Who Are You?

Do you know who you are? and what God has made of you?

SJF • Advent 3b • Tobias S Haller BSG

The priests and Levites asked John, “Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” +

“Who are you?” That’s a question that confronts us all from time to time, probably more often than we are aware. Sometimes we proclaim our identity without our even noticing we are doing so, as when we wear an I.D. card at work, clipped to a lapel or a pocket or a belt-loop, or on a cord or a ribbon or a chain around our necks. Most of us have probably been to meetings or conferences and been presented with one of those big sticky name tags saying, “Hello, My Name Is…” with a blank. Making sure everyone knows who’s who is important — at least everyone who is supposed to know. By wearing such a name tag you broadcast your identity to whomever wishes to take the time to look.

I was once at a conference out west where the delegates were warned to remove their name tags if they ventured outside of the complex, outside of the hotel conference center— a thief could see your name, would know your room was empty, and might break in during your absence! Even something as seemingly innocent and harmless as a name tag
could get you into trouble.

Other forms of the question, “Who are you?” are even more obviously threatening. A sentry challenges you as you approach the border: “Who goes there?” Or the question can be phrased in such a way as to make you feel quite uncomfortable or useless or less than worthy, as in, “Who do you think you are?” or, even worse, “Who do you think you are?”

John the Baptist was on the receiving end of just this kind of harsh question in today’s Gospel. “Who are you?” the authorities demanded. John first established who he was not: not the Messiah, not Elijah, not the prophet. “Then who are you?” they demanded with impatience. John replied, “Just a voice crying out in the wilderness, Straighten things up! Get your act together.”

Not content with that answer, they continued to press him. “Then why are you baptizing, if your aren’t the Messiah, or Elijah, or the prophet?” (This is where the“Who do you think you are” tone of voice comes in!) And John had the last word as he says, in effect, “If you think the Messiah will simply baptize with water, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”

John knew who he was and who he wasn’t. And he knew that his call from God to prepare the way took precedence over other people’s demands that he behave himself, that he not get above his place — which is to say, they really wanted him to behave not as himself — not doing what he knew God wanted him to do — but to behave the way they wanted him to behave, to be what they thought he ought to be,

and do what they thought ought to be done; and more importantly for him not do the things they didn’t want him to do.

But John knew who he was and who he wasn’t, that he was not the light, but a witness called by God to testify to that light, and he would behave himself accordingly, whether the authorities liked it or not. He was a messenger, and he would deliver his message even if they killed him for it; which indeed they did. He knew what God wanted of him, and he did it.

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John is not the only one in our readings today who — at God’s call — finds himself behaving differently than his original identity might indicate, differently than people might expect. That is the wonderful thing about God’s call, God’s empowering call, God’s transforming call. It leads to behavior out of all keeping with human expectations, human limitations, some times even our own limitations, our own low expectations of ourselves.

Isaiah understands this personally: He knows that the Spirit of God is upon him, from the time of his first call, his first anointing, when he said, Lord, who am I? I am not worthy!

God sent an angel to take a live coal from the altar and touch it to his lips, to transform him to give him the strength and confidence to say, “Here am I; send me!”

Isaiah understands the transforming power of God, and he assures us in our reading today that at God’s call a great transformation will take place. The people will be given a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness in place of mourning. They will be inspired to raise up the ruins, to restore the desolations; they will be clothed like brides and bridegrooms with the garments of righteousness.

At God’s call things get turned completely around; as we heard last week: even the mountains get leveled, the valleys get filled in. And this week Isaiah continues his vision of this new world, where the behavior of God’s people is governed not by who they think they are, or what others expect of them, but by God’s penetrating and energizing and transforming call to them to be what God intends them to be.

In the fallen world, people are expected to act in accordance with their perceived identity, to behave themselves in accordance with the world’s demands and the limitations of their standing in society. Everybody in the fallen world had best know his or her place and position in the pecking order. But in God’s topsey-turvey world the reality is different: when we become conscious of God’s call, we are not limited to act only as people expect. It is our call from God, not other people’s expectations, that governs our behavior. We are not limited by our apparent identity.

We are called by God, who shatters expectations, who creates new heavens and a new earth, in which the former things are not even called to mind. We behave ourselves in accordance with God’s call, not the world’s limits. We behave ourselves in accordance with our deepest, truest identity, as children of God, made in God’s image, redeemed by God’s love, clothed with God’s righteousness, and sanctified entirely by the God of Peace. And that’s when we can do more than we ever could imagine possible.

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I would like to conclude my reflection this morning with a word or two about one of the great saints of the church — what better way to honor the examples of people God has called than to raise up our awareness of them!

For God calls some of the strangest people to his service: I mean, look around! Look at this crew today; we are all called, my brothers and sisters, strange as we may be God calls us and wants to make use of us.

Well, one of the strangest people God ever called was named — get ready — Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky. (He’s got the whole alphabet in there somewhere...) He was an unlikely figure to become a Christian saint. He started his life asa Lithuanian Jew, but he became an Episcopal priest here in New York— he even studied at the same seminary that I attended down in Manhattan — and he was elected the Anglican Bishop of Shanghai, China, in 1877, but then, he suffered a stroke in 1883, resigned and settled in Tokyo, Japan, where he died in 1906. Now that’s some unexpected journey; from a childhood in Lithuania, to death in Tokyo, with New York and China in between! And some might think his journey ended in China with the stroke that left him almost completely paralyzed. But the fact is, he kept working on a project he started before the stroke: he set out translating the Bible into Classical Chinese. In spite of the stroke, Schereschewsky continued working on this project, typing about two thousand pages of text, poking at his typewriter with the one finger of one hand — the only part of his body he could still move. In 1902, a few years before he died, he was recorded as saying, “I have sat in this chair for 20 years. It seemed very hard at first. But God knew best. He kept me for the work for which I am best fitted.”

