A Sermon for the 5th Sunday after Trinity, July 21st, 2019

Luke 10:38-42

Our Gospel reading this morning pulls us into the busyness of life through the eyes of Martha, the sister of Mary and Lazarus. Martha is busy. She’s serving behind the scenes in the kitchen. She’s distracted by her work. Meanwhile, her sister Mary sits at the feet of Jesus and listens to his teaching. Martha is frustrated by what is occurring, although perhaps not for the reason that we typically thing. Martha comes to Jesus and tells him to tell her sister to leave the feet of Jesus and come back and help her in her household service. Jesus responds, perhaps, as we might not expect. “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.”

There are a couple of things we need to say first to set the context so that we can understand properly what it is that Mary is doing and hear properly what it is that Jesus says to Martha. The first thing we need to note is where this story occurs in Luke’s Gospel. For reasons that I won’t get into here, it’s likely that this event in the life of Jesus is placed here in the Lukan narrative for thematic purposes. In the account just before this story, Jesus answers the question, “Who is my neighbor?” with the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus, by his answer, is redrawing the normal lines of society. “My neighbor” is no longer my friend, my family member, or an acquaintance who lives nearby. My neighbor is anyone I see in need of help, even someone who, for whatever reason, I might be inclined to avoid or even hate. Jesus redraws the map regarding those whom we are supposed to love as ourselves, and something similar is happening in our passage this morning.

Martha’s complaint isn’t that

The lines in the home were drawn clearly in the Judaism of the first century. The women were in the background serving, and the men were the ones reclining and conversing. The lines are both visible and invisible.  They would have felt natural to anyone in the first century, and they feel natural to some even to today. Mary is, in a real sense, behaving like a man, and what her sister wants her to do, what Martha wants Jesus to tell her sister to do, is to get back to her proper place in the structure of the home, and Jesus refuses. In fact, he does the opposite. He says to Martha that her sister Mary has chosen the better portion and that it will not be taken away from her.

So, what’s going on here? Mary is sitting at the feet of Jesus and listening to his teaching. Notice that phrase “sitting at the feet” and remember that Paul describes himself in Acts 22 as having studied at the feet of Gamaliel. To say that Mary was sitting at the feet of Jesus might describe her physical location in the room because this often how students sat and listened and learned from their master. But that’s exactly the point. She is taking the position of a student. She wants to learn from Jesus so that she can teach like Jesus. She wants to be his disciple, and not just serving in the background with the other women. What Mary is doing is radical, and the way that Jesus reacts to her is perhaps even more radical. He doesn’t condemn her. He doesn’t tell her to get back to her rightful place. He doesn’t tell her that she’s not welcome at his feet.

What he does say is that Martha is anxious and troubled about many things. And there’s something worth noting here. When we run around pointing out problems in others, what we are actually revealing is anxiety and trouble within ourselves. It’s not our job to be the morality police. It’s not our job to walk around pointing out the faults of others. When we do those things, we are saying as much about ourselves as we are about the object of our scorn. Martha comes to Jesus with a complaint about her sister, and Jesus’ response is “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things. But one thing is necessary.” Martha, you’re anxious and worried about many things. You’re worried about the household. You’re worried about playing your pre-assigned role. You’re worried about maintaining societal norms. You’ve got all this stuff you think you should be doing. You are keeping yourself busy doing many things that are important, but only one thing is necessary. And the obvious thing to say is that the one thing that is necessary is to sit at Jesus’ feet, except the reason you sit at someone’s feet is to learn from them and then to go out and be their disciple, and that’s the one thing that is necessary.

When I was as Nashotah House this week, I was taking a Methodology course. This course is primarily designed to help incoming Doctor of Ministry students learn to craft their research proposal, and as part of the class, we all gave presentations on our projects. One of those presentations was by a retired episcopal priest who wanted to create a study program in ascetical theology for other retired clergy. His name was Fr. Phil, and Fr. Phil said something that struck me. He said that one of the difficulties he foresaw in his project was how unlikely it would be to get eight retirees to all be available at the same time every week because (and I’m paraphrasing here) “retirees are very busy people.”

