January 13, 2019 Sermon

         Today is something of Epiphany part two (or The Epiphany Strikes Back if you prefer).  If you remember from last week the epiphany that we commemorated was the revelation to the wise men that the King of the Jews had been born.  The big deal there was that those outside of the Jewish faith were now receiving such a knowledge or in the word of the day such an epiphany.  Today the epiphany that we remember comes during the Baptism of Jesus where we read, “When Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’"  So the revealing here is somewhat similar and somewhat different.  In one sense there is an announcement about Jesus to a group who were previously unaware, making it similar to the announcement given by the star to the Wise Men.  But it diverges by offering a bit more information about whom exactly Jesus is.  The Wise Men only knew that the King of the Jews had been born, which incidentally, is why King Herod got so worked up last week, because this was more or less his job description. And as a puppet king of Imperial Rome he did not want a usurper being born right under his nose.  Today though, there is additional clarification and that clarification comes from the lips of God himself announcing that Jesus is his Son, the beloved.  And while both the Wise Men and God’s statement are true, the statement from God starts getting us to a fuller understanding of who Jesus is and what he is all about. 

What I mean by this is that when we say King of the Jews it is very easy for us to give it a human context.  And as I said technically Herod was King of the Jews and he did things like kill his wife, his brother in law and for good measure three of his sons.  And while maybe not rooting for these kind of messy family dynamics there were many in the Jewish community who were looking for a messiah who would be a king with a violent disposition.  That is, they were looking for a king who would rid Israel of their Roman oppressors and the best way to do that in many schools of thought was to have a king, in the model of David, who would lead an army to wipe out the Roman army.  But with today’s epiphany we start to see that Jesus is going to go down a path that is not necessarily the one we would have chosen, because a description as both King of the Jews and Son of God does not allow for a king defined in earthy terms.  In the book of Isaiah we hear God say, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.”  The Son of God has come, but because he is also God, he will come with the characteristics of God.  And while this may have been a bit difficult for those who were at Christ’s baptism to grasp the ramifications of what they were being told, we are fortunate, because we have the rest of the Gospel account and therefore know what the mission of Jesus is going to look like.  We know how the Son of God will act on the earth and we know that it will be surprising and also somewhat confusing for those of us used to earthly kings. 

         In the United States we do not have a whole lot of experience with earthly kings only politicians.  But I assume there is not a big difference.  We vote for politicians because they promise to fix all of our problems. And in practical terms the way this often works itself out is they promise that all of our problems are external to us.  We can continue doing exactly what we want, but with them in office we will get different results. And so naturally when we hear that Jesus will be king we think of this king as one who will solve our problems, which in one sense is true.  However it will not be done in the way politician’s promise, that is by fixing everyone else; it will mainly be done by fixing us.  Yes, Jesus chased the moneychangers out of the Temple but most of the time he was telling us things like give away our second coat or turn the other cheek.  They were very personal instructions.  Jesus very much shunned all trappings of an earthly king and all which that entailed.  In John 6:15 we read, “When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.”  For the most part Jesus stayed out of political solutions and instead focused on smaller and more personal things.  Things that were the purview of a heavenly king not an earthly one. And so I know you have had over a months reprieve on my quoting The Mountain of Silence but that reprieve is about to be over so strap yourselves in, its Fr. Maximos time.  He stated in terms of Jesus, “People don’t understand that Christ’s focus and preoccupations were not with issues and concerns of this world.  Many people want to see Christ as some kind of social reformer doing good deeds and little else…But his primary concern and His central preoccupation was with the very essence of human existence, the salvation of human beings in God’s kingdom.”

