Sermons

Trinity Sunday 2009

St. John’s Episcopal Church

Staten Island

Reverend Roy A Cole

Today, every preacher in every parish that follows the historic calendar of the Church faces the same challenge—what to say on Trinity Sunday.  In parishes with Curates or other assisting priests, this is their Sunday.  Rectors tend to be very happy giving up the pulpit for this sermon.  Why?  Because the Trinity cannot be rationally understood.  It makes no sense.  In all of science, in all of mathematics, in all of philosophy, there is no example of one thing being simultaneously One and Three.  For nearly 2,000 years the best minds of the church have tried to explain it.  Augustine, Tertullian,  Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and all the rest have tackled the problem of the Trinity and every explanation falls short. 

Yet in all this theological inquiry and debate we have nevertheless come to understand something of what the Trinity is by what the Trinity is not.  Such a disciplined approach to understanding who God is by what God is not finds its basis in Apophatic Theology.  Apophatic Theology starts from the uncontested premise that the finite, you me, can neither fully grasp nor understand the infinite, God.  What we know of God, and there is much that we do know, is not the summation of God.  It is only an ephemeral glimpse of the God whom we have come to know through the revelation of God.  The first lesson appointed for today gives us an historical example of what I mean.

Moses, you may remember, began life as that baby pulled from the bulrushes of the Nile where his mother had placed him in a wicker basket because Pharaoh had decreed that all male Jewish babies were to be killed.  Discovered by Pharaoh’s daughter he was adopted and made a Prince of Egypt.  As a man of privilege, wealth, and learning he one day killed an Egyptian who was beating a Jewish slave.  Condemned to die for his act of violence Moses fled to the deserts of Midian and became a tender of sheep and goats.  It is here we pick up the narrative.  Scripture tells us that one day as he was out tending the flocks of this father in law Jethro, he saw something no one had ever seen before—a bush was ablaze with fire but was not consumed.  Turning aside to look at this great sight a voice called out to him from the fire saying, “Come no closer!  Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place you are standing is holy ground.”  And so it was that Moses met God and learned from God that he was to lead the Jewish people out of slavery in Egypt to the land that had been promised over 400 years before to his ancestor Abraham.  Apophatic theology tells us that God was not the fire, nor the bush, nor even the voice that spoke.  Nevertheless, it was a revelation of the infinite to the finite.  The revealing of God to humankind.

So what is it that is not true about the Trinity.  First, it is not three little gods, called father, son and holy spirit, making up one Big God.  Second, it is not one Big God divided up into three parts – each just a piece of God—like a generous piece of pie served up at the end of Thanksgiving Dinner.  Third, it is not one God working in three different ways – as Creator, Redeemer, and Life Giving Spirit – as some contemporary Trinitarian formulas express it.  By being clear what the Trinity is not, we are able, in small part, to come to know what the Trinity is:  The Trinity is one God, eternally manifest in three persons, who are co-eternal and co-equal, being of one substance.  We cannot explain how such a thing is possible, we can only declare it to be true as we do when we recite the Nicene Creed, written in 325 for just this reason, to declare the doctrine of the Trinity as the orthodox teaching of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.

So, if the Trinity cannot be explained, why bother with it?  Because even though we cannot explain it—and let me be quick to point out that even science tells us many that are true, but for which they have no explanation either—the doctrine of the Trinity has been given to us by the revelation of God in Holy Scripture and has been daily experienced as reality by faithful Christians throughout the world for 2,000 years.  The clearest Biblical statement on the existence of the Trinity is found in our Lord’s words to his disciples after his resurrection.  Giving them the Great Commission he says: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.  Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Spirit.” (Matthew 28:19)

God the Father, Creator of all that is created.  Who said at the instant time began, “Let there be light”: and there was light.  Who said, as the culmination of all that had already been created, “‘Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness….”  So God created us in his image, in the image of God he created us; male and female he created us.”  (Genesis 1:26-27)  It is this imago Dei, this image of God, imprinted upon the very core of our being that differentiates human from non-human life.  Whether you believe in a literal Creation or in evolution there is an undisputed moment in time in which humankind came into existence as a creature different from all other living organisms.  Philosophers, theologians, and ethicists strive to quantify that difference.  Christians accept that that difference is the Imago Dei, the image of God.

God the Son, the eternal Word of God, spoken in word and flesh throughout time and history for the sole purpose of reconciling the world to God who created it.  That is a rather long, theologically dense sentence that some Christians reduce to a bumper sticker that says it much more succinctly:  “Jesus saves.”  The Triune God who actively and with divine intention created the world, now just as actively and with equal intension seeks to reconcile the world—not only to God, but the world to itself.  Think of it in these terms.  President Obama went to Cairo, Egypt last Thursday for one purpose—to offer the possibility that the Muslim world, Judaism, and the United States could be reconciled.  That the long simmering tensions that regularly break out in violence, on all sides, could cease and we could live together in peace—in Shalom—in Salaam.