Typically when this text is preached, what you’ll hear is something like “the church needs Marys and the church needs Marthas.” That may be true, but that is not what this text is saying. Despite what I said earlier, Jesus doesn’t say to Martha that Mary has chosen “the better portion.” That would imply that both are good but one is better. He says that Mary has chosen “the good portion.” What this text is saying is that we are like Martha. We fill our lives with busyness and that busyness fills us with anxiety and worry, but only one thing is necessary and that is to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, to sit at his feet, learn from him, and then go tell the world about who he is and what he’s done. How many times do you say the word, “I have to…” I have to be at this meeting. I have to take this phone call. I have to go over this paperwork. I have to write this paper. I say it all the time, and what Jesus says to me today, to all of us, is that there is only one “have to” in this world, and that is to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. It doesn’t mean that everything else isn’t important, but it does mean that there is only one “have to.”

Amen

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A Sermon for the 2nd Sunday after Trinity, June 30th, 2019

Galatians 5:1, 13-25

The Apostle Paul frequently found himself in a difficult position because of what he believed. It’s an interesting fact of New Testament theology that there seems to have been easier ways for the Apostles to have constructed the theology that we find in the New Testament than ways in which they did. I mentioned this on Trinity Sunday, but presumably it would have been easier to become tritheists than it would have been to become Trinitarians, but nevertheless what we find in the New Testament is an insistence that whatever we mean when we speak of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, it cannot contradict the long-held Jewish claim that God is one. In a similar way, it seems that it might have been easier for Paul to frame Christianity as a faith within the Jewish religion. This would have meant that all Gentiles who wanted to become Christian would have needed to be circumcised, but it had been the practice of the people of God for centuries to welcome foreigners so long as they submitted to circumcision. This was the norm.

But Paul’s theology would allow

In Paul’s theology, when we are baptized God’s Spirit is poured out on us and makes us children of God, and from that moment we are being led by the Spirit away from our slavery to the flesh and all the ways that we defined ourselves before we belonged to Christ. You see the metaphor at work here isn’t about a human being having two parts. The metaphor at work in what St. Paul says to us today is the one that Paul uses over and over. It’s the Exodus. He says in the first verse of our reading, “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Gal 5:1). When you have passed through the waters of the baptism, you have left behind your old way of life in Egypt, or we might say, the flesh, which was a life of slavery, whether you were Jewish or Gentile, and now you have been set free.

And before we go any further, it’s

Now, this can be dangerous, because there are Christians with addictions that fully ensnare them, and we don’t want to make it sound like all they need to do is flip a switch and decide not to be enslaved anymore. The truth is that that process of untangling yourself from the slavery that you’ve chosen can be a very long and hard process. But the message here is that it’s doable because in Christ you have been set free. The Lord of the Rings analogy here is Gandalf walking up to Theoden on his thrown and saying, “I release you.” That is what Christ has done for us. He has set us free. He has released us. You are free.

But now that we have this newfound freedom, Paul’s worry is that the Galatians will use this freedom not to serve the purpose of the Spirit, but to serve the purposes of their old way of life, the flesh. With this newfound freedom comes one single commandment. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The freedom that we experience in Christ isn’t just freedom from our old way of life and all the things that entangled and ensnared us. It is freedom from our love of ourselves. It is freedom to love others selflessly. I always joke that the command to love your neighbor isn’t hard, but the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself is incredibly difficult. So difficult, in fact, that many of us don’t know how to do it. It feels too far beyond our capabilities. Love your neighbor. Yes. Love your neighbor as yourself? It’s only two words, but there’s a wide chasm there.

And there should be because you don’t have the ability to do this on your own. God hasn’t set us free and left us to wander aimlessly. He has set us free and given us his spirit as a guide to the land flowing with milk and honey. This is what Paul means when he speaks of being led by the Spirit. He doesn’t mean that we are listening to our inner spirit rather than listening to our flesh, but instead that rather than liking back to our old way of life in slavery, we are looking ahead to that Promised Land of milk and honey to which God has promised to bring us because we are his children.