The other day I got an email, well actually the church got an email from a religious organization.  The strange thing is that it was purely about politics and not even the kind that is dressed up with religious trappings.  It was instead about what was largely a legislative procedural question that would benefit one political party over the other.  I don’t want to get into the specifics, but I found it very disturbing because it subordinated the City of God to the City of Man.  What I mean by this is that it sought to use God in the service of an earthly power struggle.  God was only important to the extent that he was cheering for their team.  This is not Christianity it is rather paganism.  The Roman world into which Christ came had lots of gods and their gods demanded sacrifices in exchange for putting their thumb on the scale to ensure whatever it was that you wanted.  If you voted for the right god, you got what you wanted.  But Christ’s coming is about what God wants and that is for us to be reconciled to Him.  But the only way for that to happen is for us to change so that we may be completely receptive to God’s call on our lives.  God gave us an epiphany today with the words “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased."  God sent his Son to reconcile us to him but this can only be done on God’s terms, otherwise we are asking God to reconcile himself to us.  We are asking the unchanged one to change so that we do not have to. 

Let me finish with one more bit from Fr. Maximos and what Christ came to do.  He says Christ’s mission “Aims at healing our existence, our personhood and sealing our communion with the Divine.”  Or in the words of the great fourth century theologian St. Athanasius, “God became man so that men might become gods.”  Christ came to heal us one person at a time because that is the only way for us to be in communion with God.  When we are healed we are changed and are able to be so filled with God that when people see us they see God.  Humanity desires a King who will fix our problems without asking us to change, but Christ came to help us change, to help turn our hearts to God so that we may be his both now and forevermore. 

January 6, 2019 Sermon

         One of the sillier ideas to emerge from the scientific revolution is the belief that humans could be neutral observers.  That is, that humans could survey a scene and coolly observe all that is actually there without distortion.  There would be no bias, no preconceived notions and no laziness.  But we all know people tend to see what it is they want to see and often block out that which they do not.  For example on Saturday, December 29th The University of Notre Dame played Clemson University in a football game.  Clemson won the game 30 to 3.  In mathematical terms this means that Clemson scored ten times as many points as Notre Dame.  By the fourth quarter much of Clemson’s second string was playing.   Or put another way Notre Dame only scored three more points than I did and I spent the entirety of the game sitting on my sofa.  Afterward a Notre Dame player said this of the game, “I still don’t believe it, honestly, that they’re four touchdowns better, I think we could have definitely competed, we definitely could have won this game.”  Somehow this player saw a different game than I did – so much for the neutral observer.  The fact is we often see what we want to see and often miss things that we are not even aware that we are missing.  To those of us who are Christian some of the explanation for this is less self-interested and more theological in nature.  That is we believe that God only chooses to reveal certain things to us at certain times.  So the things we miss may not be because of bias, but simply because God has not allowed for us to see it.

St. Paul discusses this in 1st Corinthians when he says that the Lord, “will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness.”  We have blind spots built both of our own making and about things that God has not yet revealed.  Which may or may not be interesting to you, so let me get to the point I want to make.  Today is the Feast of the Epiphany.   The name Epiphany comes from the Greek word epiphainein, which means to reveal.  Meaning that today is a day, which commemorates a time where God brought to light something that was once hidden in darkness.  Something that was there all along but only became understood when God chose for it to be understood. 

So I assume most of you know what that is, but if not let’s look to our readings.  The Gospel contains the story of the wise men from the East.  They have seen a star, which has revealed to them that the King of the Jews has been born.  Why this is an epiphany is because of who these wise men are or more properly who they are not.  They are not Jewish.  If you remember history as comes to us from the Old Testament the Jewish people were the ones that God had set apart to reveal his special plan to.  They were chosen and the rest of us were not.  There were some possibilities of conversion but it was in many ways a closed system.  The revelations before the wise men spotted the star would have been to this specific people.  But now with this astronomical revelation to the wise men from the east, God has done something new and has revealed who he is to an entirely new audience.  Or as St. Paul puts it, “In former generations this mystery was not made known to humankind, as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit: that is, the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.”  The Gentiles that Paul mentions are us.  So in many ways the epiphany that we remember today is our epiphany.