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God calls us to be what God wants us to be, God calls us to the work for which we are best fitted, for which he created us to be and re-creates us to be — clothed in his power — and God can make use of us strange creatures, even when we might say, How useless is an old man who can only sit in a chair and type with one finger! God knows all the possibilities that are before us, and within us, and inspires our hearts to do what we can with what we have,

with the strength God provides. Isaiah knew that God would transform the world. John the Baptist knew that the light towards which he bore testimony would one day shine brightly through the dark world’s midwinter night. God calls us to be what God wants us to be, what God created us to be, and re-creates us to be, what God inspires us to be, and lifts us up to be, and sometimes, as in the case of Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky, what he sets us down to be. God does know best — and God calls us, us strange creatures, to do the work for which he knows we are best suited, for which he equips us with the skills to work in just such a way as to work God’s will, even in our infirmity and weakness, but all to God’s glory.

So when you are asked, “Who are you?”; when the border-guards of this fallen world challenge you with “Who goes there?”; when the proud and impatient try to put you down with a “who do you think you are?” you can say to them with all confidence, I am a child of God and I will follow God’s call, and I am going where God sends me, or staying put where God puts me! But whatever I do, God is the one who has called — and who are you to deny that call?+

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God and the Ungodly

Water comes to the thirsty...

SJF • Lent 3a 2014 • Tobias S Haller BSG
If while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.

We come now to the Third Sunday in Lent, almost the halfway point on our journey to Easter. I want to continue today in reflecting with you on Saint Paul’s message of hope and salvation, what he called “his gospel,” as he laid it out in his Letter to the Romans. How shocking this gospel must have been to the observant Jews and philosophical Gentiles to whom Paul was speaking, especially when he spoke about Christ dying for “the ungodly,” dying for “sinners.” He writes in the passage we heard last week that “God justifies the ungodly” and repeats this idea in the passage we heard today, and tries further to explain it. And I will attempt the same, as it is crucial to our understanding of how God works in the world, and in us, to accomplish his great purpose: not to condemn the world, but that all the world might be saved.

Saint Paul uses two terms that bear further study: justification and reconciliation. Both are acts of God done for us and to us, not for any merit of our own, but because God chooses to do so, because, as John says, God so loves us.

The problem is that we tend to think about justification as if it means “to be found just.” We picture God judging and weighing us and our works, and finding us worthy. But that is not what justification means. It does not mean “to be found or judged just”; rather it means “to be made just” — and only that which is unjust needs to be made just.

Fortunately for us, the word justification has another meaning that can help us understand, and you’ve got an example of it today right in front of you, in the Sunday bulletin! Most of you who have used a word-processor on a computer know that justification means arranging the spacing of the text so that the words all line up along one or both margins. Look at the way our long Gospel reading is printed in the bulletin — and, Paul, I hope your biceps are doing well, for holding up the book for that long! — look at how the Gospel is printed: you’ll notice that the text runs even down the left side of the page, but along the right it’s uneven, it’s ragged. That is called “left justification” and is easily accomplished: in fact, back in the days of typewriters that’s how all typewritten text looked — for those among us who remember typewriters!

But look at the first or the second reading. Notice how the words line up down both sides of the text. In the days of manual typesetting that was very tedious work indeed, and thank goodness the computer can do it now with the touch of a button! The point is that text is not “naturally” justified. It takes work. Naturally speaking, each letter and word take up so much space, so if you make no adjustments — as in our Gospel text — if you start at the same place at the left, the words will go across the page, following their own course, and end up uneven on the right, since the total number of letters and of words is different line by line. But in the fully justified text — and that is what it is called — in the fully justified text extra space is added between the words and sometimes between the letters (and hopefully unperceptibly) to stretch the lines out so that they line up flush — justified — both on the left and on the right. Left to their own devices, they would be as ragged as the other text, but through the intervention of the computer program — the lines are made to stand evenly down the page: they have been justified. And it took work; it took the work of someone — in this case the computer — outside the words themselves to do justify them. Left to their own, they would be ragged still.

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I think perhaps you see where I’m heading with this! But I’d first like to also take up the other word that Saint Paul uses for this process: reconciliation, for it too has a contemporary meaning that can perhaps help us understand what Paul is getting at. I’m sure that many of us here have had the experience of trying to balance your checkbook when the statement from the bank comes in. Sometimes the figures just won’t come out right, and you have to work and work to find where you have made a mistake, either entered the wrong amount in the wrong place or added or subtracted incorrectly, and compare it with the statement that you got from the bank. And this process of examining and comparing the bank’s statement and your record, and correcting any errors, is called reconciliation. If you never got the bank statement, the errors would pile up and accumulate month after month, and you would end up terribly out of balance. It is impossible to “reconcile” your bank account on your own, just from your own perspective: you need that statement from the bank to compare with your record, and it is only through the arrival of that statement that reconciliation is possible.

God’s reconciliation works the same way: God comes to us — God sent us his “statement” — and deals with us in the messed up checkbooks of our lives, where we’ve entered the wrong numbers and done the math wrong — and reconciles us, bringing us into sync with what God and God alone knows is righteous and true.

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Both of these words, justification and reconciliation, show us that it is the unjustified who need justification and the unreconciled who need reconciliation — and that is who we all are; for as I reminded us last week, we are the ones who are not righteous: there is none who is righteous, under his or her own power; no not one — we are all, as the old song goes,“standing in the need of prayer.”

