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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. |
Sermons on this page:
Epiphany
Sermons
Today's gospel opens with these words, "When he was come down from the mountain" and goes on to describe two hearings. Jesus had been up on the mountain to deliver the longest sustained piece of his teaching the New Testament gives us -- the Sermon on the Mount. So as St. Matthew presents the beginning of Jesus' public ministry, the first thing he does is teach and the second thing he does is heal.
After I was ordained in the Episcopal Church I worked as an assisting
priest in three parishes. In the first and the third -- which were,
perhaps not coincidentally, the more socially prominent ones -- there were
no healing services and no public laying-on of hands.
We did have a healing service in the second parish, but to avoid
embarrassment it was safely conducted not on Sunday morning. The rector
always assigned me to do that service, because, as he said, I "seemed
to be interested in that sort of thing."
I almost always read today's gospel at the healing service. That was
partly because it appeared so prominently at the start of Jesus' ministry
and emphasized how important healing was to him. It was also because the
gospel contains two hearings which are different from one another in two
ways. In one Jesus heals a Jew and in the other a Gentile. In the first he
heals directly by laying on his hand, and in the other he heals from a
distance.
We conclude from all that both that Jesus can heal anybody and
everybody and that he can act either through direct touch or at some
remove. That is why I don't check anyone's ethnic identity card before I
am willing to lay my hand on him in Christ's name at the altar rail, and
why we also pray for Jesus to heal people who are not right here.
I have told you before that I find this parish's receptivity to the
healing ministry to be one of the most rewarding things about being here.
It is fascinating to observe the effect of our unashamed -- though
perfectly decorous -- administration of healing on Sunday mornings. I
don't just mean the effect on the people for whom we pray, I also mean the
effect on the people who watch.
The second person who asks Jesus for healing in today's gospel is a
centurion -- a Roman commander of one hundred men. He isn't sick himself,
he is concerned about his servant who is lying at home paralyzed. When
Jesus says he will come right over, the centurion says the familiar words,
"Lord I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof, only
speak the word."
The centurion recognizes that he and Jesus have something in common,
even though Jesus is not wearing any sort of uniform. The centurion knows
he operates in a hierarchy. He is under authority himself, and he has
authority over other people who do what he tells them to do. The centurion
implies that Jesus operates within a hierarchy, too. He obeys his heavenly
father, and the spirits which produce such things as paralysis are subject
to him.
What he says reaches Jesus as not much else ever does. Jesus responds, "I
have never seen as much faith among my own people as I see in this
Gentile. And this centurion is not the only Gentile who gets into the
kingdom of heaven ahead of the people God chose in the first place."
Last Tuesday we buried Col. E.G. Van Orman. I had known Van off and on
for nearly twenty years -- not a quarter of his long life -- but quite
well for the past eight years. Van was a retired colonel in the Marine
Corps. I won't soon forget the first time I talked to him after the
assistant secretary in the Defense department had made her ill-advised
recent remarks about the Marines. I said, "Hey, Van Orman, are you an
extremist?" He replied perfectly in character, "Hell, yes, I am."
But I also won't soon forget how this same man stood at the altar rail
every Sunday morning for several years to receive Holy Communion and the
laying on of hands for healing. He believed with all of his being that it
was through that brief moment of nourishment and touch that Christ was
keeping him alive. So he would stand at the rail after I had prayed, and
say, "Thank you God, thank you, God."
I laid my hand on him just a few hours before he died, and though he
was not exactly conscious, he raised up his head and writhed his body
around in response. I think God answered that prayer for healing
positively just as he had answered all the other ones. We didn't run out
of miracles. Van's final healing just took a different form.
After all Jesus promises us what he promised the centurion two thousand
years ago -- "as thou hast believed, so be it done unto thee."
And his servant was healed in the selfsame hour.
Conversion of St. Paul, January 25,
1998
I arrived in California to attend seminary in the fall of 1968. The
diocese there was presided over by a bishop named C. Kilmer Myers -- who
would, about ten years later, defrock me from the priesthood of the
Episcopal Church. Bishop Myers had been elected in 1966 to succeed the
legendary James A. Pike.