When Nicodemus came by night to our Lord he was looking for something.  He knew the Law.  He knew the Scriptures.  He knew the prayers he prayed, the worship he offered, the sacrifices he freely gave.   Yet he also knew there was something for which he still yearned, something for which his soul in its quietest recesses hungered for in every pray, in every act of worship, in every sacrifice.  Nicodemus yearned to be reconciled to God.  Our Lord’s answer to his unspoken question confused him.  It made no sense.  He was to be born again.  It is unfortunate that some in the larger Christian community have taken this simple metaphor of new life and turned it into a club with which to beat people over the head.  I confess I rankle a bit when someone asks me if I am a “Born-Again Christian,” as if that were some super-Christian club that only the most dedicated get to join.  There is only one category of Christian and all Christians have been born-again.  Baptism, as we will witness in a few minutes when Thomas, Kate, and Lillie are baptized, declares by the outward signs of water and word the inward transformation that happens when we believe the revelation of God in Word and Flesh—when we believe in God as revealed to us in Jesus Christ.  When that happens we are born anew.  Old things, as St. Paul tells us, are passed away and all things become new.

It is the Spirit of God that gives witness to this new birth.  St. Paul tells us that it is “that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.”  (Romans 8:16-17)  When God created the first human being, Scripture says God formed that unique being from the dust of the ground and, here is the key, breathed into that lump of clay the breath of life.  In the original languages of Scripture the words breath and wind have the same root as the word Spirit.  The Spirit of God is the life-giving breathe of God, it is that which animates, that which makes alive, that which makes us Children of God.  God breathed into our nostrils, the Scripture says, God’s Spirit of Life.  I don’t know about you, but I think that is a pretty amazing thing to say and a rather awesome thing to believe.

On this Trinity Sunday, as we celebrate the Sacrament of Holy Baptism, as we once more invoke the ancient formula; in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, we do so not with a complete understanding of all that this means, but we do so knowing what it no longer means.  It means that we are no longer of this world and its hatred, fear, and violence, but of God as God’s child, empowered to live as Christ lived among us, with love for one another, with forgiveness for those who hate us, and with the humility to know that we do not have all the truth, but a truth to which all may come.

Amen.

Pentecost 2009

St. John’s Episcopal Church

Staten Island

Reverend Roy A Cole

Text:   Acts 2:1-11

I Corinthians 12:4-13

John 14:8-17

The Great Fifty Days of Easter are over.  It has been seven weeks since we stood in the dark, lit the paschal flame and intoned the Easter Proclamation:  Christ is Risen!  For the first disciples it has been a confounding fifty days as the Risen Christ revealed himself first to Mary Magdalene, then to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, to those gathered in the locked upper room, to the disciples who toiled the night away on the Sea of Galilee hauling repeatedly empty nets up from the deep.  It has been a curious fifty days as Christ appeared at unexpected times and in unexpected places, drawing the disciples out of their theological confusion, out of their shame at their betrayal and flight in the face of his impending death, out of their mistaken dreams of messianic nationalism that drove them to repeatedly ask, “"Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” 

And it has been ten days since these selfsame disciples stood with their mouths gaping as Jesus was caught up into the clouds and ascended out of sight leaving them confounded once again, wondering what comes next.   Until, that is, a pair of angles came along and ask them what they were doing with their heads thrown back and their eyes straining to catch the first simmering glimpse of a hope-for Christ at the vanguard of an army of heavenly hosts ready at last to establish the Kingdom of God on Earth and destroy all Christ’s enemies.  All this and so much more swirled about the disciple’s heads filling their dreams with hoped for vindication and the final consummation of all that Jesus taught and did and promised.  Yet God in His way had a different plan.  A plan that included not the angelic hosts, not the cataclysmic establishment of the Kingdom, not even their personal vindication before family and friends.  God indeed had a different plan. A plan to continually confound the world and the disciples by doing what no one had expected—at Pentecost, God choose the foolish things in the world to confound the wise, the weak things to shame the strong, the lowly and the despised … to reduce to nothing the things that are, so that no one could boast in God’s presence as if he or she were the master and sovereign of life.  At Pentecost God choose all this.  At Pentecost He choose us.