And it’s probably no surprise then that when Paul thinks about how the Spirit leads us and how we can look for the signs of the Spirit’s presence, he calls it the fruit of the spirit. There’s no time here, but Paul is drawing from a rich tradition of Biblical theology involving the way in which God provided for his people in the Exodus, the promise of a land flowing with milk and honey, and the promise of a future day when God’s Spirit would be poured out on his people and the ground would burst forth in abundant fruitfulness. The Spirit has been poured out, Paul is saying, and that fruitless that are signs of his presence is apples and oranges, but “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law” (Gal 5:22).

Our freedom in Christ isn’t freedom to live however we please. It isn’t freedom to do whatever we want. It isn’t freedom to look at the law and pretend that what we do and say doesn’t matter. Our freedom in Christ is freedom to follow the Spirit where he leads. It is freedom to cultivate through prayer the fruitfulness that is sure sigs of the Spirit’s presence. You can’t bear the fruit of the Spirit and be a lawbreaker, at least by Paul’s reckoning. You can’t bear the fruit of the Spirit and be looking back to Egypt, to your old way of like and to your sin and your flesh. That is behind you now, Paul says, because you belong to Jesus, which is Paul’s shorthand way of saying that you have been baptized into Christ, and because you were buried with him in death, you have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

That way of life is behind you. It’s dead. It died on the cross. You have been set free from it. You have passed through the waters of baptism and now are being led by the Spirit to a land overflowing with milk and honey, and if you say, “Well, I don’t see a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. How do I know where the Spirit is leading me?” Paul’s answer is this: look for the signs of the spirit’s fruitfulness, first in yourself, and then in the world around you. Spend time in prayer, reflecting on your day, reflecting on who you are, body and spirit, and look for signs of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Where you see them, that’s where the Spirit is. Where you don’t see them, pray for more of Spirit. Pray for the hardness of the soil of your heart to be softened so that it can bring forth the fruit of the Spirit’s presence. And look for the Spirit’s fruitful presence in the world outside your doors. For the whole is fulfilled in one commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Amen.

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A Sermon for Trinity Sunday, June 16, 2019

I am of the opinion that it’s

Perhaps the best place to start is with

You can actually see this happening

Now, I wish I could take a poll right now because I would be genuinely curious as to what you think I mean when I speak about “our experience of the Triune God.” For the more sacramental among us, they might say that we experience the Triune God in the two dominical sacraments of the Church. The Father gives the life of the broken Son, who is both priest and sacrifice, and the Holy Spirit makes the Son’s presence real in the bread and wine and in us his faithful people. For the more prayerful or spiritual (although I don’t like using that word that way) among us, they might say that we experience the Triune God in the power of prayer. We pray to the Father in the name of the Son through the power of the Holy Spirit. The more scripturally oriented among us might say that we experienced the Triune God in Scripture in which we read about the actions of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit who makes the story of Scripture real to us in our hearts. The more kingdom oriented among us might say that we experience the Triune God in each other and in the world. The Father gives the Son to heal the brokenness of the world, and that salvific, world-changing power is made present by the Holy Spirit.

These are oversimplifications and generalizations, and there certainly could be more, but I suspect that we all probably triangulate what we mean when we speak about our experience of the Triune God somewhere within those four options. And what this says to me is that our experience of Triune God is very different than it was in the New Testament. Most of the writers of the Testament experienced Jesus in bodily form. They walked, talked, and ate with him, and when he ascended to the Father, they felt his absence. Then the Holy Spirit was poured out, and again they experienced the presence of God in a new way that they never had before. And now we are two thousand years removed from those events and those initial experiences, and we find ourselves on Trinity Sunday being asked to confess faith in the Triune God who we have not experienced in the same way as the Apostles did.

Now at this point,we have two options. One would be to jettison the Christian tradition and say that we’re going to reflect theologically on our own experience of God and come up with new and fresh ways to speak about God, but we’re not going to do that. The other option is to recognize that the church’s doctrine of the Trinity, like everything else that makes us distinctly Christian, cannot be proven, cannot be verified, cannot be tested, and cannot even be experienced in the same way as it was by the Apostles.