         And so not just to dust off last weeks sermon, but the Epiphany asks a similar question that the birth of Jesus asks which is now that God has revealed himself to not just the chosen people, but to we gentiles, what are we going to do about it?  How will we use this new knowledge?  Will we act like nothing has happened or will seek out to live into this new reality?  And while there are plenty of reactions we can have to the Epiphany, the reaction that I believe it guides us most strongly towards is to be grateful.  That is to be thankful to God for what he has revealed to us in Jesus Christ, because in all honesty God did not need to do it.  He did it out of love and we should be thankful for that love which to paraphrase the hymn Amazing Grace let those of us who were blind now see. 

I discovered something interesting when I was researching this sermon or at least it was to me.  There is a feature within Google that shows you the amount a word has been used in writings of a given year going back a few hundred years.  And for someone who can often poo-poo new technology I have to say that this is a pretty neat feature.  Anyway I looked up the word gratitude and its usage and found that since 1820 to the present time the word gratitude has been in a steady decline.  In fact it is now used 78% less than it was in 1820.  Interestingly this also corresponds with the greatest rise in living standards in the history of the world.  I will leave it for you to contemplate why the better things have gotten the less grateful we have become, but rather I simply want to make the point that it should not be so.  Gratitude toward the world and toward God is not just something nice we can do, it is rather a way that we should live in all things.  It is the only proper reaction to the God who has created us and sent his Son to save us.  But just in case you don’t want to take my word for it or listen to what the Bible says let me give you some other reasons why we should be grateful.

A fair amount of research has been done on gratitude and this research has shown a number of benefits in the lives of grateful people.  I don’t want to get into all of them but since I never preach a three-point sermon let me live a little and give you three benefits of being grateful people.  And very quickly before I go on let me define gratitude: It is he quality of being thankful; readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness.  Okay now onto the benefits:

First: Physical health.  A study by Patrick L. Hill, Mathias Allemand and Brent W. Roberts published in January of 2013 found that there was a positive correlation between dispositional gratitude and people’s self-reported physical health.  In other words people who were grateful said that they felt better than those who were not.  Now you can argue that this is self-reported and so their physical health may not be better in reality, but I would still say that it beats the alternative.  Would you rather be in mediocre condition and feel physically healthy or in mediocre condition and feel terrible?

Second: Psychological Health.  Robert Emmons, a professor at the University of California at Davis has studied gratitude extensively and found that grateful people are both happier and show lower rates of depression.  In addition he finds that being grateful also reduces toxic emotions like envy, resentment and regret.   

Third: Better Sleep.  So if having better physical and psychological health are not your thing I would imagine that you would at least want a good nights sleep.  A 2011 study published in Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being found that people who keep a gratitude journal, that is people who spend time daily writing down things for which they are grateful, sleep better and longer.  So maybe our grandmothers were onto something when they told us to count our blessings.

On this day of the Epiphany we commemorate the moment where God’s promise of salvation was opened to all the people of the earth.This was not something we earned nor that we deserved, but something that God gave freely and generously.Our job is to be grateful for that wonderful gift and to thank God for all of his blessings both now and forevermore.

December 30, 2018 Sermon

Something dawned on me the other day and it is probably not a very original observation, so you don’t need to get out a pen and write it down, unless you really want to in which case I don’t want to clip your wings.  So this is my observation: society in general treats Christmas like it is an end when in fact it is really a beginning.  Now the reasons for this vary.  I think it is partly because of where Christmas falls on the calendar – that is it falls near the end of the year so it can be seen as the culmination of all that came previous before everything resets on January 1st.  Another reason for why we tend to view Christmas as an end, and one that I discussed at length on Christmas Eve, is that Christmas has sort of become the only Christian holiday about which anyone pays any mind.  As a result it has sort of inadvertently become the Amazon distribution center of Christian Days and now must sum up everything about the Christian faith.  But that is really not what Christmas is, it is rather the beginning of the journey not the completion of it. 