Bishop Pike was a brilliant and charismatic and controversial
character. He had resigned as Bishop of California because of personal
problems, but he continued to challenge theological orthodoxy during his
very noisy retirement. He denied such central Christian doctrines as the
Trinity, the Resurrection, and the Virgin Birth, and then he dared the
House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church to try him for heresy.
Both because many of the bishops secretly agreed with him and because
they were afraid of the beating Pike the showman might give them in the
press, the bishops declined to charge him. The then Presiding Bishop was
quoted as saying, "Heresy is an outmoded concept."
Of course, if heresy is an outmoded concept, so is orthodoxy. The way
the Episcopal Church dealt with Bishop Pike was the turning point in
making the existence of our church necessary. The various reasons we left
the Episcopal Church -- Prayer Book revision, ordination of women, sexual
confusion, creedal chaos -- all flow from the idea that heresy is an
outmoded concept.
Today is the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul. I would argue that
except for the events of Jesus' life which we recite in the Creed, St.
Paul's conversion is the most important single event in human history. The
moment at which St. Paul saw the light and heard the voice of Christ as he
traveled to Damascus to arrest Christians marked the effective birth of
the Christian church.
God set for St. Paul the task of taking a small sect of Jews who
believed that their saviour had come to earth as a carpenter in an outback
of the Roman empire, and making it into an international and inclusive
religion. When St. Paul crossed from present-day Turkey into present-day
Greece, Christianity came to Europe for the first time. The visits he made
and the letters he wrote produced Western civilization.
I want to tell you about two of my favorite of Bishop Pike's many
delicious pronouncements. The first is "I don't believe in a God who
tinkers." Though dressed up as a prince of the church, Bishop Pike
rejected the idea that God is the sort of crude fellow who would stick his
nose into human history and change things around.
Such a God would not only not have reached in and converted St. Paul,
he wouldn't have come to earth in the womb of a virgin either. Not only
does this view reject the Bible in its entirety, it is also a fairly
convincing argument against any form of prayer or worship at all. It has
been officially fine to think this way in the Episcopal Church for at
least thirty years. Can anyone think we are here just for snobbish reasons
of taste or because we are too inflexible to accept change?
The second of my favorite Pikeisms -- one more directly connected to
today's point -- is, "St. Paul was wrong about sex." "St.
Paul was wrong about sex." I hold the opinion that St. Paul was right
about sex -- and about everything else he addressed. That is not because I
have evaluated St. Paul's teaching and find that it squares with my
notions of what is true.
I believe that St. Paul is right, because I accept the judgment of the
first apostles and the fathers of the early church who teach that St. Paul
speaks with the authority of God. St. Paul's teaching about sex and all
the other topics about which he concerns himself are not things Christians
are free to make up their own minds about. To reject St. Paul is to deny
the work of the Holy Ghost.
Churches which promote the ordination of women and the ordination and
marriage of practicing homosexuals obviously agree with Bishop Pike that
St. Paul was wrong about sex. People who remain members of such churches
-- no matter what their private opinions may be -- give at the very least
their quiet approval. I'd rather be here.
Many of the great revolutions in the history of the church have become
necessary because the church is always losing its moorings in St. Paul's
teaching. The revolutions rediscover St. Paul and bring him back to his
central position as the one who explains to us who Jesus is; what life in
the Spirit is all about; and what the Father is up to.
St. Andrew and St. Margaret stands as an outpost of that revolution in
our own day. Nothing could be more important. Let us rededicate ourselves
and our lives together to what is expressed in the words of today's
collect, "that we having St. Paul's wonderful conversion in
remembrance, may show ourselves thankful unto God for the same, by
following the holy doctrine which he taught."
The special epiphany -- the particular showing up -- in this morning's
gospel takes place at the baptism of Jesus. His baptism marks his coming
out onto the stage of history. For the previous thirty years he has, as
far as we know, lived a normal, quiet, private life in Nazareth. At his
baptism he becomes a public figure.
His baptism also shows us who he is -- just as it showed the crowd
which watched it. Jesus is, first of all, the end product of the ministry
of St. John the Baptist. John had told people that they needed to turn
away from their sins, because the Messiah of Israel was coming. The
baptism made it clear that the Messiah had arrived.
