This is the night in which he was betrayed. Reading from Psalm 41, "Yea, mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me." My own familiar trusted friend is the one who will betray me.

King David prophesied it, and Jesus echoed him all along, saying that it would be one of his friends who would betray him into the hands of the people who wanted him dead -- one of his twelve followers who had heard all his sermons and had seen all his miracles -- one of his disciples.

Judas received a payoff of thirty pieces of silver from the highest Jewish officials in exchange for a fairly simple and mundane piece of information. They were afraid they would bring on the wrath of the crowd if they moved against Jesus in public, so they needed to know where he was likely to go where they could arrest him away from the spotlight.

Judas knew that when he was in Jerusalem Jesus liked to pray in a garden on the Mount of Olives. On Thursday evening after the Passover supper, Jesus went, as predicted, to Gethsemane Garden -- the garden with the olive press. Judas took the temple police there and identified Jesus by kissing him on the cheek. Mine own familiar friend in whom I trusted.

Maundy Thursday is a night of ironies and reversals. A friend betrays a friend. The one who is betrayed gives his betrayer a piece of bread dipped in gravy -- which shows that the betrayer is the honored guest at supper. The betrayer identifies his friend to the police with the Universal signal of affection -- a kiss.

The happy Passover celebration turns to chaos as Jesus goes to jail and his friends run away. Obedient Jesus finally tells his father that he doesn't want to suffer and die. The disciple who professed the most love and loyalty sells Jesus out without thinking twice. The inner circle of three disciples all fall asleep when Jesus needs their support most.

It is in the midst of this stew of treachery and weakness that Jesus gives us the most powerful and objective evidence of his continuing presence among us and his abiding love for us. He says, "This is my body. This is my blood ... Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day."

The final irony of Maundy Thursday is that we turn against him and run away from him, and he still loves us anyway. He took the bread, on the night in which he was betrayed.

Palm Sunday, April 5, 1998

One of the givens of living in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, as I do, is that if you don't have cable or a satellite dish, you don't have television. It is just not possible to get anything more than one local station without artificial help.

If I were a more responsible person, I would probably tell you that the constraints of living there have helped me to give up television entirely. But I am what I am, and though I can assure you that I don't watch nearly as much television as I once did, I have cable nonetheless.

I came home from a trip recently to discover that our cable had expanded radically, and that we have stations now that we never had before -- not an unmixed blessing. Two of the new stations have a news discussion format, so they are deeply interested in polls -- polls about the President and polls about Congress and polls about "Titanic."

The ability to canvass public opinion quickly and in great detail is one of the obvious downsides of technology -- most of the poll results I see provoke only the question, "Who cares?"

We are very righteous about office-holders who seem to govern by polls, and politicians who calculate their positions on issues by what the polls tell them people want to hear. And somehow we come to think that leadership which is driven by public opinion is a very recent phenomenon.

But a good deal of the drama of Palm Sunday and Holy Week is tied up with the first-century equivalent of governing by poll numbers. What happened to Jesus on the last Sunday of his earthly life, and what happened to him over the next few days, and finally what happened to him on the day he died were all driven by what various people thought the crowd thought -- by public opinion. The mood of the crowd -- or at least the perceived mood of the crowd -- helped determine the actions of the Jewish leadership, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, and even Jesus himself.

Jesus shamelessly plays to the crowd on Palm Sunday. There are many extra people in Jerusalem who have come from all over the world to celebrate Passover in the holy city. Holiday crowds are always looking for some excitement.

The crowd has heard that Jesus might be the savior-king the Old Testament prophets had talked about. Jesus very purposefully manipulates the crowd's emotions by riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. He fulfills a prophecy Zechariah made hundreds of years before: when the true king of Jerusalem finally comes into his capital city he will ride a donkey. The donkey ride has the exact effect Jesus was hoping for -- the crowd cheers him as their king.

The Jewish leaders hated Jesus and wanted to kill him to shut him up. His popularity with the people threatened the cozy relationship the Jewish leaders had with the Roman occupying forces. If, God forbid, Jesus really were the Messiah, he would stir the crowd up further, lead an army against Rome, and generally cause enough upset that the leaders would be of no further use to the Romans and would lose their jobs.

Up until Friday, the Jewish leaders' reading of the crowd was, "They are on Jesus' side completely. The only way we are going to get away with arresting him is if we do it away from the crowd." Their opinion about the crowd's opinion led to the payoff to Judas who knew where they could arrest Jesus quietly, to the clandestine arrest Maundy Thursday night and the secretive trial Good Friday morning.

