Eastertide Sermons, 2001 The Most Rev. John T. Cahoon, Jr. Metropolitan, Anglican Catholic Church Archbishop Ordinary, Diocese of the Mid-Atlantic States Rector, St. Andrew and St. Margaret of Scotland Anglican Catholic Church Alexandria, Virginia

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Easter IV, May 13, 2001
Easter III, May 6, 2001
Good Shepherd Sunday, Easter II, April 29, 2001
Low Sunday (Easter I) April 22, 2001
Easter Day, April 15, 2001

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Easter IV, May 13, 2001

This morning we continue to look at what Jesus said to his disciples at the Last Supper. Last week he said that the disciples' sorrow when he goes away from them is going to be as difficult as labor pains are. The disciples will suffer, but their suffering will turn into joy, just as all of our own suffering will turn into joy at the end of the world.

Today his focus is on what the Holy Spirit will do when he comes to earth. We need to be clear on the fact that "Holy Spirit" and "Holy Ghost" are absolutely equivalent expressions and mean exactly the same thing. "Ghost" is Anglo-Saxon and "Spirit" is Latin, and they both mean "breath" or "wind."

You know someone is alive, because you can discern that he is breathing. So the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit is the life force of God -- the evidence that he is alive and present with his people here on earth. Jesus says that the Holy Ghost is like the wind. You can see the evidence of the wind's activity, but you cannot see the wind itself. When Jesus sent the apostles out to forgive sins in his name and so extend the experience of the resurrection into time, he breathed on them.

At any rate, Jesus tells them this morning that that there are three specific things the Holy Ghost will reveal to the world. Since we are two thousand years into this process of revealing, they should be things we recognize and understand.

First of all, the Spirit will show the world what sin really is. Jesus says that all sin comes from not believing in him. If you believe in him you will trust him, and if you trust him you will do what he wants you to do. Sin is not doing what he wants you to do.

Second, the Holy Ghost will show them where true righteousness comes from. Jesus says that his ascension will prove to the world who was right in the great debate between himself and the Jewish leadership. When he goes back to his Father in front of the disciples, there will be no doubt that he is who he said he was -- God himself. Faking an ascension into heaven would be impossible.

Third, the Holy Ghost will reveal to the world Jesus' judgment on the devil. The greatest power the devil has over us is to make us afraid to die. Jesus' resurrection shows us that we don't need to be afraid to die. What happened to him will happen to us, because we are part of his body.

Jesus' victory over sin and death for our sakes is what the church proclaims until he comes again. The Holy Ghost is the one who leads the church and helps the church make that proclamation.

The things Jesus tells the disciples the Spirit will do are things we know he has done for the past two thousand years. The truths the spirit was going to reveal are in fact the things he has revealed. The church has lasted all this time teaching the very same things.

What we mean when we say we are a catholic and apostolic church is that we have remained faithful to all of the things Jesus taught the disciples, and we have responded to the Spirit as he has led us into deeper understandings of those truths. The Holy Spirit cannot and will not change his mind. Churches which do not remain faithful to the basic deposit of truth in the Bible are not to be taken seriously as Christian churches at all.

Jesus goes on to say, "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth." The best way to begin to understand what he is talking about is to remember that when he went back to heaven, the church did not have many of the things we now take for granted. There were no creeds, no settled form of church government, no New Testament, no clarity about the sacraments, no prayer books, no hymnals, no altar guild manuals, no canon law.

The church developed all of those things over time. We believe the Holy Spirit helped guide the church to make the right decisions. For the first thousand years of the church's existence it was undivided. During that time it was at least theoretically possible for all of the bishops of the church to meet.

Getting the bishops together to decide important issues followed the practice in the Book of Acts. There all of the apostles got together to decide whether gentiles had to become Jews before they could become Christians. When the apostles came to a unanimous agreement, they wrote a letter about it to the whole church which began, "It seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us..."

It was at a series of such meetings of bishops -- which we call ecumenical councils -- that much of what we take for granted got worked out -- such things as the creeds, the list of books in the Bible, and the government of the church by bishops. We accept the decisions of the ecumenical councils, because the Holy Ghost was leading the bishops into all truth as Jesus promised.

The existence of the catholic and apostolic church two thousand years later testifies to what Jesus promised. The persistence of the church is evidence of the resurrection of Christ. Human beings could not have kept the church going alone. That is why Jesus says, "It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you."