The coming of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples at Pentecost had one purpose:  To confound the world by transforming lives.  As the lump of clay formed from the dust of the ground was not a human being until God breathed into it the breath of life, so spiritually you and I are but mired clay until the breath of God, which is that selfsame Spirit that first brooded over the face of the deep and millennia later descended in a rushing wind upon the first disciples, is breathed into us.  How confounding to everything we would expect or imagine of God.  But that is what God is about; confounding the world by lifting up the weak over the strong, by empowering the oppressed so as to establish justice in the face of their oppressors, by restoring life when all seems dead and hope has fled into a hopeless night of despair. 

And God continues to confound, not just the world but us well by healing us, restoring us, resurrecting us, transforming us. By giving us a life we never imagined possible and rescuing us from the petty, self-serving, narrow little life we thought we wanted, or worse, the life we believed ourselves forced to live by circumstance, bigotry, or prejudice.  This is Pentecost.  The confounding transformation of life from what we have known and counted on for our imagined security into the wild expanse of Spirit.  No wonder the first witnesses to the coming of the Holy Spirit thought the disciples were drunk, they were drunk.  Drunk on the realization that their lives were never to be the same again.  Ecstatic with the experience of being swept up into the embrace of God.  Jubilant at the knowledge that what they only hoped to believe intellectually was now confirmed by what they experienced experientially.

But all this seems far too outsized for our day and age.  The age of miracles is over, we are told.  Or at least the age of sky rending, earth shaking, physically impossible miracles.  Now we take our miracles, and our God, like we take our coffee – decaffeinated, with just a little non-fat milk and sugar-free sweetener.  Nothing in excess.  Nothing over-the-top.  But that is not Pentecost.  Perhaps that is why it is a bit of a liturgical orphan.  It has been reduced to a bookend.  Ash Wednesday at one end.  Pentecost at the other.  But it is Pentecost that makes the church alive.  It is the rushing wind of the Spirit, the cloven tongues as of fire, the soul filled to such bursting that one cannot help but proclaim the mighty acts of God.  That is Pentecost.  That is what the Christian experience is to be.

There was a time in my late teens and early twenties that I worked very hard at being a good Baptist.  And not just any Baptist.  A good conservative Baptist who tried very hard to believe everything my pastor taught and preached. Who sought to avoid the worldly pleasures of movies, rock music, television and demon rum.  And who waited for that inevitable, long-expected, soon to come pre-tribulational rapture when I would be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, leaving all of you behind.  Sorry, but you’re not Baptists.  Your Episcopalians!  Obviously, as I stand here in cassock, alb, and chasuble, I’ve traveled a far distance in the last thirty years.  But one of the things I remember about my time as a Baptist was Sunday night church. You see Sunday night was testimony night.  After some hymns were sung, some Scripture read, and before the pastor gave the sermon he would walk up to the pulpit and ask if there were any testimonies.  We all got very quiet and waited for someone to get up and proclaim what blessing they had received from the Lord that week.  Now some Sundays that silence stretched on a little too long for the Pastor so he would add a little guilt and say, “Are you telling me that God hasn’t done anything this week?  Has God been on vacation?  Or maybe it’s been you that’s been on vacation from God.  Which is it?”  And then he’d wait some more until finally someone would get up and testify.

Now I’m not saying we need to take a page from the Baptists on this.  But what I am saying is that I think we have forgotten a very important component of what it means to be a Christian.  You see we really do have to tell people about the mighty acts of God.  We are commissioned and empowered by the Holy Spirit of Pentecost to testify about what God is doing.  Not just about what God has done.  That’s important.  But what is God doing now, today, at this moment in your life and in the lives of those you know?  You see somewhere along the way in the expansive history of the church we have, as I quoted last week, ”moved away from a simple witness to what has been seen and experienced to an elaboration of doctrine and tradition.  But that doesn’t confound the world, it only confuses it, and us.  And it certainly doesn’t liberate the oppressed or give hope and life to a woman or man who has been beaten down by the daily violence of poverty, abuse, racism, sexism or any of the other ways in which we strip a human being of their dignity as a child of God. 

Lloyd Ogilvie, the retired Chaplain of the US Senate said it this way: “We have been instructed in the things Jesus did, but know far too little about what Jesus continues to do today as indwelling spirit and engendering power.”  He goes on to say that from his perspective, “The greatest longing in the church today – stated both directly and indirectly, is the quest for something more than dull religion.  People are in need of the intimacy, inspiration, and the impelling power of the Holy Spirit. ”  Perhaps the reason we don’t testify so much anymore—perhaps the reason we argue and squabble over doctrine and theology and how and who people are to love and marry is that it’s less confounding, less risky, less personal then saying what God is doing in our lives.  That takes honesty.  That takes transparency.  That takes courage.