In fact the crowd's opinion about Jesus was changing as the week wore on. Jesus' poll numbers, as it were, were in free fall. The crowd expected armed rebellion, but Jesus gave them extra Bible study. The crowd demanded brutal combat, but Jesus gave them intellectual debate.

So by Friday morning the crowd was quite susceptible to the further manipulations of the Jewish leaders. They had, finally, turned completely against Jesus. They asked Pilate to release a small-time rebel named Barabbas rather than Jesus, whose ratings had been so high just a few days before.

When they were asked what they wanted done with the man who said he was their king, the crowd yelled -- "Kill him, get rid of him, crucify him" -- and then they laughed at him and made fun of him as he took up three hours of their valuable time before he died.

All Governor Pontius Pilate wanted to do was get back to his Mediterranean villa in Caesarea with a minimum of upset. He had no investment in the religious squabbles that seemed so important to the Jews, and he dismissed their leaders' case against crowd-pleasing Jesus.

When he realized that the crowd was, in fact, not with Jesus and that he would make a calm outcome far more likely by letting Jesus be executed, he said, "You go ahead and do it yourselves -- don't blame me."

Of course, Pilate did not have to go home with the crowd. He had to go home with his wife, and his wife had talked to him about Jesus, saying, "Have thou nothing to do with that just man, for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him." Pilate washed his hands.

In this depressingly human story, the crowd stands for us. We are not allowed to say, "If only I had been there, I wouldn't have betrayed Jesus -- I would have understood what he was really all about." But the fact is none of us would have understood any such thing. We are all just part of the large unthinking crowd of humanity, which on most issues -- even important ones -- just gets blown around by what we read and what we see on television and whom we want to impress.

When God allows something to happen that we don't much like, or when his actions puzzle us, or when he doesn't seem to be able to see how much better things would be if he just listened to us more -- then we turn against him just as the crowd did in between Sunday's "Hosanna," and Friday's, "Let him be crucified."

We are no better than that crowd. And that is exactly why Jesus "humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross." Jesus died for the fickle crowd. He died for us.

Passion Sunday, March 29, 1998

During my last year in seminary I bought a used copy of a book by C.S. Lewis called "Mere Christianity." I don't remember how much I really knew or cared about C.S. Lewis then. I had at least heard of him through my wife who had made me aware of his writings about medieval literature and his series of children's books.

I took "Mere Christianity" home and devoured it, and I remember that my first reaction was, "Why didn't somebody hand me this book the day I entered seminary?" I still do not know of a clearer or more direct presentation of the essentials of Christian belief. You don't need to be in seminary to understand it; in fact not being in seminary probably helps.

One of the most memorable sections comes when C.S. Lewis lays out the same issue that this morning's Gospel presents. His argument goes something like this: based on what Jesus says about himself in the New Testament, we are left with only three choices: either he is the devil -- the father of lies, or he is crazy on the level of a man who claims that he is a poached egg, or he is exactly who he claims to be.

If he is who and what he says he is, then everything about him is of infinite and eternal importance. If he is a liar or a madman, then he and the church he founded represent the most successful con game ever perpetrated.

In today's Gospel Jesus claims that he is God, not so much subtly or in an indirect fashion as baldly and absolutely in-your-face. Many New Testament scholars deny that he ever said any such thing. They say what we hear in St. John's gospel is part of the deceptive process by which a peace-loving gentle wandering first-century rabbi was made into a deity by his superstitious and paranoid followers.

But the Jesus of the Scriptures is the Jesus whom the church worships. We don't have available to us some other more rational less supernatural Jesus. Again, we are denied a safe middle-ground position. Liar, madman, or God are the only three choices he gives us.

The action in today's lesson is the end of an especially nasty exchange between Jesus and some of his Jewish opponents. The gentle accommodating Jesus that many people hope to find in the New Testament is notably absent from this story.

Jesus is argumentative and confrontational, and he baits his opponents into greater and greater levels of antagonism. They call him a devil and cast doubts upon the legitimacy of his birth. He tells these people -- who have made religion their profession -- that they don't have a clue to who God really is, and that every time they claim to know anything about God they are trapping themselves in a stickier web of lies.

They ask him in turn, "You say if people pay attention to you, they will never die. Who do you think you are? All of the greatest heroes of our religion are dead -- the prophets and Abraham -- do you think you are greater than they were?"

Jesus -- knowing full well that Abraham lived about two thousand years before the first century -- replies, provocatively, "Abraham was the happiest man in the world the day he met me." The crowd takes the bait and says, "You aren't even fifty -- how can you dare to say you met Abraham?"

Jesus closes the argument off by saying, "I am telling you the truth-before Abraham was, I am." He escapes the crowd which is ready to beat his brains out with rocks. Later on, after he says, "I and the Father are one," the crowd takes up stones a second time. Jesus is rather condescending to them again.

