The Sacred Heart of Our Lord Jesus Christ

Hosea 11:1, 3-4, 8c-9

In just a brief perusal of the headlines, we can quickly come to feel like integrity is in short supply. It’s hard to know who to trust. People we thought we knew well for decades may suddenly reveal an inner darkness. Narratives may change suddenly, inducing whiplash. Outright dishonesty and obfuscation may set us adrift, uncertain of our bearings. Where do we stand, when everything around us can feel mutable, negotiable?

Our feast today—the sacred heart of Jesus—reveals something fundamental about Jesus’s integrity, something true about the faithfulness and reliability of Jesus, of his, of God’s, love for us. And it is an invitation to us to let our own hearts be transformed, to find our own integrity in integrity of Jesus’s heart.

British philosopher John Cottingham notes the link between integrity and self-knowledge: “We cannot act with integrity until we know who we are.”[1] In life, Jesus knew himself to be sent by the Father as a revelation of God’s love in and for the world. In our Gospel lesson this evening, detailing the immediate aftermath of Jesus’s death, Jesus’s own outpouring of that love on the cross finds almost sacramental expression in the pouring forth of blood and water from a spear wound (Jn 19:34). Water and blood: the very means of our own initiation into the new life and abiding with Christ, in baptism and the eucharist, and a continued revelation, even in death, of who Jesus was and knew himself to be. I think it is equally significant that this same spear wound would be, for Thomas, a point of recognition, transformation, and conversion after the Resurrection (Jn 20:27-28). The wound to his flesh, to his very heart, reveals in both episodes how Jesus extends an invitation to be loved, to be welcomed, to be known.

This self-giving love reveals the very integrity of the God who is Love. It reveals the God of Hosea, who turns from fierce anger and wrath and “led them with cords of kindness, with bands of love,” who was “to them like those who life infants to their cheeks,” who “bent down to them and fed them” (Hos 11:4, 8-9). It reveals the God of Isaiah, who persists in loving us, who is eternally faithful and trustworthy: “Surely, it is God who saves me; I will trust in him and not be afraid” (Canticle 9). It reveals the God who sent the only Son into a world, and a people, that God loved so much. It reveals the love of the Holy One who is in our very midst, in our very hearts.

The self-giving love of God, which we celebrate today, allows us to know fundamentally who we are: God’s beloved children. But integrity is not just about self-knowledge—that is, understood simply as the quest for autonomy or authenticity—but rather about our buying into something beyond ourselves. “Becoming what I am meant to be,” Cottingham goes on, “requires me, whether I like it or not, to bring my life into line with true and enduring objective values that I did not create, and which I cannot alter.”[2]

Even more than helping us to know who we are, then, the integrity of God’s love for us is that true, enduring objective value that provides us a reference point, a place of stability. “I pray that . . . Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith,” the writer to the church at Ephesus notes, “as you are being rooted and grounded in love,” that you may “know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” (Eph 3:16-17, 19). The love of God, very simply, gives our lives shape and meaning, and equips us to live them out in a world that God loves, but a world that persists in turning away from that love.

So what are we, the beloved of God, rooted and grounded in God’s love, to do in this resistant world?

I think we can do no better than do as Isaiah enjoins us: “Make [God’s] deeds known. . . . Sing the praises of the Lord. . . . Cry aloud . . . ring out your joy” (Canticle 9). With our prayer and voices, our bodies and intellects, our reason and imagination, our acting and our resting . . . with all that we are, with all that makes us who we are, in the integrity of our own beloved and loving lives, we can do no better than testify to the integrity of God’s love—ever-faithful, ever-offered—present in our very midst, in our very hearts.

Amen.

[1] J. Cottingham, “Integrity and Fragmentation,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 27.1 (2010): 8.

[2] Ibid., 13.

Br. Jack Crowley

The Nativity of St. John the Baptist

Luke 1:57-80

So much happens before we are even born. I know that’s quite an understatement, but it’s true. So much happens before we are even born.