And of more — in need of a savior. It is the ungodly who have the greatest need of God; it is the sinners who require reconciliation. And the great good news of Paul’s Gospel is that God comes to us in our need. As Saint Paul says, “while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly... While we were still sinners Christ died for us... and we have been justified by his blood... while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son.”

God’s ultimate “statement” — and you can bank on it! — God’s “Word Incarnate” — is nothing other than Jesus Christ himself, who comes to us in our raggedness and imbalance and pulls us back into alignment and righteousness: he makes the ungodly righteous, by his own saving act, his death on the cross and his coming to life again.

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Some people don’t grasp this powerful message. They want to think we do it on our own. They don’t understand the truth that Christ Jesus came to save sinners: which is to say, all of us who stand in need of justification, who need the nudging of the Spirit to align our ragged edges, who need his overarching perspective to see our faults and reconcile us to his perfect will.

We have a wonderful vision of this in the Gospel reading today, that story of Jesus spending time with someone who on three counts should have been beyond the pale. She is a Samaritan, and Jews have nothing to do with the hated Samaritans. She is a woman, and in those days a Jewish man wouldn’t think of speaking with a strange woman in public — you note how the disciples are astonished that Jesus has done so. And finally this woman is, to use a phrase from way back, “no better than she should be.” Among other things, she’s had as many husbands as a Hollywood celebrity, and she’s working on the next one!

And yet Jesus is there with her — we’ve even got a picture of her in our stained glass window here — he is there with her, holding the longest sustained conversation with any individual in the entire gospel. Think of that! This is the longest recorded conversation with an individual person Jesus has in the entire Gospel: a Samaritan, a woman, and no better than she should be! In spite of her nationality and her religion, in spite of her sex and her role in society, in spite of her personal morality...

— But wait a minute! What am I saying? Have I too so easily forgotten Paul’s Gospel? It is not in spite of these things that Jesus spends all of this time with her, but because of these things! Jesus comes to sinners; he comes to those who need him. He comes to bring living water not to those who are so full of themselves they think they have no need, but to those who know they thirst. He comes to bring word of his Holy Spirit to those who are starved for that breath of fresh air, the wind that blows from where and to where we know not, but which bears the unmistakable scent of new life.

Jesus comes to justify and reconcile the unjustified and the unreconciled, to bring water to the desert, and the wind of the Spirit that carries the scent of green things sprouting even out in the parched land of sin. For it is there that the grace of God is needed, and it is there that the grace of God is shown. As Saint Paul so beautifully said, “If while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.”

God has come to us, the unrighteous, to make us righteous; he has come to us, even in the prison of our sin, to bring us into the freedom of his kingdom. In him, and in him alone, are we justified and reconciled — and saved.

May we always give thanks to God our heavenly Father, for that gift of his Son: who lived for us and died for us, and risen from the dead now lives and reigns forever.+

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It's Not My Fault

Original Sin and its Unreckoning -- how our unavoidable sinfulness is clothed in something better than fig leaves.

Lent 1a 2014 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made.+

We come once more to the first Sunday in Lent, the season of the church year in which we are called to examine our lives, to take stock of where we stand with God, to repent of wrongs done in the past and move forward with resolve into the future.

Speaking of wrongs done in the past, our Old Testament reading this morning takes us back to the most distant past, to the story of the first wrong done, the first violation of what at the time was the only “thou shalt not”: “God commanded the man..., ‘Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat.’” You may notice this morning’s excerpt from Genesis skips right to the woman, and her conversation with the serpent — the most disastrous conversation in human history. The folks who designed our Scripture readings — no doubt because they wanted to focus

on the question of temptation to go along with the Gospel for the day — have skipped over the part of the story about how the woman came to be there in the first place. However, because I would rather focus more on the responses to temptation than the temptation itself, I want to note what is missing from our reading. But first want to emphasize what is there. Notice that the “thou shalt not” commandment is given to the man alone — Eve has not yet made her appearance from Adam’s side. We can assume that Adam told Eve about the tree and about not eating from it, for she tells the serpent about it — she can’t plead ignorance of the law. But notice that she adds something that was not in the version that God gave to Adam; she adds “nor shall you touch it” to “you shall not eat” Now, we don’t know if this was her idea, or if Adam added this himself when he told her about this tree. You can just imagine that he did, though. Can’t you just hear him, women of Saint James? Can you hear a man’s voice in this? “Eve, we’re not allowed to eat the fruit of that tree; so don’t even touch it or we will die!”

In any case, both Eve and Adam ignore the commandment, and not only touch (about which God said nothing) but they also eat(about which God was perfectly clear, to Adam at least!) And their eyes are opened to their own naked shame — having come to the knowledge of good and evil they realize they have done evil, and they cower in their shame.

The next part of the story is also left out of our reading, but I’d like to remind you of it. I’m sure you all know the story — where it goes from there. When God charges Adam with having done what he ought not to have done, what does Adam say? “The woman you gave me, she gave me the fruit and I ate it.” When God turns to the woman, what does she say? “The serpent tricked me, and I ate.” The serpent itself cannot find his forked tongue and is speechless at last! He has no one to blame.

Both Adam and Eve imply, “It’s not my fault!” What might the serpent have said? “The Devil made me do it”? Later traditions hold that the serpent is the devil, in physical form. He is the tempter, the root of the problem, the thing that leads people astray, even to his own hurt — as hurt he is by the end of the tale.

There is another old tale, by the way, so old that no one quite knows who first told it. There are versions from ancient Greece, from West Africa, from Asia and the Middle East. Sometimes the characters are a scorpion and a frog, but since were talking about serpents I’ll tell you the one about the fox and the snake.