He says, "I have done quite a few good works among you -- for which of those good works do you want to kill me?" The crowd responds, "We don't want to kill you for your good works, we want to give you the proper punishment for your blasphemy. You, who are only a man, have tried to make yourself into God." Thou, being a man, makest thyself God."

The proper punishment for blasphemy under Hebrew law was stoning -- blasphemy was a capital crime. There is no doubt at all that Jesus was formally guilty of that crime. He uttered God's name -- I am, Yahweh; he applied the name to himself; and he said that he and the Father were one -- the same.

The passion of Jesus -- his suffering and death -- was not a mistake. On Good Friday, the Jews in the crowd who hate Jesus will tell Pontius Pilate, "We have a law, and by our law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God." The crowd may have thought he was both a liar and a madman, but they had no doubt about what he was claiming, and they didn't try to pass his claims off without responding to them.

The claims he made before the crowds in Jerusalem in the first century are the same claims he makes before us now. "Before Abraham was, I am." "if a man keep my saying, he shall never taste of death." And so he asks us exactly what he asked his disciples, "What do you think about me?" "Whom say ye that I am?"

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Lent IV, March 22, 1998

St. Paul asks the church in Galatia, "Tell me, ye that desire to be under the law, do ye not hear the law?" The problem he has with the Galatians is the same problem he had with his church in Rome. Some members of the congregation are Jews who have accepted Jesus as the Saviour of Israel. They are Christians in that sense, but they still regard themselves as Jews -- completed and fulfilled Jews, but Jews nonetheless.

Because they have made no real break with their past, they think they need to keep on following the entire Old Testament Law. The Jewish Christians also think that Gentiles who want to join the church should observe the whole Law, too.

This becomes a touchy and difficult issue -- especially for St. Paul who is a committed Jew, a highly-educated rabbi, and a man who first came to understand Jesus in Jewish terms. But he never wavers in saying that the coming of Jesus has changed everything -- especially the role of the law.

So St. Paul demands, "Tell me, ye that desire to be under the law, do ye not hear the law?" He means -- have those of you who think the law is so great thought about what the law really says? He goes on to make an elaborate argument based on the story of Abraham and his two sons.

His argument proves that the Old Testament itself says that God has something in store for his people that is greater than the law. So once you see that, St. Paul asks, why would you want to bring the law back?

The story of Abraham and his sons includes two consistent patterns in the way the Bible tells its story. One pattern is that a woman who was thought to be barren finally gives birth to a child. The second pattern is that a younger son turns out to be greater than the elder and eventually takes his place.

The list of barren women who turn out to be fruitful includes Sarah, Rachel, Hannah, Elizabeth, and the Virgin (though not necessarily barren) Mary. The list of brotherly reversals includes Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Esau and Jacob, Joseph and his brothers, and the brothers in the parable of the Prodigal Son.

These patterns are two ways of looking at the relationship between Judaism and Christianity -- between the Law and the Gospel, as St. Paul would put it. The barren Old Testament Law which could not bring man back to God gives birth to the fruitful work of Jesus and the Gospel. Christianity is, as it were, Judaism's younger brother, but Christianity surpasses Judaism and succeeds where Judaism failed.

The Epistle to the Hebrews contains a sentence which summarizes the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. "He taketh away the first, that he may establish the second." God takes away what he did first, so he can bring in something better.

That is why it is so important for us to understand the Old Testament and the Hebrew roots of Christianity. Knowing how wonderfully God worked in the history of the Jews helps us appreciate that what he has done for us in Jesus is even better. We can also come to see that even though we are not ethnically Jewish, we all retain some Jewish attitudes that St. Paul wants Christians to be free of.

The main such bad attitude is legalism -- being like the Pharisees. Legalism comes out in us whenever we think that the only way to get on God's good side is to be good -- to follow the Law or some other code of behavior we approve of and then take pride in how well-behaved we are and how lucky God is to have us on his side.

St. Paul says that the real purpose of the Old Testament Law is to show us that we cannot keep it. The proper attitude of a Christian is repentance -- sorrow for failing to keep the law, not boasting. People who like to focus on scrupulous rule-following are usually trying to say, "I am better than you -- I keep the law better than you do." Christians are supposed to compare ourselves to the Law -- not to one another.

The fact that God replaces Judaism's good things with Christianity's better things is a theme in today's Gospel as well. Jesus turns a little bread into a lot of bread and a couple of fish into many fish. Later in the same sixth chapter of St. John he gets into a discussion with the people who have eaten the miraculous supply of bread and fish.