No one is born into a blank story. We are born into ongoing stories that are well under way by the time we take our first breath. These are the stories of our parents, the stories of our ancestors, and the stories of the age we live in. We are born into a story already filled with characters.  We are born into a story so full of meaning that it takes a lifetime to understand it.

Tonight we celebrate the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist. To put it simply, the story of his nativity is awesome. John was born of a couple seemingly too old to conceive. By his birth alone, John the Baptist shows us the amazing power of God to make life happen when it feels impossible. Out of seemingly nothing came not only something, but something awesome.

My favorite part of this story is about John’s father Zechariah. Zechariah  is struck mute by the angel Gabriel shortly before conceiving John. As a result, Zechariah  cannot speak for the entirety of his wife’s pregnancy. Just think about that for a moment, that’s nine months, three whole seasons, of not speaking. Imagine if walking home tonight you were struck mute by an angel and couldn’t speak until next March. I’m guessing a lot would build up in your head during that time.

Finally, Zechariah ’s tongue is loosened shortly after John’s birth and he is filled by the Holy Spirit and delivers an epic prophecy about the life of his son. This prophecy describes the story that Saint John the Baptist was entering into. This was a story of God. A story full of mercy and forgiveness. A story of how John would lead the way for the author of our salvation.

The story of John’s life is not an easy one, but it is an awesome one. John helped out so many people and got the world ready for what was to come. The end of the story of John’s life on earth is brutal and violent. His end came with his head on a platter, but that is not the end of the story of our salvation.

We all know we work out the story of our salvation with fear and trembling. Every day of our lives we add a new chapter to that story. Every morning, when that dreaded alarm clock goes off, we start telling ourselves that story. Pay attention to that story. Is it a story full of stress and anxiety? Is it a story of healing and hope?

We may long to escape the story we are in. We may long to turn the page or skip a few chapters. We may wish for a new author or even a new protagonist, yet inevitably we end up right here again in the middle of it all.

No matter what your story is, keep turning back to God. Repent, rearrange, reorient, reintroduce, review, renew, re-whatever yourself back to God. Saint John the Baptist was emphatic about this: we must keep turning back to God.

We must do our best with God’s help to stay present, centered, and engaged with the God-given stories of our God-given lives. Of course this is easier to do when things are going well. The challenge, the cauldron of our faith, is when our stories stop making sense.

If your life and the world around you seems to be full of chaotic stories that don’t make sense, you are not alone. We are all struggling in this time to find a coherent meaning to what’s going on around us. In such times of chaos, it can be hard to find the thread, that awesome thread of the Holy Spirit that links all this insanity around us into something that makes sense. It’s that holy clue that leads us out of this maze of darkness and into the light.

If right now you don’t have a clue what you are doing, keep searching. Pray hard and pray often. Keep examining your life with brutal honesty and always be on the lookout for God. Find that thread and follow it with everything you have.

Trinity Sunday

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

Several years ago, I enrolled in a drawing class. I am not a creative person, but I thought it would be good to exercise that part of my brain. In my first class, the instructor gave us a stick of charcoal, put us in front of a piece of blank newsprint, and told us to draw anything.

Did I mention I’m not a creative person?

Honestly, I just froze. Absolutely nothing came to mind. I stared at the blank sheet, mildly panicking, and feeling very powerless and very alone.

The class got better, and I did learn to draw. I don’t think I became any more creative, but what I did gain was a fresh perspective, a way of looking through what seemed to be a new set of eyes. I learned to see shadow as well as line, the spaces in between as well as familiar forms.

Today is Trinity Sunday. And on this Trinity Sunday, we are being invited, more than ever, to see with a new set of eyes. As we celebrate the mystery of God as Trinity; as we rejoice in our creation, redemption, and sanctification; as we lift our voices in hymns and praise; we cannot but be aware of what surrounds our celebration. War and political violence, fear and insecurity, petty vindictiveness and hollow posturing. Whether we read it in the news, see it with our eyes, or feel it in our bodies, we are all aware of the overwhelming wrongness that surrounds us, in our country and in our world.