The truth of Pentecost is that God took a group people more like us than we want to admit and commissioned them and empowered them to confound the world.  And now God commissions us.  Now God empowers us.  We are the ones who live in the present reality of Pentecost.  A Pentecost that is not a bookend to the high drama of Holy Week and Easter, but a Pentecost as the rushing, unpredictable, uncontainable, unimaginable power of God that courses through the very core of our being and continues each day to confound us with the wealth of God’s grace, the surety of God’s forgiveness, the expansiveness of God’s love and the power of God’s presence to resurrect the dreams we long ago stopped dreaming when we settled for a decaffeinated, low-fat, sugar-free God.

The power of the Church is the power of God, realized in the present experience of the Holy Spirit who sweeps through our life and transforms us into disciples empowered to give testimony to the works of God by our words, by our actions and by our living.   As Martin Luther reminds us, “The church is not an organization with Jesus as the founder…  It is a continuing community of people in whom the Lord is still alive and with whom the Lord is present.”  On this Pentecost let us each open ourselves to the wind-rushing presence of Holy Spirit and allow ourselves to be confounded.  If we do we, like those disciples of old, will not be able to contain ourselves but be compelled to proclaim the might works that God is doing.  Then and only then will we surrender our tame and timid decaffeinated God and discover anew what it means to be filled with the Spirit and confounded by the great love God has for us and for our world.  Then and only then will we be a people of the Pentecost.  A people of God.

Amen

Easter Six, 2009

Rogation Sunday

St. John’s Episcopal Church

Staten Island

Reverend Roy A Cole

Text:  I John4:7-21

“Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God.”

Today’s liturgy may have caught some of you by surprise.  Rogation Days are a part of the Episcopal Church’s calendar, but many parishes never mark their observance.  I think they are missing out.  As you will read in the back of today’s service leaflet, where I have included an explanation of this tradition, the word rogation comes from a Latin word and means “to ask.”  Today, on Rogation Sunday, we ask God for his blessing.  Not individually for ourselves, but we ask God’s blessings on our entire parish, and not just the parish consisting of the members and friends of St. John’s, but the parish in the original sense of the word; the geographical boundaries in which our church sits.  We ask God’s blessings on the neighborhoods around us, on the people who live here and work here, who raise their families, do their shopping, and serve their country.  In the early days of the church St. John’s was known by its parish boundaries as St. John’s Clifton or St. John’s Rosebank.

The blessing we ask for on this Rogation Sunday is the blessing to be fruitful.  That is why Rogation days fall in the spring.  If you have ever lived on a farm, you know what spring is like.  It is not only a time of plowing and planting, but of praying; praying that moderate rains will come to water the seeds you have just planted, praying that the summer storms that inevitably come will not be so severe as to destroy your crops, praying that grasshoppers, horn worms, and even fussy caterpillars will stay far from your fields.  Every farmer knows that he or she plants in spring by faith, faith that come fall there will be a bountiful harvest to harvest so as to see you and your loved ones  through the long winter that draws closer every day.

Today there are few farmers let, especially here on Staten Island, though I am told it was once filled with farms.  So many people do not have the same appreciation for praying that the labor we put forth today will bring a bountiful harvest in the future.  Yet I have still chosen to lead us in the observance of Rogation Sunday today.  Why?  Because there is another kind of labor that we are to be about and another kind of harvest we pray for.

Through the Sundays of Easter the Lectionary has led us through a reading of St. John’s first epistle.  Repeatedly, throughout his letter to the church in Ephesus, St. John stresses the central responsibility of Christians.  It is a responsibility that comes to us because of what God has already done for us in Christ.  It is a responsibility that allows for no exceptions.  If you are a Christian you must do this.  If you do not, then, according to God’s word, you cannot rightly claim to be a Christian.   If we say we are Christians, then it means we have a responsibility.  Just as a farmer has the responsibility to plant his or her fields if they expect a harvest in the fall, so you and I have a responsibility to do as God asks of us if we hope to hear God say to us on that day we stand before him, “Well done, my good and faithful servant.  Enter into the joy of your Lord.” 

What then are we to do?  What is this paramount responsibility?  St. John tells us.  We are to  “Love one another.”  Why, “because love is from God;  Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.”  This is the labor that we are to be about.  This is the seed that we scatter and sow here at St. John’s Rosebank, Clifton, Staten Island.  We are to love one another.  That is what we ask of God today on Rogation Sunday.  We ask that we may do the hard work of love, that we may scatter this seed throughout our Parish, its members, its friends, its neighbors, its community.