They say, "God gave our forefathers manna in the wilderness -- what are you going to do for us (feeding five thousand of them miraculously doesn't seem to have been enough)?" Jesus replies, "Your forefathers ate the manna, but they all died later on. If you eat the bread I can give you, you will never die."

When they say, "Let's have some of that bread," he says, "I am the bread of life. Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you will not have eternal life in you." We are about to eat the bread and drink the cup of eternal life right here.

So, "Tell me ye that desire to be under the law, do ye not hear the law?" "He taketh away the first, that he may establish the second."

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Lent III, March 15, 1998

If you watch sports or other public events on television for long enough you will see someone who has the legend "John 3:16" emblazoned on his hat or on his shirt or on some sort of makeshift sign.

The sixteenth verse of the third chapter of the Gospel according to St. John reads, "So God loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, to the end that all that believe in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." So for us Anglicans, it would probably make more immediate sense if the T-shirt legend read, instead, "Second Comfortable Word."

As a one-verse summary of the Christian religion, John 3:16 works pretty well. Today's lessons are both about the devil's work, and (if you'll excuse the pun) in light of that fact, I want to take a look at what comes just after the sixteenth verse.

Jesus is speaking. He continues his argument by saying that God sent him into the world not to condemn it, but to save it. To "condemn" means to sentence to death.

What sentences the world to death is the law. When we measure our lives by God's law, we discover we have not kept it, and that provokes most justly (God's) wrath and indignation against us." What saves the world is admitting the truth about ourselves, saying we are sorry, and receiving forgiveness through the blood Jesus shed on the cross.

He goes on to say that the believer is not condemned, but the unbeliever is condemned already. In this context, believers are not people who think there is a God and that Jesus might just be special in some way. Believers are people who accept God's judgment upon them and then repent and claim forgiveness. God's condemnation remains upon unbelievers precisely because they refuse to accept the only way to escape it.

It is what Jesus says next that echoes today's Epistle particularly. I quote, "This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed."

So Jesus associates sin and evil with darkness and secretiveness and fear of exposure. When St. Paul talks about evil activities in today's Epistle he uses the same image, saying, "Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them."

The point both of them are making is that when we do bad things we want to hide them so we won't be found out. The basic pattern of sinful behavior is: first, do a bad and disobedient thing; then, try to cover it up by hiding it and rationalizing it; and, if that doesn't work, then blame it on somebody else -- and that pattern is as old as Adam and Eve.

Sin always has three parts -- action, cover-up, and blame-shift. But that pattern is the absolute antithesis of the character and the work of Jesus. He is Light of Light. He has come here not to reinforce our desire to cover things up and evade our responsibility, but, instead, to get us to bring everything up to the surface.

Jesus says, also in St. John, Chapter 3, "He who does what is true comes to the light, that it may be clearly seen that his deeds have been wrought in God."

He means that the more you can discipline yourself to look at yourself as objectively as God looks at you the better off you will be. When we really allow the light of Christ to shine on us, we see that the good things about us come from God, and that we can repent and be forgiven for the bad things. We cannot lose.

God's light shines on you whether you like it or not, and no matter how much you may fantasize about hiding the truth from him. He sees the whole truth about you very clearly, no matter how good you may be at hiding that truth from other people or from yourself.

That is the point we make at the beginning of every communion service: God is the one unto whom all hearts are open, all desires are known, and from whom no secrets are hid. As St. Paul puts it, " All things that are reproved are made manifest by the light: for whatsoever doth make manifest is light."

The good news is that you don't have to hide, and you don't have to pretend. The better news is that God knows everything there is to know about you; but he loves you enough to send his son to die for you anyway. John 3:16.

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Lent II, March 8, 1998

The only specific guidance the Prayer Book gives us on what to do and what not to do for Lent is not about smoking or exercise or even prayer and Bible study. The specific Lenten instructions have to do with our food intake. The Prayer Book tells us to fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, and it tells us to practice abstinence on the forty regular days of Lent -- Sundays are always exceptions.

To fast means not to eat anything at all. To practice abstinence means to cut back on our usual intake. Abstinence can take many forms --avoiding a specific type of food, cutting out one meal a day, just generally eating and drinking less -- or any combination of those things.

I welcome the restrictions of Lent, because they give me a good reason to do what I should obviously be doing more of all year long. That is not just for health reasons -- important as they are. There is a connection between being detached from food and drink and one's ability to pray. Also, treating one's body properly is the expression of a larger theological point.

There is a scene in the gospels where Jesus runs into a man who has a son whom he describes as "lunatick." The son is possessed by a devil which makes him fall into the fire and into the water -- we can only hope it was in that order. Jesus casts the devil out, and the disciples tell him that they had tried to do the same thing but failed.