But I think this celebration is exactly what these troubled and tumultuous times calls for. This celebration today of the triune God has so much to say about who God is for us, who we are for God, and who we are for each other. We are invited to see the Trinity afresh, and that seeing encourages us to see others with new eyes.

We praise today God our Creator. Our Rule of Life expresses one central way to understand the Trinity: “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are One in mutual self-giving and receiving.”[1] The very act of creation, of our creation, of the world’s, an act of “pure self-emptying,” is an expression of who God is.

Our creation was in the image and likeness of this self-giving God; sin—turning away from God, again and again and again—eroded this image, making it harder and harder for us to see that God-shaped pattern that we were created with. Disobedience and murder took place in the first two generations of humanity’s primordial story. Each age confronts the consequences of sin in its own way. In ours, dislocation and isolation, convenient violence, demonization and dehumanization. The denial of the inherent, God-given dignity of all of our neighbors, fellow children and creations of God.

Remembering God our Creator today draws our attention out from ourselves: “O Lord our Governor, how exalted is your Name in all the world!” (Ps. 8:1). It draws our imaginations up: “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars you have set in their courses” (Ps 8:4). And it reminds us of our own dignity as creatures: “What is man that you should be mindful of him? The son of man that you should seek him out? You have made him but little lower than the angels; you adorn him with glory and honor.” (Ps 8:5-6).

How does this exalted language strike you today?

Praising God our Creator today, as we encounter so much hardship, so much anxiety, so much uncertainty, alerts us to the gap between the glory and honor promised us and the sorry state we so often find ourselves in—and the help we need.

And so today we praise God our Redeemer, who meets us in that sorry state, who empties himself and takes on our human nature. “God proves his love for us,” Saint Paul writes to the Church in Rome, “in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8); and it is through him that “we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God” (Rom 5:2).

Remembering God our Redeemer today draws our gaze back down to earth, to our daily struggles and afflictions and inadequacies, to all the ways in which we daily fail to live up to the promise of our creation—draws our gaze to all of that, and makes us know that that failure is not the last word.

What are you carrying today?

Remembering God our Redeemer today reminds us that whatever failures or disappointments or setbacks we face, no matter how bad the world and our own lives get, that is not the last word. The last word is that God has freed us through Jesus Christ, and that God remains with us always.

And so today we praise God our Sanctifier, guiding us who have been created and redeemed through a world that can still so often feel hostile. In the face of injustice, of violence, of overweening pride, of sin—of all that is not God—God our Sanctifier surrounds and upholds and strengthens us with the daily, the hourly, the constant assurance and hope of God’s unfailing love and presence. “We also boast in our sufferings” (Rom 5:3)—what Saint Paul asserts here, as Joseph Fitzmyer notes, is that “suffering and affliction become precisely the point at which hope is encountered and proves itself.”[2] “Hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts” (Rom 8:5).

If for us God is Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, what, then, are we to God? We are God’s beloved, and we are God’s delight. “What is man that you should be mindful of him?” What is man—what is humanity—who are we—but God’s beloved creations, fallen and redeemed, God’s image and likeness in the world, God’s children in whom God delights. “I was daily his delight,” Wisdom speaks in the book of Proverbs, “rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race” (Prov 8:30-31). And so equally today when we praise God our Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, we can only be humbled by our own high calling—God’s beloved, God’s delight, the apple of God’s eye.

How does this feel to you today? Do you accept it? Do you struggle with it?

How wonderful, how strange, to know ourselves to be God’s beloved, to come to know and feel in our very bones that we are God’s delight . . . while still seeing all that is wrong around us.

I feel that this may be as much of a mystery as the Trinity is.

If the mystery of the Trinity, even only imperfectly understood, elicits in us praise and celebration, the mystery of our own salvation by that same Trinity—Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier—can only—should only—elicit in us a response of humble thanks and determination to adopt a fresh perspective, to see with new eyes. To see all our neighbors with the eyes of the Trinity: as beloved siblings, in whom is found cause for delight, who suffer in ways that may be hidden from us, and who share in the same hope of God’s future, when all will be one.