Once upon a time — that’s how all good stories start, right — a fox came upon a snake sunning himself by the side of the river. Fox wisely kept his distance and inquired politely, “What are you up to Mister Snake?” Snake looked at Fox with his cold eye and said, “I would like to crosssss thissss river but I can’t ssssswim. Would you mind at all giving me a ride over?” Fox raised his eyebrows and said, “Well I would but I’m afraid you might bite me and then we would both drown.” Snake then said, “Sssut, sssut!” — Snakes are not very good at saying, ‘Tut, tut’— “now why would I do that? Please jussst give me a lift and I promisssse I won’t bite you. I’d crossss my heart if I could!” So Fox approached Snake and allowed him to slither up onto his back, and then stepped into the river and began to swim. Sure enough, about halfway across, in the deepest part of the river, Snake bit Fox right in the back of the neck. And as they were sinking beneath the waters, Fox looked back over his shoulder, gave Snake a plaintive look and said, “Why?” Snake shrugged — at least as well as a snake can shrug without any shoulders — and sighed, as both of them perished, “It’sssss my nature!”

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Well, we could say the same thing, couldn’t we. In addition to shifting the blame for our sin to someone else, sometimes we are willing to take the blame ourselves but simultaneously try to excuse ourselves by saying, “I can’t help it. It’s my nature.” There is truth in that, which this story — not the one about the fox and the snake but the one from Genesis — is designed to tell us.

Human beings do have a tendency to sin — the theologians call it “original sin” meaning it is there from the beginning. It is a part of us, deep down, this desire to choose selfishly and out of self-preservation or pride or envy, rather than choosing the path of self-giving goodness and generosity. The story in Genesis, after all, isn’t really about snakes and fruit trees, but about human beings. Snakes don’t really talk, and in this tale from Genesis the serpent is a parable for human craving, for own desire to choose for ourselves at the expense of others and in defiance of God. It is our nature. Once one has the capacity to choose, one can choose wrongly. The point of the story is that Adam and Eve choose wrongly while they are in Paradise, just as the devil himself chose wrongly and turned away from God while he was an angel in heaven. Sin — or the possibility of — is there from the beginning. It is original.

Now, that doesn’t mean, ‘Oh well then. let’s just forget about it and get on with your life and sin as much as you like; after all, if it’s your nature then you can’t help it and it’s not really your fault.’ Nor is it enough to make the kind of response I spoke of a few weeks ago; the response that Joshua ben Sira gave his advice about: just always be good; choose the good — as I noted, that doesn’t work. We are not capable in ourselves to save ourselves. It is in our nature to run off the road. We need help. Sin, it seems, is inescapable; as St Paul wrote to the Romans, “sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, so that death spread to all because all have sinned.”

And that would be the end of the story were it not for the hope that is held out to us in Christ Jesus. That hope is not about finding some way never to commit a sin, but to address the root reality that, like it or not, it is our nature to sin. However much we might try to shift the blame, in the end it is our fault. The Snake of original sin lies coiled in our minds and in our hearts, and he will, from time to time, bite us on the neck — or the heel. It simply doesn’t work to adopt the stoic attitude of “Just say no” when in truth we are — all of us — addicted to sin, and the only truly effective answer to it is an appeal to a higher power to rescue us from our own fallibility and inability to save ourselves. Sin, as Paul told the Romans, has been there from the beginning; but it was not reckoned as sin until the law was given: that first law, “Do not eat of that tree.” And then, because the law had been given, the warning made, when the sin crept out, it was reckoned as sin. But since Christ has come, the law itself is dead. This is what St Paul is getting at in his Letter to the Romans: sin is still there, but the law is dead, and so sin is no longer reckoned.

We as Christians believe that a higher power has come to us in the person of Christ. Through him come the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness, purchased by means of his own obedience and righteousness, through which the law itself was put to death, nailed to the cross with him. We are not and we cannot be righteous on our own — but the reckoning of sin can be washed away, and we can be deemed as if we were righteous by and through the one who is righteousness himself, the obedient Son of God, who faced down the devil in the wilderness, who gave himself for our sake, on our account, and by his death stripped away the shroud of death that had covered all nations, to clothe us in the glory of his righteousness: clothed with Christ, we are covered by him. And so God looks upon us and loves us, when we do right. But when we do wrong he forgives us, all on account of the love he has for his Son, our Lord and savior, in whom we are all clothed from above.

Just as the Avenging Angel passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt, houses whose doorposts were marked with the blood of the Paschal lamb, so too when God looks at us, washed as we are in the blood of the Lamb, and clothed with the royal robe of his righteousness rather than in our own patched together fig-leaf efforts at righteousness, to conceal our sin, when God looks at us, he no longer sees our sin. He sees his own beloved Son. In this is life, the life of the Son of God, in which we share, because we have been clothed with him. To him be the glory, henceforth and for ever more.

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Tipping the Scales

However low you go, or however you go low, God will raise you up.

Proper 25c 2013 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
O Lord, have you completely rejected Judah? Does your heart loathe Zion? Why have you struck us down so that there is no healing for us?

Today we conclude our series of readings from the letters of Paul to Timothy. As we’ve seen over the last few weeks, Paul has been encouraging Timothy in the struggles that he faces with and among the congregation over whom he has charge. People have been caught up in controversies about the interpretation of Scripture, indulging in false teaching, and wandering away into myths. People have been casting doubt on Timothy’s authority, in part due to his relative youth, but also in rebellion against the very gospel message that he delivers. And at every stage at which people have sought to cut Timothy down, Paul has encouraged him to remain strong and to fight the good fight with all his might, to proclaim the gospel fearlessly, and in the knowledge that God’s power is with him.

Now Paul himself, it seems from the passage we read today, is about ready to retire from the combat. As he says, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” Using once more the analogy of a footrace, he portrays Jesus as the scorekeeper and judge who will give him his crown at the end of the race — the race he has run so faithfully.