Because of the centrality of love in Christian theology it is easy to discount it as a sentimentality best practiced by doting grandmothers and tottering priests—or by those baseball fans who wave placards reading John 3:16, a reference to the verse that says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.”  Love is the summation of all Christianity—it is the culmination of our faith and God’s work in the world.

There are innumerable examples of love both in literature and in life that demonstrate for us the power of this seed that we scattered to transform lives and heal brokenness, even in the face of great suffering and evil.  In such contexts my thoughts always turn to Mother Theresa and the love she demonstrated in the slums of Calcutta and in so many other places in the world where cruelty, violence and systematic neglect leave thousands to fend for themselves against a loveless world.  Truly she was a living saint, as she will someday be a canonized saint of the Church.  But the Gospel lesson today draws me to another example of love—this one occurring in a place of even greater cruelty than the slums of Calcutta.  Our Lord says to his disciples, in his attempt to define for them and for us the full power of love to do the impossible, he says, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

During World War II Fr. Maximillian Kolbe sheltered those trying to escape the Nazi onslaught in his friary, including 2,000 Jews.  His work of Christian love was eventually discovered and he was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz as prisoner #16670.  One night a prisoner in his barracks disappeared.  It was assumed he escaped and the commandant demanded ten prisoners to die by starvation as retribution.  As the men where lined up to be taken away, one man cried out for mercy, pleading that he had a family waiting for him and begging to be spared.  The commandant would not allow it, until Fr. Kolbe step forward and asked to be sent to die in this man’s place.

Reports say that Fr. Kolbe led the men in prayers and hymns throughout their slow descent into death.  Prisoners throughout Auschwitz could hear the muffled songs and news of Fr. Kolbe’s sacrifice spread throughout the camp.  One by one the men died leaving Fr. Kolbe’s weakened voice still sounding forth in prayer and song.  After three weeks without food or water, Fr. Kolbe still would not die, until that is the Commandant ordered him to be killed by an injection of carbolic acid.  Reports say that when the guards came in he calmly raised his left arm to receive the lethal injection.  Fr. Kolbe was canonized by Pope John Paul II on October 10, 1982.  Fr. Kolbe’s statue stands today above the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey in London, uniting Roman Catholic and Anglican Christians is their recognition that indeed, “greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”

Easter Five, 2009

St. John’s Episcopal Church

Staten Island

Reverend Roy A Cole

Texts:  I John 3:14-42, Acts 8:26-40, & John 14:15-21

“Jesus said to his disciples, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”

“Every Christian must be actively righteous.”  At least that is the opinion of the Biblical commentator Stephen Smalley.  Though, I must say, I agree.  To be a Christian means that we are different from those around us.  Different in ways that people notice, that can be identified and named.  It is not uncommon for people of various religious beliefs to demonstrate their affiliation to a particular religion by the clothes they wear.  One small example of this happened last week when I was at the post office mailing our newsletter out to the parish.  As I was standing in the Bulk Mailing Office waiting for Monica to finish processing our mailing, in walked a Jewish rabbi about to do a similar task.  Now all we needed was a Baptist minister to walk in as well and I’d have the start of a very good joke:  “A priest, a rabbi, and a minister went to the post office….”  But the minister never showed up, so the joke won’t work.  But my point is that everyone in the post office knew who was the priest and who was the rabbi from the moment we each walked in.  Of course there are many more such examples, especially here in New York.  We can regularly identify Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, and even, from time to time, Mennonite or Amish Christians.  No matter what your religion, to be religious is to be different from those around you.  But we all know that that difference isn’t about the clothes we wear.  My clerical collar, the rabbi’s beard and broad black hat, the burqa of a Muslim woman, the finely woven turban of the Sikh, or the flowing robes of the Hindu or Buddhist monk is not what I am talking about.  What I am talking about is the difference that inhabits our lives though our beliefs and behaviors—through our actions towards others and our accountability to God.

Years ago, when I starting studying for the ministry, I began my coursework at a rather fundamental Bible College.  We too were to be different.  Girls could not wear slacks.  Boys could not have long hair, which in the 70’s was all the rage.  There was no going to movies, no rock music, no playing cards, no drinking alcohol, or even going to a restaurant that served alcohol. There were lots of rules like that, all in an attempt to instill within us St. Paul’s admonition found in I Thessalonians 5:22 to forsake all appearances of evil,   But the admonition I most remember came in the form of a question.  “If you were arrested for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?”

The lessons appointed for this Fifth Sunday of Easter provide for us the true evidence by which we could be convicted if arrested for our faith.  Because, while I, and others, may adopt specific types of clothing to mark our religious affiliation, the evidence of the authenticity of one’s faith is not found there, but in a person’s actions and  accountability to God, by a person’s behavior and the beliefs that motivate that behavior.