Jesus tells them, "Your lack of faith and belief kept you from being able to do it -- this kind only comes out by prayer and fasting." You'll remember we sang a hymn on Ash Wednesday night which chronicles the advantages of fasting such other Biblical characters as Moses, Elijah, Daniel, and John the Baptist experienced. Fasting and abstaining help us to focus upon God more directly and clearly.

In this morning's epistle, St. Paul is concerned about sexual behavior. He is telling the church at Thessalonica that God does not want them to have any sort of sexual activity with anyone to whom they are not married. That Christian standard could hardly be clearer: "This is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication." No exceptions, no excuses, no "I'm sure God will understand."

Concern about food and concern about sex come from the same basic Christian teaching. It begins with Genesis -- with the idea that God created the material world, and he says the material world is good. Since God made it, and since God also said it is good, what goes on in the material world counts.

The idea goes onto a specifically Christian path with the birth of Jesus. The Creation leads us to the Incarnation. In Jesus, God takes on a human body just like our own bodies. He comes into the material world, and he becomes part of the material world. He has come not just to reconcile us human beings to God, but also to restore harmony between God and the material world.

We fit into this plan in a very physical way. After we are baptized, our bodies are what St. Paul calls "temples of the Holy Ghost" -- our bodies become quite literally houses where God lives. That makes issues about the upkeep of the house quite important.

Our baptisms also make us what St. Paul calls, "members of Christ" -- organic parts of his body. St. Paul asks, "Do you think God approves if you take your body which is part of Jesus and join it physically to the body of someone to whom you are not married? You would literally be making Jesus part of your own sin. God forbid!"

Someone might well say, "My body is my own, I can do with it whatever I want." But St. Paul's reply to people who want to be Christians is, "You do not belong to yourself -- you were bought with a price -- so glorify God in your body and your spirit -- both of which belong to God."

The material physicality of the things of God plays a big role in this morning's gospel. Jesus is on a journey far north of Jerusalem, when he runs into a Gentile woman who wants help. The help she wants is both physical and spiritual -- her daughter has a devil, and she wants Jesus to cast it out.

There are some physical issues which make her request rather problematical. She shows she knows Jesus is the savior of the Jews by calling him, "Son of David," but she is not a Jew herself, so she has no real claim on him. Her being both a Gentile and a stranger threatens to make Jesus unclean -- under the very physical specifications of the Old Testament Law.

So it is not especially surprising that he ignores her. When the disciples say, "Get rid of her, she is driving us crazy," Jesus says, "I have only been sent to the lost sheep of Israel -- I am here to save Jews." When she begs him for help again, he replies, "It wouldn't be right to take the bread which belongs to my children and give it to a Gentile dog like you."

But she keeps at him and says, "But even dogs get to eat the crumbs under the table -- it isn't going to deprive the Jews of anything if you give me a little help." Jesus praises her faith and gives her what she wants.

Jesus operates in the real world in which we live, and in this material world, "God hath not called us unto uncleanness, but into holiness."

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Lent I, March 1, 1998

I want you to put in your minds a picture of nesting Russian dolls. I hope you know what I mean -- a set of high-gloss, painted, stubby dolls of descending size which when cut in two fit inside one another. Opening up the biggest one reveals a slightly smaller one and opening that one reveals a yet smaller one and so on down to an extremely tiny doll not cut at all.

The image of the nesting Russian dolls can help us try to puzzle out the meaning of this morning's gospel. The gospel tells a story which opens up to reveal a second story, which points in turn to a third story.

The devil tempted Jesus in the wilderness after he had fasted for forty days and forty nights. That is where the length of Lent comes from. Forty is a significant Bible number -- forty days between Easter and Christ's ascension into heaven, forty days of Noah's flood, forty days Elijah spent on Mt. Horeb waiting for God -- but not Ali Baba and the forty thieves.

The way St. Matthew presents Jesus in the early chapters of his gospel shows that Jesus' life follows the same pattern as the entire history of Israel. So the most important Biblical forty behind the story of Jesus' temptation is the forty years the people of Israel spent in the wilderness. God led them out of Egypt in the Exodus, and it took them forty years to make the trek to the Promised Land.

Jesus is tempted by the devil three times, and each time he resists him he quotes from the Old Testament -- "it is written ... it is written ... it is written." When you go back to see exactly where each of his retorts is written you discover that they all come from the Book of Deuteronomy.

The Book of Deuteronomy contains the speech Moses gave to the Israelites just before he died. One thing he does is to review the forty years of wandering and try to explain what God meant by putting them through it. The idea is that the Israelites should reflect on their experience and learn from it -- always a chancy proposition when human beings are involved.

