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Sermons 1998
The Rt. Rev. John T. Cahoon, Jr. |
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Sermons 1998
The Rt. Rev. John T. Cahoon, Jr. |
Holy Innocents, December 28, 1997
This morning we move away from the familiar scene of Jesus' birth to the bloody aftermath which it caused. The angels told the shepherds on Christmas Eve: "Unto you is born this day in the city of David a savior, which is Christ the Lord." In other words, "The real king for whom we have been hoping and praying is now, finally, among us. We have been expecting the Messiah to be like the great King David; this baby is off to a proper start, because he has been born in royal David's city."
But anyone who was satisfied with the situation in Israel as it was already would not perceive the birth of the true king as good tidings of great joy. The gospel lesson for today's feast of the Holy Innocents tells us what happened when the news of Jesus' birth reached the person who had the most to lose because of it.
The king of Israel at the time of the birth of Jesus was named Herod -- usually styled "Herod the Great." His claim to legitimacy as king rested more on his family's alliance with the Caesars in Rome than on his descent from the historic monarchy of Israel.
As St. Matthew tells it, wise men from the east saw a star which indicated to them that a new king had been born in Israel. They came, quite naturally, to Herod's court to ask him where the baby was. Herod, of course, knew nothing about the birth.
His advisors told him that the Hebrew prophets said the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem, near Jerusalem. Herod gave that information to the wise men and asked them to come back and tell him where exactly in Bethlehem they had found the baby. He told them he wanted to worship the child, but he really wanted to kill him.
God warned the wise men not to go back to Herod, and he also appeared in a dream to Joseph, who seemed to be the new baby's father. God warned Joseph about the threat from Herod, and he told him to take his family into safety in Egypt.
When Herod realized that the wise men had double-crossed him, he gave orders that every boy baby in or near Bethlehem who was two years old or younger be killed. When that was accomplished, Herod figured he was safe from any threat to his throne that might come from a newborn -- and possibly more legitimate -- king. Not at all a pretty story.
How believable is it that someone would do such a thing? Nobody who has lived in the twentieth century should find Herod's use of brutality as public policy at all surprising. In his own time, Herod was not known as a great defender of family values. He was married ten times; he had at least one of those wives executed, and in the time just before the birth of Jesus he had three of his sons put to death for plotting against him.
To try to shore up his credibility in Israel, Herod also made some attempts to appear to be an observant Jew. His friend Augustus Caesar, who knew the several facets of Herod's personality, is said to have remarked, "I should rather be Herod's pig than his son."
The way St. Matthew presents the story of the slaughter of the Innocents shows his interest in connecting the story of Jesus to both themes and specific verses from the Hebrew Bible. God talks to New Testament Joseph in dreams. God talked to Old Testament Joseph in dreams. Jesus goes into Egypt and comes out again to escape sharing in the death of other babies. The whole people of Israel got out of Egypt because of the deaths of the Egyptian first-born.
The specific Old Testament prophecy to which Matthew ties the story is from Jeremiah. It reads, "in Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not."
That, quite obviously, echoes the mournfulness of the entire event - especially for the parents of the Innocents themselves. Rachel was the second wife of Jacob and the mother of Old Testament Joseph. She died giving birth to Benjamin, and she was buried along the road between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. The wise men would have passed her tomb on their way to see Jesus, and Herod's death squad would have passed it as well on their way to and from the slaughter.
Rama was the place where the people of Israel demanded that God give them a king a thousand years before. The establishment of a monarchy turned out to be disastrous. It lead to the separation of the tribes of Rachel's sons, Joseph and Benjamin, and to the dynastic tensions that made Herod kill the babies -- two things over which Rachel could be said, poetically, to weep.
Rama was also the place from which exiles from Israel left and from which people were deported. Talking about Rama summons up the depressing history of Israel's defeats and humiliations and the scattering of her people throughout the world.