         If you look at the readings we have today they all have an air of a new beginning.  Isaiah says, “For as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations.”  The Psalm says, “The Lord rebuilds Jerusalem; he gathers the exiles of Israel.”  And if those two were not overt enough John’s Gospel start with the phrase, “In the beginning.”  There is very much the sense that we are starting on a journey and in many ways we are.  The question that I think today’s readings are asking and excuse me for putting it rather crudely is now that Jesus has been born what are you going to do about it?  What are we going to do about the words we heard on Christmas Eve spoken by the angel of the Lord who said, “I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” 

         For all of those that have had children I assume that at some point you realized that things were not finished when the doctor handed you the baby for the first time.  My mother likes to tell the story about when I was younger and had some ailment and she was on the phone with the doctor.  After he told her what needed to be done my mom asked when she should stop worrying to which he replied, “I guess when he graduates from college.”  And not that I am saying that we need to commence worrying, but rather that we now need to make a decision about what we are going to do about the birth of Jesus, are we going to drop him off at the orphanage and stop by and see him next Christmas or are we going to bring him home and have our lives completely turned on their head and be changed forever.  Because I know for those of you who are parents you realize just how much having children changes you. 

         The other day Amy and I were having a conversation and I said do you remember what idiots we were when Auggie was first born?  What I meant by this is we had not yet learned the lesson that if we were going to be halfway decent parents we were going to have to change.  We entered into it thinking that our will would be done at all times and all places but soon realized that like Helmuth von Moltke pointed out that, “No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.”  Not that Auggie was the enemy, but I think you know what I mean.  Similarly, with the coming of Christ, if we are going to be halfway decent Christians we are going to have to change.  As I hinted this first Sunday of Christmas is very similar to when you first take a child home from the hospital.  We do not know exactly how things will be, but we know that they will never be the same.  And I don’t want to beat this simile to death, but one of the ways that things will begin to change is that just as parent’s lives become more focused on their new child our lives should begin to be more focused on Christ.  And so to make sure you have a thought to go home with let me make one suggestion of how we should change and focus more on Christ and that suggestion is to love him above all so that we may more fully love this world.

         You have heard me discuss at length the divisiveness that is such a part of society these days.  I have generally described it as everyone hates each other and it is the other person’s fault.  Politics seems to be the main things that divide us, but there are certainly many other things.  I mean people seem to get beat up or killed regularly by fans of other soccer teams – an Italian man died just this past Thursday because he was a Milan fan and the Napoli fans did not like that (which does not seem very amore’).  However, the idea is that when Christ enters our lives our divisions are overshadowed by his lordship.  Or as St. Paul implored in his letter to the Philippians, “make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.”  So just as a newborn baby becomes our chief focus we should make our chief focus Christ, because he is the only thing large enough to overshadow and consume all of the hatred, division and animosity in this world. 

         Think about it like this.  Let’s say you go to lunch with a friend.  You order a Caesar salad and your friend orders a Cobb Salad.  Now the question is will you get in a fight over this difference.  I assume that unless a Cobb Salad killed your parents this would not be the case because hopefully you both realize that a difference in what you feel like for lunch is simply not that important when compared to the rest of life.  But there is a point where differences in how we do things become dividing lines.  If I had said that you go to the polling station and one of you votes Republican and the other votes Democrat then the divisions might start to emerge.  But really differences of political opinion just like differences in lunch choices should not be occasions to hate one another.  Certainly you can try to persuade the person to come over to your point of view, but it is certainly not as important as the love of Christ.  Just like when we brought Auggie home from the hospital a lot of things that had previously been important became much smaller compared to what needed to be done for him.  And when we bring Christ into our lives things that used to be important and divisive should become much less so.  And making such a change in thought will not be easy because it takes two people to go down this path and the society in which we live seems pretty content with and also pretty proud of its divisions.  Many people these days seem to define themselves by what they hate rather than by what they love.  But as we start this journey of living with Christ we should be defined by whom we love and that is Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God.   

So as we begin our journey with Jesus through the year we need to ask what it changes.How will our lives be changed?After the shepherds went to the manger we read that they, “returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.”Will we live lives like this?Not ones defined by hate and division but defined by the love of Christ.Will we be changed so that we may be God’s both now and forevermore?