During the last few Sundays in Eastertide, there is a shift in the focus of our gospel lessons. We are beginning to look away from the resurrection of Jesus and on to the next two great events in his life and on our calendar. They are his ascension into heaven and then, ten days later, his sending the Holy Ghost down to the church at Pentecost.

This morning's gospel is taken from the long speech Jesus gives to his disciples during the Last Supper in the Gospel according to St. John. He is trying to prepare them for the fact that he is going to go away from them for awhile, but then they are going to see him again.

Until the Holy Ghost actually comes down, the disciples don't usually understand too much of what Jesus tells them. What he says is pretty much incomprehensible when they first hear it, but then later on -- helped out by the Spirit -- they remember what he told them, and it begins to make sense.

Here he says that in a little while they will not see him, and then again in a little while they will see him again. He is referring to two sets of events. The first one is the little while between Maundy Thursday night and Good Friday afternoon when they don't see him after he goes into his tomb. That is followed by the little while between Friday and Sunday, when they see him again when he rises from death.

The second set refers to the little while between Easter and Ascension -- the forty days when he is with them before he goes back to heaven and they don't see him any more. And then we have the little while between the Ascension and his coming again -- a little while which has lasted nearly two thousand years so far.

It is also possible that Jesus is referring to the little while -- the ten days -- between Ascension and Pentecost. On Pentecost the disciples see him again not in the flesh but through the Spirit -- in the Scriptures and the Sacraments and the fellowship of the Church.

In any event, they don't know what he is talking about, and they ask each other -- "What is he saying? We don't get it." He tells them, "Here is how it is going to happen: you will be sad, but the world will be glad. They will be happy that I am dead, but you will be sorry. They will be glad again when I leave this scene permanently, and you will cry about it."

But one of the facts about God is that he never lets the people he loves suffer forever. There is always an end to it. Suffering ends in peace, sorrow always gets turned into joy. You have to be patient with God and hang in there with him trusting that he is going to make it all come out right -- and, in fact, he always does.

Jesus supports that contention with the image of a woman in labor. Labor hurts, but it never goes on forever. It always ends. And the end of labor is accompanied by such joy about the new baby that the woman who has labored forgets her pain in the midst of her new happiness. One might ask, "What does he know, he was never pregnant?" but he was the one who set the whole system up.

Jesus' more general point here is that life in this world is like being in labor all the time. We have the sense within ourselves that this world is not our last destination. We are anxious to be somewhere else -- heaven. And waiting for heaven to break into our lives is painful -- the pain of it can be likened to the pains of a woman in labor. That is an idea that comes up quite frequently in the Old Testament prophets.

His ultimate point is that when we are in heaven with him, we aren't going to be as conscious as we are now of the pains and sufferings and general cussedness of our earthly existence. We are going to have bodies that can't get sick or get old. We are actually going to love everybody with whom we come into contact -- an astounding thing to look forward to.

And we are going to be consistently and consciously in God's presence. No more rising gas prices, no more maddening relatives and fellow workers, no more cell phones, no more needing to strive to make contact with God.

Jesus tells the disciples to trust God -- especially when they are in the midst of situations which are painful and unpleasant and uncomfortable. He says the same thing to us. We can put up with anything if we wait expectantly and confidently for his coming again, when he will raise us up from our graves and take us to heaven to be with him forever.

Jesus' closing words in today's gospel acknowledge the fact that we suffer in this world, and they give us the guarantee of a far better future. They are enormously helpful words to hold onto.

"A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world. And ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart will rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you."

The Collect. Almighty God, who showest to them that are in error the light of thy truth, to the intent that they may return into the way of righteousness; Grant unto all those who are admitted into the fellowship of Christ's Religion, that they may avoid those things that are contrary to their profession, and follow all such things as are agreeable to the same; through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Epistle. i Peter ii. 2.

The Gospel. St. John xvi. 16.

Easter II, April 29, 2001 ("Good Shepherd Sunday")

Today, the Second Sunday after Easter, is Good Shepherd Sunday, bringing with it the focus on the Biblical imagery of shepherds and their sheep. Concern with sheep is an alarmingly contemporary matter also.

