Swearing Words

We cannot do good on our own, but God's credit can be applied to our expenses...

6th Epiphany A 2013 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
It is written in the Book Ecclesiasticus: If you choose, you can keep the commandments, and to act faithfully is a matter of you own choice.

There is some significant tension between the language of today’s opening collect and that of the author of Ecclesiasticus, Joshua the son of Sira. For while that wise man, who wrote about two hundred years before the birth of Christ, portrays being good or bad as a simple matter of choice — in which one can always choose the good, and keep the commandments and act faithfully simply by choosing to do so — the collect today with which we began our worship acknowledges, a bit more humbly, and realistically, that “in our weakness we can do nothing good without” God’s help and grace.

In a case like this I am very glad to endorse the official Anglican position that the writings of Joshua ben Sira, the book of Ecclesiasticus, like all of the apocryphal or deuterocanonical books — which are part of the Bible for Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox, but are treated separately by Anglicans and Lutherans, and completely ignored by most Protestants — that these apocryphal or deuterocanonical books can be read for instruction but not to “establish...doctrine” as the Sixth Article of Religion puts it. And if you’d like to look it up, it is on page 868 of the Book of Common Prayer.

It is helpful to have the church’s authority for this point of view. For even if it weren’t our own experience, even if it weren’t just common sense, you know that what Joshua ben Sira said is just not true. The idea that one can simply choose to be good, and always act faithfully as a matter of one’s own choice, conflicts with the teachings of Jesus and of Saint Paul, and those teachings form a part of our canonical and authoritative Scripture, not just for instruction, but for doctrine!

Towards the end of today’s Gospel reading Jesus takes on those who, like Joshua the son of Sira, put all the stress on us: ben Sira says, “Do not swear falsely, but carry out your vows” — as if vows could simply be carried out by the force of our own will alone, unaided by grace; as if you could just choose to be good and the action would follow the choice as the night the day. Jesus teaches in contrast (and in contradiction) that it is folly to swear in such a way. It is beyond our strength to rely on our own strength unaided, to take it into our head that we could do such a thing when we cannot even control a single hair on that head, to make it change from white to black!

Saint Paul even more readily admits his own weakness when he writes to the Romans, “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good that I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” (7:18b-19) And in the epistle before us today he calls out the quibbles and quarrels of those Corinthians, accusing them of acting like infants — and anyone who has had to care for an infant knows that infants cannot always choose to do the good! It is said that Saint Augustine once pointed out that anyone who doubted the existence of original sin only needed to spend an hour or two with an infant to be convinced otherwise!

The sad truth, though, is that adults often act no better than spoiled, whining children; as Saint Paul says to the Corinthians, not ready for solid food, still on milk. If you don’t believe me, or Saint Paul, just turn the TV on to any of the 24-hour news stations; it’s like turning on a faucet that will pour forth a steady stream of infantile behavior, by supposedly grown people.

Saint Paul also points out — and here we return to the collect of the day — that the ultimate victory over such petty and infantile quarrels and quibbles and fleshly temptations of human inclination, infant or adult, do notcome from Paul, or Apollos, or from the Corinthians’ own inner virtue. They are God’s servants, working God’s field. Paul echoes the beautiful language of the 100th Psalm, though translating it a bit from sheep to agriculture: “Know ye that the LORD he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.” Just so the collect of the day appeals to God for the help of God’s grace, so that God can supply what is lacking to give us the strength — not our own strength but God’s strength at work in us — to keep God’s commandments.

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Now, you might well say, if it’s all about God and we can’t do any good on our own, and that any good we do is just God working in us and through us, is this trip really necessary? Let me say that’s a cynical thought, but it’s one I can understand — as I’m sure Joshua ben Sira would have understood too, and it’s a sentiment he would have stood by: God has given commandments and we are expected to do them under our own steam and by our own power, and if you do, in the end you will receive the reward for having done well.

There are whole religions built on this principle — but thankfully Christianity is not one of them, at least not in the way we Anglicans and Episcopalians understand it. We understand, on the contrary, and as the collect of the day says, echoing Saint Paul, that “in our weakness we can do nothing good without” God.

Still, you might say, Then if it is just God acting through us when we manage to do good, is God just pleasing himself through us? Are we just puppets? Let’s look at it another way; not as puppets, but as children. There is a charming TV commercial that shows a little boy standing with his chin just reaching the top of the jewelry counter in a fashionable store, pointing to an item he wants to get hismother for her birthday. The sales clerk nods and the little boy proudly empties his hand on the counter, revealing a crumpled dollar bill and a few coins. The clerk raises her eyebrows sympathetically and looks over the head of the child to see the boy’s father standing there behind him, discreetly waving his credit card. He and the clerk almost wink at each other — though no wink is needed.

This is what we are like and God is like when we do good. Our inclination is in the right direction, but our handful of change could never actually accomplish what God has willed for us — or what we have willed for ourselves or for each other. It is nowhere near enough to make the purchase we desire and need.

Yet God is with us, and the credit of God’s grace can cover any good towards which we set our minds and our hearts and our wills. On our own we could never accomplish the good intent that warms our hearts, but with God’s grace and support we can accomplish this — and anything good, to which we set our hearts. And God is pleased with our intent even though it is God who supplies us with the means to put that good intent into action — just as that little boy’s father and mother are and will be pleased even though he didn’t actually buy that bracelet with his own money.

There is an old saying, “It’s the thought that counts,” and in this case it is true, for it is the thought and choice to do good, when undertaken in prayer and in confidence in God’s grace, not our own strength, that we will receive timely help in putting that good will into good action, that, as the collects says, we may please God “both in will and deed.” God is pleased when we will to do good, and will give us the grace to do it.

After all, he paid a debt for us far greater than the cost of a bracelet, far more costly than the most precious jewel. Godin Christ paid for all our lives with his own life, and bought salvation for us at the cost of his own blood. If we swear by anything at all let it be this: Not to us, not to us, O Lord, but to your Name alone, be glory given, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.+

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Choose This Day

Not the music, not the preaching, not the stained glass windows, and certainly not the air conditioning draw us to this place today, but the love of God in Christ who has redeemed us, and whom we have chosen to follow as our Lord. A sermon for Proper 16b

Proper 16b • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
If you are unwilling to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served in the region beyond the river, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.

There is an old story about a man and a woman being awakened one Sunday morning by the alarm clock going off. After lying there for a while doing nothing, as people are wont to do, the wife finally says, “Dear, it’s time to get up and get ready for church.” The husband complains, “Oh, I don’t want to. I hate going to church. I don’t like most of the people there and they don’t like me. The music is dull, and the sermons are so boring. I don’t want to go.” The wife responds, “But dear, you have to go. You’re the minister.”

The sad fact is that this unhappy minister is not alone. There are many people who seem to prefer to worship at the shrine of Saint Mattress on a Sunday morning, instead of going to church. Even if they don’t have any particular dislike for the church, they just don’t seem to want to make the effort. Then there are all of the people who have stopped going to church because they do have some particular dislike: they are upset about something — it could be the music, or the preacher, or the worship itself. Perhaps it is something about a decision made or position taken by the larger church — surely we all know of people who left conservative churches because they were too conservative, just as there are those who have left liberal churches because they are too liberal. People have left churches that forbid things they want to do, as well as churches that allow other people to do the kinds of things they don’t think they should be allowed to do.

One begins to wonder is there isn’t a Church of Saint Goldilocks out there somewhere — a church that offends no one because it is neither too large nor too small, not too hot and not too cold, not too hard, not too soft, but “just right.” If there is such a place, I’ve not heard of it; and I can guarantee you that if it existed someone would still find reasons to complain and to depart. “This church stands for nothing! It’s too middle-of-the-road, too wishy-washy!”

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As our Old Testament reading and Gospel show us today, this isn’t a new problem, nor is it a problem faced only by churches. God himself, and Jesus, also seem to have a hard time keeping their followers from taking offense at them and stomping off or drifting away.

Joshua put the question bluntly: he asks the people to choose that very day whom they will serve: whether the gods from the other side of the Jordan, or the gods from the land in which they have come to live, or the gods of Egypt whom they left behind — or will they choose the Lord their God who delivered them from captivity in Egypt and brought them safely through the wilderness after that wandering of forty years, finally to come to the land of promise, driving out the inhabitants of the land before them to give them a home. And of course, you see, the people swear they will serve the Lord just as Joshua and his household will.

Except, of course, they don’t. As the rest of the history of this people spells out in no uncertain terms, they go on to forsake the Lord their God, almost immediately, and in almost every conceivable way through the coming centuries; rebuked by judges, prophets and a handful of good kings; yet also corrupted and misled by crooked politicians, false prophets, and idolatrous kings.

And what about Jesus? He presents the people with a hard teaching, something that many — even many of his disciples — are unwilling to accept. He presents a difficult teaching, and they begin to drift away from him. And of course, a few of his inner circle, such as Simon Peter, swear that they will remain loyal to him.

Except, of course, they don’t. Who are they who flee when the shepherd is struck, but these very sheep of disciples? Who is it that denies Christ before the cock crows on Good Friday morning but Simon Peter himself?

In both cases — both the people to whom Joshua spoke and those to whom his namesake Jesus preached — the people do not just reject a minister or a preacher, but God. This is clearly the case with the people who turn away from the God of Israel as they accommodate the tame gods of Egypt or Canaan or Philistia. They reject the God who brought them into the land of promise with signs and wonders, with a mighty hand and a powerful arm.

But it is also clearly the case with the people who turn away from Jesus in this Gospel passage today, in part because in this passage Jesus is making the kind of claim to divine power that they simply can’t — or won’t — believe. He tells them that he is himself the bread come down from heaven, and that those who eat his flesh and drink his blood will live forever. Jesus is not presenting himself simply as a good man or a wise teacher, but as the Son of the living God, who gives life to the world for those who believe, so that they might not perish, but have everlasting life. He claims to be, as Peter recognizes, and declares, the Holy One of God.

The British author C.S. Lewis, perhaps best known for his Narnia stories, once said that this sort of plain speech from Jesus leaves us with few options, as it left few options for those who heard him speak. Either we accept that he is who he presents himself as, who he claims to be, who the disciples recognize — the Holy One of God — or we must categorize him as a madman on the order of someone who claims to be a poached egg, or as a liar as bad as any devil out of Hell. There is no option to treat him as simply a good man or wise teacher. For if what he says is true he is as far above any good man or wise teacher as God is above all of humanity. And if what he says is false he is either mad or a liar. We already know that his family thought he had gone out of his mind, and no doubt some of those disciples in this passage today, who turn away from him, make the same judgment, and turn back from following him. That is their choice.