But it is precisely into this depressing, brutal mess that the Son of God comes. He comes to give it meaning, and he comes to give it hope. The up and down history of Israel represents the up and down character of our own lives. God sent Jesus to straighten Israel out. God sends Jesus to straighten us out. "O holy child of Bethlehem/ Descend to us we pray/ Cast out our sin and enter in/ Be born in us today."
Christmas Eve, December 24, 1997
One of the first things we did when we bought this church building last year was to get rid of the sign which used to be on the front lawn. The Alexandria city fathers had shown us a thick manila folder containing letters which complained about it. They promised us that the neighborhood would love us if we just trashed the sign.
Nobody in the congregation who expressed an opinion on the subject seemed to have any argument. The sign was, not to put too fine a point on it, tacky -- tacky in a shiny, back-lit, moveable letters, titles of sermons sort of way.
We didn't think it said what we wanted to say about ourselves. So we got ourselves an eminently tasteful sign -- tasteful in a traditional, understated, semi-colonial, Anglican sort of way.
The whole experience has made me hyper-conscious of church signs. I am much more inclined than I ever was before to look at them, and pass esthetic judgment on them, and meditate upon what they express about what goes on inside the church building. I generally subscribe to the idea that the medium is the message. Churches tell who they are by the way they present themselves.
One of the churches I pass by quite frequently houses a Baptist congregation which meets in a trim and attractive converted tract house. It has a version of the kind of sign which used to be here -- exactly the sort we would have got rid of.
But sometimes the message is the message. The message on the Baptist sign when I passed it last week read in bold, though moveable letters, "The baby in the manger is God." The baby in the manger is God.
If you can accept the idea that a church's sign points to what a church is like, then let me suggest to you that Jesus is the sign of God. Jesus reveals what God is like. God is a person. We are excited tonight because he starts his life on this earth off with all the sense of hope and new possibility the birth of any baby brings.
The married couple in the stable at Bethlehem and the shepherds abiding in the fields nearby were products of the most sophisticated religious culture in the history of the world. They lived a religion which was shaped and ordered by direct contact with God himself.
The problem with their God was that they could not get their hands on him. He spoke and he acted and he moved, but he never stayed around. Contact with him was unpredictable. They were so afraid of looking as though they even thought they could control him that they couldn't say his name -- let alone draw his picture or sculpt his form.
It was a rich and powerful system, but it didn't finally work. What was missing was not a sense of God above us and greater than us. What was missing was a sense of Emmanuel, God with us -- with us to stay.
Jesus is Emmanuel. He has been with us since Bethlehem, he has never left us alone, and he is never going to leave us alone. St. Paul calls Jesus, "the image of the invisible God." He is the picture of the one who could never be pictured, he bears the name of the one who could never be named. Jesus himself says, quite simply, "He who has seen me has seen the Father."
0 come to us, abide with us, our Lord Emmanuel. Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel shall come to thee, 0 Israel. The baby in the manger is God.
Advent IV, December 21, 1997
John the Baptist is being interrogated by the authorities in this morning's gospel. His preaching in the Jordan River valley attracted a great deal of attention, and that was threatening to the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem. Their biggest worry was that John would use his popularity with the crowds to stir up trouble.
The trouble would likely come in the form of a rebellion against the Roman army which occupied Palestine. The Jewish leaders had made a deal with the Romans: as long as there weren't any armed insurrections, the Romans would let them practice their religion and not make them worship Caesar, the Roman emperor.
The effects of the general unpleasantness of living under an imperial colonizing power were intensified by a promise in the Jewish Bible. Their God had promised them that some day he would send someone to save them, and many Jews were hoping that day would come soon.
John the Baptist assured his questioners that he was not the one. Faced with the embarrassment of having to make some sort of report to their superiors, the priests and Levites demanded, "Tell us who you are." John replied, "I am the man about whom Isaiah wrote hundreds and hundreds of years ago. I am the voice who is crying in the wilderness, 'Make straight the way of the Lord.'"
There had been so many strange things about the conception and the birth of John the Baptist years before, that at his circumcision, the invited guests all asked, "What manner of child shall this be?" "How is he going to turn out?" "What is his destiny?"