But not before Paul will have what the English call a bit of a good moan first — you know what that’s about! Sometimes you just feel better when you let it all out and complain for a bit — not to make a habit of it, but just to let off a little steam of frustration. Contrasting the heavenly grace he expects with the earthly problems he has encountered, all the things he has been running through, Paul complains that everyone has deserted him and no one has supported him — except the Lord himself. In fact, Paul is using how low he has been to show just how powerful God is — who can lift up one who has been abandoned and betrayed. The message Paul shares here with Timothy, based on his own experience, is, No matter how low you have fallen in your own confidence, no matter how much you have been cut down by adversaries or problems, God will raise you up.

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Today’s gospel presents us with a different kind of up and down — but ends with a similar message. Jesus portrays two people: a proud and self-righteous Pharisee and a humble and penitent tax collector. I almost picture them standing on a seesaw or teeter-totter: the Pharisee high and lifted up, and the tax collector down in the dumps. For it seems that the very reason for the Pharisee to be so high is because he is so pumped up and proud of himself, because he sees himself in relation to others, whom he regards as sinners worse than he. It is the weight of the sin of those on the other side of the scale that gives that Pharisee his boost, his exaltation, his pride. He has no consciousness of sin in himself, and he plays that off against those whom he regards as “obvious” sinners — thieves and adulterers — or even like this tax collector here.

But enough about him — as I can imagine he learned better when he finally did face the Almighty judge at the end. (And let’s hope he was ashamed of himself and at the last accepted God’s forgiveness!) I would rather focus on that tax collector down there.

Jesus portrays him as being low in comparison to the Pharisee being high. If you picture that seesaw I mentioned there is no doubt that the tax collector is on the heavy end of the scale. We do not know what his sins are — unlike the Pharisee who declares what his sins aren’t and catalogs a few of the things that he imagines make him virtuous, the tax collector does not enumerate his sins — he merely repents. He beats his breast in that ancient act that forces home to me that it is I who am at fault: (for when I beat my breast I am forcibly reminded of my own physical reality and presence! And maybe we all need a little of that spiritual CPR, now and again, to remind us of where we are, and help us rediscover the true meaning of our lives.)

Jesus promises that this man, this man on the low side of the scale, who has humbled himself will return home exalted and justified. And so the message here is that it is by lowering yourself that God will raise you up. As a proverb (3:34) quoted by both James (4:6) and Peter (1P 5:5) puts it, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” Or, as someone with even greater authority, Mary the mother of Jesus, put it: “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the humble and meek.”

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So the clear message appears to be consistent through all these readings: whether you have been brought low by others, have fallen low in your own estimation and disappointment, or humbled yourself in the knowledge of your sins — however you came to be low, or however low you came to be, God will raise you up. Let the teeter totter as it may, and swing us down even so low that we can feel the warmth of hell-fire toasting our feet — even then God can and will bring us up again, so long as we turn towards the one from whom our help and rescue comes. Even if we don’t look God’s way with our eyes — for recall that the penitent tax collector was so cast down he dare not even raise his eyes to heaven — even if we don’t look God’s way with our eyes, if that is towards God that our hearts are turned, God, who after all looks into our hearts and knows us better than we know ourselves, will also know that we have turned our hearts towards him, and God will raise us up from where we have been cast down, or fallen, or lowered ourselves.

God is not like that famous statue of Justice — the one who holds the scales but wears a blindfold, blind to the relative weight of sin or innocence, and simply allowing the scale to tip as it may. God is also not like the Egyptian god Thoth, who weighs the heart of the dead against the feather of innocence, and condemns all of those whose hearts tip the scale towards guilt.

No, my friends — and it is a good thing for us — God is neither blind like Justice nor a mere secretary like Thoth recording the result shown by the scale. No, my friends, the good news for us is that God tips the scales in our behalf, for the mercy of God is greater than the justice of God, and although God is just, the heart of God is love and mercy and forgiveness.

When God sees we are cast down by the assaults of others, God will raise us up. When God sees that we have abased ourselves in our own eyes, discouraged or despondent, God puts a powerful arm around us and raises us up. And when we are sunk low in the depths of the knowledge of our own faults and failings, God pushes that lightweight Pharisee from the other end of the seesaw and presses it down with a strong arm and a mighty hand — and O my friends, are we in for a ride!+

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No Estate Tax

We cannot save ourselves.

Proper 6c • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing.

Today we continue our journey through the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Galatians, and I find once again that I have a slight bone to pick with the translators of the New Revised Standard version of the Bible, the version that we use in our readings, because they make a translation choice in common with many of the modern translations, thought not all of them. The bone I have to pick may at first strike you as trivial, but it is an example of how one small, simple word can change the whole meaning of a passage. And I find that in this regard I prefer the translation of what’s know as the Authorized Version. It is probably better known as the King James Bible because King James I was the one who commissioned its translation — which celebrated its 400th anniversary two years ago. Some things stand the test of time.

The word at issue here is the little two-letter word “in” used throughout Galatians as part of the phrase, “faith in Jesus Christ.” Wherever the modern translations, such as the New Revised Version say it that way, say, “in Jesus Christ,” the Authorized Version says, “faith of Jesus Christ.” Yes, I’m giving you prepositions this morning; it’s the difference between two little two-letter words — of and in — but what a difference they make, including how best to make sense of Saint Paul’s theology of grace. I will also add that I also find this translation to be a bit more accurate. The King James translators are closer to the original meaning of the Greek in which Paul wrote — so their reading not only makes better sense, it is more accurate. And when sense and accuracy combine, I have to say I am convinced! Are you? Let me say more about both.

