Fr. Joshua Daniel

Year C Good Friday Service

Gospel Text: John 18:1-19:42 (The Passion of Christ)

 

 

Fr. Joshua Daniel

Year B Proper 18

Gospel Text: Mark 7:24-37

Pictured: The Syrophoenician Woman

 

Fr. Joshua Daniel

Year B Proper 16

Gospel Text: John 6:56-69

Pictured: The Vine

 

 

 

Around 10,000 years ago, give or take a few thousand years, standing on Mount Sinai, Moses smashed the original tablets that God had written the ten commandments on.

On July 20th 1969 NASA landed on the moon. Shortly thereafter they mistakenly recorded over all the original footage of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on said moon. In 1173 AD construction on the Tower of Pisa began. 177 years later it was finished. Just ten years after that it started leaning. And it’s been leaning ever since. That’s nearly 668 years of leaning folks. On January 1st 1962 Decca records auditioned the Beatles. The rejected the band and signed Brian Poole and the Tremeloes instead.

Moreover, children of God, sometime in 1937 somebody filled the Hindenburg with hydrogen. And the rest is history.

In today’s gospel we learn that more than two thousand years ago, a group of disciples heard Jesus say, “I am the bread of life … I am the living bread that comes down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever…” and we’re told that “many” of the disciples who heard this “turned back” and no longer “went” with Jesus.

Today we are confronted with what it means to have heard the Gospel and to reject it. To walk away. We are confronted with, as the kids say these days, an “epic fail.”

What was it that broke the camel’s back for the disciples? Jesus had already preached many difficult lessons, he had already demanded much of them. And they had seen him do marvelous things. Why walk away now? What pushed them over the edge?

I want to answer that question by looking at another period of epic failure. In 1933 a protestant German pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, delivered a lecture on broadcast radio in Berlin. He aggressively attacked the German church for having conceded so much to its new leader, Adolf Hitler, whom Bonhoeffer called “an idol,” and the menacing political order he was beginning to install. So fierce was his attack that his radio address was abruptly ended before he had finished.

Bonhoeffer fled to England refusing to have go along with the “German-Christian” compromise that the Nazi government proposed. But in 1935 he was called back to Germany by the “Confessing Church”–a Christian movement established to resist the fascist government–to teach at an underground seminary in Germany. He accepted the call and while teaching there he wrote two famous texts Life Together and The Cost of Discipleship.

In Life Together Bonhoeffer addresses, I believe, the very issues that led the disciples to walk away from Jesus and the demands Jesus made of them.

___

Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream. The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and to try to realize it.

But God’s grace speedily shatters such dreams. Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves.

By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. … Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight…”

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The disciples that walked away are confronted by their wish dream for Jesus. They had seen in Jesus, perhaps, another way for control. For keeping a lid on what God could and could not contain,

Fr. Joshua Daniel

Year B Proper 14

Gospel Text: John 6:35, 41-51

Sermon without notes.

Pictured: Resurrection Icon

 

Father Joshua Daniel

Year B Proper 13

Gospel Text: John 6:24-35

Sermon given without notes.

(Pictured: Greek Orthodox Icon)

 

The Rev. Jason Alexander, Canon to the Bishop of Arkansas

Year B Proper 12

Gospel Text: John 6:1-21

Pictured: A cycling peleton

(No written text of the sermon is available.)

 

 

Father Joshua Daniel

Year B Proper 11

Sermon Text: Mark: 6:30-34, 53-56

(Pictured: Qumran, Judean Wilderness, Palestine)

(Audio cuts out half way)

 

 

 

There is much to like in Robert Fulghum’s well-known book, Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Here are just a select few insights. 1. Share. 2. Play fair. 3. Put things back where you found them. 4. Flush. And last but not least, 5. Take a nap every afternoon. There is real wisdom there. Jesus also has a thing or two to say about the importance of children, the importance of seeing the world through their eyes. Later in Mark Jesus quite provocatively says, “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” More on that later (like in October, which is when we’ll read that passage). For every thing that children do know–and in some ways know better than we do–there is something that hardly any child can appreciate. And that’s what I want to focus on today. The blind spot for all children. Boredom. This is a sermon about boredom. A sermon–to the horror of children everywhere–meant to celebrate boredom.