Amen.

[1] The Rule of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist (Lanham, MD, 1997), 12.

[2] J. A. Fitzmyer, Romans, The Anchor Bible (New York, 1993), 397.

Br. Luke Ditewig

Saint Barnabas the Apostle

Acts 11:19-30; 13:1-3

Barnabas was a Jew from Cyprus named Joseph. He was living in Jerusalem when he joined the follower of Jesus. The apostles give him the name Barnabas which means son of encouragement. He sold a field of his and gave the money to the apostles to help provide for the community. Barnabas encouraged and provided for the poor financially, possibly sacrificially, as well as how he led relationally.

After Saul saw Jesus on the Damascus road, Barnabas introduced him to the apostles in Jerusalem, vouching and affirming he was now a believer and bold preacher.[i] When many believed the good news of Jesus in Antioch, the apostles sent Barnabas “a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith.”

Barnabas went to find Saul and brought him to Antioch where they taught together. As Ray Bakke wrote, consider what it took for Saul to heal and change. Barnabas recruited and mentored Saul to lead with him. Having been a notorious persecutor of believers, Saul needed further embodied forgiveness, safety, and encouragement to rebuild as a new kind of leader. Barnabas risked embracing Saul to enable this kind of healing and formation.[ii]

The Holy Spirit kept sending Barnabas and Saul out to share good news with others, the first missionary journeys. They took others to help them including Mark. On one such journey, Mark withdrew and left them. Later when Barnabas and Saul were setting out for a new journey, Saul refused to include Mark. Barnabas and Saul split over this. Barnabas took Mark and Saul took Silas.[iii]

Was Saul just hot-headed about Mark’s previous failure? I keep learning with conflict there is truth on both sides. A big challenge is in the face of true faults, what is a loving response? For Barnabas it was to include Mark, his cousin, even as the expense of parting ways with Saul then known as Paul. Barnabas risked embodying grace, trusting that Mark would learn, grow, and further become.[iv]

Who has risked being there for you? Who trusted you could get through, heal, and further become? Who has embodied grace for you? Who is this for you now?

Mark did grow and mature including in the sight of Paul. At the end of his letter to the Colossians, Paul gives greetings from fellow gospel workers including “Mark cousin of Barnabas, concerning whom you have received instructions – if he comes to you, welcome him.”[v] He is traditionally understood to be the writer of the gospel that bears his name, and he went on a later missionary journey to Alexandria, Egypt. Millions of Egyptian Christians continue to give thanks for Mark.[vi]

For many of us teachers, preachers, and caregivers, formation is part of our vocation. We also need to receive. Paul and Mark needed mediated healing and encouragement. Barnabas was at and on their side. The generativity of being an elder, mentor, companion, or friend on the way has deep impact. Give thanks for those who encourage you, like St. Barnabas whom we remember today.

[i] Acts 9:26-28

[ii] Ray Bakke (1997). A Theology as Big as the City. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, p. 149.

[iii] Acts 15:36-40

[iv] Bakke 1997, p. 150.

[v] Colossians 4:10, in Bakke 1997, p. 151.

[vi] Bakke 1997, p. 151.

Br. James Koester

The Day of Pentecost

Acts 2:1-21

I must confess that I have always been envious of those who are able to acquire another language. I have always struggled to learn first French, then Latin, before being completely defeated by Greek.

As a child my parents enrolled me in private French lessons, but when French became available at school, it was like starting over again. Each year was the same. I struggled all year to learn a few basics. I’d scrape by with a pass at the end of the school year and then forget everything over the summer. Each Fall I would have start again from square one. I finally dropped both French and Latin in high school. In the first year of seminary, I enrolled in New Testament Greek. Early in the term the professor arranged for us all to take a language aptitude test. My years of struggling to learn another language all came together with that test. Finally, everything made sense.