When St. John was writing his first epistle he was writing specifically to the church at Ephesus.  The church was in the midst of a wide-ranging debate over what was the true practice of the Christian faith—right beliefs or right actions.  Theologians refer to this as the tension between orthodoxy (right belief) or orthopraxy (right actions).  Or, to put it another way, is it more important that I believe the right things or that I do the right things?  This question has been a tension point in the church throughout its history.  How a person answers that question gives an indication as to which side of the Protestant/Roman Catholic divide they find most compelling.

It works a bit like this.  Going back to my Bible College days.  My professor of theology was leading us through a semester’s course on Soteriology, which is the doctrine of salvation.  Professor Lambert was a stanch Calvinist.  And he wanted us to be stanch Calvinists as well.  For him salvation could be reduced to the familiar evangelical injunction,   “Accept Jesus Christ as your personal Savior and confess him as Lord and you will be saved.”  But there was a hitch.  You had to believe in the right Jesus.  The question came up in class as to why he taught that Mormons were not Christians.  His answer was that they did not believe in the right Jesus.  They believed in the Jesus of the Book of Mormon, not the Jesus of the Bible.  And it wasn’t just Mormons he had it in for.  He didn’t think Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists or any other Christian denomination could be saved except Baptists – and then only those Baptists who held to a strict Calvinist doctrine—meaning that those liberal American Baptists over at First Baptist Church were probably not going to make it.  For Professor Lambert, having the right theology, having the right beliefs, was the essential evidence needed to prove that you were a Christian.

The other approach, right action, or orthopraxy, finds its basis in Roman Catholic theology.  (Now let me be quick to add for all you good theologians out there, I am speaking in very broad terms when making these characterizations.  So please allow me a little theological latitude or we’ll be here for an entire semester as I unpack Christian Theology 101—and, be warned, if I do, there will be homework and there will be a final exam!)

Roman Catholic theology places the emphasis on right action, not on knowledge, when it comes to salvation.  It is one of the reasons that Catholics, for most of that Church’s history, were not encouraged to study or even read the Bible. What mattered most is that you did the right things, even if your theology was a bit fuzzy or even non-existent.  If you did the things that Christians are to do—pray, make your confession, attend Mass, love your neighbor as yourself, honor your father and mother, then this was evidence that you were a Christian.  Therefore it is not what you know, or the number of Bible verses you can quote, that is evidence of Christian faith, it is what you do.  And, from my experience, whether you are Protestant or Roman Catholic, most people tend to think this way.  It’s our actions that speak louder than our words.  Words, without the accompanying action, are just empty, hollow sounds that make no difference whatsoever.

In all three lessons today we see that the tension between right belief and right action is not an either/or proposition, but rather a mutually supporting foundation to the active righteousness I spoke of earlier.  St. John sets the frame for us in the words we heard read this morning.  “Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.”  He drives the point even further home when he challenges us by asking, “How does God's love abide in anyone who has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?”  For St. John the evidence of our faith is found in doing what our beliefs call us to do.  If we believe what we say in Church on Sunday then it must be evident in what we do, not only in Church, but in all areas of our lives and every minute of our day.  It is what we do that can be seen and evaluated and held up to the example Christ has given us by his life and sacrificial death.  This is the point of the Gospel according to St. John and summarized in our Lord’s instruction to his disciples:  “"If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”

When the Ethiopian eunuch was making his way back to Africa from Jerusalem, he left the driving to his charioteer and sat down to read the scroll of Isaiah.  As he did he found himself puzzled by what he read.  He was unclear as to whom the prophet was referring.  Who was the sheep to be slaughtered?  What lamb was led silent before its shearers?  His heart was hungry to understand.  His soul was thirsty for knowledge.  And God, in his providence, had St. Phillip right on hand at just the right time.  As the Ethiopian’s mind opened to the Word of God, as he grew to understand what he read and gained the knowledge he was thirsty for he knew the action he needed to take.  Not the baptism that next took place, that was only the outward sign of an inner conversion.  Baptism was, as it is today, the Sacrament that brings a person into the Body of Christ, God’s one holy catholic and apostolic church.  No, what the Ethiopian eunuch did with the knowledge he had gained through St. Phillip’s instruction and the illuminating work of the Holy Spirit, was to begin living his life in a different way—he became actively righteous.