First of all, Galatians is concerned with the contrast between rival sources of justification, different approaches to righteousness: the grace of God versus the works of the law. Make no mistake, Paul comes down squarely on the grace of God — that is, the justification that starts with God and comes from God. We cannot save ourselves — for after all, if we could have we would have, and Christ would have had no need to be born, baptized, suffer, die, and be raised from the dead for our salvation. As Paul says in his punch-line: “If justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing.”

So justification is not our work — it is Christ’s work, work done for us, on our behalf, work that involved his suffering and death in the full faith that God would raise him from the dead in the ultimate act of justification, the ultimate declaration of his righteousness. So it is that the faith of Christ — his faith in God — that God would vindicate him — vindicates us as well, because we have, through our baptism, shared in his death so that we can share in his life. It is not that we simply have faith in Christ — in the sense that we believe in him — but that through the mystery of God’s grace we have become part of his body the church; we are in him and so are saved by his faith. As Paul argues, just as the faith of Abraham made him the father of many nations, so too the faith of Christ has led to the justification of many — through his life and death — and life again.

Paul often uses analogies of life and death . Here he says he has died to the law: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” And as the Authorized Version will continue, “The life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” In his Letter to the Romans, Paul uses the analogy of widowhood, portraying the law as a husband. A woman who has an affair with another man while her husband is alive is an adulterer, but once she is a widow she is free to marry again — and since Christ has come the old law has passed away and we, the church, the bride of Christ, have a new husband.

Later in Galatians he will use yet another image of life and death, that of inheritance: the point being that you don’t earn an inheritance — it comes to you by virtue of what someone else has done. This is precisely what makes it grace, a gift — not something that you earned.

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Our gospel passage today shows us one of the most beautiful examples of grace in all of Scripture. In its own way it presents a vivid contrast between the kind of life that trusts in righteousness through the law, and the kind that trusts not in its own righteousness but in the forgiveness and grace that is a free gift to all who turn their hearts and souls towards the source of all that is good.

There is no doubt that Simon the Pharisee is a righteous man — he has worked hard at it, he has followed the rules laid down by Moses, as his sect has interpreted them, taking care above all that he has observed everything. And there is also no doubt that the woman of the city is a sinner — the text clearly says so right at the beginning, and Jesus says “her sins were many,” and so Simon judges rightly that she is a sinner, even if he judges wrongly concerning how Jesus ought to have reacted to her. From his standpoint, he would have pulled back in horror that this sinful woman had touched him; he would have thrown her out of the house. Jesus doesn’t do that, and the Pharisee is scandalized.

Now we would be as mistaken as Simon the Pharisee if we were to think that Jesus has forgiven this woman because of what she did — that is, because she bathed his feet with her tears and anointed them with costly ointment. Note the explanation that Jesus gives to Simon: he does not describe her actions — contrasted with those of Simon himself, or rather his inactions — he does not describe her actions as the reason her sins have been forgiven, but as her response to the fact that her sins have been forgiven. To use Jesus’ own parable — both the Pharisee and the woman have been forgiven their debts, but the one who owed more is more grateful. The gratitude does not earn the grace, but flows from it, like tears and precious ointment.

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In spite of the clarity of this Jesus’ teaching — here and in many other parables that he taught, and many further explanations from Saint Paul in his other Epistles — there are even still today some who would insist that it is doing good things that makes you a righteous person; that the works of the law are the way to salvation and justification. But as Saint Paul bluntly puts it, if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing. What need is there for grace if we can make it on our own? Referring back to that ancient story from Genesis: who needs God to bring us to heaven, if we can build our own tower that will take us there?

The answer, of course, is that even our best efforts cannot and will not bring us to that goal — for there is none righteous, no not one. Any and all righteousness that any of us have does not come from us but from God, Christ working in us, as we live in him, and the life we live in the flesh is lived by the faith of the Son of God — who died and was raised. We live because he died — and rose. It is on his coat-tails, my friends, that we ride, we and the whole saved world. As our Presiding Bishop once said, “Jesus is our vehicle” to salvation — and it is by being in him that we share in that journey, and in the benefit of his faith. His cross is the vehicle on which we get a free ride, for through our baptism, like Paul, we can say that we have been crucified with Christ, and the life we live is no longer our own, but life in him.

The good works that we may be able to do are not the way we earn salvation, but they are signs of gratitude that we have been saved. Like the tears and the ointment of that woman of the city, any good works we do are testimony to the grace we have already received. It is as if we have all received a huge inheritance — and I will tell you we have, even if we don’t know it — we have received an inheritance and been invited to move into the mansion prepared for us, and invited to the banquet set before us. And it is all a gift from a generous God who has forgiven us all of our trespasses just as we have forgiven those who have trespassed against us. Our debts have been forgiven and canceled, nailed to the cross, and there is no estate tax on this inheritance. God is gracious; God is generous: and everything good comes to us as a gift, a justification in righteousness transmitted to us by that incredible act of faith, the faith of Jesus Christ our Lord. And who would not show gratitude for that?+

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No Boundary to Grace

We do not come to the banquet because of our righteousness but because of God's invitation. — A sermon for Proper 15a

SJF • Proper 15a • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. Thus says the Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, I will gather others to them besides those already gathered.

All of our Scripture readings today point in the direction of healing the division that has existed since the days when God first created a covenant with Abraham and designated him as the ancestor of a special, holy, and chosen people. This was a people separated from all the other nations of the earth. Brother Millard spoke last week of the end-of-Sabbath Havdalah ceremony by which Jews celebrate their “chosenness” and being set apart by God’s covenant with them, reflected in the separation of the Sabbath from the other six regular days of the week. The covenant of separation was cherished by the Jewish people down through the centuries as a sign of their unique status in God’s eyes.