If you have taken the language aptitude test, you will know that it is based on learning a few simple elements of Kurdish. The idea is to see how quickly you can learn and retain it and then answer some questions. A week or so after the test, I sat in the professor’s office to hear my results. He began by telling me he didn’t understand why I was having such difficulty learning Greek, as I had a perfect aptitude for foreign languages. Suddenly he stopped in his tracks. Mumbled oh and said to me, sorry James, I see why you are having such difficulties. I was reading the score backwards. You have absolutely no aptitude to learn a second language

I don’t know exactly how that language aptitude test works, but after years of trying to learn French, Latin and then Greek, I didn’t need a test to tell me what I already knew. There is something about my brain that simply can’t absorb languages. I joke that even after over thirty years in this country, I still don’t understand and can’t speak American. It has been explained to me countless times what freshman, sophomore, junior and senior mean, but it needs to be explained to me again each time someone uses those phrases. And please don’t tell me you are a rising sophomore because that will just confuse me even more!

With my inability to learn another language, I’m always amazed by this story from Acts. For no apparent reason, suddenly everyone was speaking a different language, and more to the point, others could understand them. I confess, I am more than a little jealous.

Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.’ All were amazed and perplexed.[1]

It is interesting to note, however, that it was not the speaking, but the comprehension that amazed and perplexed the visitors to Jerusalem that day, for the ones who were speaking were Galileans, but those who comprehended were from all over the world and heard in their own native languages.

Was the gift of tongues given at Pentecost in the speaking, or in the hearing? It’s not clear. What is clear is that the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost was not so much the gift of speaking foreign languages, but the gift of comprehension that resulted in unity and understanding. That is the gift that brought about amazement, and even healing.

Today the world and this nation are perhaps more divided by mistrust, enmity, even hatred and fear, than ever before. The gifts of trust and comprehension feel elusive, and impossible to attain. Yet those are the very gifts given, when God poured upon those early disciples the gift of the Holy Spirit.

The thing is, Scripture is not Plimouth Plantation, a museum forever frozen in time. Rather it tells stories of the past, not to freeze them in time, but so that we can recognize their realities in the present. The gift of the Spirit of Pentecost was not given once, never to happen again. It is not just a story of a few Galilean fishmen who could suddenly speak other languages. It is not even a story about the ability to speak other languages. Yes, Pentecost happened that day long ago in Jerusalem. But that is not the end of the story. The story of the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost is the story of the gift of trust, comprehension, unity, and understanding, as it is being given today. Every time trust, comprehension, unity, and understanding happens, God’s Holy Spirit is poured out upon the world once more, and what is more, truth, compassion, love, and healing follow.

We live in a time when the story we constantly hear is the story of fear, suspicion and inequality. Is it any wonder then, that hostility and hatred are our daily diet? The world is griped by fear, suspicion, hostility, and hatred. But the answer to fear is not guns, and the answer to suspicion are not tariffs and laws. The answer to suspicion is not defunding education, and the answer to hatred is not deportation. The answer to fear, suspicion, hostility and hatred is the Spirit of God who pours out upon this hostile, divided, and alienated world, comprehension, unity, and understanding, which turn into compassion, love, and healing.

The difficulty is that comprehension, unity, and understanding, require patience, and generosity. Those too are of the Spirit, for as St Paul reminds us: the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.[2]

It is easy for us to get sidetracked today by the images of rushing wind, flames of fire, and the speaking in tongues. But we lose the real gifts of Pentecost when we do. The real gifts of Pentecost are not tongues, but tolerance, not flames, but faithfulness, not wind, but wonder.

How different our world is when we approach one another, not with fear and suspicion, or with hostility, and hatred, but with wonder, faithfulness, and tolerance. When that is the case, it is truly be a Pentecostal moment and the gift of the Spirit is poured out once more. In those moments, all are amazed to see that love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control follow, and give birth to the comprehension, unity, and understanding we so desire.

The vision of God for humanity, is that we are multilingual, speaking the language of God, which is the language of compassion, unity, and understanding. Each time that happens, the Spirit of God is revealed in our lives once more.