One of the enduring images of my trip to England will always be the video tapes of the funeral pyres of thousands of sheep who are thought to be suffering from foot and mouth disease. Sheep are dying in droves in England, and that fact is affecting the national economy and the national temper. Going back a couple of years, we see the sweet stupid face of Dolly the sheep as the icon of the oncoming global crisis over cloning.

Sheep appear in the Bible first in the fourth chapter of Genesis, which describes Adam and Eve's son Abel as a "keeper of sheep." Abel looks good by comparison with his farmer brother Cain, but Abel pays for his superiority with his life. That begins the rather curious Biblical connection of sheep with death.

Ancient Israel was a nomadic culture, and its economy was based in large part on shepherding. That is why so many important Old Testament figures are shepherds -- the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Amos the prophet, for example.

The most prominent shepherd is also the most prominent Old Testament character of all, King David. David comes to public notice in Israel when he uses his sheep-guarding skills to kill the Philistine champion Goliath with a slingshot.

We also know David as Israel's greatest songwriter. The psalms which he composed probably grew out of the songs he played on his harp while he spent long periods in the fields with his sheep.

Over time, the relationship between the shepherd and his sheep became a poetic way of talking about the relationship between God and his people. The Hebrew Bible describes God taking care of his people and leading them and keeping them out of danger and feeding them and getting them back onto the right track when they wander off -- all the things a shepherd does for his sheep.

God shared his shepherding responsibilities with the leaders of Israel --especially her priests and kings -- but they were not as good at it as God was. They looked at their sheep as objects to be exploited rather than as creatures to be tended lovingly. God promised that some day he would send Israel a proper shepherd who would do right by them.

The promise of a good shepherd to make up for the bad shepherds was like the promise of a good king to take the place of the bad kings and a good priest to take over from the bad priests. All of these roles are fulfilled at the same time in Jesus. In today's gospel he says, "You have been waiting for a good shepherd to come along and do what God promised in the Old Testament. I am the good shepherd."

The section of a somewhat longer speech which the Prayer Book appoints this morning contrasts Jesus the good shepherd with a hireling or hired man. The shepherd will risk his life for the sheep because they belong to him. A hireling will run away when danger comes, because the sheep are not his -- he has no personal stake in them.

That gives us a test for the quality of leadership. How far is any leader --whether of a family or a church or any other sort of organization -- how far is the leader willing to go to promote the welfare of the people for whom he is responsible? Jesus paid the ultimate price for us when he died on the cross.

One of our hymns says, "Lo, the Good Shepherd for the sheep is offered." And in this morning's epistle St. Peter points out that when Jesus the Good Shepherd gave up his life for his sheep, he did it without whining and complaining.

St. Peter says we should profit from his example, and try to act as he acted. Jesus had done nothing for which he deserved to suffer, but when he suffered he didn't complain about it. St. Peter says there is nothing remarkably wonderful about enduring suffering you deserve without whining about it. What is truly remarkable is to put up with suffering you don't deserve without complaining -- just as Jesus did.

What enabled Jesus to put up with his undeserved suffering without complaining about it was his confidence that God could make everything come out right in the end. St. Peter says Jesus, "committed himself to him that judgeth righteously." Faith in God means confidence and trust that he will make everything come out properly in the end, no matter how unpromising things seem to be for the moment.

Good Shepherd Sunday comes in Eastertide to remind us of the connection between what God did on Easter and what God did for Israel at the Passover, with its sacrifice of a spotless lamb. But Good Shepherd Sunday comes in Eastertide also to underscore the fact that Jesus' death and resurrection is the supreme example of how much God loves us.

Sheep are cute and cuddly, but sheep are also stubborn and headstrong. God knows all that about us, and he loves us anyway. "For ye were as sheep going astray, but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls."

The Collect. Almighty God, who hast given thine only Son to be unto us both a sacrifice for sin, and also an ensample of godly life; Give us grace that we may always most thankfully receive that his inestimable benefit, and also daily endeavour ourselves to follow the blessed steps of his most holy life; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle.i Peter ii. 19.

The Gospel. St. John x. 2.

Easter I, April 22, 2001 ("Low Sunday")

No sermon; Archbishop Cahoon's visitation to the Diocese of the United Kingdom.

The Collect. Almighty Father, who hast given thine only Son to die for our sins, and to rise again for our justification; Grant us so to put away the leaven of malice and wickedness, that we may always serve thee in pureness of living and truth; through the merits of the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle. i John V. 4.

The Gospel. St. John xx. 19.