That covenant was also renewed many times down through the years. Moses recommitted the people to obey the Lord their God at Mount Sinai. Joshua recommitted them, challenging them to obey the Lord as he and his household swore to do, when they crossed the Jordan and gathered at Shechem. Ezra and Nehemiah reminded the people of these commandments after their exile in Babylon, and the Maccabees did the same after their liberation from the Greek empire. Time and again that message was hammered home: you are God’s special, chosen people, unique in all the world because of your relationship with the God who made heaven and earth. As for the rest of the world, as the prophet Micah said, each of the nations walks in the name of its own god, but we walk in the name of the Lord our God for ever and ever.

That message, as it came to be understood, was that salvation itself was only for the children of Israel — they alone were chosen and precious not only for this world but for the next as well. Among the Rabbis it became a topic of some interest as to whether a non-Jew could even have any share at all in the life of the world to come — that is, was it possible for anyone who was not among the Jewish people to be saved.

In spite of the promises of the prophets, such as Isaiah, that God had a special place reserved for the Gentiles who sought him out and dedicated themselves to righteousness in his name — in spite of these promises, the question of whether Gentiles were worth God’s notice, or God’s salvation, was still a hot topic by the time of Christ.

Jesus appears, by one reading of the incident recorded in this morning’s gospel, to have accepted that stricter view that Gentiles and foreigners (which is all the same thing to most Jewish people of that time), are not God’s concern — God’s interest is in making sure that the children of Israel are looked after, after the mess they’ve gotten themselves into, like lost sheep who have wandered off but who are still valuable to the shepherd. But then Jesus appears to be moved by the Canaanite woman’s persistence, and her chutzpah in talking back to him when Jesus indirectly compares her tormented daughter to a dog. She is bold enough to remind Jesus, who has himself brought up the analogy of food and the dinner table, that even the dogs are remembered and fed — along with the children — from the master’s table, even if it is only with crumbs.

Now, I’ve often wondered if Jesus really was being as cold-blooded as he appears to be to this poor woman with a sick child, or if he isn’t — in keeping with reading this passage as a test of his disciples — seeing whether they would abide by the prevailing view that foreigners are trash and not worth their trouble, or if they would show the kind of gracious openness Jesus himself shows on other occasions. You note that the disciples come first to urge him to send her away...

But that is a topic for another sermon. Because whatever the reason, whether Jesus was moved by this woman or testing the disciples, in the end he broke through that boundary to grace and allowed it to flow freely to a Gentile. And of course, by the end of Matthew’s Gospel it is abundantly clear that Jesus intends salvation for the whole world, as he sends the disciples out to baptize all nations — and we might even translate that as all “ethnics” — which is to say all Gentiles — into the faith of the one true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

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In today’s epistle, Saint Paul addresses the question of how this might work in the manner of a good Rabbi — which he often reminded those to whom he wrote he was, himself a student at the feet of Gamaliel, who had himself been a student of the great Rabbi Hillel. Hillel had been an advocate of the generous view that Gentiles could be saved, and Paul no doubt believed that in Jesus Christ this doctrine of his spiritual grandfather had come true.

Much of Paul’s letter to the Romans is an effort to explain just how this might work. In the section we heard today the image is almost one of a seating at a banquet. Those who had formerly been seated — God’s chosen ones — have lost their seats because of their disobedience, their misbehavior, and it is only that misbehavior that has opened up the possibility for the Gentiles to take their place for a time. And that “for a time” is important because Paul promises the eventual ushering back in of all of God’s people all whom God foreknew and chose as his own — Jew or Gentile — for the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable.

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In God’s good time, there is plenty of room for Gentile and Jew alike on the mountain that Isaiah envisages. In God’s good time there is no boundary to grace, no limit to the abundance of God’s generosity and God’s patience with Jew and Gentile alike. The ultimate message that Paul is transmitting in his Letter to the Romans is that salvation is the work of God: just as creation is the work of God, so too is the new creation in Christ; it is God’s work.

It is God’s party, and God invites whoever God wishes. It is not for self-righteous party crashers to push themselves forward on the basis of their own righteousness, Nor, even worse, is it right for some at the party to seek to keep those others they judge unworthy out, but for all to trust in the saving of mercy of God as the only basis for admission to the banquet. We are not invited to the banquet on the basis of our righteousness, but his righteousness, and his generosity.

There is plenty of room at the table, and crumbs aplenty under it — but believe me, no child of God invited to that table will be made to eat those crumbs, but will be given the choice and richest portions of the feast. God’s grace is God’s, after all, and our God is a God of abundant blessing and not of parsimonious stinginess, a God not of crumbs and crusts but of marvelous abundance of multiplied loaves and bread showered from heaven. To God be the glory, henceforth and forever more.

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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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Countless Countless

SJF • All Saints Day 2009 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages...+

One of the things about optimists and pessimists is that they can look at the same thing but speak about it in entirely opposite ways. Is the glass half-full or half-empty? At home in my kitchen cupboard I have a wine glass that is etched with a line around the middle, and the words optimist and pessimist appear respectively above and below the line. The optimist says, “Hey, I’ve still got half a glass left” while the pessimist says, “I’ve only got half a glass left.” Each has the same amount, but one is content, the other despondent.

Today is All Saints Day, which falls on a Sunday this year. This is the day on which we remember all of the great saints of ages past. We also anticipate by a bit the celebration of the Feast of All Faithful Departed, which used to go by the name All Souls Day. And we do this in recognition of the fact that the saints are larger in number than just those few who are named on the church calendar. As the old children’s hymn says, “They lived not only in ages past, there are hundreds of thousands still,” and you can even meet them “in shops or at tea!” A saint is what every Christian is called to be. We are called to be saints, and that doesn’t mean sanctimonious, but being a member of the body of Christ — into which we will welcome a few more new members through the sacrament of Baptism in just a few minutes!