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But what about us? What is our choice? We are all here today in large part because we do believe that Jesus is who he claimed to be, the one the disciples recognized as the Holy One of God. We trust that in him we have salvation and eternal life. We believe in him, not just that he is a good man, a wise man, but that he is the Holy One of God. We are here today because of him; because at this altar-rail we share in that body and blood, that promise of everlasting life; the bread of heaven and the cup of salvation.

We are not here simply because we like each other, or you like me, or I like you — though I hope that that is true — but because we believe in Jesus Christ. We are not here simply because we enjoy singing hymns, or because you enjoy the sermons — although I hope you do get something out of them! — or because of the coffee hour, or because of the stained-glass windows, or because of the air-conditioning... No, it couldn’t possibly be because of the air-conditioning!

We are here, my friends, because we have chosen, this day and every day we choose to be in this assembly, to be with the One who has the words of eternal life. He it is who calls us to this place; he it is who gave himself up for us; he it is who is the bread come down from heaven for the life of the world, not like that which our ancestors ate, and they died; but the bread that will preserve us to eternal life, the flesh and the blood of the Holy One of God, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, to whom we ascribe, as is most justly due, all might, majesty, power and dominion, henceforth and forever more.

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One Mind One Heart

Having the mind of Christ -- a sermon for Proper 21a.

SJF • Proper 21 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Be of the same mind, having the same love being in full accord and of one mind. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.

In last week’s sermon I spoke to you about the double-mindedness and indecision of Hamlet the melancholy Dane, in contrast to the relative single-mindedness of Saint Paul the Apostle. Just as Hamlet wrestled with the question, “To be or not to be,” so too did Paul wrestle with the question of whether it was better for him to give up his life and be with God or continue to struggle along with his fellow Christians to build up the church for which Christ died. And it didn’t take him long to come to the decision to do the latter.

This theme of single-mindedness or decisiveness — making up your mind and then following through on your decision — lies at the heart of all of our Scripture lessons today. It’s important to hear those lessons because making decisions and being firm in your own mind once you’ve made a decision can be very difficult.

I don’t know how many of you are familiar with or recall comedian Jack Benny — he was very popular in the days of radio comedy, and I have to admit I am just old enough to remember his popular early TV show from my early childhood. Over the years he had created a character notorious for his stinginess — he drove a car that was at least thirty years old, and squeezed many cups of tea from a single teabag he would bring to restaurants where he would order a cup of hot water.

One of his most famous comedy “bits” — one involving making decisions — was broadcast on his radio show. He’s returning home after an evening rehearsal — walking instead of taking a taxi, of course, because he’s too cheap — when a mugger comes up to him and says, “Your money or your life.” This is followed by several moments of silence, as the studio audience begins to giggle and chuckle; finally the mugger repeats, “Say, Mister, I said, your money or your life!” To which the cheapskate Benny finally replied, “I’m thinking! I’m thinking!”

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Most of us would not have to stop to think about such a matter — and of course that’s what makes Benny’s comment comical. And yet most of us face situations in our lives where reaching a decision simply isn’t all that easy. You may recall another favorite comedy portrayal of indecision with a character having a little angel on one shoulder and the little devil on the other shoulder — each of them a miniature replication of the person him or herself — and both of them arguing in one ear and then the other the various urgings of what to do or not do. So foreign and yet vivid can our own thinking become that we may project it out onto such imagined angels or devils on our shoulders. Sometimes indecision can feel like that — and the more important the matter the more likely we are to find ourselves in such a quandary of double-mindedness.

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It is a distressing situation in which to find ourselves, Because we want to know what it’s best for us to do. Sometimes we do know, but don’t really want to acknowledge it — which is why Ezekiel has worked himself up into such a temper addressing the house of Israel: surely they know better, well aware that the transgressions they have committed are transgressions. After all, they’ve had the Law of Moses for a thousand years and the words of other prophets for hundreds of years by that time, and they have the own sorry example to look back on, their own history — what happened time and again when their leaders turned aside to worship false gods. From Solomon on, most of the leaders forgot the Lord and turned aside to do what ought not be done. And the land and people suffered for it.

And so Ezekiel appeals to them to turn from the folly of their transgressions and make up their mind to follow the Lord — who, in all fairness, will save and restore them if they mend their ways. For when they have set their mind on God they will also have a new heart and a new spirit — one mind, one heart, devoted to God.

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Today’s gospel presents us with another form of double mindedness: those two sons who, when their father tells them to get to work, both have a change of mind, a change of heart — one for the better and one for the worse. It is important to note that neither one of them is a picture-perfect son to their father. That would be one who would both say he would do what he’s told to do, and then do it. But surely Jesus favors the son who changes his mind for the better and does his father’s will in the end, in spite of that initial back-talk. It is after that example that the tax collectors and prostitutes have turned towards God at the preaching of John the Baptist, changing their minds about their bad decisions, and turning their lives around to devote heart and mind to God.

Meanwhile, the chief priests and elders are caught in a two-minded dilemma. They failed in their ministry of inspiring the people to righteousness, and wrote off the tax collectors and prostitutes as beyond salvation. Along comes the layman, this unordained uneducated man John, whose powerful preaching cuts to the heart and soul and inspires those deemed hopeless sinners by the self-righteous to change their ways.

So Jesus puts the authorities on the spot with his pointed question — one they cannot answer without incriminating themselves. For if John was God’s agent, why didn’t they accept him? And if John was simply acting on his own, how to explain the people’s acclamation of him as a prophet who has changed their lives? Either way the evidence is against them. And so the ones who should be teachers are stumped like the dunce in the corner.

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Finally, Paul offers us the best way forward: the best answer to the double mind is to have in oneself the single mind of Christ. For the mind of Christ, which becomes ours through the Spirit of God and our adoption in baptism — does not equivocate, does not balance on the one hand this and on the other that, is not pulled from side to side by contrary temptations and urges for good or for ill.

Some of you may recall another figure from the 1950s, Harry Truman, who became President of the United States just at the end of the war, succeeding Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and then was elected President. At one point in those tumultuous post-war years, the country was going through great economic problems and realignments — not unlike what we’re going through today. And Truman called upon a series of economists to get advice about what he should to — again, much as we find today. And the economists came to him and said, “Well, you could do this on the one hand, or on the other hand you could do that.” Time and again it was the same message. “Well, on the one hand, you could do this; but on the other hand, you could do that.” Finally Truman famously said, “Will someone please bring me a one-handed economist!”

Now, far be it from me to compare Harry Truman with Jesus Christ. But there is another famous thing that Harry Truman said that does apply: “The buck stops here.” He had that on a little sign on his desk in the President’s office. And “the buck stops” with Jesus. He is the One to whom we are all called to turn — both as our Savior and as our Example, in single-mindedness.

The mind of Christ moves right forward — doing the will of God the Father without veering or delay or detour. And that same mind can be in us, the mind of the one who though he was in the form of God did not grasp at divinity to exploit the powers that were his by right, but emptied himself, in a single-minded decision, to the cause for which he came among us: to live and die as one of us, in obedience to his Father’s will, to save us and redeem us. If we have that mind of Christ, then God will be, as Paul said, “at work in us” as God was at work in him — giving us with one heart, one mind, the hope and assurance of salvation. To him, Jesus Christ our Lord, be the glory, now and for ever.

To Be or Not To Be

Choosing life over death -- for the right reason. A sermon for Proper 20a.

SJF • Proper 20a • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
To me, living is Christ and dying is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me; and I do not know which I prefer. I am hard-pressed between the two; my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better; but to remain in the flesh is more necessary for you.

In this morning’s reading from the prophet Jonah we encountered a rather petulant man prepared to die almost out of spite. Jonah is angry at God on two counts: for letting the wicked Ninevites off the hook because they repented in response to Jonah’s own prophetic warning; and more immediately and selfishly because the bush that shaded him from the harsh desert sun has withered at God’s command. Jonah the Impatient is not one to put up with such things, and one hopes he learns better by the end of the story. At that point Jonah appears to have been struck speechless in response to God’s final question putting things in perspective. He should, after all, be happy that his prophecy was heeded and saved an entire city.

When we turn to our Epistle there is no doubt that we are dealing with a much more positive assessment. In Saint Paul’s Letter to the Philippians we behold the efforts of a committed servant of God to wrestle with the issue of whether it is better to live or to die, but for the right reasons — not choosing to die out of spite, or even out of a desire to be with God, but choosing life instead in order to serve God’s people.

Living or dying: to be or not to be. That is the issue with which the melancholy Dane Prince Hamlet wrestles, though in very different circumstances from either Jonah or Paul. As you may recall, Hamlet is a philosophy student entangled in the midst of a family drama with supernatural overtones — his father’s ghost has appeared to him and told him that he was murdered by Hamlet’s uncle, who has since married his widow.

Shakespeare’s play is among the richest and most complex ever written, and the character of Hamlet can be played in many different ways. Sir Laurence Olivier’s version resonates most with our readings this morning — in weighing the question of life and death. You may recall that the film begins with Olivier’s voice-over introducing the theme, “This is the story of a man who could not make up his mind.” That is the heart of Hamlet’s dilemma, and it lies in that most famous of Shakespearian speeches, the one that begins, “To be or not to be.” That is, as Hamlet observes, the question — the one that faces him, and Jonah, and Paul, and ultimately every thinking person. Is it better to live or to die?

Hamlet’s short speech is a brilliant summary of the philosophical arguments for and against choosing death over life, or life over death, laying out an “on the one hand this and on the other hand that” kind of argument with himself.

Hamlet really would like to just end it all — in modern terms we would probably say he is suffering from clinical depression. Life itself has just become too much of a burden — especially with his father’s ghost getting into the picture and planting seeds of suspicion — and Hamlet doesn’t know if the ghost is telling the truth or if the ghost is trying to tempt him into committing the murder of an innocent person! So Hamlet is looking for a way out, and is even contemplating suicide. In an earlier speech he has already expressed the wish that he could just die — that his “too, too solid flesh” might simply melt and evaporate and disappear; but he immediately recalls that taking any action along those lines himself has been forbidden, as the Almighty has fixed his law “against self-slaughter.”

So in the more famous speech Hamlet returns to the question, Is suffering a thing that makes you more noble and virtuous by enduring it, or is it something you should overcome or avoid? Who after all would suffer if it were an option simply to end your life in an instant, and plunge into that endless sleep? But in that sleep of death what dreams might come? Ah, as Hamlet observes, “There’s the rub!”