It seems to me that most Christians today are passively righteous.  By that I mean they are righteous enough to be considered good people, at least most of the time.  But such passivity to the things of God doesn’t really cut it in today’s world.  It would be a bit like being “passively married” – you and your spouse have the marriage license and the wedding photos but for all intents and purposes you have ended up becoming two strangers living in the same house.  There is no joy, no celebration, no support when the hard times come, no companion when there are successes to be celebrated.  To be actively married is like being actively righteous, it is something that informs and affects every aspect of your life.  And, taking the parallel just a bit further, people know your are married not because of the ring on your finger, but by the light in your eyes when you speak of the one to whom you have given your life in pledge of your troth. 

The Christian life is an intensely active life.  Because of what we know we are compelled to act in ways different from the world.  To act as the world acts is sin.  To act as Christ acts is righteousness.  But to know how Christ acts we must be one with him through the waters of Baptism and through the continuing nourishment of the Eucharist.  Therefore it is not just what I know about God, nor is it just what I do for God that makes me actively righteous, but it is what I know and what I do that gives the evidence that convicts me before others of being a Christian, a child of God, precious and cherished in his sight.

Amen.

St. John’s Episcopal Church

Staten Island

Reverend Roy A Cole

Text:  John 20:19-31

 “(Jesus) breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained."

A couple of years ago the author Garry Wills wrote a pair of books entitled “What Jesus Meant”, and “What Paul Meant”.  They are pretty good books and certainly capture the core teaching of both these great teachers.  Yet it occurred to me as I was reading them that the titles are rather misinformed.  While it is certainly important to know what our Lord meant by his words, or what St. Paul meant by his writings, it seems to me that it is of far greater importance to understand what our Lord’s words mean today, now, in this situation, in this experience of life.  The words of our Lord, or of St. Paul, or of any of the Biblical writers only mean something if they mean something today, in the midst of our joy or our disappointment, in the midst of our celebration or our grief, in our health or in our illness.  The words of Holy Scripture that we read from week to week only have relevance if they are relevant to my life – to your life.  Otherwise all these pious words are just a catalogue of difficult to verify historical events and occasionally confusing teachings.  They are about as interesting as the writings of Herodotus, who is called the Father of History and died in 425 BC.  They make interesting reading, if you have nothing else on your bookshelf to read, but they are hardly pager turners like a good thriller or “who-dun-it”.  

So the real question is, “What does Jesus mean?  Today!  On April 19, 2009!”  The answer is in the Gospel we read this morning and it is this:  the Gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ, is that forgiveness has been made possible and has become the means by which the world is reconciled to God and to itself.  The events of the second half of Easter Day reveal this unequivocal truth.

As you remember from last Sunday, the day began before dawn as Mary Magdalene and the “other Mary” went to the tomb to finish the burial preparations that were interrupted on Friday by the beginning of the Sabbath.  They arrive and discover the stone rolled away and the tomb empty.  Then, Mary Magdalene, alone and in profound grief, is confronted by our risen Lord, whom she mistakes for the gardener—until, that is, he speaks her name and the reality of her Lord’s resurrection comes thundering into her consciousness.  That is where we left off last week.  Today’s lessons take us to the end of the day.  In some ways you could consider this Easter Day, Part Two.

That first Easter night, locked away in a room, the disciples gather and discuss and wonder what all this means.  Mary has already told them that she has seen the Lord and he sent them a message to go to Galilee.  Two of the disciples who were on their way to Emmaus had spent the afternoon walking with a stranger who open to them the Scriptures and explained the ancient prophecies concerning the Christ—then at supper he blessed and broke bread with them and vanished from their sight.  They had now arrived back in Jerusalem and told the rest of the disciples that they too had seen the Lord.  Here is where we pick up the story.

As we listen to today’s Gospel lesson it is easy to fixate on St. Thomas.  After all he has spent the last 2,000 years being criticized for his doubting – as if none of us ever doubt the impossible, much less the improbable.  But it is the first part of the lesson that truly reveals to us what the Gospel means.  Locked away in their own thoughts, hiding away from the authorities in fear of being arrested and executed, the disciples are amazed to suddenly discover our Lord standing in their midst.  And in even greater amazement he breathes on each of them and says, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained."  Here it is.  The essential Gospel.  The very core of the Good News we are commissioned and empowered to proclaim.  Forgiveness.  We are to forgive as God has already forgiven us.  The message we are called to bring to the world, starting right here with the people around us, is that God has forgiven you—and I have forgiven you.