So the doll of Jesus' temptation opens up to reveal the doll of Moses' speech. The doll of Moses' speech opens up to point back to three specific temptations the Israelites faced during the forty years -- events the Books of Exodus and Numbers describe -- in, as it were, a third doll.

So we can see that under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost St. Matthew has put together a remarkable work of literary sleight-of-hand. But their collaborative genius is by no means the whole point.

Just as Jesus' forty days in the wilderness stands for Israel's forty years in the wilderness, both of the forties stand for the pattern of the lives we all live on this earth. These stories are not just fun facts from the distant past to know and to tell. These stories are about us. Our own stories compose the final doll.

Not to mix my metaphors, but the key which unlocks the secrets of all of the dolls comes again from Moses' speech in Deuteronomy. He explains the reason it took the Israelites forty years to make a journey that would normally take only a few weeks.

I quote, "You shall remember all the way which the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not."

That describes what I know my life is like. I am caught up in a relationship to God. God is my father, and God wants me to grow up and become an adult. The way he tries to make that happen is to humble me-to have things happen in my life to show me I am not in control -- and then to test me -- to have things happen in my life which continually call into question whether I trust him enough to do what I know he wants me to do.

God works in my life exactly as he worked in Israel and in Jesus. The many testings in my life, the many testings in Israel's history, and the three temptations of Christ all pose the same questions, "Do you know God is in control? Do you realize that it is better that way? Do you think God knows what he is doing? Do you trust him enough to obey him? Do you believe that he is your father, and that he really loves you?"

Now the fact is that I don't do very well at answering those questions, and I am quite weak when it comes to passing those tests -- and, to be fair, Israel didn't do too well either. Jesus, of course, did just fine-as Hebrews says, he "was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin."

The first step on the Lenten path is to look at our lives not as a series of random, meaningless, unconnected events, but as a series of humblings and testings. The humblings and testings are not inflicted by a nasty, sadistic, mean God. They come from a Father who loves us and wants us to grow up.

The second step is to realize that we cannot get anywhere either in understanding or in trusting and obeying without continually calling upon the help Jesus send us through the Holy Ghost. That is why we come to church, that is why we pray, that is why we read the Bible.

Israel made it into the Promised Land after all, and angels ministered to Jesus -- so there is plenty of hope for us -- "as sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing."

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Quinquagesima, February 22, 1998

One of the few relatively light moments in Princess Diana's funeral came when Prime Minister Tony Blair read today's New Testament lesson/epistle. There is nothing intrinsically amusing about First Corinthians, Chapter 13, to be sure. But after the reading was over, one of the commentators I was listening to asked the person with him, "What did you think of the Prime Minister's address?" The other one replied, "It seemed perfectly appropriate under the circumstances."

As I recall, Tony Blair did not introduce what he read in the proper way, but, even so, the fact that the commentators did not recognize this well-known Bible passage seemed at least mildly remarkable. Blair read it in the King James translation, but at every point the word "charity" came up, he substituted the word "love."

That really is not much help toward understanding what St. Paul is talking about. The fact is that both of those words carry connotations that make it difficult to see what he means. When we hear "charity" we think "giving money away." "Love" can mean so many things that it does not clear things up much either.

St. Paul is talking about the gifts of the Holy Spirit. He has just got done describing healing and prophesying and speaking in tongues and other such things. He has taught very clearly that those gifts are not for everybody. If you have one or more of them, that is great, so long as you use them to help build up the church rather than as a way of calling attention to yourself.

He concludes the argument by saying that the three most important gifts of the Holy Ghost are available to everybody just for the asking. Those gifts are faith, hope, and charity. Charity is the greatest of the three, because charity is the nature of God. What St. Paul means by charity is the way Jesus always acts toward us.

How does he act? He acts always for our good -- in our best interests. His dying on the cross to free us from the power of sin, Satan, and death and to guarantee us never-ending forgiveness is the most dramatic example of that, of course.

But we can learn to see that everything that happens to us is a way God shows us his love -- his charity. As St. Paul puts in it Romans, "All things work together for good for those who love God." God shows us his love -- his charity -- in what happens in our lives.

St. John says, "Since God loves us, we should love one another." That summarizes Christian morality -- Christian ethical behavior. It means always to act for the good of the other person. Jesus acts for our good, we should act for each other's good. If that were easy to do, we would not need to be reminded constantly to pray for the strength do it.