In the end it is the unknown — what comes after death in that “undiscovered country” from which “no traveler returns” — that keeps Hamlet alive: not a positive will to live and a commitment to act, but fear of the unknown and the consequences of action. As he concludes, “Conscience makes cowards of us all.” So Hamlet continues on the course of his tragedy, only able finally to act against his murderous uncle when he finds a way to be sure the uncle is guilty — but too late to save himself or his mother, or his prospective father-in-law or his fiancée, or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, or anyone else, from a swift journey offstage to that undiscovered country, death.

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Saint Paul, on the other hand, is not a man of doubt and double-mindedness, but of faith. He weighs the options, true, but he comes to a very different conclusion, and that right quickly. And this is because unlike Hamlet he is fully confidant of knowing what awaits him beyond the veil of death. He has absolutely no fear of what dreams might come. He does not regard death as an undiscovered country from which no traveler returns, but a land to which one indeed has gone to prepare a place for him, a land in which there are in fact many dwelling-places prepared, and from which that same one has returned, when the bonds of death were not able to keep him down. You know who that is, of course: Jesus Christ, the one in whom Paul places all of his faith. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is at the heart of Paul’s faith, Paul’s gospel, and it informs everything about his life and his ministry. It is his trust, his faith, his knowledge that he is assured of passage into the new life with Christ. In fact, he longs for it — not as Hamlet did as a kind of oblivion and end to his troubles — but as a positive desire to be with Christ. But Paul also knows that he still has work to do among the faithful — and though it is hard work and will be a sea of troubles for him, though it will mean suffering and pain, he commits to stay with it. His conscience is at work, but not to make him a coward, but to make him a hero — one willing to suffer for and with others rather than to take the easy way out. He chooses this course, convinced that remaining in the flesh — that is to say, remaining alive — is for the benefit of the struggling Christians to whom he writes. Even though he longs to be with Christ, he chooses to remain in service to and with his spiritual children.

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In the Buddhist tradition there is a figure known as the Bodhisattva. This is a person who has gained the Buddhist equivalent of sainthood — they have risen to the level of spiritual consciousness where they no longer need to suffer “the slings and arrows” of life in an endless cycle of reincarnation, but have broken through to the pure land of nirvana, the land of bliss — and yet, instead of going off to that endless bliss, the Bodhisattva chooses to remain, to stay in the flesh to help guide and teach others in their spiritual journey.

This is the kind of choice that Saint Paul makes — no quite the same, but a similar choice: not to depart and be with Christ in bliss, but to stay in the struggle, a struggle he voluntarily shares with the Philippians, striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel.

Paul chooses to be rather than not to be: to be in the flesh as long as the flesh is useful to himself and to others, and only to go Christ in glory when the time is right — when God has made full use of him and the cup of suffering endured in faith has been drunk down, and the vessel is empty and he has finished his course in faith. May we also serve so faithfully, working together as long as we have life, till by the grace of God this mortal life is ended and what is mortal is laid down to rest to wait for the day of resurrection, through Christ and in Christ, our redeemer and advocate, who lives and reigns for ever and ever.

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The Options Market

So many choices, with so much at stake. What does it profit to gain the whole world at the loss of your life? — A sermon for Palm Sunday 2011

SJF • Palm Sunday 2011 • Tobias S Haller BSG
From my mouth has gone forth in righteousness a word that shall not return: To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear.

It has been said that our lives are constituted based on the choices we make. At every point of our lives we are faced with options and choices, alternatives to go one way or the other — and the choices we make determine the shape of our lives, sometimes in dramatic ways, and sometimes more subtly.

This truth is laid out plainly for us to see in Matthew’s account of the Passion. We see the choices that people make all along the way, choices to act or refrain from action, and choices to act in one way or another. So many options for so many lives! And how each of these choices shape the reality of each one’s world — and our world!

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Think of the terrible choice that Judas makes: the choice of betrayal, the choice to accept a handful of silver to betray a man to death, in whose company he could have found eternal life. Instead, he chooses the path of delivering his master and teacher to death, and when stricken with remorse, he chooses death for himself.

Then look at Peter, the unsteady man who totters between heroism and cowardice, pulling out a sword at one point to defend his Lord, and then cowering in the shadows at another, denying that he even knows him. He chooses to deny Jesus, and only the rooster’s crow recalls him to himself, and rebukes him for his choice.

Then there’s the high priest, Caiaphas. Matthew doesn’t supply us with a window into why he acts as he does; for that we have to depend on John’s Gospel, which we will hear on Good Friday. Caiaphas is a practical man — who follows what would later be called the ethics of “the greatest good for the greatest number.” So, John tells us, he advises that, given the danger Jesus creates in the fragile political climate of Jerusalem, it is expedient that one man should suffer instead of many. In making this choice, Caiaphas is going against the teaching of the greatest rabbi in Judaism, Rabbi Hillel. who ended his ministry during Jesus’ childhood. In a powerful statement on the value of human life, Rabbi Hillel had said that to save a single human life is to save an entire world. Caiaphas on the other hand, weighs human life in the shopkeeper’s scale, life against life, and figures the trade-off is reasonable: one life sacrificed to avoid the possible loss of others. And by that choice he sets in course all that follows.

Then we have Pilate, another politician, a man who also weighs his choices carefully. It is easy to sympathize with Pilate — so much is pulling him one way and another — even his wife chimes in to warn him off. And so Pilate makes the interesting choice not to choose. Like many a politician before and since, rather than take a position — he takes a poll. Pilate is one of those leaders who leads from behind, safely insulated from having to take responsibility should things not work out, sheltered from the consequences of his inaction, able to wash his hands of the whole matter — a perfect biblical example of “plausible deniability.”

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All of these choices, all of these lives, swirling in the mix of options and opportunities! And step by step, each one of them choice by choice, each life hardens into reality as each choice is made, all the fuzzy options fading away as each choice becomes concrete, and the path is taken. And amidst this cloud of options, the most important choice, the one that is the eye of the storm around which all of these other possibilities swirl, is the one that Jesus makes, and he keeps right on making it through to the end.

It begins in the garden of Gethsemane, as Jesus appeals to his Father for another option — another way for salvation to be accomplished without his having to drink the cup of suffering set before him. Matthew portrays this scene with only one side of the conversation: it is as if we were witnessing a telephone call — we hear what Jesus says, but not the response.

Is God truly silent? Is this the beginning of the terrible silence of God that will lead Jesus to cry out from the cross those words of agony: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? We do not know. What we do know is that Jesus has a choice, there in the garden, and throughout the rest of the suffering that would follow. There in the garden it is perhaps clearest: even though Judas and the guards are on their way, it is still not too late for Jesus to escape, to leave the city and head on back to the safety of Bethany, to flee to far-off Galilee. But he doesn’t.

That same choice is available to Jesus right on up to the end. When they bring him before Caiaphas, he could choose to deny himself and his mission as God’s holy one, the Messiah. But he doesn’t. When brought before Pilate, he could play on Pilate’s weakness, and work out a deal. But he doesn’t. Even when they nail him to the cross, he could indeed — as the taunters say — choose to come down now from the cross. But he doesn’t.

For he knows at any one of these steps that for him to do so would be to disobey his heavenly Father, to deny the very purpose for which he was born. To choose not to die on the cross — that is the most tempting option, but it is one that he refuses.

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In his novel, The Last Temptation of Christ, author Nikos Kazantzakis explores what it might have been like if Jesus had given in to this last temptation, this option to refuse God’s will: to be a disobedient son and cast it all aside; to refuse the cup of suffering. In a flash, as he hangs on the cross, Jesus envisions what it would mean to come down from the cross. He sees himself return to Galilee as an ordinary man, to get married, to run his carpenter shop — and to leave the world unredeemed.

But he doesn’t. Jesus doesn’t do this, in the novel or the Gospel. He rejects that dreamlike fantasy of an untroubled, ordinary life; he doesn’t give in to that tempting choice, that seductive option to live instead of dying. He gives himself to death on the cross, knowing that in the options market of Calvary, all of the conniving deals and bartering in human souls are turned upside down. He lays down his life because he knows that this is the only investment that will bring a return — and what a return it will be! What had he said? “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world at the cost of his life?” Jesus took that risk, as only he could do. His gift of himself, his one sacrifice of himself once offered, would bring redemption to the whole world. His act of obedience unto death, even death on the cross, will lead to his exaltation above all earthly things, and the sanctification of all things, in him.

This is the path the Son of God chose on our behalf, for our salvation. It meant pain and suffering and death for him — but life for us. At the cost of his life he gained the whole world.

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We are offered a similar choice each day of our lives: we too are offered the option to take up our cross day by day, and follow him? Or will we follow Judas’ choice to betray, Peter’s choice to deny, Caiaphas’ choice to victimize, or Pilate’s choice to abdicate?

Will we bend our knee at the name of Jesus, or bow to other earthly gods of wealth and comfort, or act like we don’t know who he is, or take advantage of our sisters and brothers, or act as if this all has nothing to do with us? Sisters and brothers, how we choose each day of our lives, how we play the stakes in this options market, will determine our fate for all eternity. As we sow, so shall we reap.

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You may remember that line from Charles’ Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” when Scrooge asks Marley’s ghost about the heavy chain that binds him. The unhappy ghost responds: “I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it link by link... I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you? Or would you know the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this seven Christmas’s ago, and you have labored on it since. It is a ponderous chain!”

Such are the choices we make, my friends, day by day: the things we do and refuse to do — “things done and left undone.” The life and death of our Savior is set before us to show us how to free ourselves from the ponderous chain of self-interest that binds us to betrayal, and victimization, fear, and evasion of responsibility.

God is calling us to follow him, my sisters and brothers, and he will give us the strength to do so. So let us choose then, and choose wisely, to follow him, through whom alone we find the way to eternal life.+

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Seeking First

SJF • Epiphany 8a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

I’m not sure about you, but as far as I’m concerned that doesn’t have quite the ring of, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you.” But whatever the translation, old or new, authorized by King James or revised in the late 20th century, the sentiment is as clear as day, and what a sentiment it is! On this eighth Sunday after the Epiphany we come to the end of our readings in Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount. It really does end on an up-beat doesn’t it?