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There seems to be a paradox about all of this, however. And part of it lies in that reading from Ecclesiasticus, with which I admit I’ve always had a bit of difficulty, because it seems to contradict itself. The author sings the praises of those famous men who are remembered, and then says that some others are forgotten and have left no memory — and then turns around and says that “these also were godly men, whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten.” So which is it? Is the glass half full or half empty?

We will find our answer — as is so often the case — in the Gospel. Right at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus offers us a catalog of blessedness — of what it means to be blessed. We are so used to hearing this passage that we are likely to be unaware of how startling it must have been to the ears of many who first heard it. Even today, while I’m sure many will tip their hat towards the merciful, the pure in heart, and the peacemakers, you will find few who would agree that the poor, the mournful, or the reviled and persecuted are living in blessèd circumstances!

Jesus’s words are startling in part because the prevailing view then — and I’m afraid to say, now — is that your circumstances in the world are a reflection of how right you are with God. For many, then as now, health and wealth was a sign of God’s favor, and poverty or illness a sign of God’s judgment. If you don’t think that sentiment is still very much alive you haven’t been paying attention to the health care debates! Under much resistance to the urge to provide health care for every single man, woman and child, regardless of circumstances, there lies that old sneaking suspicion that if you were a better person you wouldn’t be in such a mess. That “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality is still very much with us — and it is particularly ironic to me that it is so often espoused by religious people who think they’ve got the Gospel on their side. The “prosperity gospel” maybe, but not the Gospel of Jesus Christ!

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In Jesus’ time, this way of seeing the world came largely from people who held that obedience to the Law of Moses — especially as they interpreted it — was the defining principle of what it meant to be a righteous person. They were eager to judge others, looking for specks in their neighbors’ eyes while ignoring the logs in their own. Jesus followed more in the tradition of the prophets — who see righteousness as a matter of internal disposition rather than in merely external compliance: good and evil come from within, as Jesus would say, out of the heart, as a tree’s fruit shows what kind of tree it is deep down. You know, you can’t cover up graffiti with just a light coat of whitewash — it will come bleeding through after a few days. You need to work from the inside out if you are to be righteous.

And so Jesus casts aside the false gospel of prosperity — and holds up the more challenging vision of the kingdom of heaven. It is not limited to those who, like the scribes, were rich enough to have the leisure to spend their days studying and arguing about the law and other people’s sins. Rather, as Jesus will go on to say in the mountainside sermon: God’s kingdom is open to any who are willing to seek him and his kingdom and his righteousness; and you are to seek those things first, and then to knock at God’s door and to ask for a handout from the Lord of the household. The gate may be narrow and the road hard that leads to eternal life, but Jesus assures us that it is there for all who seek it, who seek him, with all their hearts. While the scribes were busy keeping people out of the kingdom of heaven (or so they thought) for not observing all of the appropriate rules, Jesus points the way to eternal life, in him and through him, doing the Father’s will. The scribes are the pessimists and Jesus is the optimist!

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John’s vision in Revelation gives us a similar message. Initially the number of the servants of God marked for salvation does seem surprisingly small: 144,000 — a little over the capacity of the two Yankee Stadiums put together. It begins to look as if few indeed will be saved. But then John turns around and sees a multitude beyond counting, not just from the tribes of Israel, but from every nation and tribe and people and language: countless countless thousands of people. The kingdom of heaven is not a posh nightclub with a stern bouncer at the door — much as the scribes might have seen it. Rather, it is a huge expanse, so large that it can contain more people than can be counted. And of those countless, countless people too, it is said: they will no longer hunger or thirst — they are the blessèd who have come to the kingdom of heaven. Their tears are wiped away, they drink from the springs of the water of life, and worship for ever at the throne of God.

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And it is God who makes all the difference — getting back to that troublesome passage from Ecclesiasticus. Some people who have done good and gone to their reward have been forgotten — by us, but not by God! Even if they pass their lives unnoticed and uncelebrated, or even though people forget them, God will not. They are his, and he will not forsake his own. The treasure of their goodness — which is, after all, only the return on the goodness that God has already poured into their hearts— that treasure will be shared out and enjoyed in the kingdom of heaven, when they and all the blessed will be gathered in, at the time of the great harvest. God stores up all who seek him in his treasury, he calls them all to his embrace, even if their lives were lived in obscurity, even if they left no monument or memorial in this world.

Human beings may forget, but God will not. Human beings may be unaware of all the anonymous good done in the world, but God sees not as humans see and looks to the heart of each and every one of us. God is one who looks at all our half empty hearts, and by his grace supplies the difference.

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As I said at the beginning of this homily the number of the saints is far greater than the list of those on the calendar. All of us are called to be saints — and the one who calls us is the one who makes us so. Today he calls these children to join us as members of his body, the church. Some might say it’s only a drop in the bucket — if they want to be pessimists! I prefer to take the optimistic view and say that drop by drop the bucket gets filled! Our God is a God of abundant blessings, abundant blessings of which we may not be aware at the moment — when we are poor or mourning or hungry or thirsty for righteousness, or when we are persecuted or reviled, or when evil things are spoken against us falsely on account of our lives or our service to God our Father in heaven. It may not feel like blessing at the moment — but it is, and it so will be seen to be.

So let us then, as our Lord commands us, “Rejoice and be glad!” Not only do we still have half a glass full — but God has not stopped pouring yet!+

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