The centrality of forgiveness in the Good News of Christ is so deeply woven into the pubic ministry of our Lord that it becomes easy for us to dismiss it.  It seems as if Jesus was forgiving everybody he met.  The woman taken in adultery, the lame, the blind, the troubled in mind, body and spirit.  He even forgave the soldiers who drove the nails into his hands and feet saying in his final moments of life, “Father, forgive them.  They know not what they do.”  Such unrelenting forgiveness overwhelms us.  It seems too great a gift to just toss around to helter skelter.  But that is exactly what our Lord did, and does.  Nearly 60 times in the Gospel the word forgive is used.  This is what our Lord does.  This is what God does.  And this is what we are to do. 

The devotional writer Max Lucedo, speaking of the difficulty we have in forgiving ourselves and others reminds us that we “will never forgive anyone more than God has already forgiven us.”  The noted 20^th century preacher Stuart Briscoe writes,  “When all is forgiven, there is nothing to hide, and when there is nothing to hide, there is nothing to fear.”  This is the power of forgiveness. To heal ourselves and those around us of shame, of fear, of the desperation that comes from hiding ourselves away from our family, friends, and community.  This is the power of forgiveness.  This is the power that comes from canceling the debt, from removing the stain, from setting a person free from their past and its mistakes and sins.

But our Lord did more on that first Easter night then just forgive his disciples for their abandonment of him at his crucifixion.  He did more than just give them the instruction to forgive others as they have been forgiven.  He sent them out.  “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”   They were sent into the world as the practitioners of forgiveness.  And now, we are sent into the world as this generation’s practitioners of forgiveness.  We do so by forgiving those who have harmed us, humiliated us, perhaps even nearly destroyed us.  We forgive, not in our own power or by our own strength, but by the same Holy Spirit that our Lord breathed into his disciples as God breathed the first breathe of life into a lump of clay and created humankind.   When we do this, by God’s power and Spirit then it is as the theologian Colin Brown writes:  “Each time [we forgive] it is a fresh act of proclamation, coming from Christ himself to the concrete situation of the present.”

You and I know that there is much evil in the world.  We know that whether it is Rosebank, Staten Island, or Darfur, Sudan, people enact great evil of those who are most helpless.  Whether it is the terror of living daily with domestic violence in your home, or the terror of living daily with the threat of armed militias attacking your village and murdering your children, great evil exists.  And it can seem, I must confess, very Pollyannaish of me to stand here (in the safety of this mighty pulpit) and speak of forgiveness in the face of such horrific evil.  Yet I must, not only because I am a priest in Christ’s one holy catholic and apostolic church, not only because, like you, I proclaim myself to be a disciple of Christ, not only because, like you, the Holy Spirit resides within me as God’s gift of salvation, but because I have personally seen the power of forgiveness to heal people of the evil they have endured. 

Over the last few days we have been reminded by the news media that tomorrow, April 20^th is the tenth anniversary of the shooting at Columbine High where two teenagers killed 13 people and then themselves.  That community and our nation will carry that wound for many more decades to come.  But this morning I want to remember a different massacre.  This one occurred on the morning of Monday, October 2, 2006, when a gunman entered the West Nickel Mines School, a one-room schoolhouse in the Old Order Amish community of Nickel Mines, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, took a number of hostages and eventually killed five little girls (aged 6-13) – and then killed himself. Police report that the gunman was Charles Carl Roberts IV, a 32-year-old milk-tank truck driver who lived nearby.  Like Columbine before it, we, as a nation, were appalled that such random evil could break into the place where we have long thought our children safe from such evil. 

On the day of the shooting, a grandfather of one of the murdered Amish girls was heard warning some young relatives not to hate the killer, saying instead, "We must not think evil of this man."[1]  Another Amish father noted that, "He had a mother and a wife and a soul and now he's standing before a just God."  Jack Meyer, a member of the Brethren community living near the Amish in Lancaster County, explained: "I don't think there's anybody here that wants to do anything but forgive and not only reach out to those who have suffered a loss in that way but to reach out to the family of the man who committed these acts.  A Roberts’ family spokesman said an Amish neighbor comforted the Roberts family hours after the shooting and extended forgiveness to them. Amish community members visited and comforted Roberts' widow, parents, and parents-in-law. One Amish man held Roberts' sobbing father in his arms, reportedly for as long as an hour, to comfort him. The Amish community also set up a charitable fund for the family of the shooter. About 30 members of the Amish community attended Roberts' funeral, and Marie Roberts, the widow of the killer, was one of the few outsiders invited to the funeral of one of the victims. Marie Roberts wrote an open letter to her Amish neighbors thanking them for their forgiveness, grace, and mercy. She wrote, "Your love for our family has helped to provide the healing we so desperately need. Gifts you've given have touched our hearts in a way no words can describe. Your compassion has reached beyond our family, beyond our community, and is changing our world, and for this we sincerely thank you."

This is what the Gospel means.  Today, and every day.

Amen.