A messenger from God had told John's father that he and his wife were going to have a son. That was arresting news, since they appeared to be too old to conceive. The news about the birth came along with a fairly specific description of what this unusual child was going to do.
Gabriel told him that John was going to fulfill the very last prophecy in the Hebrew Bible -- the promise that some day God would send someone like the prophet Elijah to reconcile both his people to him and fathers to their own children. By turning people's disobedient hearts to wisdom and justice, he would prepare them to meet God.
At his circumcision, John's father sang him a song in which he repeated what the angel had said: "Thou, child shalt be called the prophet of the highest, for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways."
So God set John the Baptist aside to perform a particular task for him even before John was conceived. His parents knew what it was, and he knew what it was. Yet in last Sunday's gospel we heard John wondering if he had played his vocation out properly, or whether he had been mistaken as to just who the Lord really was.
John was sitting in prison waiting to see if something more was going to happen. He probably couldn't even imagine how things would turn out for him: beheaded because he had offended a woman who knew how to make the most out of her husband's lusts.
It certainly seems probable that John died not knowing whether he had really done what God wanted him to do. He was executed before he could know what the drama in which he played a major role was all about or where he fit into it. That is why Jesus' eulogy for him was, "Among those that are born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist: but he that is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he."
This is pretty poignant and ironic material, it seems to me. God goes to all the trouble of having John conceived and born; he flashes across the stage of history for a very short time; and then he dies a death worthy of a supermarket tabloid -- while some pretty significant questions are left without answers.
I am trying to suggest that we have some good reasons to identify ourselves with John the Baptist. We all wander through life in a greater or lesser fog of puzzlement and uncertainty. Many of us die not terribly certain about what our life has meant -- if anything at all. John is just a dramatic and intensified instance of anyone who looks around himself and asks, "Is this all there is?"
What saves us from despair is what I think is one of the most reassuring promises the New Testament offers us. It comes, wouldn't you know it, from St. Paul. He agrees that in this world we see things as if they were appearing to us in a fun-house mirror -- everything is distorted and cloudy. We have a hard time making sense out of it.
St. Paul promises -- an Advent guarantee -- that at the end of the world we shall be able to see everything as clearly as God has seen it all along. "Now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."
John the Baptist will find out, finally, what it was really all about. So will I. So will you. That promise is the foundation stone of Christian hope. As one of my favorite hymns expresses it, "Through light and dark the road leads on/ Till dawns the endless day/ When I shall know why in this life/ I walk the King's highway." Then, not now. So "Rejoice in the Lord alway."
Advent III, December 14, 1997
One of the most important purposes of Advent is to remind us about the second coming of Christ. The Nicene Creed sums up what the Scriptures say about why Jesus is going to return: "He shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead."
When Jesus was about thirty, and it was time for him to come onto the stage of public history, it was St. John the Baptist who got people ready for him. The collect for the Third Sunday in Advent says that the bishops, the priests, and the deacons of the church are supposed to get people ready for his second coming by doing the same thing John did the first time. What John the Baptist did was to tell people to repent.
One of my favorite stories--which I run the risk of telling once too often -- concerns the time I visited a classmate of mine from college who was in the hospital. I hadn't had any contact with him since graduation, but I saw his name on the hospital census, so I thought I'd drop in.
He wasn't in any particular danger, so we got to talking, and finally he said to me, "I don't envy you your job." If he had meant, "it must be sort of a drag to have to make idle chit-chat with Yuppie unbelievers who are dressed in hospital gowns," I might have agreed. Instead, he said, "I'm sure it's very hard to spend all your time telling people how to be good."
The Holy Ghost spoke right up, and he used my mouth to reply, "I spend very little time telling people how to be good. My job is to tell people what to do about the fact that they are not good."
That conversation shows us two different views of what the judgment of Christ is all about. It is natural to think that the way Jesus is going to judge you is to show you the big scorecard he has been keeping of all the good things and all the bad things you have done during your whole life. People with a favorable ratio of good to bad will go to heaven; people with not enough good to outweigh the bad will go to hell.