Jesus' baptism also shows that he is more than just another king in the
mold of David and from David's family tree. Jesus is God, as well as a
man. The Father speaks out of the sky to say so, and the Holy Ghost comes
down upon him in the form of a dove. That gives us, as they say, both
verbal and non-verbal cues.
Baptism is the first sacramental step in becoming a Christian. We
baptize not so much because Jesus was baptized, but because he tells us to
baptize. His last orders to the disciples included, "Go ye,
therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father
and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost." He also says, "Except a
man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom
of God." It could hardly be much clearer.
One of the essential messages of the season of Epiphany goes like this:
God manifested himself in the world through Jesus; Jesus manifests himself
in the world through us. "Us" is the church, which the Prayer
Book calls "the blessed company of all faithful people" and "the
body of which Jesus Christ is the Head and all baptized people are the
members."
The operative word that goes along with "church" is "people,"
not "building" or even "hierarchy of clergymen and rules."
Jesus is manifested in the world through the people who have joined
themselves to him in baptism and who live a life of faith. The world has
no way to know Jesus except through us. That should give us all something
to think about.
St. Paul gives us ideas about how to go about our task of showing Jesus
to the world. He says nothing about embarrassing people at cocktail
parties or about carrying placards. He is interested in suggesting
behavior that will make people who see you act that way want whatever it
is that makes you act that way.
One of St. Paul's basic teachings about baptism is that baptism makes
you part of the church, which is a body like a human body. Human bodies
have different organs and other mechanisms, each of which has something
specific to do to promote the health and general welfare of the whole.
Individual Christians have gifts which they are supposed to use for
everyone else's benefit -- not to call attention to themselves.
Whatever your own particular gifts may be, there are some things
everyone can do to help the body function in a healthy way and show Jesus
to the world as effectively as possible. They are simple things, all far
easier talked about than actually accomplished.
He says we should abhor evil and choose good -- so we have preaching
and teaching to help us know the difference. He says we should be kindly
affectioned one to another with brotherly love -- so we have coffee hours,
and classes, and other chances to socialize. He says we should be generous
and hospitable both to one another and to people outside the church --
today is food collection Sunday.
Besides these social, more interpersonal things, St. Paul says that the
way you conduct your individual life will be an advertisement for
Christianity, whether you know it or not. Your choice is whether you will
be an advertisement which attracts people to the church or repels them.
Are you happy and excited to be a Christian? Does your relationship to
Christ fill you with joy and hope, or are you negative and despairing and
bitter? Do you bear your own burdens and sorrows with patience, or are you
quick to lapse into despair and self-pity? Do you pray, and do you seek
the prayers of others?
Do you try to have a charitable and forgiving and understanding
attitude toward everyone else, or are you quick to criticize and feel
superior and complain that your interests are not being served? None of us
does these things as well as we might, of course. The scary thing is to
come into contact with people in the church who don't even try much.
Jesus' baptism was just a beginning -- a rich and dramatic and
earth-shattering beginning, to be sure, but a beginning nonetheless. We
are responsible for continuing the story -- for continuing to participate
in Jesus' epiphany -- his showing himself to the world. Once you have been
baptized and have committed yourself to him, there is no going back.
That is all just another way of asking yourself the old question, "If
you were on trial for your life, and the charge against you was being a
Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?"
Epiphany I, January 11, 1998
The word "epiphany" means "manifestation," "appearance,"
"showing up." Jesus shows up in this morning's gospel at the
temple in Jerusalem. He is supposed to be in a caravan of people heading
home to Nazareth after Passover. His disappearance has frightened his
parents into a frantic search. They find him finally in the temple where
he is debating theology with the chief Hebrew teachers. Jesus doesn't seem
to have much sympathy with their distress.
King Solomon built the temple in Jerusalem in about 1000 B.C. Tradition
says it sat on the spot where God called Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.
Solomon's temple was the only place in the world where the Hebrew people
could carry out the regulations about worship which God laid down for them
in the Old Testament. Hebrew worship revolved around sacrificing animals
-- offering them to God.