There is no proof that Jesus died on the cross. There is no proof that Jesus’ death paid the price for our sins. There is no proof that Jesus rose from the dead. There is no proof that Jesus ascended to the right hand of God. There is no proof that the Holy Spirit has been poured out on the church. There is no proof that God exists as the Almighty three-in-one. So, I have nothing to say to you today that will prove the doctrine of the Trinity, and I have nothing to say to you that will describe the Triune God in such a way as to convince your friends and neighbor that the Trinity exists or that the Trinity created, redeemed, and saved the world. All of this, everything that makes us distinctly Christian, must be received by … faith.

And I think that’s where I want us rest this morning as the core of the liturgical calendar passes us by and we transition into ordinary time. Everything that we do here is about that word faith. By faith, e believe that the Father created a good world. By faith, we believe that the Son united himself forever to humanity and that his death paid the price for our sin. By faith, we believe that the Holy Spirit has been poured out upon the church to bring the church to salvation and to transform the entire world. By faith, we believe that the God we worship is not three gods but One God without division existing miraculously in three persons. And so we need to understand this project that we call St. Dunstan’s Anglican Church in Largo, FL, this journey that we are taking together on the way, is first, foremost, lastly, and always a journey of faith in what Scripture and the Church say about the Triune God.

And so what we need to be doing in

Amen.

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A Sermon for the Feast of Pentecost, June 9, 2019

Romans 8:14-17; Acts 2:1-21

Today we celebrate the outpouring

That story of God acting through that one family to bless the whole world is the story that we rehearse every year in our liturgy. God sends the Jewish Messiah to atone for the sins of the whole world, raised him from the dead as proof of his claim that he is who he says he is, and lifted him up to the heavens to take his rightful place at the right hand of God as the world’s true Lord and King.

But if we’re paying attention to the story there is something missing still. Good Friday and Easter Sunday undo Genesis 3. Death enters the world through a person, namely Adam, and also through a person comes the resurrection of the dead, name Jesus of Nazareth. But if the cross undoes Genesis 3, what undoes Genesis 11? What undoes humanity’s sin of trying to ascend to the heavens and what undoes God’s resulting punishment on humanity whereby he divided them into nations and languages? In some ways, the answer is still Good Friday and Easter, because the cross is the answer to most of the great existential questions that have plagued humanity from the day we left the Garden. But there is more that we can say.

The Jews would have already had an answer to our question. They would have said that God has chosen their people to be his people out of all the nations on earth and that anyone who wanted to join them and live according to their law was welcome. And the Law was the second part of the answer. It was the book, so to speak, that came down from Heaven. We could not go up so the Law came down. There are even stories about angels being the ones who brought the Law out off Heaven to earth. Humanity was not supposed to go up as much as Heaven was supposed to come down and it did, but in the form of God’s presence in the tabernacle and Temple and in the giving of the Law.

And yet the people and the prophets knew that there was something wrong with the Law. It had come down from Heaven and taken up its residence among the people of God, and yet they consistently failed to follow it. The prophets understood that the Law was something outside the people. It was always external to them. It couldn’t change who they were. It couldn’t change their hearts. It couldn’t change the world.

But still, the giving of the Law was celebrated every year in the Festival of Shavuot, or the Festival of Weeks. This festival, which is mentioned in the Old Testament, was a harvest festival. The Jews were instructed to count seven full weeks, so forty-nine days, from Passover, and on the following day they were instructed to have a feast celebrating the first fruits of the Harvest. The feast came to be associated with the giving of the Law, although that’s not explicitly mentioned in the Old Testament, and because it occurred after the forty-ninth day after Passover, in Greek it became known as the Festival of Pentecost from the root word for fifty.