We are inclined naturally to act for our own good and not necessarily to consider the good of anyone else. But Jesus uses that natural tendency precisely to tell us how we should act. He says, "You love yourself -- you do what is best for yourself without having to think much about it. Your job as a Christian is to choose to act that way toward everyone you meet." The Golden Rule tells us to act toward others as we would want them to act toward us -- for our good.

The only fully Christian way to evaluate your relationships toward other people is to ask the question. "Am I acting for this person's good, or am I just using him in some way to promote my own interests?" We will discover that we have few completely charitable relationships.

I find that people are particularly likely to have difficulty with the concept of Christian love when they are in a situation where a friend or a family member is behaving badly. I often find myself asking, "Do you think it is the best thing for him to allow him to persist in acting in this destructive way?" People assume far too much that love means no correcting -- no judging bad activity -- no suggesting that some things are right and others wrong.

It is time to get ready for Lent. The Prayer Book tells us to fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday and to cut back on food intake the other days of Lent. Lent is the obvious time to get more serious about the other regular disciplines of the Christian life -- regular church attendance, regular prayer, regular Bible study, regularly giving money away. We have plenty of Bible study classes, I will be giving instruction about prayer at the quiet day next Saturday, and I am always glad to talk to any of you privately.

But St. Paul reminds us that no Christian discipline is an end in itself. The point of Christian discipline is to build up our charity -- make us appreciate the charity God shows us, and make us want to show God's charity to other people.

God evaluates the quality of our lives on the basis of how much we love in the Christian sense. None of us does terribly well at it -- that is why Jesus had to die. But that is not an excuse for not praying for the grace to love more. As St. John asks, "If a man say, 'I love God,' and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? And this commandment have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also."

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Sexagesima, February 15, 1998

I was talking recently with a member of our congregation who was -- on her own -- reading the letters St. Paul wrote to the church at Corinth. Corinth is a port city in Greece. The Book of Acts tells us how St. Paul founded the Christian church there, and we have two letters he wrote to them later on -- which we call, with impeccable logic, First Corinthians and Second Corinthians.

My friend remarked that the Corinthian letters seem different from most of the rest of St. Paul's writings in that there is such a high degree of hostility and emotional turmoil in them. She's absolutely right -- St. Paul's relationship to the church at Corinth was extremely problematical. I think the best short explanation is that the people in Corinth did not want to behave themselves, naggy old Paul was always telling them to shape up, and they resented it.

I am fond of saying that one of the most reassuring things one can learn from the New Testament is that there was never a golden age in the church's life. We are relatively free from strife and turmoil right here, thank God, but my parish in California was fairly contentious and as a bishop I deal with difficulties within other congregations all of the time.

The fact is that the same problems that plague congregations now plagued congregations in the first century. The New Testament describes squabbling, jockeying for control, arguments about the preaching and the way the services were conducted, attacks on the clergyman, stinginess with financial support, people wanting to be called Christian but not wanting to let the pesky moral standards interfere with their lives, petty jealousy, clique-building, and gossip.

The Corinthian church had gone to some amazing extremes. One man was carrying on quite openly with his father's wife, people were coming to communion drunk, parish suppers dissolved into competitions over who had brought the best food, and members of the parish were hauling one another into court. And that doesn't say anything about their general disbelief in the bodily resurrection of Christ, their chaotic worship services, and their contemptuous attitude toward St. Paul himself.

In today's epistle St. Paul comes as close as he ever comes to losing his composure completely. He has sent the Corinthians one letter already to try to straighten things out, but that hasn't worked very well. He has threatened to come to see them again, and he suggests that it would be better for them if he could come in a friendly and peaceful spirit. Some leaders of the church have continued to make personal attacks on him, and this morning he replies.

The fact is that he loves the people in Corinth as he loves everyone in the church for whom he is responsible. He cannot understand how they can follow people who are hostile to him and hostile to what he has taught them. He describes the church as a bride he has betrothed and presented to her husband Jesus -- his feeling for them is as tender as what a father feels when his daughter gets married.

After an opening which reeks of sarcasm, he compares his credentials to those of the rival church leaders whom he calls false apostles and ministers of Satan. He says he's as good a Jew as they are, and if they are claiming to be ministers of Christ they should compare what they have put up with to what he has put up with.

St. Paul describes the reality of his work in graphic detail-punishment by both Jews and Romans, shipwreck, constant danger, and annoying physical discomfort. He ends his litany this way, "Beside those things that are without, that which cometh upon me daily, the care of all the churches." He seems to be saying, "Shipwreck and starvation are positively pleasant when compared to dealing with people like you." And he didn't have a fax machine, an answering machine, or e-mail!

In last week's epistle -- from First Corinthians -- we heard St. Paul talk about the virtue of persistence -- the importance of just keeping on keeping on. The Christian race is about making it to the finish line -- not about how fast you get there or getting there before someone else.

St. Paul had plenty of trouble with the Corinthians, but he didn't let it finally get him down -- rants like today's helped him let off steam. He was convinced that God had reached out of heaven to give him specific work to do. That was reason enough to do whatever he had to do and to put up with whatever he had to put up with. There is never even the slightest suggestion that he might go back to full time work as a tentmaker or retire to a quiet life where he came from in the first place.

God has a purpose for each one of us. It may not be as grand or as earth-shaking as St. Paul's, of course, but that is only a matter of degree. God wants us to do what he has set out for us to do and to remain faithful and not let anything sidetrack us or discourage us until we make it all the way to the end when he will give us our reward.

The Epistle to the Hebrews gives us another model, when it says, "Let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God."

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Septuagesima , February 8, 1998

Both of today's lessons can help us answer the question, "Is life fair?" Is life fair? Fairness is a concept most people have drummed into them when they are children. We all have some sense of what fair play is and what a fair distribution of the cookies looks like. If we have brothers and sisters, we run up against the question of fairness as we watch our parents deal with them. "You let him do things you never let me do. It's just not fair."

Much of the public business of our society is devoted to resolving issues of fairness. The criminal justice system is supposed to treat everyone the same way. That's only fair. We don't want people deprived of opportunities for reasons over which they have no control. That wouldn't be fair.

Today's gospel is one of Jesus' parables which tells us what the kingdom of God is like. The concept "kingdom of God" has several different meanings in the New Testament. Heaven, of course, is the kingdom of God in the final and ultimate sense. But the kingdom of God also refers to what things are like here on earth when God is in charge.

If you allow God to be your king -- that is, if you try to let his teachings guide what you think and say and do, then you are in the kingdom of God already. When God's will is done, his kingdom is present. That is what we mean when we say the Lord's Prayer -- we ask for his kingdom to come, and we admit that the best way we can help make that happen is to do his will -- as everyone in heaven does.

Judging from this morning's parable, things in the kingdom of God are not exactly fair. If someone works twelve hours performing the same task at which another person works one hour, it seems only fair that he should get twelve times as much pay. But everybody in the story gets exactly the same amount of money at the end of the day no matter how many hours he worked. It just doesn't sound fair.

In this morning's epistle St. Paul is talking about himself -- one of his two or three favorite topics. His big concern is the danger that even after he has worked as hard as he has for God and put up with all that he has suffered, at the end he might not make it into heaven. That really wouldn't seem terribly fair either.

The short answer to the question, "Is life fair?" is, quite obviously, "No." It doesn't take a membership in Mensa or a degree in theology to see that some people are better looking, some people die before their time, some people get horrible diseases, some people have trouble with their children, some people just seem to glide through difficulty, some people can eat and drink a lot and never get fat, some people just seem to get all the breaks. There's nothing fair about any of that.

We may decide God is not fair because he makes everybody's life different -- and that he could have been a bit fairer to me, but the fact is that on the only issue of lasting importance, God is better than fair. He doesn't stop at evenhandedness or giving just deserts -- he is positively generous.

The parable of the workers in the vineyard is not about labor economics, it is about salvation. At the most obvious level the parable means everybody's reward from God is the same no matter when he lets God into his life. You can't have more or less heaven, or more or less forgiveness, or more or less reconciliation to God.

In the parable, the people who worked the longest should have been glad, rather than resentful. They represent the people who have a relationship to God throughout their whole lives. If we really think friendship with God is a good thing, we shall want to have it as long as we can -- we won't think we are being victimized just because it is possible to get into heaven through a death-bed conversion.

St. Paul says that life is like a footrace. In a normal footrace, all of the contestants work hard and go into training, but only one of them can win. In the Christian race, everybody who makes it to the finish line is a winner. Is that fair?

He is trying to tell us that we need to train for the Christian race, even though victory in it is not only to the swift. The kind of training he means involves all the things the Prayer Book talks about -- weekly church attendance and praying and studying the Bible and giving money away and trying to help other people.

But at the same time St. Paul knows that no matter how much he trains himself and no matter how much he may do for God, if he doesn't hang on all the way until the end he will be lost, and he won't go to heaven. All his accomplishments will count for nothing if he has turned away from Christ at the end. It is all about getting there -- not about how you do it.

So what can we conclude? Try to get yourself straight with God as soon as you can so the blessings will start to flow. Don't be resentful toward other people who seem to have things easier than you do. Take Christian discipline seriously for the long haul -- so you will still be committed when you die.

Jesus reminds us, "Be faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life," and, "He that endureth until the end will be saved."

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Revised August 25, 1998