The New Testament's Epistle to the Hebrews explains the crucifixion of
Jesus in terms of the animal sacrifices. It says that Jesus' death on
Calvary was the sacrifice to which the animal sacrifices were pointing
ahead all along. By offering himself, Jesus made the perfect sacrifice, so
no more such sacrifices were necessary, and God didn't want them any more
either.
In this morning's epistle, St. Paul is talking about sacrifice. He
assumes we know about the connection between the Old Testament animal
sacrifices and the sacrifice of Jesus, so he takes that teaching and
connects it to us.
He says that Christians also have a obligation to sacrifice to God. We
are obliged to offer God our bodies. He writes, "I beseech you
therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a
living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable
service."
We may be called upon literally to give our bodies for God as martyrs
-- that is, actually die for him. That seems rather remote in tolerant
America, but the possibility remains. St. Paul defines our sacrifice in
somewhat broader terms. He writes: "Be not conformed to this world;
but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what
is that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God."
This kind of sacrifice involves having a new attitude. The new attitude
comes from looking at everything in terms of God, instead of looking at
everything from the self-regarding perspective which comes to us
naturally.
The new attitude involves asking such questions as, "What does God
want me to do here?" "What would the Christian response to this
situation be?" "How can I best serve the interests of this other
person?" "What is God trying to tell me by allowing this to
happen in my life?"
We talked during Advent about how the Prayer Book service of Holy
Communion puts us through what will happen to us on judgment day. We go
through the cycle of being convicted of sin, repenting, confessing,
getting forgiven, and experiencing new life connected to Jesus.
What St. Paul teaches about our sacrifice of ourselves is part of the
celebration of Holy Communion also. In the long Prayer of Consecration on
pages 80 and 81, we begin by representing the sacrifice of Jesus under the
forms of bread and wine -- just as he taught us to do.
After the Word and the Spirit have made the bread and wine his Body and
Blood, we join our sacrifice of ourselves to his sacrifice of himself. The
dramatic climax of the prayer comes when I say, for all of us, "And
here we offer and present unto thee, 0 Lord, our selves, our souls and
bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee."
The point of all this should be obvious. We can never transform our
minds -- that is, take up the new God-regarding attitude -- without help.
The power we need both to want to make that sacrifice -- and actually to
go ahead and do it -- comes from God.
That power flows from Jesus' sacrifice on the cross, and we literally
eat it and drink it at the altar rail. Later on we ask God to give us the
help we need "to do all such good works as thou hast prepared for us
to walk in." You can only do those good works after you have made
your own sacrifice -- the transforming of your mind, the offering of your
whole selves -- your souls and bodies -- to do what God wants you to do.
Hebrews places on the lips of Jesus the words of Psalm 40, which
summarize our point, saying, "When Jesus cometh into the world, he
saith (to his Father), 'Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not, but a
body hast thou prepared me: in burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin thou
hast had no pleasure. Then said I, Lo I come to do thy will, 0 God."'
Epiphany, January 6, 1998
The ancient world was, as St. Paul said, "very religious."
There were many gods and many religions and theological systems from which
to choose. We know that that is also pretty much the way things are now.
Little of substance in human life ever really changes.
The word "Gentiles" means, literally, "those born,"
"the nations," and came to refer to everyone who was not a Jew.
One of the major themes of the Hebrew Bible is the idea that someday
everybody -- Jew and Gentile alike -- will worship the God of Israel. The
prophets said such things as "Rejoice ye Gentiles with God's people,"
and "Praise the Lord (the God of Israel), all ye Gentiles."
Sometime in the future what appeared to be the tribal god of a not very
important Semitic people based in Palestine would be revealed as the one
true God of the entire universe. St. Paul and the other early Christians
saw that the way God chose to reveal this cosmic and earth-shattering fact
about himself was Jesus.
That insight came to St. Paul by a direct communication from God, as he
tells us in this evening's epistle. He says that God has told him a secret
which he had never revealed before. In St. Paul's own words, this is the
secret: "that the Gentiles should be fellow-heirs, and of the same
body, and partakers of his promise in Christ by the gospel."
What he means is that Gentiles don't just have to recognize that the
God of the Jews is the only God. In Jesus Christ Gentiles can now actually
become Jews -- they can get in on all the good things God had always
promised his chosen people. Now membership in God's chosen people is not
limited to the descendants of Abraham, it includes anyone at all who wants
to inherit the promises. Good news for us.
