Grace Episcopal Church Sheboygan, Wisconsin The Sunday of the Passion (Palm Sunday) [A] Isaiah 50.4-9a          Psalm 31.9-16                Philippians 2.5-11                    Matthew 26.14-27.66 May the Lord be in my mind, on my lips, and in my heart that I may faithfully and truly proclaim His holy Word.  Amen. Jesus is put on trial for being a “false prophet,” a blasphemer, and yet it is when He is seized and put on trial that His prophecies are fulfilled.  While He is true to His word, Peter is false, and Jesus’ prophecy of Peter’s denials is fulfilled when Jesus is Himself answering charges of being a false prophet. On the Cross Jesus is derided as described in Psalm 22, and His last words are the opening line of Psalm 22.  He is offered wine mixed with gall, as described in Psalm 69.  Throughout all of Matthew, Jesus as the fulfillment of the Law and prophecy is a recurrent motif, and it is about this that we will sing, in a few minutes, in our offertory hymn, in which we sing, “Fulfilled is all that David told in true prophetic song of old; how God the nations King should be, for God is reigning from the tree” (The Royal Banners Forward Go, Venantius Honorius Fortunatus, no. 162, The Hymnal 1982). The words of the hymn—and this is one of the oldest hymns we have, from the sixth century—speak of God’s reign, of His reign from the cross.  How unworldly is that image; how against expectations.  And that is precisely the point, the mystery, of God coming to us while we were yet His enemies, and giving His Son to pay the price of our own sin.  The hymn continues, “Blest tree, whose chosen branches bore the wealth that did the world restore, the price which none but He could pay to spoil the spoiler of his prey.”  The image and the reality are unworldly because they do not meet any of our expectations, but God’s.  Those who hail Jesus as king cry out Hosanna! to Him because they think He is coming as the powerful Messiah, the anointed king who will restore the kingdom of Israel, kick the Romans out, and bless the people with a new age of prosperity and power.  Those who hail Jesus with Hosannah! (many of them) will be the same people who will within the week cry out “Crucify him!” and “We have no king but Caesar!” Why the change in what the crowd cries out?  The change relates to expectations, to whether the people are receiving what they hope for, rather than what God has in mind.  Where does this leave us?  Expectations are defined in how they relate to where our hearts are, more than to what we think should happen. Here we are on Palm Sunday.  We have entered the church nave singing “All glory, laud, and honor to thee, Redeemer, King!” (Hymn  154)  We have sung that our praises are to echo the praises ...

Grace Episcopal Church Sheboygan, Wisconsin The Fifth Sunday in Lent (A) Ezekiel 37.1-14                           Psalm 130                                 Romans 8.6-11                         John 11.1-45   May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. “I am the resurrection and the life.”  We hear these words from the Gospel at a funeral, reaffirming that just as each one of us is marked as Jesus’ own in baptism, we become one with Him in rebirth into life-everlasting.  We hear these words at a funeral and we hear them again today, along with the exchange between Jesus and Martha, in which Jesus asks if Martha believes that He is who He says He is, and she replies, “Yes, Lord, I believe.” “Yes, Lord, I believe.”  That is the response to God to which we are all called.  That is a response that some people will never make.  At the end of the story of the raising of Lazarus, Jesus cries out and Lazarus comes forth from the grave.  The people standing by the grave see a man rise from the dead, and yet what does John tell us?  “Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him.”  Many?  Many believed?  That means that some did not, although they had seen with their own eyes Jesus exercise dominion over death itself, just as they had seen Him give sight to the man born blind (our lesson last week). Some people did not believe.  Some people don’t believe today.  Some people will not believe whatever proof is offered them; just think of Richard Dawkins and his best-selling book The God Delusion. We’ve just listened to the very long story of the raising of Lazarus, the story of the final sign described by John of how Jesus reveals His identity, authority, and mission.  He’s once again said who He is, the resurrection and the life.  He’s demonstrated His authority, even over death, and He’s again revealed His mission; the salvation of those who live and believe in Him.  We’ve heard Martha confess her faith, “Lord, I believe,” and so why look now at those few, unnamed people in the story who despite all did not believe?  It’s because when we examine resistance we learn about success; we learn more about what a life of faith means. In Romans, St. Paul tells us that “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.”  Now, when we first hear a contrast made between “flesh” and “spirit” it’s easy to think that Paul is saying that there’s something wrong with how we’re made, and that our human nature is somehow a bad thing.  But that’s not what he’s saying.  If you go back and follow all his argument, and not just the excerpt we have in our lesson today, it’s clear that what ...

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Grace Episcopal Church Sheboygan, Wisconsin The Second Sunday in Lent (A) Genesis 12.1-4a                    Psalm 121                  Romans 4.1-5, 13-17                                     John 3.1-17 May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. “Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews.  He came to Jesus by night …”  What do we know about Nicodemus, other than what we are told in John's Gospel?  He's not mentioned by the other evangelists.  John mentions him three times, first describing him in this passage as a leader.  Nicodemus reappears later, when the Temple authorities have sent police to arrest Jesus.  Then he acts as a leader in the council, defending Jesus by questioning how He can be condemned without a fair hearing.  Finally, Nicodemus appears at the end of the passion narrative, when he comes with Joseph of Arimathea to bury Jesus.  All that we know about Nicodemus testifies to him being a leader in the community, a man of authority, so why does he come to Jesus by night? Maybe it’s because he is powerful and respected, because he is a leader, and as a leader he’s just a little bit worried about control.  Maybe he’s concerned about what he can do to make sure that when he first meets Jesus, this man he describes as a “teacher who has come from God,”  he can retain options and have what we would now call “plausible deniability”.  What does Jesus say?  He talks to Nicodemus about new birth, about birth in the Spirit.  Let’s think a little bit about this exchange.  Here’s Nicodemus, a man who in our day and age would be the type who in any town would be a public leader.  Maybe he’d be the banker who is active in the Chamber of Commerce, or the lawyer who is known as a fund-raiser for the hospital.  Maybe he’d be the best-known pediatrician, or the woman who owns and runs the best-known store on Main Street.  Maybe he'd be the principal of the high school, or the pastor of the biggest congregation in town.  Whatever identity Nicodemus would have in our day, he would have the role of leader, and so he would have a role in which he is used to being consulted, used to doing things by the rules, and used to letting other people know how the system works. We can have sympathy for Nicodemus, because of the way in which this rational, safe man struggled to try to fit Jesus into the system of his day.  Jesus in effect told him to not worry about the rational, not to worry about figuring things out, but to let the Spirit lead.  He spoke of new birth, birth in the Spirit, saying, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet do not understand this?”  Jesus talked about new birth–not a rational, safe, expected thing –and Nicodemus just didn’t quite getit. “The wind blows where ...

Grace Episcopal Church Sheboygan, Wisconsin   The First Sunday in Lent (A) Genesis 2.15-17; 3.1-7                 Psalm 32                                Romans 5.12-19                              Matthew 4.1-11   May the Lord be in my mind, on my lips, and in my heart, that I may rightly and truly proclaim His holy Word.  Amen.   “While I held my tongue, my bones withered away, … Then I acknowledged my sin to you …” (Ps. 32.3, 5).  And how does the psalm end?  With the imperative, “… shout for joy, all who are true of heart” (v. 12).  That, in a nutshell, is what Lent is about.  My sermon today, therefore, is a little bit redundant, and as for the rest of the season—well I guess we’ll just watch cute kitten videos. Now, before you think I’m being flip in joking about kitten videos, consider that what the world around us counsels whenever we question ourselves is that we can reject the questioning in distraction.  We’re bombarded with media, entertainment, stuff to buy, which makes an interesting parallel to Satan offering Jesus the splendor of the world—“all these”.  And “all these” may, in fact, not be evil or harmful.  There’s nothing wrong with watching cute kittens.  There’s nothing wrong with bread, which Satan also offers Jesus.  But if we ever allow the good things in this world (let alone the distractions) to allure us from our relationship with God, then we’ll find that it becomes easy to hold our tongues.  It becomes easy to not engage in self-examination.  It becomes easy to not give voice to our hopes, fears, failures and joys to God, and we become a dry bag of bones that eventually no longer can give voice to our hopes, failures and joys to God.  We wither. What does this withering process look like?  I suggest to you that our approach to Lent provides a mirror in which is reflected either withering or joy, either an approach in which (because in Lent we increase our emphasis on repentance) I begin to feel that there is something wrong with myself, or one in which, in turning, I experience how I grow closer to God. St. Paul famously instructs that in Jesus Christ’s righteousness all are given justification, life, salvation.  All we have to do is accept the free gift, and we accept this gift through our faith in Jesus Christ.  The biggest hurdle those who are withering face is to realize, to experience God’s love.  If you are ever tempted to think of yourself as unworthy, Lent is a time to realize how we can turn to God, how God will make us worthy, that we might “shout for joy”. God takes delight in you.  He loves you.  When He looks upon you what He sees is the image and likeness of God, in which you were created.  He sees you as having such infinite worth to Him that His only Son was given for you.  Jesus did not just die on the ...