling like those ancient Israelites: “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost”? Or it can be scary in another way. It’s easy for individuals to claim that the spirit is leading them in new ways. But sometimes you wonder. After all, how can we tell when the Holy Spirit is at work and when it’s some other spirit? the spirit of jealousy, say, or the spirit of competition or the spirit of deceit or pride or selfishness?
The earliest Christians had problems with that because a lot of people claimed to be speaking for the Spirit and they were contradicting one another and splitting the church. There’s a lot about that in the writings of Paul. And John was also conscious of it and gives us some help with it in our Gospel reading today. Jesus, at the Last Supper, is bidding his disciples farewell. He understands their grief, but he promises them that they will receive, in his place, the Advocate, the Helper, whom we sometimes call, using the ancient Greek word, the “Paraclete.” This Paraclete, he says, is “the Spirit of truth.”
And this Spirit, he promises, will guide us “into all truth.” “Well, thank you,” we might say, “but isn’t that just the problem? How do we tell which Spirit is the true one?” Well, earlier on in this discourse, Jesus said, “the Holy Spirit . . . will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.” That’s the key. The Spirit who calls to mind what Jesus told us is the true Spirit.
And what did Jesus speak of? Love. God’s love for us. Our love for God. Our love for one another and for all the world and all the people God loves. When the Spirit speaks to us about that kind of love, we know we are hearing the true Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God.

This feast day, then, gives us news of great joy. Jesus has ascended, but God is still here with us every bit as much as when Jesus walked the roads of Palestine, as much as when God promised, though Ezekiel to revive the people of Israel after their crushing defeat, as much as when God called into being this whole wonderful world around us. The Spirit can never be pinned down; she may make her presence known at unexpected moments and in surprising ways. But we can count on her to proclaim to us again and again the good news of God’s love and to prompt us into living that good news and sharing it with thanksgiving.

ANOTHER STORY

by Leave a Comment

We’ve just heard a long and demanding story [Mark 15], one that looks deeply into human evil and God’s self-giving love of humanity and the ways those two collide. It’s a story that’s hard to add anything to by way of preaching, but, this year, I’m going to offer you an alternate story, one that turns out quite differently but may give us some help in understanding the one we just heard a little better.
The story comes from a Czech poet of the last century, Milovan Bureš, and it begins in a village church, where:

The gentle Mother,
complaining in the darkness of the church,
descended from the altar and passed through candle light.
Like thrifty peasants do,
she took off her sandals
when she came to the edge of the village.

In that country of rocks and rivulets,
where the azure was cut up by swallows’ wings,
she met her son there in the field.
The blood on his hips had long gone rusty,
and the wounds by thorns pierced the mother’s heart.
Without the aureole, her face a little wrinkled,
between the creases of her dress the fragrance
of the glades,
in the shade of the cross, the widow was seated.

“Sweet son of mine,
they jailed my heart in stone,
and I would like to live again.
Why ever is your and my plight
so often engraved in stone,
and at my feet cold candlesticks placed?
I wish I were like other women,
with joy as part of me, not only suffering.
Bare-footed, I would like to step on the primrose.”

“Sweet mother of mine,
I wish that not my bood but love would save humankind.
For is it not enough
that in their hands grain waits for salvation,
and that its blossom bears the whole heaven’s weight?
May this mouldering stone fall off our shoulders,
and towards blue skies the captive heart be set free.
May all the statues come out of the dark
and may all the saints be changed to people
from that land of butterflies and forget-me-nots.

The pious villagers discover that their Virgin has gone missing and rush out to look for her.

Meanwhile, she, in a robe of ripening rye,
her hair uncombed, unwashed,
after the simple village people’s habit,
rushes toward the brook, its waters chilly in the morning.
In her fingers she holds wind, like a comb,
running it through her long hair. . . . .

They did not recognize her as they rushed past,
they saw only their meadows and their fields,
and by the brook, a peasant maid—
a peasant maid who can hardly say Lord’s Prayer and Ave. . . .
They did not recognize her.

At length, the searchers return without success, but news spreads that
Some lads who grazed goats on the slopes,
as it were, found Mother of God.
She was well and in good health.

They tell their story to the doubting elders:
“Well, as we grazed our goats there in the fields,
there she was, sitting amidst the farmhands relishing buttermilk.
Each of them shared his bit with her.
Like on the altar, her hair was of gold,
only in place of the halo she wore a flowered scarf,
and she was wiping sweat off her brow,
as if she’d been with us for ages.”

All the elders can do is mourn over what they have lost. But the story concludes:
Mother of God, cousin of rowan-tree, clear as a flame,
has found her Christ
in these lads full of life and strength.
What use would she have for the dark church
with its candles’ tears,
if now all around she saw the sunflowers agleam.
The good mother of springs and light,
without whom, it’s said, not even daises will reach bloom,
lives on in our midst, eternal.

It’s a happier ending, isn’t it? And it’s an attractive story. The saints, for a moment, become people and simple working folk become saints. We go out of the church to a warm spring day. And we humans are at peace not only with one another but with the whole world—the goats, the sunflowers, the primroses, the daisies, the cold water from the brook, the wind. Mary is as close to us as nature itself.

But right at the heart of it all is that question Mary asks Jesus, “Why ever is it that your and my plight is engraved in stone?” And Jesus’ answer: “I wish that not my blood but love would save humankind.” Yes, how deeply we wish that. What attracts us in this story is a kind of picture of heaven, where harm and hatred and cruelty and suffering and alienation are things of the past.
I believe we were starting to think, not so long ago, that we ourselves were coming within sight of such a world. A world of democracy, respecting the sacredness of human rights, discovering a new sense of justice toward the creation as well as toward one another. The whole world has had a rude awakening from that dream. Not that the dream is dead, not that it is no longer worth working toward. It is still the goal of every loving heart. But we see now that the path will be more rugged and perilous than we had thought.

And God, confronted with this reality, does what? This is what the Passion Story today has been telling us. It’s not enough for God to join us only in the moments of sunshine and flowers and butterflies. If God is going to be with us in our world, God has to be with us even in the worst that our world deals out. If God is to be with us in such a way, the Passion story becomes inevitable.
The other story that I set alongside it, the one that ends with Mary watching over our human life and joy—there is no direct path that can lead us, once for all, to that one. But hang onto it, anyway. It is an image of heaven, an image of the life Jesus wants to invite us into even as he walks the Way of the Cross. The goal of the Passion Story is not the cross, but life lived in the power of God’s love.

This sermon was preached on Palm Sunday, 2019 at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California. It draws heavily on Milovan Bureš’s poem translated by Hilda Hearne as “The Legend of the Smoke from Potato Tops.” I have taken it from the booklet to the Supraphon CD of Cantatas by Bohuslav Martinů, performed by the Prague Philharmonic Choir under the leadership of Lukáš Vasilek. Copyrights by Ms. Hearne (2016) and Supraphon (1993).
Incidentally, Martinů’s music for this piece is wonderful! I highly recommend this recording.