That is a simple and perfectly rational way to look at it. And if that is the way judgment is going to be, then it is very important to rack up the good deeds--and it is perfectly reasonable to think that the ordained ministry should get people ready for judgment by being goodness coaches-personal trainers in the art of doing good and avoiding bad.
But if we use John the Baptist as our model we will see that that view of the judgment is wrong. The first thing John said was not, "Be good," but, instead, "Repent." To repent is to admit that you are a sinner, say you are sorry, and ask for God's forgiveness and for his grace to try to do better. John told people that if they really repented, their behavior would change. Following him, we see that the good works God is interested in are the ones that result from repenting.
The big secret about the last judgment which we see looming ahead of us in the future is that Jesus has made his judgment already. The verdict is already in. We don't have to wait until the judge calls the court to order to find out how the trial is going to come out.
The charge is sin, which is disobeying God's law in any way -- and the verdict is, "Guilty as charged." St. Paul puts it this way, "All have sinned and come short of the glory of God" -- all, everybody who has ever lived, even (heaven forbid) me.
The proper response to Christ's judgment is not, "I've been pretty good" but "I am sorry that I have not been good. And you died to forgive me." We ask God to accept us and love us, "Not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offenses."
The Prayer Book's Communion service gives us a weekly opportunity to act this out. Every celebration of Holy Communion is a practice session for judgment day. We hear God's law, and we know we haven't kept it. We hear God's word, and we know we haven't believed it or acted upon it. We hear the statement of belief God has given us, and we know we haven't let it interfere too much with what we thought already.
After all of that, I turn around and face you, and I invite people to come to Communion. Notice that I don't say, "Everybody who has obeyed the Law and kept the Word and lived by the Creed is welcome." The people who are welcome are the ones who repent of their sins and want the strength to try to do better in the future.
The message about Christ's judgment is good news for people who know what the judgment is all about. Jesus is not coming to judge us so he can send us to hell. He doesn't want anybody to go to hell--that is why he died on the cross. He judges us, because it is only when we face up to who we really are that he can save us and take us to heaven.
Jesus can't save the person who thinks he is good. He can only save the person who knows he isn't good and is sorry about it. So, if you want to be saved and you want to go to heaven, "Repent ye, for the kingdom of God is at hand."
Christianity is a religion of revelation. Revelation is something that is revealed -- shown or told -- to us by somebody else. In a religion of revelation the focus is not on us. Christianity does not claim to be the product of thousands of years of man's wisest thoughts and fondest hopes and noblest aspirations.
Christianity claims to be a body of information that God himself has shown us. Christianity is not a theory or hypothesis, Christianity is the truth. The truth remains the truth whether we accept it or not. God reaches out to us, and he reveals truth to us. Our understanding and our response are determined by our cooperation with the Holy Ghost.
The main way God has revealed the truth about himself to us in Jesus Christ. Jesus is God-become-man. The way we know God is in and through Jesus. Jesus himself says that the way we know him is through what he calls "the scriptures" -- the writings. He told his Jewish opponents, "Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life; and they are they which testify of me."
He was referring, of course, to the Hebrew scriptures -- what we call the Old Testament. Under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, the church regards Jesus' own scriptures and the writings about Jesus we call the New Testament as the chief sources of God's revelation. The Bible is the main way God shows himself to us, and tells us about himself and about how we can get into a proper relationship to him.
Our Anglican tradition places a high priority on the Holy Scripture. A man who seeks ordination according to our Prayer Book has to swear before God and the bishop that he is "persuaded that the Holy Scriptures contain all Doctrine required as necessary for eternal salvation through faith in Jesus Christ."
It is no secret that Bible study plays a large role in our life together in this parish. One of my goals in my work as a bishop is to make what happens here less the exception and more the rule among our congregations. The attendance at our Bible classes and the response to them is extremely gratifying. I can only assume that those of you who never attend the classes are studying diligently on your own at home.
Bible study is not an optional extra. If you want to have an ongoing relationship to Jesus Christ -- and it is hard to know what you are doing in church if you don't -- you need to be in constant contact with his word. If you do not know him as he reveals himself in the Bible, it will be that much more difficult to see him in the sacraments, and in your relationships to other people, and in the way he works in your everyday life.
The piece of Biblical revelation that today's gospel lesson gives us is the news that some day the world is going to end very dramatically. Jesus describes major disturbances in the sky and on the earth which will occur just before he comes back to earth in cloud and light. There is nothing in nature that would suggest that things are going to end that way. We only know it because he says so -- we know it by revelation.
Christians are going to have a big advantage when all of that begins to take place. People who haven't heard the revelation -- or who have decided to ignore it -- will participate in a collective nervous breakdown. Jesus says there will be "distress of nations with perplexity ... men's hearts failing them for fear."
Christians will not need to be distressed or perplexed or fearful, because we will know what is happening -- we got it from the revelation. Jesus tells us, "when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh." He means, "While the rest of the world tears its hair out, you can be calm, because you know that the end of the world is something to be happy about."
Jesus is going to come back. The dead are going to be raised up out of their graves in new bodies. We are all going to be judged. We are all going to found guilty of sin. Those of us who want to go to heaven will say, "Yes I am a sinner. But Jesus died to forgive me."
The people who choose hell will say things like, "I can't believe this is happening. My rector said it was all just symbolic;" or, "How dare you call me a sinner?" or, "I thought you were just kidding about going to church;" or "You're just being arbitrary;" or, "Let's look at all the good things I did." There is only one way to heaven, and it is through letting yourself be washed in the Blood of the Lamb. Only a revelation could tell you that.
I love the story of the distinguished professor of philosophical theology who was retiring after a long life of thinking and writing and teaching. After his last lecture one of his students asked, "What is the most important single thing you have learned in all of your years of study?" The professor replied without hesitating, "Jesus loves me. This I know, for the Bible tells me so."
I think one of the most pleasant customs we have in the church is birthday blessings. The birthday blessing calls attention to the individual Christian, which is always a nice ego-builder, and it is a way of the congregation's saying to him, "We are glad you were born, and that you have lasted this long." I also believe that when we have more than one birthday blessing on any given Sunday, the variety of the people who come forward proves conclusively that astrology is wrong.
One of the things we pray in the Prayer Book's birthday prayer is that God will, "bless and guide (this person) wherever he may be, keeping him unspotted from the world." The phrase "unspotted from the world" comes from tonight's epistle.
St. James is counselling against the besetting sin of religious people, which is phoniness -- hypocrisy. We see that sin most vividly, of course, in all the people around us. He says that one proof of a truly religious person is that he knows when to keep his mouth shut. Bad news.
St. James tells us that if somebody seems to be religious, but doesn't control his tongue, he is deceiving himself. That person's religion -- such as it is -- is vain -- empty. Truly credible religion, he says, consists of visiting orphans and widows -- and keeping oneself unspotted from the world.
I shall never forget a birthday blessing I bestowed in the state which shall be nameless where I spent most of the earlier part of my ministry. The young woman in question was the daughter of our Senior Warden, and we were at the height of the punk period twelve or thirteen years ago.
She was a natural blonde like her mother, but she had shaved half of her hair off and had dyed the other half absolutely black. She wore stark white makeup for a hint of contrast, and from the ear below the shaved half of her head dangled an earring which was a sizeable black rubber rat.
As she knelt before me for her birthday blessing, I couldn't decide whether to gag or to break out laughing when I hit the phrase, "keeping her unspotted from the world." Almost predictably, she has turned out just fine, and she works quite successfully in the wonderful world of fashion design.
The thanksgiving connection to all this has to do with the requirements for a sacrifice that God will accept. The service of Holy Communion is a series of sacrifices -- we offer money, we offer bread, we offer wine, we offer prayers -- and we put them on the altar so God can make them perfect and give them back to us.
Then in the consecration prayer we first represent Jesus' sacrifice on the cross of Calvary in the forms of bread and wine, and then we sacrifice ourselves. We join our sacrifice of our selves to his sacrifice of himself, as we ask God to use our souls and bodies as he wants to use them.
In the Law of Moses God required that the animals the Hebrew people offered him in sacrifice be without spot -- no deformities or obvious imperfections were allowed. Those animal sacrifices were pointing ahead to Jesus' sacrifice. His spotlessness is not so much an outward matter as an inner one. His claim to be an unspotted sacrifice is his moral perfection -- his sinlessness.
The purpose of many of the Old Testament sacrifices was propitiatory. That means the sacrifices were intended to turn away God's wrath and to try to buy him off so he would overlook what people had done wrong. Jesus' death brought the need for any such sacrifice to an end. He is, as St. John says, the propitiation for our sins.
Christians sacrifice not to propitiate God, but to thank him. When we offer ourselves in sacrifice, it is not because we are afraid of what God will do to us if we don't. We make our sacrifice of our souls and bodies to thank God for what he has done for us already.
The thanksgiving offering we make of ourselves is spotless not because we have achieved spotlessness -- or because we can ever be spotless. We are spotless, because Jesus shares his own spotlessness with us. Our sins are washed away, and we are made perfect in the blood of the Lamb.
So let us thank God for "our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but, above all, for his inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory."
My college roommate became fifty years old a couple of weeks ago, and I took him out to lunch to commemorate the occasion. He told me that the only interesting thing anyone had said to him about his hitting this milestone came from his doctor, who observed, not especially cheerily, "Well, at least now you know in which half-century of your life you are going to die."
One of the consequences of the fall of Adam and Eve is our surrender to the relentless tyranny of time. Adam and Eve were created to live forever, and God provided everything they needed. They didn't have to be in a hurry to do anything.
God punished them for their disobedience by sentencing them to die. It seems to me that with that sentence came the consciousness of the passage of time. If time is never going to end, its passing doesn't much matter. If our time is limited -- if we know that it is going to run out-then the passing of time matters very much. The passing of time marks our passage out of life and into the grave. Happy Advent.
In this morning's epistle, St. Paul places a very high premium on what he calls, "knowing the time." Knowing the time. Knowing the time involves, first of all, accepting the fact that you are indeed going to die. This life is not going to go on forever -- for you or for anybody else.
For a Christian, knowing the time involves knowing that death is not the end. No one gets out of this world that easily -- death will not bring obliteration, total unconsciousness. There is going to be a reckoning of your life after your life is over. As Hebrews puts it, "It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment."
What is the judgment going to be? God is going to measure us by the simple standard St. Paul articulates this morning, "Owe no man anything but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law." To love is to do what is best for the other person without considering your own selfish interests. If that is the standard, it should be obvious that we all fall short of attaining it.
So "knowing the time" means living in light of those undeniable
facts: we cannot escape the passage of time; we cannot escape death; we
cannot escape the judgment of God, we cannot escape his verdict of
"Guilty." So with that sobering message before us, what should we do?
Again we refer to St. Paul who tells us, "Wake up. Stop sleepwalking through your existence. Get real." "Now it is high time to wake out of sleep ... the night is far spent, the day is at hand."
Most reasonably respectable people don't walk around the next morning in the clothes in which we spent the night. St. Paul says that remaining in the sleepwalking, unaware, not-knowing-the-time frame of mind is like continuing to wear the less-than-presentable clothing of the night. He calls that clothing the "works of darkness," and he commands us to take it off.
When we take it off, we don't stay naked. We put on the armor of light. Putting on the armor of light means dressing up as Jesus. Jesus is the answer to the problems of knowing the time. Jesus has died already. Jesus has moved out of the limitations of time. Jesus lived a life of perfect love, so he receives the verdict of "Not Guilty."
God invites us to dress up as Jesus, because when we dress up as Jesus God looks at us as if we were Jesus. We share his victory over death. We share his perfect righteousness in the face of God's judgment. We share his eternal timeless life with the Father.
Knowing the time doesn't have to be depressing. Facing the realities involved in knowing the time opens you up to the one who is beyond time, but who came into time to break the tyranny of time. So, "Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof."
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