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

there’s a bunch of work to be done and Mary isn’t helping. This is the second

thing to notice. We’re not even told what work it is that Martha is doing. Is

she cooking, cleaning, doing dishes, doing laundry? We don’t know. Luke simply

tells us that Martha was “distracted with much serving.” So, if Martha’s

complaint isn’t that there is a bunch of work to be done and Mary isn’t doing

her fair share, then what is her complaint? To answer that we must look at what

it is that Martha complains about. What Martha complains about, and what Mary

is doing, like the story Jesus told about the good Samaritan, is crossing

social boundaries.

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

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

there’s a bunch of work to be done and Mary isn’t helping. This is the second

thing to notice. We’re not even told what work it is that Martha is doing. Is

she cooking, cleaning, doing dishes, doing laundry? We don’t know. Luke simply

tells us that Martha was “distracted with much serving.” So, if Martha’s

complaint isn’t that there is a bunch of work to be done and Mary isn’t doing

her fair share, then what is her complaint? To answer that we must look at what

it is that Martha complains about. What Martha complains about, and what Mary

is doing, like the story Jesus told about the good Samaritan, is crossing

social boundaries.

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

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

this position, and he found himself in the difficult position of having to say

in various different ways that even something that came from God had to be set

aside. Exhibit A for this is the Law, and one of the ways that Paul does this,

besides drawing deeply on Biblical theology from creation to the cross, is to

say that both the paganism of the Gentiles and the law-keeping of the Jews fall

under the same category which he calls the flesh. Now, before we fall into the

oft-repeated mistake that Paul makes some huge division between a person’s

flesh and a person’s spirit and says that the flesh is bad and the spirit is

good, let’s be clear that that’s about as far from Paul’s mind as it could be.

Paul isn’t thinking about the person being divided into two parts, but about

who we are before Christ and who we are after we have been baptized into the

Messiah.

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

worth stopping there and reflecting on that point. Paul says that you have been

set free. Not that you will be set free or that you can be set free, but that

you have been set free. So when you think about those things in your life that

entangle you, the things that drag you down, it’s easy for us to think “I need

to be set free from that.” But Paul says that you have already been set free.

What you don’t need is freedom, what you need is to stop choosing slavery. You

have been set free.

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

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

this position, and he found himself in the difficult position of having to say

in various different ways that even something that came from God had to be set

aside. Exhibit A for this is the Law, and one of the ways that Paul does this,

besides drawing deeply on Biblical theology from creation to the cross, is to

say that both the paganism of the Gentiles and the law-keeping of the Jews fall

under the same category which he calls the flesh. Now, before we fall into the

oft-repeated mistake that Paul makes some huge division between a person’s

flesh and a person’s spirit and says that the flesh is bad and the spirit is

good, let’s be clear that that’s about as far from Paul’s mind as it could be.

Paul isn’t thinking about the person being divided into two parts, but about

who we are before Christ and who we are after we have been baptized into the

Messiah.

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

worth stopping there and reflecting on that point. Paul says that you have been

set free. Not that you will be set free or that you can be set free, but that

you have been set free. So when you think about those things in your life that

entangle you, the things that drag you down, it’s easy for us to think “I need

to be set free from that.” But Paul says that you have already been set free.

What you don’t need is freedom, what you need is to stop choosing slavery. You

have been set free.

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

A Sermon for Trinity Sunday, June 16, 2019

I am of the opinion that it’s

nearly impossible to speak about the Trinity without committing heresy unless

one is simply repeating the great creeds of the Church. Some of you will

remember from a comedic video I played one night after one of our theme dinners

in which Saint Patrick tries to explain the Trinity to two simple Irishmen by

way of analogy. The point of that video is to say that every analogy you’ve

ever heard or used to explain the Trinity is heretical because in all of them

one aspect of the Triune God is always sacrificed for the sake of the analogy.

And yet here we are on Trinity Sunday, and I am expected to say something about

the Triune God, so I will do my best and try not to be heretical.  That is my goal on every Sunday, but it is

especially my goal this morning.

Perhaps the best place to start is with

the Bible. One of the clearest testimonies to the Jewishness of Christianity,

by which I mean that the New Testament and New Testament theology all develop

within a thoroughly Jewish mindset and worldview, is the Church’s doctrine of

the Trinity. There was nothing like it in the ancient world. The Christians

didn’t develop it or borrow or even steal it from another culture. What they

did was experience Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit within a context that still

held hard and fast to the Jewish Shema: Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the

LORD is one. The early Christians certainly had the option to become bitheists

or tritheists, but their fundamentally Jewish theology would not allow them.

They experienced Jesus as God, and they experienced the Holy Spirit as God, and

when they tried to make sense of what they experienced, rather than jettisoning

the Jewish belief in monotheism, they tried to make sense of it within that

Jewish context.

You can actually see this happening

within the New Testament in pretty remarkable ways, but we won’t get into that

here. What interests me more this morning is the contrast between the way in

which the creeds seek to define the language by which the church can rightly

speak about the Triune God and the early church’s experience of the Triune God.

That is to say that I am more concerned about the ways in which we experience

the Triune God than I am in the ways that we define the Triune God. At some

other point, when we go to define the Triune God, we will certainly use the

language of the creeds, which are the established the linguistic boundaries of

what is and is not Christian speech about God, but for now, I want to us to

reflect upon our experience of the Triune God because that is what the New

Testament authors are doing.