But let us not mistake the upbeat quality of this passage. It is not merely the cheery optimism of a Bobby McFaren sort of world where we can all just sing “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Let us not mistake it for the kind of blind optimism displayed in Voltaire’s book and Bernstein’s musical Candide — in which the principal characters keep on smiling through plague, kidnap, pirates, mayhem and murder because they believe themselves to inhabit the best of all possible worlds! It is not blind optimism we are called to, but a careful and perceptive seeking after what is of true worth, a careful and persistent seeking and striving for God — and God’s righteousness. It is in that holy quest that we will find all things added unto us.

There is much more to Jesus’ teaching in this passage from the Sermon on the Mount than looking on the sunny side of the street or letting a smile be your umbrella! No, my friends, this teaching is about a life based on what is important, focused on the right goal, and leading to the right end, under the grace of God: to strive, as we saw in last week’s gospel passage, after God’s perfection and holiness.

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So let’s follow that advice, and take a closer look, and start at the beginning. Jesus begins by warning us of the impossibility of serving God and wealth. Notice he says, “serve.” How many people who seek after wealth find themselves serving their wealth rather than enjoying it or benefitting from it. I have to say I feel a bit like that in relation to my computer: in principle it is supposed to work for me, to help me do my work, but there are times that I feel like I am serving it. I carefully protect it from viruses and spam, I patiently wait for it to install its never-ending stream of updates and patches letting it complete its work so that I can actually get to some of my work!

So when it comes to the things of this world, including money, the question, “Whom do you serve?” is a good one to ask — it is a good reminder that money exists to serve us as a medium of exchange, and we are to employ it, and not to be employed by it — or worse, be enslaved by it.

Jesus follows this up with a “therefore” — always an important word when looking to implications — since we are obviously called to serve God rather than wealth, therefore we are not to become worried — about our life or food or drink, or what we will wear. If we serve God, God will provide for his servants.

Think of what happens to people who spend their whole life thinking or talking about nothing but food or clothing — apart from the fact that it’s really boring! — are they any better off in the end than those who simply wear what is suitable and comfortable and eat what is set before them?

Jesus offers a startling pair of images: the birds of the air and the flowers of the field. The birds are not farmers, nor do they store up a supply of food. (It’s a good thing Jesus didn’t have squirrels on his mind, or Aesop’s fable of the grasshopper and the ant!) Birds don’t store things up; they eat what they can find day by day, whether its an early bird catching the worm or a flock o pigeons pecking up birdseed on the sidewalk, or geese carefully trimming the grass on the Bronx River Parkway. Jesus reminds us that God provides for them — and don’t we mean more to God than birds do?

And look at the flowers in all their glory of their color and finery — I mean it: check out the Bronx Botanical Garden some time if you want to see some spectacular beauty — for none of which did the flowers do a lick of work. If God provides such beauty to clothe things that live for a few days or weeks, how much more will he clothe and adorn us — we of little faith!

And so, again, therefore: do not worry about what you are going to eat or what you are going to drink or what you are going to wear. These are the things the Gentiles spend all their time worrying about — and by “Gentiles” Jesus really means people who don’t know God. These are the people not just of little faith but of no faith at all because they worship idols and false gods that are no gods: the literal idols of stone or metal, or the more insidious idols of wealth and fame and glamour — the junk food of the soul. They are far from God and God’s righteousness because they do not seek God or God’s kingdom; they seek only to grab what they can and fill their bellies with what they can amass.

But you — that’s us — do not strive for, do not seek, these things, Jesus assures us. God knows well enough that we need food and clothing; and God will provide. Strive for and seek God and the righteousness of God and all the rest will be thrown in.

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C S Lewis, the author of the Narnia stories, once made a sound observation. He said that if you study world history, that study will show “that Christians who did most for the present world were those who thought the most about the next.... It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they become ineffective in this one. Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you will get neither.”

That last bit may be a little too strongly worded — Lewis wasn’t known to his friends as “Bluff Jack” for nothing! and he was known to be plain-spoken and direct — but this little saying does sit well with the teaching of Jesus concerning where we should focus our attention, and what we should strive for and seek. Remember that Jesus also said, What does it profit one to gain the whole world if he loses his soul? We are called to aim high — to aim for heaven, as Lewis said. Even in earthly things, doesn’t it make sense to aim high? To let your reach exceed your grasp? To aim beyond, and to seek the higher things?

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On this last Sunday in Black History Month I want to share a story that Jesse Jackson told some years ago. It was in an article in The New Yorker (2.10.92) as he reminisced about his first day in sixth grade. His teacher was Miss Shelton, and she began the class by turning to the blackboard and writing these long words on it, words the children in that class didn’t understand and had never even heard of before. The kids all looked around and started whispering to each other, “She got the wrong class. She thinks we the eighth grade class!” Soon enough somebody in the class got the courage to yell out, “Uh, Miss Shelton. Those are eighth-grade words. We only the sixth grade here.”

Miss Shelton stopped writing and turned around. She peered over the top of her eyeglasses and surveyed the room with a keen eye. “I know what grade you are,” she said. “I work here. And you will learn every one of these words, and a lot more like them, before this year is over. I will not teach down to you. One of you little brats just might be mayor or governor, or even president, one day, and I’m going to make sure you’ll be ready!” And she turned back to the blackboard and went right on writing those long scary words.

That moment, that wonderful moment, started something in Jesse Jackson’s heart. To think that one of the children in that classroom, one of his classmates, maybe even himself, might be mayor, or governor, or even president one day — when in that town at that time there wasn’t a single African-American even on the school board.

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God challenges us, he gives challenging words to us, through Christ. He will not teach down to us. All through the sermon on the mount he has taught and sought to bring us up to him, up to his standards and his vision and his call for each and every one of us. He will speak to us sometimes of words we do not understand, of things we do not know. But he knows us, beloved, he knows each and every one of us. He knows we are worth more than many sparrows, worth more than all the botanical gardens in the world. And he calls us, each and every one of us, to seek his kingdom and his righteousness, putting our trust in him. He knows that one of us little brats might be mayor, or governor, or even president one day. And more than that, he knows that one day we will be with him where he is and live with him for ever. Aim for that, my friends, aim for that.+

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The New Moses

SJF • Epiphany 6a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Moses said, “See I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity... Choose life, so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him.

We continue our readings today in Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount. In this passage Jesus speaks particularly about a number of passages from the Law of Moses, several of them from the Ten Commandments. In this, Jesus is taking on the role of a New Moses — he is, after all, as Matthew emphasizes, giving this teaching about the Law on a mountain, just as Moses received the Law from the hand of God on another mountain.

Matthew and others in the early church got the message about a new Moses appearing on the scene to teach the people, based on a promise Moses himself made in Deuteronomy, his farewell address to his people in chapter 18. He said, “The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people; you shall heed such a prophet.” (18:15) Matthew wasn’t the only one who saw Jesus as fulfilling this promise. Simon Peter quoted those very words from Deuteronomy to the same effect when he defended himself before the people for having healed the afflicted man who sat by the Beautiful Gate, a scene from Acts 3 portrayed in the stained glass window just around the corner from me. Peter proclaimed that he worked this miracle through the power of God made known in Jesus, and through the faith of Jesus Christ, and he quoted that passage from Deuteronomy. This Jesus, whom God raised from the dead, is the fulfillment of Moses’ promise, and more.

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So what, acting as the new Moses, what does Jesus do in this portion of his sermon on the mountain? We are accustomed to thinking of Jesus as the one with the light touch, the lenient and tolerant one who forgives; the generous one. And indeed he is that — when dealing with individuals, especially individuals demeaned and judged by others, or those willing to throw themselves on the mercy of the court. In those cases Jesus is acting as a pastor — the best pastor, the Good Shepherd! In those cases, such as the one where he stands up for the woman caught in the very act of adultery, Jesus acts as a defense attorney.

But on the mountain Jesus is acting as a new Moses, as a supreme court judge who is giving a strict interpretation of the Law to those who have sought loopholes or made excuses. Here Jesus cuts through the evasive undergrowth to get to the spirit undergirding each law. And in this cutting to the core each law ends up being sharper and more demanding, not easier and more casual. Just as when you sharpen a knife: there is actually a little less of it — you have actually ground some of it away — but it is sharper than ever.

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Our reading from Deuteronomy sets the stage for this, showing Moses presenting the commandments of God, and following them or not, as a matter of life or death. This is not just idle speculation or trivial argument about nonessentials. This is a turning point in the history of God’s people, a decision made before crossing the Jordan; as weighty a matter for them as crossing the Rubicon was for Julius Caesar. The Law of Moses will be a source of life or a source of death, depending on how it is treated. It is like a very useful tool — a very sharp knife indeed — that comes with a warning note on the box advising just how sharp and dangerous it is. If you obey the commandments, using them in the way God intends, you will live and prosper; but if you are careless, or misuse the tool, you will fail and die.

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As I say, Jesus raises the ante — if you think getting beyond matters of life and death can be raised, seen, and called. But this is a game of strip poker Jesus is playing: He strips away all of the protective padding in which the Law had become encased over time, all those evasions and excuses, to get to its sharp and dangerous core. In the passage we heard today, Jesus addresses murder, adultery and swearing falsely — three commandments from among the Big Ten delivered on that other mountain, and he polishes the sharpness of these Laws so they cut like Ginzu knives!

He starts by quoting the law, “You shall not murder,” but immediately gets beyond the letter of the law to the spirit, beyond the crime itself to the evil energies that lead to the crime. He is like a good detective addressing the murder mystery by looking at the motives that lead to and underlay the crime: anger, hatred, insult, and dissension.

He takes up another of the 10 Commandments: “You shall not commit adultery.” But once again, he clarifies that it is what lies behind and beneath adultery — that is the real problem — the lustful eye that casts its gaze on another man’s woman, or the dismissive and unloving spirit that sends a wife away with just a piece of paper.

Finally, at least in the portion assigned for today, he summarizes another set of commandments from different parts of the law — not just from Sinai — under a single principle: “You shall not swear falsely.” But then he tosses even this basic principle aside to affirm one even more basic: do not swear at all and risk not being able to follow through on your promise, but simply say Yes or No, and then take or refrain from action, as appropriate.

In each of these moral situations Jesus sharpens the knife: he provides those who first heard him preaching from the mountainside, and us, with principles that are after all easier to understand than the complexities of the Law, with all those evasions and loopholes, but perhaps harder to follow and more demanding to obey. This passage, especially the part about plucking out your eye or cutting off your hand if either of them leads you to sin, is considered to be one of the “hard sayings of Jesus” the things that some Christians, including a few preachers, would like to soften and explain away. Volumes have been written by those attempting to make Jesus mean something other than what he said.