So, here the people are in Acts 2, celebrating their identity as Jews with this Jewish festival and celebrating the giving of the Law that came down from Heaven but could not actually penetrate their hard hearts, and something miraculous happened. The long-awaited Spirit of God was poured out from Heaven to earth not on the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but on the church. The answer to our desire to ascend to the heavens is given to us when the Spirit of God is poured out on his people. No longer are we apart from the divine. No longer as we separate from our maker. No longer must we grope in the dark for a meaningful existence that transcends our natural experience. No longer must we build temples and ziggurats that we might go up for God has come down in the form of his Spirit and taken up his residence in his new people, the church, those who are in Christ Jesus.

And no longer should the world be

Through the Spirit, God is forming one new people that transcends and perhaps even tears down all the divisions that we erect between each other as people, and this new people formed through the spirit are called the children of God. [And that’s what we do today as we baptize these two children and welcome them into the household of faith. We are making them members of the family of God by the pouring of water on their heads and by the outpouring of the Spirit from heaven into their hearts. In that way today is another Pentecost.] It is the Spirit of God, poured out on those who have been baptized into Christ, Paul says, that makes us children of God. And therein lies our celebration today. Because of what God did today almost two thousand years ago we are made children of God and heirs of the promise of God. Through the Spirit, we are called on this life long journey, our own wildness expedition, from the place where we were slaves to sin to the place where we are made alive in Jesus Christ, and all along that path we hear these words: you are my child; I love you. You are my child; I love you.

The Spirit of God that is poured

Amen.

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Fr. Michael’s Sermon for the Sunday after Ascension Day, June 2, 2019

Revelation 22.12-14, 16, 17, 20-21

This Sunday is the Sunday in between. Some churches will celebrate the Ascension today, but the Feast of the Ascension was Thursday. The next major event in redemptive history is the outpouring of the Spirit, which we will celebrate on Pentecost, but that’s next Sunday. So, today is the Sunday in between the ascension of our Lord to the right hand of God and the outpouring of his Spirit on all his disciples. Our collect this morning is about this time in-between. “O God the King of glory, you have exalted your only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph to your kingdom in heaven: we beseech you, leave us not comfortless, but send your Holy Spirit.” And maybe it’s because we are here in between Ascension Day and Pentecost, but it’s worth thinking about the great movements between Heaven and Earth.

In Advent, we wait for the coming of God from heaven, from there to here, and we celebrate those moments where God intervenes in the stories of human beings, like the burning bush, the tabernacle, and the Temple, moments where the God up there came down here to be with us. At Christmas, we celebrate this again. God has come in human flesh. Heaven has come down to earth. Then on Ascension Day, our incarnate Lord leaves, he goes from here to there, but soon enough he sends the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit says with us down here for the entirety of the church age, and then we come back to Advent, which serves a dual purpose, and we find ourselves waiting again for the coming of Jesus Christ from Heaven to Earth to resurrect his bride, make all things new, and finish the work of the kingdom of God.

Now, think about this for a moment.

So, it’s not surprising then, that many people, when they come to the end of the Revelation, and they hear all these invitations to come, they immediately assume that this is Christ in heaven calling his church to come up and be with him where he is. Note that even our collect gets close to this. I stopped short when I quoted it earlier, but here’s the full ending “send your Holy Spirit to strengthen us and exalt us to the place where our Savior Christ is gone before.” Now, Paul says enough about setting our mind on things above and about our life being hidden with Christ in God that this language is understandable in more than one way, but it sure sounds like it’s saying “Jesus has gone there, and we can’t wait to go there too.”

But when you come to the end of

Except… we don’t. I want to empower you to pray this morning. I want to empower you to pray in a way that is consistent with the theology of the Bible. We don’t live in a world where evil reigns. We live in an evil world, sure, but the one who reigns is the Son of David who sits at the right hands of God, and he is currently in the process of placing all his enemies under his feet. We do not live in a world where Jesus has gone to heaven and left us to our own devices to figure out our path forward. Pentecost is next Sunday, but all of us who have been baptized have received the gift of the Holy Spirit which was poured out on Pentecost almost 2000 years ago, and by the Spirit, we are made members of the body of Christ to do the work of his kingdom here on earth.

So, with those two facts in mind,

Amen.

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