The wonder of Pentecost then, is not that people suddenly spoke in foreign languages. The wonder of Pentecost is that people suddenly spoke in the language of God, the language of compassion, unity, and understanding. And like those early disciples, the gift to speak the language of God is ours for the asking.

Come, Holy Spirit, come, and enkindle our hearts with the fire of your love.

When we truly are people of the Spirit, we will be people of compassion, unity, and understanding, speaking the language of God, and the world will be amazed and astonished, once more. And my goodness, do we ever need the gifts of compassion, unity, and understanding today, because fear, hatred, suspicion and hostility are tearing our world, and this country apart.

Come, Holy Spirit, come, and enkindle our hearts with the fire of your love.

[1] Acts 2: 6-12

[2] Galatians 5: 22 – 23

Br. Jack Crowley

Psalm 16:5-11

In any journey of faith, there is always the question of what it looks like to ask God for help. Asking God for help comes in many forms. We are all familiar with foxhole prayers. Prayers asking for help in times of overwhelming stress. There are also the day-to-day prayers of people asking God for help to just function. Other times, we approach God with a problem we think of as so complicated that no one else would ever understand.

It’s with that spirit of looking for help from God that makes me love the first half of the 7th verse of Psalm 16, our gradual psalm today. The Psalmist prays “I will bless the Lord who gives me counsel.” I’ve always loved how the psalmist is plain spoken in saying that the Lord does in fact give him counsel. The psalmist is not making a qualified, sort of, kind of, statement. It’s a bold statement that God does in fact offer counsel in our lives.

To seek, listen, and follow the counsel of God may be humbling, but it is worthwhile. It may be humbling to admit that we cannot get through life, or maybe even a single day, alone and without God’s help. However, if that is the truth for you, as it is for me, then there’s no avoiding it.

I need God’s help every single day of my life. I can stand here and deny it. I can try to live a life fueled by complete self-sufficiency. A life in which I can try to figure out every detail of every problem of every moment of my life. In my own experience, at some point this becomes unsustainable. I need God’s help. Then I desperately seek God’s counsel.

There is no shame in seeking God’s counsel. Much of our lives are spent stumbling through half understood situations – full of confusion, doubt, and anxiety. We don’t have the time or energy to understand it all. We never have the power to fully control it, even if we really wish we did.

We live our lives in the middle of seeking God’s counsel and doing our best to follow it. That is the most we can ask of ourselves and our fellow human beings. We answer the never-ending problems of our lives with the same answer we have in our Baptismal Covenant: “I will, with God’s help.”

The Martyrs of Uganda

Matthew 24:9-14

“The one who endures to the end will be saved. And this good news of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the world, as a testimony to all the nations” (Mt 24:13-14).

Today we commemorate the martyrs of Uganda, a group of young pages in the court of the king of Buganda, who were executed for refusing to recant their Christian faith. This faith provided these men, who were caught up in overlapping power struggles, with another choice, an alternative power, a way of naming a truth and an allegiance that was greater than powers of chiefs or kings or empires.

The very bodies of these martyrs were sites of claims of personal power. The king had power over the use of their bodies, up to their deaths. In denying the king his traditional prerogatives, they undercut his very claim to authority over them. Their martyrdom signaled the king’s very failure of power.

They were also subject to generational rivalries. As younger men at court, future tribal leaders, they represented a threat to older and entrenched authorities. Their Christianity was weaponized as a pretense to dispose of rivals. In persisting in their confession of Christian faith, they acknowledged an authority higher, and an allegiance greater than what they had previously known. Their confession drew their gaze upward and outward.

Finally, they were caught up in transcultural encounters. Their conversion was the result of the intertwined projects of mission, colonialism, and empire. And yet, their very act of martyrdom led to the spread of Christianity and eased the way toward integrating it with traditional values: “By demonstrating to young people that Christianity could demand the highest courage,” historian John Iliffe writes, “the martyrdom was an important stage in breaking the heroic culture’s resistance to the new religion.”[1]

Faithfulness to their confession thus allowed the martyrs of Uganda to transform the network of power in which they found themselves enmeshed: to free themselves from bodily control by the king; to overcome courtly and tribal rivalries; and to use the instruments of empire to demonstrate that Christianity was also an African religion.