In doing so, such commentators attempt to redo the very thing that Jesus wants to undo: they want to dull the edge of the moral conscience; to wrap it in the cotton wool of legalism, to put it on a shelf out of sight and out of mind; to find a likely suspect and convict him rather than do the hard detective work of ferreting out the motive that led to the crime; or to cry out in this game of poker, ‘all bets are off.’

But Jesus will not have it so: and if we are to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world — as he told us in last week’s portion from this gospel — then we should not have it so either. Rather let us look into our hearts and our consciences with the same piercing examination, and honest evaluation, that Jesus calls us to. The sharp knife of discernment and judgment is like the surgeon’s scalpel; or like the knife that young man used to cut off his own arm when trapped by a boulder (you can even see the movie!). It is one thing to save your body by being willing to sacrifice your arm. How much more vital to save one’s immortal soul by allowing the Good Physician to heal us and restore us by his sharp teaching.

You have heard what was said by Moses; and you have heard what Jesus had to say. May each of us choose wisely, for it is life or death that awaits us, and the choice is ours to make.+

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The Two Ways

SJF • Proper 8c 2010 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
A man said to Jesus, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”+

I’m sure that many of you here are familiar with the Narnia series — children’s stories by CS Lewis, beginning with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. That first volume, and the second, Prince Caspian, have been made into movies — and you may have seen one or both of them. For those who haven’t, let me just say that Lewis was trying to address some of the major themes of Christianity in his imaginative portrayal of another world — and, in a way that would appeal to the imagination of children, a fantasy world of talking animals, magic and mystery.

I can attest how important these stories have been to many people over the years — including myself. They played a part in my adult return to the Christian faith when, as a teenager, I was working as a counselor at the Episcopal Mission Society summer camp, and shared these stories with the children under my care — most of them orphans or children in foster care, living in situations very far removed from the polite English world of CS Lewis or the fantasy world of Narnia! Yet they just couldn’t get enough of these stories — nor could I! They spoke truth, and truth we heard. When I returned home from that summer, I looked up the local Episcopal parish and became an active member.

In the last volume of the Narnia stories, Lewis chose to end with his own version of Revelation — a description of the last days of Narnia in a great Last Battle. And as the battle between the forces of good and evil rage through that fantasy world, one group tries to play the part of neutrality — the Dwarfs. They don’t want to get involved on either side. They do nothing to help the forces of good, to hinder the forces of evil, or vice versa. As they say, “The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs.” And so they refuse to take sides in the Last Battle — off to one side in a circle by themselves.

And after the battle is over and the forces of good have triumphed and the forces of evil have been conquered and dispatched, the Dwarfs are still sitting there — off in a circle to one side. They have become blind. They literally can no longer see what has happened — that the battle is over and the world itself is about to end, folded up into a glorious new life — not unlike the biblical images in Revelation! But the Dwarfs have missed out on it all, and don’t even know it. They think they are stuck in a damp, lightless stable, when they are in fact sitting in a beautiful sunlit flowery meadow. As the new creation dawns, they sit in their circle, arms folded across their chests and chanting, “The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs!”

The children try to rouse them from their blindness, holding flowers in front of them, but they cry out, “What do you mean by shoving filthy stable-litter in my face!” Even when the great Lion Aslan — who represents Christ in Lewis’s fantasy world — goes over to the Dwarfs and gives them a low growl of warning, they all say, “It’s just someone trying to frighten us with a noise-making machine! They won’t take us in.” As the old saying goes, they have made their bed and they’re going to lie in it. Or as Aslan himself observes, “Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison. They are so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.”

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I mention all of this because in our readings today we see similar failures to respond to a call to action, people failing to see the good that is set before them, and engaging in all sorts of delaying tactics. Elijah calls Elisha but Elisha wants to say goodbye to his parents before he follows on the way. Jesus gets a whole litany of excuses from various people, as to the things they need to do before they can follow him — and he gives them a stern rebuke.

More importantly Saint Paul lays two choices before the Galatians when he talks about the works of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit. There is a long tradition in Judaism and early Christianity called, “The Two Ways” — the way of evildoers and the way of the righteous. And which way you take will shape your life.

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I think it was Yogi Berra who said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” The point is, you have to choose — it’s one way or the other. The problem is that sometimes people don’t want to commit; they don’t want to take sides — it may not be quite so clear as the contrast Paul makes between the flesh and the spirit; I mean, he make it obvious about which way is the way of righteousness!

But sometimes, even the best intentioned people can be more like the Dwarfs in Lewis’s fable, or like the would-be disciples who delay in or withdraw from following Jesus because they decided they have other, more important things to do. Sometimes people think that rather than making a choice to reject what is wrong and do what is right, it is acceptable to do nothing, to abdicate responsibility and stand in watchful waiting to see how things go.

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And the church can be just as guilty of this kind of inaction as anyone else — being made of fallible people sometimes the church as a whole fails to live up to the challenge Jesus presents us. Paul’s letter to the Galatians reminds me of one such instance in our own history. The passage we heard begins with a call not to submit to a yoke of slavery This reminds me of a sorry aspect of our own church’s history — not this parish, but the whole Episcopal Church. By the 1850s the Episcopal Church was well-settled in just about every part of the United States, North and South, East and West. And of course, because of this, the church was faced with becoming embroiled in the controversy dividing the nation — slavery. The nation was occupied with the question: shall slavery be allowed to continue or shall it be stopped; and if stopped, how.

The church decided to play it safe. To avoid allowing this important issue to become a source of division, the Episcopal Church officially decided not to take a position on the question of slavery — the church would neither approve nor condemn what was called “the peculiar institution.” The Presiding Bishop of the Church, John Henry Hopkins of Vermont, even wrote a book defending the biblical foundations of slavery. He argued that as long as slaves were treated well there was nothing to prevent Christians from holding slaves, and that going to war about it was a far greater sin than the continuation of a venerable biblical institution — after all, he pointed out, Abraham had held slaves, and he was a model of biblical righteousness. That a bishop from the far North could make such an appeal warmed hearts of his Southern confrères.

And so, during the very years when this congregation was forming, while other Christian churches split along north-south lines, the Episcopal Church was able to remain a single body — at least until war actually broke out, and with the creation of the Confederate States of America, all of their bishops and deputies withdrew from participation in the Episcopal Church of the United States — after all, from their perspective they were part of a different country. One of the southern bishops was even a Confederate general, and died in battle.

The irony is that some people will point at this history with pride — the Episcopal Church didn’t divide, except for those few years during the actual war, and came back together afterward — unlike the Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists. But somehow, I think in failing to stand for something we missed a great opportunity. By accepting slavery — for others, since few slaves were themselves Episcopalians — we colluded in injustice, and at a crucial moment remained silent; like the Dwarfs who were only for the Dwarfs, we were only interested in the preservation of our ecclesiastical union — a union that was in fact divided when the war broke out, even though the Northern bishops refused to recognize it, and continued the roll call of the names of the absent southern bishops whenever the House of Bishops met — knowing full well they were not there.

Is there virtue in such obliviousness? Such living in denial and embracing fantasy? Such collusion in injustice? Do you think so?

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For to be truly righteous it is not enough just not to do bad things — it is not enough just not to take the way of the works of the flesh, those obvious failings. It is not enough to say to Jesus, I will follow you when it becomes convenient for me to do so. No, my friends, we are called to choose — and to choose rightly; not just to avoid the way of the flesh but to get on our feet and walk in the way of the spirit — to follow Jesus. We are called to live by the Spirit, and, guided by the Spirit, to join Jesus in the proclamation of the kingdom of God. To follow him will mean to do the works of God and bear the fruit of the Spirit in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And these are the things God calls us to do, calls us to follow. Where he leads us, will we follow? Will we?+

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The Best-Laid Plans

Saint James Fordham • Proper 22a • Tobias Haller BSG
There was a householder who planted a vineyard.

A little girl, five years old, kneels in the middle of the kitchen floor, building a house of bright wooden blocks. It is a beautiful house. There are round, green pillars at the front door. Windows on each floor are framed by blocks of yellow and orange, and topped by bright red lintels. Just as she is about to place the finishing touch — the blue, notched chimney block — on the roof of the house, the door opens and her mother comes in with an armful of laundry. As the door closes, the floor shakes and the house collapses in ruins — no house now, just a pile of blocks: yellow, red, green and blue. The little girl jumps up, and in frustration kicks the blocks that go sliding across the floor. Then, looking at her mother, she bursts into tears.

We have all known disappointments in our lives — some minor, some deeply painful. From earliest childhood, when we first begin to have expectations, through the shattered dreams of adolescence, and the dashed hopes of adulthood, our best laid plans often don’t work out.

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Today we have heard two stories about vineyards — and about failed hopes. Isaiah sings a tragic song about crop failure. We need not look far to find parallels for this story, what with droughts and hard winters, to say nothing of the collapse of the virtual crop known as the stock market, or the changing climate. A modern day folk singer protesting farm foreclosures or ecological disaster is singing in the spirit of Isaiah; because the song is about more than vineyards; it is about plans going awry, and a world misused.

Isaiah’s beloved, for whom he sings this song, is a careful planner. The land is fertile; the ground is cultivated with care, the stones are cleared away. The property is fenced to keep out the foxes. The vines themselves are choice. In the middle of the property a wine vat is prepared, and a tower is built as a home for the workers. The vineyard owner, looking over the scene, smiles and savors in imagination the taste of the rich sweet wine.

But when harvest time comes, what does the vineyard yield? Wild bitter grapes, good for nothing. Like the little girl whose house of blocks collapsed — like many of us who suffer disappointments — the vineyard owner reacts with violence: tearing down the fence, breaking the walls, trampling the vines under foot, letting it go to wrack and ruin. The vineyard owner even makes it stop raining.

Wait a minute! How can the vineyard owner make it stop raining? Who has the power to do that? Suddenly, with this one phrase — “I will command the clouds” — Isaiah reveals that this song isn’t about agriculture, but about God and Israel and Judah. God is the owner who looks — not for grapes — but for justice and righteousness: justice as sweet and righteousness as fortifying as wine. Instead God finds the bitterness of strife and bloodshed, the stench of injustice.

This song isn’t about farming after all, or natural disasters like drought and hard winters. This is a song about sin: the human tendency to misuse even the best advantages for selfish ends. God delivered the tribes of Israel out of Egypt, and brought them to a fertile hill, a land of milk and honey. They were given the Law as a guardian and watchtower, to keep them on the paths of righteousness.