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

A Sermon for Trinity Sunday, June 16, 2019

I am of the opinion that it’s

nearly impossible to speak about the Trinity without committing heresy unless

one is simply repeating the great creeds of the Church. Some of you will

remember from a comedic video I played one night after one of our theme dinners

in which Saint Patrick tries to explain the Trinity to two simple Irishmen by

way of analogy. The point of that video is to say that every analogy you’ve

ever heard or used to explain the Trinity is heretical because in all of them

one aspect of the Triune God is always sacrificed for the sake of the analogy.

And yet here we are on Trinity Sunday, and I am expected to say something about

the Triune God, so I will do my best and try not to be heretical.  That is my goal on every Sunday, but it is

especially my goal this morning.

Perhaps the best place to start is with

the Bible. One of the clearest testimonies to the Jewishness of Christianity,

by which I mean that the New Testament and New Testament theology all develop

within a thoroughly Jewish mindset and worldview, is the Church’s doctrine of

the Trinity. There was nothing like it in the ancient world. The Christians

didn’t develop it or borrow or even steal it from another culture. What they

did was experience Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit within a context that still

held hard and fast to the Jewish Shema: Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the

LORD is one. The early Christians certainly had the option to become bitheists

or tritheists, but their fundamentally Jewish theology would not allow them.

They experienced Jesus as God, and they experienced the Holy Spirit as God, and

when they tried to make sense of what they experienced, rather than jettisoning

the Jewish belief in monotheism, they tried to make sense of it within that

Jewish context.

You can actually see this happening

within the New Testament in pretty remarkable ways, but we won’t get into that

here. What interests me more this morning is the contrast between the way in

which the creeds seek to define the language by which the church can rightly

speak about the Triune God and the early church’s experience of the Triune God.

That is to say that I am more concerned about the ways in which we experience

the Triune God than I am in the ways that we define the Triune God. At some

other point, when we go to define the Triune God, we will certainly use the

language of the creeds, which are the established the linguistic boundaries of

what is and is not Christian speech about God, but for now, I want to us to

reflect upon our experience of the Triune God because that is what the New

Testament authors are doing.

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

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

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

Today we celebrate the outpouring

of the Spirit on the Church on that first Pentecost almost two thousand years

ago. This is a momentous moment in the life of the church. Even more so, this

is a momentous moment in the story of humanity. The cardinal sin of humanity in

the opening chapters of Genesis is humanity’s audacity to ascend to the

heavens. It’s as punishment for this sin that God confuses the languages of the

people, creates different people groups, and sends humanity off in different

directions across the face of the earth to form new nations. From a narrative

perspective, the call of Abram is the immediate response of God to this sin.

God has divided the world into families, and now he has decided to act through

one family to bless every family on earth.

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

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

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

Today we celebrate the outpouring

of the Spirit on the Church on that first Pentecost almost two thousand years

ago. This is a momentous moment in the life of the church. Even more so, this

is a momentous moment in the story of humanity. The cardinal sin of humanity in

the opening chapters of Genesis is humanity’s audacity to ascend to the

heavens. It’s as punishment for this sin that God confuses the languages of the

people, creates different people groups, and sends humanity off in different

directions across the face of the earth to form new nations. From a narrative

perspective, the call of Abram is the immediate response of God to this sin.

God has divided the world into families, and now he has decided to act through

one family to bless every family on earth.

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

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.

As I just explained it, almost the entirety of the salvation, almost the

entirety of the Bible, is about Heaven coming down to earth, and yet somehow in

the minds of most American Christians and certainly in our language, rhetoric,

and music, we’ve convinced ourselves that the message of the Bible is about

leaving earth and going to Heaven. We could not have it more wrong. And it’s

ironic because in today’s Christianity the word “heresy” gets tossed around a

lot. If you spend any time on theological forums or Facebook groups, as I’m

sure you all do, you’ll see this a lot. “So and so has a heretical view of

women’s ordination.” “So and so has a heretical view of baptism.” You can be

wrong about theology and not be heretical, but a version of Christianity that

implicitly denies the resurrection of the dead by placing all the focus on

going to Heaven when we die is certainly bordering on heresy because it denies

a fundamental tenet of the creed. We say it every Sunday. “I believe in the

resurrection of the dead.”

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

revelation, it’s important to pay attention to who is doing the calling. Jesus

says in vs. 12, “Behold, I am coming soon,” from Heaven to Earth.” Then in vs.

17, there is the invitation to come. “The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’ And

let the one who hears say, ‘Come.’” But to whom? To whom is this invitation

given? The Spirit is with the bride on earth, and one the one hand, the church’s

invitation through the Spirit

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.

As I just explained it, almost the entirety of the salvation, almost the

entirety of the Bible, is about Heaven coming down to earth, and yet somehow in

the minds of most American Christians and certainly in our language, rhetoric,

and music, we’ve convinced ourselves that the message of the Bible is about

leaving earth and going to Heaven. We could not have it more wrong. And it’s

ironic because in today’s Christianity the word “heresy” gets tossed around a

lot. If you spend any time on theological forums or Facebook groups, as I’m

sure you all do, you’ll see this a lot. “So and so has a heretical view of

women’s ordination.” “So and so has a heretical view of baptism.” You can be

wrong about theology and not be heretical, but a version of Christianity that

implicitly denies the resurrection of the dead by placing all the focus on

going to Heaven when we die is certainly bordering on heresy because it denies

a fundamental tenet of the creed. We say it every Sunday. “I believe in the

resurrection of the dead.”

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

revelation, it’s important to pay attention to who is doing the calling. Jesus

says in vs. 12, “Behold, I am coming soon,” from Heaven to Earth.” Then in vs.

17, there is the invitation to come. “The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’ And

let the one who hears say, ‘Come.’” But to whom? To whom is this invitation

given? The Spirit is with the bride on earth, and one the one hand, the church’s

invitation through the Spirit