I’m sure many of us have experienced what it means to be caught in the middle of forces that we can’t understand, let alone control. Being unfairly judged, without recourse. At the whim of faceless bureaucracy, without leverage. Witnessing appalling injustice with no power to meaningfully effect change. With no tools, no weapons, no help except for a simple affirmation of faith, the sure knowledge that God is with you, bearing all of that with you now. And that God will give you the highest courage to endure, to persevere, and to know that your own simple, persistent affirmation of faith matters more than you can possibly imagine.

Amen.

[1] J. Iliffe, Honour in African History (Cambridge, 2005), 173-74; cf. Lesser Feasts and Fasts (New York, 2022), 258: “The martyrs had left the indelible impression that Christianity was truly African, not simply a white man’s religion.”

Br. Jamie Nelson

Acts 18:1-8

In today’s reading from the Book of Acts, we hear a story about a time when the Apostle Paul faced disappointment and seeming failure in his work spreading the gospel, yet that failure wasn’t the last word for God.

We hear the story of Paul’s arrival in Corinth, a Greek city where people of many cultures, languages, and religions passed through or made the city their home.

Some of those people were Jewish refugees who had recently been expelled from their homes in Rome due to a decree of the emperor Claudius. Paul, a fellow Jew, became close with two of those refugees, a married couple named Aquila and Priscilla, and worked in their canvas and leatherworking business.

Paul worked in their shop during the week, and he spent the Sabbath in the city synagogue preaching and teaching about Jesus – an evangelism strategy he’d used with success in previous cities. But other than his friends and benefactors Priscilla and Aquila, he didn’t find much initial success sharing the good news about Jesus the Messiah to the Jewish community.

We hear that time and again, Paul’s testimony was met with opposition and resistance. Finally pushed beyond his limit, Paul responded by shaking the dust from his clothes and announcing that he was done butting heads with people in the synagogue community. Henceforth, he would preach to the Gentiles of Corinth.

Have you ever found yourself in a similar place to Paul?

A situation where you have taken time to prepare and sought wise counsel until you arrived at a sense of clarity about how to proceed, yet your best efforts just weren’t bearing fruit. Maybe it’s a situation in your work where a project isn’t going as planned due to factors outside your control. Or maybe it’s a relationship where you’ve shown up, tried your very best, and still things just aren’t working out. It’s easy to get disillusioned and ready to give up when that happens, to feel like you’ve failed.

I wonder if Paul felt like he’d failed at his God-given mission, since the very people he came to reach had turned away. But he kept on sharing the good news of Jesus, this time with Gentiles.

And then something unexpected happened: Crispus, the leader of the synagogue, the very place Paul had left in frustration, came to faith in Jesus. Not just him, but his household, and many others in Corinth. And as we know from Paul’s letters to the Corinthians sent after his departure, the church he planted became a robust Christian community.

So what can we learn about God through the conclusion to that story?

Failure and resistance don’t mean God’s not at work.

Paul may have been finished with the people he met through the synagogue, but God wasn’t. The seeds that had been planted took root beneath the soil. God continued to be at work in the community, opening hearts to Jesus.

So if you’re facing resistance and failure or something in your life isn’t unfolding the way you’d hoped, trust that God is still at work. That what feels like rejection can create a space for a new direction, that what looks like a closed door can actually be the threshold to something new.

Trust that failure and disappointment isn’t the end of God’s story for you.

Br. Luke Ditewig

Ascension Day

Luke 24:44-53

Gathered together, the disciples and friends are amazed Jesus had appeared to Peter. The two who walked to Emmaus just returned and told of meeting Jesus in breaking bread. As they speak, Jesus stands among the gathering. “Peace be with you,” Jesus says. “Look, it’s me. Look at my hands and my feet. Remember my wounds. Watch me eat. I’m alive. Everything written about me must be fulfilled. Good news is to be proclaimed to everyone. You are witnesses of all of this.” Then Jesus leads them out to nearby Bethany and is carried up to heaven.