Instead, injustice and crime are the rule. Sinful humanity thinks of itself first, and in place of a pleasant harvest of righteousness and generosity, only grapes of wrath grow upon the stunted vines.

+ + +

Selfishness and greed are even more evident in the second vineyard story that Jesus tells. It starts in the same way, with a carefully planned vineyard. Then the owner leases the vineyard to tenants, and goes off to another country. When harvest comes, the owner sends servants to collect the share of the produce that constitutes the rent, but finds the workers have decided to keep the whole harvest for themselves. They beat and kill the servants, and then even murder the owner’s son when he is sent to set things right.

Selfishness and greed — but surely folly, too. What can these tenants be thinking? What could possibly lead them to believe they can keep the whole harvest for themselves, not even turning over the portion due as rent? How can they imagine that by killing the son they could gain the inheritance? What can possess them?

Well, what possesses anyone acting out of greed? Look around at the world and you will see. God gives us the good earth to live in — but we pollute it with waste, we deplete its resources, we warm it to a boil and then wonder where have all the glaciers gone. Look at the financial crisis: a mixture of greed and misplaced optimism, of thinking you can cut corners and not have to abide by any rules, and squeeze the fruit until it gives more juice than it contains, and even to wager on derivatives that gain when everyone else loses. No wonder we are in a pickle.

+ + +

God gives humanity the ability to choose between right and wrong — yet we often place our own needs, our own best laid plans before those of others. As a result, the physical and human worlds both are spoiled. We look “for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold, a cry!” Fallen humanity clutches the harvest to its breast, crying out like a five-year-old, “Mine! Mine!” and failing to see that what it holds is a harvest of dry and stinking weeds.

Greed and folly make the harvest turn sour. Like the manna of the wilderness, the harvest cannot be stored up, but must be used and shared day by day. If you try to keep it, to possess it as your very own, it will rot. God promised that the bread from heaven would be there daily, but the untrusting souls who tried to store it overnight ended up with rot.

St Paul wrote to the Christians of Philippi about such people: “Their end is destruction, their god is the belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things.” The greedy focus on their own plans without regard for others.

This is the attitude of the earthly minded. But the earth itself is good — it is God’s own creation, created it for our benefit. What turns the earth bad is our selfish misuse of it. When the earth becomes an end in itself — only good for what we can dig out of it, grow from it, or make of it — the earth itself will rebel — has rebelled — against us. If we go on trying to squeeze every last derivative penny from a stock market based not even on stock any more, but on futures, options and indexes — well, our future is bleak, our options few, and the index is the skin of our teeth. When we begin to think of the harvest as ours, rather than God’s, it will turn sour. If our best laid plans leave God, and God’s children — the whole of humanity — out of the picture, we are as foolish as those who worship their bellies, or who think that by killing servants or son, they will inherit the kingdom.

If, then, we are to lay our plans well, if we are to build on a firm foundation, then God must be at the heart of our best laid plans. The earth is available for our use and benefit, but it is the kingdom of heaven that should concern us ultimately. The market is there to trade in, the banks to invest in wisely and prudently — not in wild speculation but in sober judgment — but the place our dearest treasure should be stored is not here on earth, but with our Father above.

To do so, we must face for a time away from the earth, lifting our eyes toward heaven, and pressing “on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”

+ + +

Seven hundred eighty-two years ago yesterday, a man died whose whole life focused on heaven, but who delighted in things of the earth. Few have so embraced the simplicity of Christ’s life, and few so relished the glories of God’s creation. Yet Saint Francis of Assisi understood the secret of moving amid his fellow creatures — men and women, the sun, moon and stars, the rivers and animals, especially the animals — while keeping his eyes fixed on Christ. He even knew the greatest secret of all, the secret the vineyard tenants did not know. They thought that killing the son would wreck the owner’s plan; that Christ’s death was the collapse and ruin of God’s best laid plans for the world.

But out of death came life. Christ’s death was not the failure of God’s plan, but its culmination. As Saint Francis knew, death is not the end. We joined our voices with his in our opening hymn, based on one of his poems: “Even you, most gentle death, waiting to hush our final breath... You lead back home the child of God, for Christ our Lord that way has trod. O praise him, Alleluia.”

As we pass — as we must — through that narrow door of death into the wide expanse of the kingdom of heaven, may we bear a rich harvest of fruit, the fruit of a life lived in generosity and fellowship with all of our brothers and sisters, ready to present it to the owner of the vineyard. The Lord will welcome us, as he has always planned, with open arms, the same arms he once spread out for us and for the whole world, upon the hard wood of the cross.+

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The Prison of Oneself

SJF • Proper 9a • Tobias Haller BSG

For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.

+In a film of a few years back, The Statement, Michael Caine plays an aging French Nazi. As a young man he had participated in the massacre of fellow villagers who were Jewish. He himself is a devout Roman Catholic who has been shielded by the church — moved from monastery to monastery around the country — because he belongs to a mysterious organization, a “church within the church,” similar to if not identical with Opus Dei — the group given a rather fantastic interpretation in another more recent film, The Da Vinci Code. He is constantly on the run and lives between the terror of being assassinated or abducted to Israel to stand trial, and wallowing in emotional outbursts of repentance.

In one particularly telling scene, he is kneeling in his tiny apartment, resting his arms on a small table adorned with various devotional objects, weeping and wailing his heart out in a paroxysm of repentant anguish. At the end of this emotional display he seems a bit calmer and relieved; but as he stands he almost trips over his old dog, lying on the floor all this while behind him. Suddenly possessed with a savage rage, he begins kicking the dog mercilessly, cursing at the top of his lungs. And whatever sympathy the audience might have had for him, it disappears in a flash.

More importantly, the problem with this Nazi isn’t just that he can’t escape his past, it is that he can’t escape himself. He is not just a good man who did a bad thing once years before and has yet to pay the price — he is a bad man who thinks his bouts of repentance will make up for the fact that his heart has not changed in all those years: the heart that led him to betray his fellow villagers in order to preserve himself. In fact, he isn’t even really repentant — he just doesn’t want to get caught; self-preservation is still the rule. The irony is that he is already caught: he is free only in the sense that he is not in a prison made of stone and iron — his real prison is his own self - the very self he so earnestly wants to preserve.

+ + +

Saint Paul has a similar problem, but finds a better solution. He too has done something awful when he was younger, as a persecutor of the church who arrested Christians up and down the country, and even saw to it that some of them were put to death. But even after his conversion he realizes that not only can he not escape his past — even though he has really repented of it — but that he cannot escape himself. He keeps on sinning: he knows what he ought to do, but he doesn’t do it; he knows what he shouldn’t do, but he still does it. As he says, “When I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.”

Now, Saint Paul is not unique in this: in fact, this is pretty much the human condition when it comes to good behavior. None of us is perfect, and all of us fall off the wagon from time to time — and even if we are able to avoid the sins of intention, the ones that we have to work at (such as pride, envy, and hatred) it is difficult if not impossible to avoid the sins that derive from the emotions, such as anger — the sins that arise unbidden and almost irresistibly.

The boundary between who we are and what we do is open and easily crossed — you don’t need a passport to go from one country to the next: and it is sometimes hard to tell the difference or make the distinction between being and doing. The late science fiction author Kurt Vonnegut once observed, “Socrates said, ‘To be is to do.’ Jean-Paul Sartre said, ‘To do is to be.’ And Frank Sinatra said, ‘Do be do be do.’” Our being and our doing are intimately connected, however you sing the song. As I noted in my sermon a few weeks ago, the sum of who we are is largely determined by the choices we make and the things we do in our lives — and we do not always choose rightly even if we want to, and we have to deal with the consequences of our wrong choices as much as we enjoy the rewards of our right ones.

+ + +

But to get back to Saint Paul: even as he complains about his situation, he doesn’t stop there wallowing in his own inability to be perfect, his own inability to escape himself, his own flesh and members, which seem to be a law unto themselves and lead him to do the very things he doesn’t want to do. He knows that there is someone to rescue him from what he calls “this body of death” — and isn’t that a powerful phrase to describe the prison of oneself, the Death Row of ones own body?

Paul knows that as bad as he is, as harsh is the sentence he deserves, he has been saved — rescued, quite literally from death, delivered from solitary confinement in the prison of his own incapacitated self, a self that without Christ Jesus can look forward to nothing but condemnation and destruction and death. The rescuer has come.

No wonder daughter Zion rejoices greatly, no wonder daughter Jerusalem shouts aloud — the cavalry has come to the rescue! Or perhaps I should say “Calvary” in this case, for this isn’t about horses and chariots, but about the Son of God come in the likeness of sinful flesh, to deal with sin, by nailing it to the cross and sealing the new covenant in his own blood, and then to rise in glory.

It is this new covenant, the covenant of the Spirit in the blood of the Savior, ratified by God in his rising from the dead, that allows us to escape the prison of our selves. He put the power of the flesh to death in his own flesh, so that those who walk according to the Spirit can find both life and peace in him; rescued and reprieved, and pardoned, to rise with him.

And you will notice that Paul’s teaching on this is fully in keeping with Jesus Christ’s own assurance on the subject. He calls us from the weariness of carrying the heavy burden of our selves — our sinful flesh weighed down by the burden of the law, which cannot save but only makes us more conscious of how low and sinful and weary we are, as if, like villagers in some medieval town, we had our sentence carved on heavy wooden signs to carry around our necks.

He has taken that heavy, weary burden upon himself — borne the weight of the sins of the whole world, and in exchange has placed upon us only his easy yoke and light burden, easy and light enough that the weakest and weariest can bear it.

And what is that burden? Of what does the yoke of Christ consist? Not an endless quest after perfection; not a repetitious wallowing in emotional bouts of repentance that may bring momentary relief but can offer no permanent escape from the prison of self. No, what he asks of us is simple, so simple that the wise and intelligent sometimes miss it, and it is up to infants to proclaim it — what he asks is summed up in that one word, Love: to love our God and our neighbor.

Like any good yoke this one is balanced: it has two arms, and you cannot use it unless both sides are engaged — have you ever seen villagers carrying two pails of water with a yoke? It’s no good trying to carry one, or one full and one empty! So too with the yoke of the Spirit, the easy yoke that Jesus places upon us, so that we may walk in his way, bearing only the light double burden of love — a burden that steadies without wearying, for love never fails nor grows weary.

The double love of God and neighbor delivers us from the law of the flesh, from the prison of ourselves, because it turns us from ourselves towards others — towards God and our neighbor. We are no longer obsessed with seeking forgiveness for our sins in bouts of repentance — our sins have been forgiven, not because we earned their forgiveness, but because Christ died for us. “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set us free from the law of sin and death.” We remember and confess our sins here in church week by week not to earn God’s favor, but to remind ourselves of his love for us in having forgiven them already. In that knowledge we are strengthened in the Spirit to return that love to him and share it with our neighbors.

This is the means by which are liberated from the prison of ourselves — when we recognize that the door has been opened, the chains have been cut, the locks unlocked and the gates flung wide. The King of glory has entered in and done his work in rescuing us from sin and death: his incarnation has reversed our incarceration! All we need do now is walk through the door bearing his yoke of love, and walking in accordance with the Spirit. Let us take his yoke upon us and learn from him, the one gentle and humble in heart, yet strong to save: Jesus Christ our Lord.+

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Choosing God

St James Fordham • Proper 6a • Tobias Haller BSG
The Lord said to Moses, “If you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all peoples.”+

How many choices have you made today? That may seem like an odd question, and you may not even be aware that you have made any choices. But you have, I assure you. Every minute of our lives we are all making choices, some as insignificant as which shoe to put on first, left or right; some a bit more important, such as what clothes we will wear.

Even more important — and because you’re here I know what choice you made — was the choice not to lay in bed this morning with the Sunday paper, or to go to the mall or the cricket field, but to come to church.

The thing about choices is that if you choose one thing, you don’t choose something else. You can’t, as the old saying goes, have your cake and eat it too. If the right shoe goes on first, the left waits its turn. If you wear the blue dress, the red one stays on its hanger. And if you’re here in church, you are not still in bed, or at the mall or the cricket pitch, or enjoying a quiet snooze by the seaside. Making one choice, accepting one option, means that all the others go unchosen; and unlike the choice with pairs of shoes, where it is either the right or the left, many choices you make stand against many, many other possibilities, which become, in the moment you choose one out of many, a multitude of unchoices.

As we choose, moment by moment and day by day, we create, as it were, a trail of choices marked out on the map of all possible choices, a silver trail glimmering on a velvet field of innumerable possibilities passed by, innumerable paths not taken; so that if we were to look back through time and space we could see our lives drawn out like strings of pearls, each choice in each moment glistening in the early morning light. And we could say, That is my life. For the choices we make form the sum not just of how we are dressed, or where we may be, but indeed describe who we are. We become who we are by the choices we make, by the paths we choose to take, by the singular things we choose to do as well as the multitude of things we choose not to do.

+ + +

What our readings today show us is that God makes choices, too. God tells Moses that even though the whole earth belongs to him, he has chosen Israel to be his people, to be a priestly kingdom and a holy nation, a treasured possession. That means, among other things, that all the other nations of the earth have to stand by and wait for the right time, until the coming of Christ fulfilled what the prophet had promised — that light would eventually come to all nations, a light to enlighten the Gentiles. The light would have to shine somewhere before it could shine everywhere.

In the Gospel reading, we see Jesus even intentionally delay that process, soft-pedaling even the spread of the Gospel itself. He looks out on the crowds and sees them like sheep without a shepherd. But instead of sending all of his followers out to all of the world — to all those other nations apart from Israel — he chooses only twelve, and tells them to be very choosey about where they go: not to the Gentiles, not even to the Samaritans, but only to recover the lost sheep of Israel.

This is the same Israel that God chose long before, when he plucked Abraham from the midst of the populous land between the rivers, and sent him off to a country he’d never known; the same Israel that God chose when he swooped down on eagle’s wings and rescued them from slavery in Egypt. God, and the Son of God, choose and choose again, and seem to know exactly what they want, and when they want it. And what God wants, what Jesus wants, is what we all want, when it comes right down to it.

What God wants is a people who will hear and obey his voice, a people who will choose to enter a loving relationship, and return that love. What Christ wants is to gather the lost sheep of the twelve tribes of Israel, to gather the stricken flock lost in a world that has lost sight of God, and he chooses twelve apostles to gather that flock, to spread that word, the good news that the kingdom of heaven has come near. Once that is done, there will be plenty of time to spread the message further.

+ + +

The fact is, you have to start somewhere before you can act everywhere. And Jesus shows the wisdom of a strategic thinker, for he knows that the best way to grow is to build a firm foundation — as we were reminded a few weeks ago when we heard about the houses built on rock and on sand. So the choosey Jesus chooses the twelve, to send them out to prepare the way by first recalling Israel to its true vocation as God’s chosen. And, as we see from the advice he gives them, what Christ seeks is to be welcomed. In the long run what God chooses is to be chosen in return.

For Abraham chose God after God chose him. He could have said, “No thanks, God, I’ll stay here in Chaldea. I’m comfortable here; I know my neighbors and they know me.” Moses could have remained in Egypt as Pharaoh’s right-hand-man, the Dick Cheney of ancient Egypt: “Look God, I’ve got a great job here; I’m second in the kingdom to Pharaoh, and if I play my cards right I might even get a pyramid after I’m gone.” What power he might have held if he hadn’t chosen to follow God’s call, to choose what was comfortable rather than what was right! And look at the apostles themselves: Matthew could have chosen to stay at the custom house, collecting taxes and making a good living; Peter, Andrew, John and James could have stayed by the seashore with their nets.

And Judas.... well, here is someone who did finally make the other choice, as Matthew reminds us. Even though God had chosen him, offering him a hope and a glory that was yet to be, to be one of the twelve foundation stones of the new Jerusalem, Judas chose instead the short-term security of silver across his palm. And his choice shaped who he was and what became of him as surely as it shaped the lives of the other eleven, of Moses and Abraham, and of us too.

For you and I have made choices as well. We could have chosen to stay in bed this morning, or gone to the mall, the Van Cortland Park or Orchard Beach. But these choices we make, in response to the choices God has made, form us into a different sort of people, not just people who are a nice enough bunch of folks, but a people who is holy, a royal priesthood, a chosen nation that chooses God right back. We are who we are because God has chosen us, and because we have chosen him in return. And that is what it means to be partakers in the kingdom of heaven.

+ + +

We are who we are by the choices God has made, and by the choices we make in return. We can choose to wander and stray — see, the door is open, and nobody’s got a gun to your head holding you a hostage here in church. We don’t live now in the days of the early church when being a Christian could cost you your life. We don’t live in a place where being a Christian can mean assault, or being thrown in prison. We live in a place and time when being a Christian requires very little — yet how many are reluctant even to part with that little of their time, talent and treasure? We are free to choose the comfortable cushion and worship at the Church of Saint Mattress if we want to. We can slip off to the mall or the park or the seaside. I’m old enough to remember when the stores were closed on Sunday; not so much because the merchants respected the Lord’s Day as due to the lack of customers who did respect Sunday. And I remember — how many of you do too? — when Macy’s broke the barrier and was the first store to open for business on Sunday. Maybe they heard there was someone outside with thirty pieces of silver to spend! Oh, yes, we have many choices we can make.

This is Fathers’ Day, and we know that fathers can choose to be good fathers, sons to be good sons. Or they can follow the way of neglect and abdication, of abandonment and disdain. Oh yes indeed, there are many choices.... But by such choices we shape what kind of people we are, and what kind of future we will enjoy, in this life and the next. May we always choose the way that brings us ever closer to the one who chooses us: the Son of God, the Son of his Father in Heaven, Jesus Christ our Lord.+

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The King and His Cross

Saint James Fordham • Proper 29c • Tobias Haller BSG
The soldier mocked him... saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself.”

What does a king look like? We all carry pictures in our heads evoked by words, images that pop up when we hear a word like king. Many people, I’m sure, probably picture a figure like Henry VIII. Though if you’ve seen any of the TV dramas about Henry recently, you might have a very different image in mind. In an effort to promote a younger viewership, they’ve got actors playing Henry who look more like Brad Pitt than Charles Laughton — Henry as a hunk instead of a slab! But perhaps you are familiar with the famous portrait of Henry as a stately monarch standing defiantly arms akimbo vested in splendid and colorful robes.

On the other hand, kings are often more comical figures, subject to ridicule and caricature especially in our democracy. So perhaps instead you might picture one of those comical cartoon kings, the little chubby guys with goatees and tiny crowns perched on their heads, your average Dr. Seuss kind of king. Whatever image first leaps to mind when you hear the word king, I think I can guarantee that it will almost never be the image of a condemned criminal about to be executed.

We expect kings to be seated on thrones, not electric chairs. We expect kings to exercise their power in the freedom of their monarchy, not to be fastened down in the incapacity of bondage and death.

+ + +

Yet this is the central paradox of Christianity, the embarrassing scandal that made it and makes it so hard for some people to understand: that our king — and more than a king, the Son of God incarnate, Jesus Christ — that our king died on a cross, executed for insurrection against the Emperor, nailed up and hung out to die in naked agony on a rocky little hill outside the walls of a provincial city in an outpost of the Empire.

This was and is hard to understand. For some it was and is impossible. It was, as Saint Paul told the Corinthians, a scandal to Jews and a folly to Greeks — in short, to the whole world a notion that was absurd and tragic — the very idea that the one through whom all things were created should be so powerless! And that is because in most minds — then as now — kingship was and is associated with showing your power, especially power over others. To be a king is not just to be powerful, but to display that power through control, to have in your hand the power of life and death over others and to use it, to be able to shout out, “Off with his head,” or “I dub thee, Sir Wilfrid.”

At the very least, to be a king means to have complete power of self-determination: no one can judge or forbid the king anything. The King is the boss! As I said before, many people picture someone like Henry the VIII when they hear the word “king” — and Henry certainly was powerful and willful. He enjoyed exercising his power and his will, and nobody, pope, queen, chancellor or archbishop, better get in his way! Henry once wrote a little song about himself, and so we have his own testimony on this matter: “Grudge who will, but none deny; so God be pleased, thus live will I!” Or, to put it in more contemporary language, “Nobody crosses the king.”

+ + +

That is why it is so very hard for so many to see the kingship of Christ. Here is a king who is crossed. It is the cross that confounds our notions of kingship. Here on the cross is a man seemingly completely bereft of self-determination, literally nailed down so that he cannot move, stifled and in pain so he can hardly breathe. For those who see control and self-determination as the sign of kingship, it is the powerlessness and immobility of the crucified Christ that render him incomprehensible.

Many don’t understand him now, as they didn’t understand him then. And this is why the voices rang out through our Gospel today, echoing three times. “Save yourself!” cried the religious leaders, the soldiers, and even the criminal at Jesus’ side, three points of view representing the whole world, civilized and uncivilized.

+++

The religious leaders, even while they acknowledged Jesus’ power to heal and save others, called upon him to prove himself Messiah by saving himself. They echoed the doubting words from the very start of his ministry, when the leaders of his hometown challenged him to do for them the same sort of miracles he’d done elsewhere. How ironic that religious leaders should show such a lack of faith!

Those who say, “Prove it and then we will believe!” fail to grasp that the kingdom of God is built upon faith, not evidence. The kingdom of God is based on love, not proof; freedom, not compulsion. The kingdom of God is not about force, but invitation — it is not make believe: no one is made to believe. But all are given the gracious opportunity to come to the banquet; to taste and see, and seeing, then believe. And so those who looked for proofs could not recognize the king when he came to them full of faith in his Father, full of love for them, came not to lord it over them but to set them free. Instead of being lifted up by its astounding and shocking glory, the religious leaders stumbled over the scandal of the cross.

+++

The soldiers mocked Jesus, and said to him, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself.” These are the worldly wise. They don’t know from religion, but they do know from authority. They know Caesar; they know what kings look like and what kings can do. The soldiers who mocked Jesus as he hung on the cross knew what it meant to have power, to be able to issue orders, and take command. And they knew that this poor, naked, pitiful figure was no more like a king than either of the helpless criminals crucified to his left and his right. And so to these Gentiles the cross was simply foolishness, an absurdity to be laughed at, a sick joke at the expense of a madman who thought he was a king.

And so the civilized world, Jewish and Gentile, rejected the cross and the one who hung upon it, rejected its scandal and its folly.

+ + +

And what of the uncivilized world? They have a voice in this drama as well, in the person of the thieves, men who have rejected civilized behavior in return for satisfying their own needs and desires over and against those of society, who have chosen themselves ahead of others, breaking the golden rule of the social fabric.

So it is that finally, one of the criminals, himself condemned to death and hanging on a cross, challenged Jesus to save himself — and him — if he was the Messiah. The irony is that this criminal had it partly right. Jesus was there to save him, to save him and all who had erred and strayed, to save even those who nailed him to the cross, to save the entire world, for that is just how much his Father loved that fallen world, loved it so much that he gave his only Son — not to condemn the world, but that all might be saved. Jesus was there to save them all, but he could only do so by not saving himself.

+++

It was in this act, in his not saving himself that his true kingship was revealed. It was his self-determined self-sacrifice that crowned his divine kingship. The only perfect individual ever born, the Son of God, the firstborn of all creation, for whom and in whom all things were created, made the one possible perfect act of self-determined self-sacrifice — not in showing his power over others, but in revealing his power, his power to choose for others. Only the offering of his perfect self in perfect sacrifice upon the cross could restore the royalty that once belonged to all humankind, made after the likeness of God’s Son, the express image of the invisible God. Only the act of a true king acting in true humility could bring peace to a world gone out of all control, through the misuse of the power to choose, God’s gift to his human children, spent in seeking to control others rather than in loving them.

Humankind had abused the royal power to choose, and robbed itself of its own majesty by choosing selfishly instead of for the sake of others. But one man, one perfect man, showed us there was another way. This, my brothers and sisters, is the royalty of Jesus: that he chose not himself but others, chose completely and utterly to give himself — for all of us. In Christ, and him crucified, the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, the King of kings and Lord of lords. Even if he was unrecognized by those who stood mocking in his presence, taunting him to save himself while he was busy saving them, his kingship is nonetheless real.

It is not the kingship of power, but the kingship of sacrifice, the kingship of the hero who saves someone else at the cost of his own life. Such heroism will be embarrassing or scandalous to those who wouldn’t think of dirtying their hands to help another; such heroism will be foolish to those who see power and control as the only marks of a person’s worth; such heroism will be outrageous to anyone who thinks only of himself at the expense of others.

But such is the heroic kingship of Jesus Christ, the heroism that chooses freely to give up its freedom so that others might be free. This is the kingship of Christ our King, through whom — in this one great act of self-determined self-sacrifice, laying down his life for all of us — God was pleased, as Saint Paul said, to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

Do you want to know what a real king looks like? You need look no further to see all might, majesty, power and dominion, than to that cross, that Christ, that King.+

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Decisions Decisions

SJF • Proper 18c • Tobias Haller BSG
Moses said to all Israel, “See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity.”

Human life is full of decisions, some trivial and some important. Some of the decisions that we face day by day, and the choices we make, will have little impact on our lives. Other choices will have consequences so serious that we can even find ourselves paralyzed and unable to choose out of our fear of making the wrong choice.

And, let’s face it, even simple decisions can sometimes be hard to make. There is an old story of the Queen of England attending tea at an English lord’s manor. The butler in attendance was understandably a bit nervous, as it was his first time serving a royal. He asked, “Will you take tea, Ma’am?” The Queen answered, “Yes, thank you.” “India or China, Ma’am?” “India, please.” “Darjeeling, Assam or Nilgiri, Ma’am?” “Darjeeling, I think.” “Yes, Ma’am. Milk or lemon, Ma’am?” “Milk, please.” As the butler paused to turn away, he had one last thought. “The milk, Ma’am... Hereford, Guernsey, or Jersey?”

It is easy to see how having too many choices can make it difficult to make a decision even over such trivial matters. Part of me dreads going to the KFC, because I often find myself transfixed and overcome by what has become an entire wall of menu choices. It used to be so easy — just one piece, two or three! But now there are so many things to choose from. Perhaps that’s why they added that new dish — the bowl that contains layers of everything piled one on top of the other — a perfect solution when you can’t make up your mind. Believe me, there are times I am grateful that there’s a long line so that I can sort out what it is I want to order before I have to do so!

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Yes, many of the choices in life are trivial — and if even these can sometimes cause us to pause, with how much greater fear and trembling ought we approach the kinds of questions set before us in today’s readings from Scripture.

Even the choice that Saint Paul offers Philemon must have been difficult for him to decide upon — and it is a little frustrating that we only have Saint Paul’s side of the story, and so have no final word of how this story ends. Paul sends the runaway slave Onesimus back to Philemon. He asks the slave owner to receive him back, and not only not to punish him for having run away, but to accept him back as a brother in Christ — as an equal.

As I say, we don’t know if Philemon followed Saint Paul’s urging. The fact that Philemon preserved this letter (so that it could later be included in the Scripture) suggests that he did — after all, if he had rejected Saint Paul’s urging he would be unlikely to advertise that fact! We also know, from the writings of Saint Ignatius, that the bishop of Ephesus was named Onesimus — so it is possible that this former slave not only became a beloved brother to Philemon, but a bishop of the church.

Choices have consequences; and Paul’s choice to make this appeal and Philemon’s choice to hear it — as we hope he did — are remembered to this day.

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As are the choices made by the people of Israel as they approach the promised land. And here the choices are even more momentous than one person’s freedom. Moses offers the Israelites a literal life and death choice — the decision to follow the commandments of the Lord their God, walking in his ways — or to abandon the Lord who has delivered them, and follow other gods.

Now, you might say, this is a no-brainer! Who would choose death and destruction rather than life and prosperity? And yet, as we know, even though the people say they will choose life, and hold fast to God and follow in his way all the days of their lives, it isn’t too long after they cross the Jordan and enter the promised land that they begin to stray, setting up pillars and posts of wood and stone, bowing down to gods made by their own hands. And the consequences soon follow.

The reason they make this choice, strange as it may seem, is actually quite understandable when you consider human nature. Human beings have an amazing capacity for wishful thinking, for thinking they can live a life without consequences, for the freedom to choose what they want when they want it, even when they are told what their choices will lead to.

I don’t know if anyone here has ever been in the position of needing an organ transplant, but I’m sure you know that there are waiting lists and significant costs involved. But I am sorry to say, I once knew a man whose heavy drinking destroyed his liver, and who was lucky enough to get a liver transplant — but then drank his way through that liver too, and was dead within five years. And I’ll tell you, even many members of his family, as well as many of the doctors and nurses, were furious, and even said, “He didn’t deserve to get that liver; it could have gone to someone else who respected the gift of life they were offered.”

So it is for the Israelites — delivered from bondage in a land with many gods by the mighty acts of the one true God — they find it easier to slip back into their old pagan ways, than to follow the ordinances and commandments that could bring them a blessing instead of a curse.

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In our gospel today, Jesus doesn’t make things much easier for us. He tells those who followed him that if they want to choose him it will mean giving up all kinds of other attachments. He even uses the word hate — and he applies it to things we have always been told we should love: parents and spouses and children and siblings — and yes, even life itself. Jesus tells us to crucify all of these things, to give up all of our attachments to seek only him, taking up the cross to follow him.

This is a hard saying; hard to receive and even harder to put into action. How much easier simply to honor Jesus with our lips, rather than devoting our lives to his service. But he assures us that such halfway measures will not do. As I said in my sermon last week, simply acknowledging him as Lord or even inviting him to your home for dinner, even coming here one day a week to gather at his table, will not be enough. Jesus wants all of you, all the time, not just on Sunday morning but 24/7: just as God said to the Israelites, God wants “all your heart and soul and mind and strength.” Just as with air travel, getting out halfway there won’t do.

And so, Jesus is up-front and tells us to count the cost, lest we end up like a foolish man who tried to build a tower but didn’t have the resources to complete it; or a king who takes account of the number of his troops and the strength of his adversary before he dares to commit those troops to a war he cannot win.

This is not a decision about what kind of tea to drink, or whether to have original recipe or extra crispy. This is a decision that will affect the rest of my life — the rest of your life — the rest of many lives — not just in this life but in the life of the world to come. This is a matter of life and death, eternal life or eternal death.

Decisions have consequences; choices have outcomes. Directions taken lead to destinations reached. Not just for us but for all with whom we come in contact — our families, friends, and neighbors; those who serve us and those whom we serve — or refuse to serve. Hear the voice of God to all who truly turn to him: love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength; and your neighbor as yourself — your whole self, all of you, 24/7. Choose life, so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him. Choose wisely, by taking up the cross of Christ, by which alone we can overcome the world. By it we are delivered from slavery to freedom, and made part of a family and given a heritage to outlast any merely earthly tribe or people. Thanks be to God for the opportunity to choose him and to follow in his way.+

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