I’m not a culture warrior. I don’t get overly concerned about the “war” on Christmas or whether prayers are spoken over the intercom before school. But one of the cultural trends that does concern me is the growing lack in boredom. The decay of boredom. The pervasive desdain our culture has towards it.

And I speak about this not from a safe distance, eyeing all you sinners. But rather as someone who personally struggles to be bored. Someone who, as a parent, fails to adequately bore my children.

Almost a year ago I got the first upgrade to my phone in seven years. I went from an iphone 4 to an iphone 7. It was magical. After several failed, what I will generously call “updates” to the phone, everything because a negotiation. I would open it and ask, Will you work today? Will you tell me if someone calls? Will you not leave me holding the bad with bad directions in the middle of a trip? Sometimes–in fact, I think it’s fair to say, many times–the answer was no. No, I will not help. Not today, sorry.

But the new phone never talked back to me. I could make calendar appointments. I could check my mail any time I wanted. I could listen or watch news as I cleaned the dishes after super.

Living the last three years so far away, my family travelled by airplane more than we ever have. Switching phones was like the difference between travelling in an airport with multiple connections with young children in tow to flying direct without children.

What I mean to say, dear people of God, is that the struggle is real. With my new phone the problem of boredom became real. It became real because boredom–for at least the first few weeks of having the phone–almost disappeared completely from my life.

I won’t lay out the clinical case for the dangers that screens (like my magical, wonderful new phone–but also tablets and other small and large TV devices) pose for our individual and collective mental and physical health. As far as I understand them, though, many researchers are very concerned about the effect screens are having in our culture.

Imagine all the events in your day as large stones in a sturdy vase. There’s a rock for walking the dog, there’s a rock for the current project at work, for the drive home, for preparing the day’s meals, for getting ready for bed, etc. At the end of the day the vase is full of different sized rocks. But there’s still plenty of space in between them. Screens have become the sand that fills up the empty space in the vase.

Where there might have been some empty space between different events in the day, my phone often fills up that gap. I struggle to find “downtime” now. To sit and be still.

Sermon by Father Joshua Daniel

Year B Proper 9

Sermon Text: Mark: 6:1-13

(Pictured: Sisters of Nazareth Convent)

 

 

In the early 19th Century a handful of nuns left their village in France and made a pilgrimage to the Holy Lands, specifically to Nazareth where they believed they had been called to serve. They arrived safely and began searching for a site to build their convent. In the neighborhood of the Roman Catholic Church of the Annunciation (the historic site where tradition holds that the Angel Gabriel appeared to Mary to announce the coming of Jesus) they found a property that was available for sell–not more than a block away. The sellers were an Arabic, Palestestinian family who had held the property for some generations. Hoping to increase the value for these Christian women they told them a story about the ancient roots of the property. In the medieval ages, perhaps even earlier, there had been a man who had lived there known as the “honest man”–or something near that, I can’t remember the exact details. Paying that fact some attention the women made a fair offer and the land was eventually sold to them. They established their order (called Sisters of Nazareth), and a school for the palestinian children, and a health clinic for the town. They became greatly loved and admired by the community in which they lived. And they remain so even now.

Fast forward nearly 150 years. A group of archaeologists (I believe in the 90s) gained permission from the Sisters to excavate part of the site and see if there was any proof that anyone of historical importance had lived there. After some time of carefully digging they found what was eventually determined to be a 3rd century Christian mosaic and altar. Now in the world of middle-east archaeology this is the “holy grail” so to speak of discoveries. When the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and thereby made Christianity legal throughout the empire, he commissioned his mother, Helena, to build churches throughout the Holy Land marking cities of great religious significance. She had churches built at the site of Jesus’ execution, at Jesus’ resurrection, at the Sea of Galilee, and also in his hometown, Nazareth, where the locals still knew which home Jesus had lived in. What distinguished these sites was exactly what the archaeologists had found: a 3rd century mosaic and altar.

Just below the discovery of that ancient church they found a 1st century dwelling. Something that could not be described as much more than a cave dug out from the side of a hill. But what they had found was something more than just a simple home, two thousand years old. It did not belong, they concluded to a mere legend–to the “honest man”–but rather, what they had found, many have come to believe, is the actual home of Jesus the son of God. The home of Mary and Joseph and their family. The very home in which Jesus was raised.

A year and a half ago I got the chance to visit Nazareth and stayed at the Sisters’ convent, my room about 70 feet above the very place Jesus likely slept as a child. Many archaeologists believe that Nazareth, in Jesus’ time, in the 1st century, was indeed a simple place. Likely consisting of no more than 12 families. It was a remote town, nothing fancy, even the small fishing villages at the Sea of Galilee were at least a day’s journey away.

When my group arrived one of the nuns took us down into the bowels of the site. Down, down, down, many stairs, peeling back hundreds and hundreds of years of history. We got to see the church likely built by Constantine’s Mother and then she took us into the home of Jesus.

At each of the sites we visited during our pilgrimage I tried to steal myself away and find a place quiet to pray and soak up the place. [Almost got locked in the cave where Jesus grew up.]

Seeing it first hand,

First Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Joshua Daniel

Year B Proper 8

Sermon Text: Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-15; 2:23-24, Mark 5:21-43

(Pictured: Catacombs)

 

 

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In God there is no death. The author of the book of Wisdom tells us that “God did not make death…” that in the “generative forces of the world…there is no destructive poison in them.” This is a familiar kind of claim that puzzles many both inside and outside the church. What could it mean that In God there is no death?

Looking for a through-line in today’s readings one might easily conclude that death is actually the theme that connects these lessons. Lamentations speaks of grief and loss; in Corinthians Paul alludes to a theme he more fully develops in Philippians. In 2nd Corinthians Paul says of Christ “that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor.” In Philippians he adds that

…Though [Christ] was in the form

of God,

[He] did not regard equality

with God

as something to be exploited,

but emptied himself,

taking the form of a slave,

being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form,

he humbled himself

and became obedient to the

point of death–

even death on a cross. (Phil 2:5-8)

And in Mark’s Gospel there are two stories intertwined, both deeply concerned with death and disease.

The importance of death can be seen throughout the history of the church. If we were to travel to Europe, we’d see that at the center of many of the oldest cities from the middle ages there are cemeteries. Before they built churches, those Christian communities dug graves. In this they followed the custom of the earliest Christians. In the first 200 years of Christianity, where that faith was not legally permitted, Christians gathered mostly not in churches (neither in large public spaces nor in private homes) but in the catacombs, in the underground places where they had buried their dead.

One of the most genuinely shocking developments in the emergence of the Christian faith–something that marked Christians as, really, repulsively different–is that they did not shun their dead. For Christians the dead were not treated as unclean. This made their faith an anathema to both the “secular” and “religious” culture from which it emerged.

On the surface, of both our Scriptures and history, death seems to be very much part of God. So, then, in what sense can can the author of Wisdom mean that in God there is no death?

Okay, let’s put a pin in that for a moment so that I can say, Good morning! One of the things I love about church is that it’s one of the few public places where both celebration and mourning are both perfectly at home. The Eucharist, which we will share together in a few minutes, most literally means “thanksgiving”. This is a joyful and celebratory place! A place for laughter, high spirits, and warm fellowship. But also it’s a place where sadness is not suppressed. Sadness and lamentation, sometimes, is not a byproduct of church but an essential theme. Not something we shy away from but take in full measure. Some Sundays–even joyful days like today, my first day of worship with you all–are marked by readings focused on death. I mean, what can you do but smile!

This is the power of our scriptures and the power of our tradition. And it is tensions like these that have drawn me to ministry. In God there is no artifice. The Gospels cannot be reduced to simple catchphrases. Jesus pushes his disciples to see past their religious presuppositions and to see the complicated, often paradoxical, nature of their faith. That faith is best understood as something pulled in different directions. Something in tension. A wrestling with God and God’s creation. Something full of joy but also, because it is deeply engaged in the harsh reali...

Matthew Richardson preaches Year B, Proper 7