Jesus ascending into heaven is part of the resurrection story. Risen and ascended go together. The Word became flesh and lived among us as a human infant who grew into an adult, living, loving, losing, dying, rising, and ascending. God with us.

As our neighbor The Rev. Jarred Mercer wrote: “The ascension is simply the completion of the first movement of the incarnation.”[i] “As in the incarnation divinity was introduced into human life, so in the ascension humanity is introduced into the divine life. The human condition now inhabits heaven, the eternal presence of God.”[ii]

Jesus is God embodied. When born, Jesus was fully vulnerable as an infant. When risen, Jesus kept and showed his wounds. Resurrection didn’t magically restore Jesus to pre-crucifixion. Returning to heaven didn’t diminish Jesus’ humanity.

Jesus ascended with wounded hands and feet, needing food and companionship, vulnerable to and for love and heartbreak, grief and trust. “The human condition now inhabits heaven.” Mysteriously wonderful. Loving us humans, God comes all the way down to restore all, and God takes all up. Our condition and identity God loves, embraces, and heals with all the limitations. The good news is that all will be healed, all will be fully loved.

The pain and suffering now are real and so very hard. At the same time, God has power over all. God saves. Love has already and will ultimately win. We see this in Jesus. Again, from Mercer: “The ascension is the realization of our salvation: humanity has been exalted to enjoy the perfect love of God. Ascension is hope realized.”[iii]

One day we will fully enjoy the love of God where there will be no more weeping, where there will be no need of lamp or sun for the Lord will be our light. Amid the pain and hardship of today, we are not alone. Gaze and grasp and be still with Jesus, God who was a child, a teen, a friend, who was hurt, confused, who loved and lost, who lived and died, rose, and ascended.

Pray your pain and gratitude to God who is fully with us and who loves without limit. Look forward in hope for all to be healed. Rejoice with our risen and ascended Christ, wounded and triumphant.

[i] Strawbridge, Jennifer, Jarred Mercer, and Peter Groves. Love Makes No Sense: An Invitation to Christian Theology (2019) London: SCM Press, 103.

[ii] Ibid, 104.

[iii] Ibid, 104.

Br. Jack Crowley

John 10:22-30

How long will you keep us in suspense? Of all the questions Jesus was asked in his life, this is one of my favorites. How long will you keep us in suspense?

Despite all of Jesus’ miracles, teachings, healings, and feedings, people kept wanting more from Jesus. People kept wanting more signs and more explanations. No matter what Jesus did, it was not enough for some.

One unfortunate tendency we have as human beings is to find something we enjoy and then squeeze the life out of it. We place unrealistic expectations on the things that make us feel good, and then when our expectations are not met, we get resentful. We end up crucifying that which we once loved.

To live a sustainable life with Christ requires balance. If we demand too much, too often, we will burn out. On other hand, if we are too passive, we will never build an authentic relationship with our savior.

An authentic relationship with God is something you cannot fake for too long. Inevitably, the frustrations of life will catch up to you and you will end up saying to God how much longer will you keep us in suspense?  The answer to that question at times will be a brutal and painful silence. Yet, it is in these hard questions and harrowing moments of acceptance that we gain intimacy with Christ. We understand our own suffering so much more in the light of he who suffered so much for us.

So how much more proof do you need that God exists? How many more religious experiences do you need until you believe that God is already at work in your life? For me oftentimes, the answer is more. I am human after all.

Much of our life we are kept in suspense, waiting for one thing to end and another thing to begin. We often believe that once this one thing ends and the next thing begins, then life will really happen, then and only then will we truly find God. So what if God is meant to be found in the meantime?

What if we were to let go of our feelings of suspense? What if we were to say that God is here, now, in the present, in the very details of our days? An act of faith like this takes courage – the courage to a be a human and the courage to be a Christian.