The Gentile wise men who come to see baby Jesus put flesh and bones on
the point the prophets made. "There shall come a star out of Jacob,
and a Scepter out of Israel;" "The Gentiles shall come to thy
light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising;" "The
multitude of camels shall cover thee, the dromedaries of Midian and Ephah:
all they from Sheba shall come: they shall bring gold and incense; and
they shall show forth the praises of the Lord;" all because, "There
shall be a root of Jesse, and he that shall rise to reign over the
Gentiles; in him shall the Gentiles trust."
Christmastide Sermons
Christmas II, January 4, 1998
Today's gospel starts where last week's gospel for the feast of the Holy Innocents ended. We left Joseph and Mary and their newborn son in Egypt. God told them to go there to escape the wrath of King Herod. Herod was so upset at the news that a new king had been born in Israel that he ordered the murder of every boy two years old or younger in Bethlehem and the surrounding territory.
God sent messages to Joseph in his dreams. As today's gospel opens, Joseph gets word that Herod is dead, and it is safe now to go back to Israel. St. Matthew spares us the report that Herod died of syphilis, and that he had had his eldest son and primary heir murdered just five days before he died himself.
The son who emerged the winner in the turmoil surrounding Herod's death was named Archelaus. Herod's will divided his realm three ways. As the oldest surviving son, Archelaus got the most attractive part -- the kingdom of Judaea where Jerusalem was. Archelaus distinguished himself early in his reign by the massacre of three thousand pilgrims who had come to the temple for Passover -- keeping up the family tradition.
So it is not surprising that when Joseph found out that Archelaus was ruling Judaea, he did not want to take his family there. He wound up in the town from which his wife had come -- Nazareth, far north of Jerusalem in the area near the Sea of Galilee.
St. Matthew says that the Holy Family settled in Nazareth so Jesus could be called a Nazarene. "Nazarene" seems to be some sort of play on either the word for root -- as in Jesus is the root of Jesse's stem -- or the word for watchman.
The point today is the same as the point last week. Jesus is born into real human history. His life on earth was not "once upon a time" or "long ago in a galaxy far away." We say in the creed that he was crucified under Pontius Pilate," not to give that foreign service bureaucrat special attention, but to fix the life and death of Jesus at a moment in time that we know about from outside the Bible.
During the time between Jesus' birth and his return to heaven, God was on earth in a very specific way. St. John says of his friend Jesus the God-made-man, "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled."
Jesus assured the disciples that the descent of the Holy Ghost would guarantee that they would not lose his presence or his power after he had gone back. We continue to hear his voice in the Bible. We continue to see him and look upon him in our fellow members of the church -- his body. Our hands are still able to handle him in the sacraments.
Those are the ways Jesus continues to be present in human history. I don't mean history in the limited sense of what we can read about in history books, I mean history in the sense in which we all have histories-things happen and the pattern of our lives unfolds through what happens.
The Prayer Book defines a sacrament as "an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace." So sacraments have two aspects -- the outward and the inward -- the material and the spiritual -- what you see and what you get. That idea about the sacraments comes directly from the message of Christmas -- that Jesus is God who has become man.
Jesus is himself the biggest sacrament of all. The outward and visible sign is his humanity -- his nature and his body, and the inward and spiritual grace is God. I quoted his pithiest saying on this point on Christmas Eve, "He who has seen me has seen the Father." Simple.
Self-righteous people often like to deplore Christmas for being "too material." It may make some sense to complain about advertising manipulation and commercialism and greed. But the fact is that the Christian message of Christmas is material.
The birth of Jesus is where the spiritual and the material finally come together. The Word of God becomes flesh. The spiritual and the material are no longer in competition. We can no longer assume that the spiritual is better than the material or that the material is better than the spiritual. In Jesus, the two become one.
We knew already that the material creation was good, because God made it, and he said it was good. Now we know even more how good it is, because God has become part of it, and he is going to stay part of it until he brings everything together in himself at the end.
The Epistle to the Hebrews puts it this way: "Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thy hands: they shall perish; but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment; and as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail."