St. Michael's Church, Litchfield, CT

The Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost
Inaugural Sermon by E. Bevan Stanley at St. Michael’s-Litchfield
October 28, 2012
Proper 25, Year B, RCL

Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

What a delight it is to be with you this morning! My name is Bevan Stanley. To answer one question straight away, I prefer that you call me “Bevan.” Save the “Father” for state occasions. I am thrilled to have been called to serve as your Priest in Charge and look forward to working with you as together we grow to be all that God desires us to be.

Today’s Gospel reading is one of my favorites. The same story is included in all three of the Synoptic Gospels, that is, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and each tells it slightly differently. I like this version from Mark the best.

The main thing that catches my attention in all three versions is that Jesus asks either the dumbest question in the world or one of the most profound. A blind beggar comes to him, and he says, “What do you want me to do for you?” Well, what do you think he wants? He’s blind! Duhhh! If, like me, you don’t really think that Jesus is that obtuse, then let us take another look at what is going on in the story.

Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem to face his destiny. He has attracted a lot of attention, and there is much speculation about what will happen when this popular figure arrives in Jerusalem. Some are saying he is the long promised messiah who will throw out the Romans and restore national sovereignty to Israel. If so, then he could be dangerous. The Roman authorities might come down on him and anyone near him at any moment.

Given this state of affairs, when the blind man starts calling out “Jesus, Son of David,” and thus essentially calling him the messiah, everyone around him becomes frightened and tries to shut him. The last thing the citizens of Jericho want is a legion of Roman soldiers arriving in force to keep the Pax Romana.

So, when Jesus speaks to the blind man, perhaps the emphasis is more on the personal needs of the beggar. “What do you want me to do for you? Everyone has this political agenda, but the kingdom that I was sent to announce has more to do with creating a whole new way for people to be live with God and with each other. So what can I do for you personally? How would this new kingdom best affect your life? What do you really want most from me?

One detail that sets Mark’s version of the story apart from the other two, is that only Mark records the beggar’s name—Bartimaeus. This is not some generic blind beggar created as a foil to show off Jesus’ power to heal. This is a real, particular human being. And that is the power of the story. Jesus, the celebrity is on a freedom march to Jerusalem. The press is all around. There are crowds and shouting and dust. In the midst of it all he stops to forge a personal relationship with one individual. “What do you want me to do for you?

The other detail that is different in Mark is that the healing is attributed entirely to Bartimaeus’ faith. In Matthew Jesus touches his eyes. In Luke, Jesus proclaims, “Receive your sight.” In Mark Jesus says only, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Here, I want to make an observation that you will hear me make over and over. In the New Testament, the Greek word for “faith” is “pistis.” It’s best translated “trust.” All too often “faith” connotes an assertion of certain facts to be true, as it “I believe that Jesus rose from the dead. I believe that Jesus is the son of God. And so on. Pistis has more to do with trust. Thus in the creeds, try making the replacement: I trust in one God, the Father almighty…” It has a rather different feel, doesn’t it? So in this story, Jesus says, “Go; your trust has made you well.” Your trust in God, your trust in me.

So what is God’s word to us this morning at St. Michael’s? Jesus asks us, both as individuals and collectively as a congregation, what do you want me to do for you? As an individual, I find this a challenging question. What do I really want? In my heart of hearts, deep down. Do I want more security? More serenity? Better health? A good career? Good things for my children? Less pain? Do I want things for others? Peace? Justice? A more equitable and secure economic system? Good government? An end to AIDS? An end to hunger? These are all good things, and God wants them, too. Yet underlying all this there is a longing in Jesus’ question. What do you see in Jesus’ eyes when he says to you, “What do you want me to do for you?” You and me. Do you want a relationship with me? And what will that relationship be like? Do we want Jesus to be a kind of ATM for blessings? We ask Jesus for good things, and he gives them to us? Or do we want something more? Something richer and deeper? Are we ready to have Jesus for our friend, our companion, our guide?

What was the outcome of the encounter between Jesus and Bartimaeus? Not the blind beggar, but Bartimaeus, a man with a name. What happened? Immediately he regained his sight and followed Jesus on the way. Now Bartimaeus could see what he had not been able to see before. He could see now, and he followed Jesus.  If we tell Jesus what we really want, we may get it. And it may change the course of our lives.

My hope, as I join you in this congregation, is that together we will become ever bolder at asking Jesus to help us. I hope that we will become more reflective in answering Jesus’ question, “What do you want me to do for you?” I hope that we will move ever deeper into our relationship with Jesus. We will trust Jesus more and more. That we will see things we have never seen before. I hope we will be increasingly bold to follow Jesus on the way to Jerusalem, through sacrifice, and on to glory. This is going to be a great adventure, and I can’t wait for us to get on with it.

Jesus said to Bartimaeus, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.
Amen.

From today’s Morning Prayer, led by Rev. Bevan Stanley:

Do not fret yourself because of evildoers;
do not be jealous of those who do wrong.

For they shall soon wither like the grass,
and like the green grass fade away.

Put your trust in the Lord and do good;
dwell in the land and feed on its riches.

Take delight in the Lord,
and he shall give you your heart’s desire.

~Psalm 37

Sermon preached in St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, Litchfield, CT
by Fr. E. Walton Zelley, Jr., Rector Emeritus, St. Luke’s Church, Metuchen, NJ
Pentecost 20 (Proper 23) October 14, 2012

Text: Mark 10:17-27 – “Jesus looking at the rich young man loved him and said, “You lack one thing, go, sell what you have and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then, come, follow me.”

Why did the rich young man in today’s Gospel reading “go away grieving?” Be careful, now, the answer might not be as obvious as you think. The most common answer people give is that the rich young man went away grieving because Jesus asked him to surrender all his wealth and give it to the poor, and the rich young man just had too much money to be willing to let it all go in one fell swoop. “Take anything, Lord, but don’t take my hard-earned money,” we hear him say in our imaginations, “I’ve worked too hard and too long to accumulate this wealth, and now I want to enjoy the fruit of my labors and spend all my money on myself.”

Now, in a sense, it might be very reassuring for many if not all of us in this sanctuary this morning to think that the call to dissolve his huge fortune was what sent the rich young man away grieving. For if refusing to part with large sums of money was the only thing that would keep him from following Jesus and going to heaven, most of us would have little to worry about, since we have, especially in this economy, precious little money to part with anyway. Even the wealthiest among us might be tempted to say, “Help yourself to my investment income, Jesus, which has just taken a 30% nosedive, and give it to the formerly wealthy, but now rather poor, whom some ethically challenged financiers like Bernie Madoff recently have fleeced.” And for many of us who live every day under the threat of losing our jobs, suffering foreclosures on our homes, and finding ourselves unable to provide adequate health care for ourselves and our families, the whole concept of abandoning fortunes we’ve accumulated is totally off our radar screens. If accumulation of wealth and a reluctance, if not refusal, to part with it were the only key to hell, most of us could be assured of front row seats in heaven.

Now there is no denying that Jesus did, in fact, tell the Rich Young Ruler to sell all he had and give it to the poor. But that was only half of Jesus’ instructions to him. And the other half of Jesus’ instructions to him was simply this: “Then come and follow me.” And I would like to propose this morning that the second half of Jesus’ instructions might have been far more instrumental in sending the rich young man away sorrowing, than the first half was. For the real issue in this Gospel story, I believe, is not that of voluntary poverty versus accumulated wealth and the desire to hang onto it. Rather, the issue is doing things my way, or doing things God’s way. It is trying to get God to do things my way, rather than getting myself to do things His way.

The Rich Young Ruler wanted to play an ethical check-list game with Jesus. The Rich Young Ruler knew that he had checked out all his possible infractions of the moral law, and had been able to award himself with a clean bill of moral health. So he felt pretty safe when he asked Jesus, “Good Master, what must I do to inherit eternal life? What must I do? Give me a list. And the Rich Young Ruler was pretty certain, I am sure, just what that checklist would turn out to be.

It would be that great old moral standby, universally embraced by Jews and Christians of every generation: “The Ten Commandments.” Its moral mandates were clear: “You must not kill; you must not commit adultery; you must not steal; you must not bear false witness; you must not defraud; and you must not dishonor your father or your mother.”

Well that’s just the kind of list we like to presented with, isn’t it? For most of us haven’t killed anybody lately. We haven’t been out night after night committing adultery. The last time we stole anything was candy from the “Five and Ten” when we ourselves were five or ten. We haven’t perjured ourselves in a court of law. We haven’t been engaged in Ponzi schemes. If all we had to worry about was keeping all the mandates of the Ten Commandments we could be pretty certain that we would be assured, as the Rich Young Ruler wanted to be assured, of inheriting eternal life.

“Master,” says that Rich Young Ruler, after reciting the Ten Commandments for Jesus, “I have kept all these from my earliest days.” And to that, most of us here this morning, could probably respond “and so have we. Maybe a little slip here and there, but for the most part we’ve been pretty faithful commandment keepers, and therefore there should be no reason why God would deny our right to inherit eternal life.

The Rich Young Ruler’s attitude brings to my mind an incident which occurred after the meeting of the local ecumenical clericus, of which I was a member during the 28 years I served as Rector of St. Luke’s Church in Metuchen, NJ until my retirement in 1998. After the meeting had adjourned I and the pastor of one of our local Lutheran churches were returning to retrieve our cars from the rear parking lot of the church where we had been meeting. As we were walking along together we were discussing how difficult it was to avoid sinning in a world abounding in temptations, and how easy it was to succumb to these temptations clergy and laity alike. A self-styled “Born Again Christian” Pastor of our local Church of the Nazarene, overheard us, and demanded, “You who call yourselves “Men of God” and “Ministers of the Gospel” certainly do not sin, do you?” When we acknowledged that we might easily find ourselves sinning daily if not hourly,” he angrily responded, “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, displaying such a poor witness to those who look up to you as their pastors and moral guides. Why I haven’t personally sinned for twenty years!” He then stormed away in a huff to his car, and sped away, undoubtedly in hopes that he might, by distancing himself as much as he could from these two hardened sinners, he would be able to avoid contamination. Wiping away the gravel he had kicked up in our faces as he “peeled rubber” out of the lot, my Lutheran buddy and I, still shaking our heads in unbelief, continued on to our cars. Suddenly, however, my Lutheran colleague grabbed me by the arm, and said to me, “Zelley, do you think this guy could possibly be serious about his sinlessness?” And I allowed as how this Nazarene Pastor must have had a much more narrow definition of what constitutes sin than we had; that perhaps his definition of sin was a violation of one of the Ten Commandments.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” he replied, “still with his chin falling to the ground in continuing disbelief, But the next thing I knew he was grabbing my arm again as he posed a question that I must confess I had been asking myself as well: “Zelley! What do you think he did twenty years ago?”

Once the Rich Young Ruler had assured Jesus that he had, like my Nazarene colleague in New Jersey, had assured my Lutheran buddy and me, scrupulously obeyed all the Ten Commandments from his youth on, we can only assume that his next question to Jesus might well have been, “So what’s keeping you from rewarding me with the gift of eternal life?” I’ve kept my part of the bargain, so now isn’t it time for you to keep yours?” I wonder if you noticed in the beginning of today’s Gospel as the Rich Young Ruler confronted Jesus with his challenging question, the preponderance of first-person pronouns. “Good Master, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Master, I have kept all these laws from MY earliest days.”, or, to put it another way, “Tell ME what you want ME to do, Jesus, and I can tell you right now that I have done it!”) And we begin to get a clue of what command of Jesus really sent the Rich Young Ruler away sorrowing. It wasn’t Jesus’ first command, “Sell all you have and give it to the poor.” It was Jesus’ second command, “Then come and follow ME.”

And. If I’m right about the second command being the deal breaker, we can understand where the Rich Young Man might have been coming from, can’t we? We like to remain in control. We find it very hard to imagine what it would be like truly to “let go and let God,” to drop everything and follow Jesus. We don’t like to be controlled by another, even if that “Other” is the God who revealed Himself to us in Jesus. We might be willing to let Jesus provide us with a self-guiding spiritual GPS, but we are very reluctant, indeed, simply to follow Jesus, wherever he might lead us. As long as we’re in control, we’re OK, but when Jesus asks us to trust Him absolutely, we are undone. Yet it is this unconditional trust in God as He has revealed Himself to us in Jesus, which we know as faith, which alone can free us from ourselves and lead us to the place where we can enjoy eternal life, both in this life, and in the life to come.

The Rich Young Ruler’s problem was not that he had money. His problem was that his money had him. His problem was not that he had a lot. His problem was that he had, in fact, been had.

There’s nothing wrong with being wealthy, per se. And there’s nothing intrinsically holy about being poor either. The problem comes when we end up being had by the wealth we’ve amassed (of for that matter, the booze, the pills, the food, the popularity, the power, the position, or anything else we have worked so hard to possess, that it ends up possessing us instead. And it leaves us spiritually paralyzed, and unable to follow Jesus wherever He may choose to lead us.

Looking at the example of Jesus’ life and ministry during the three years of his public ministry on this earth, we should have a pretty good idea, as I’m sure the Rich Young Ruler did, of where it is Jesus might be inclined to lead us, if we should decide to follow Him. He might, for example, lead us to the bedsides of the millions of refugees from civil strife and natural disasters who are dying by the thousands of starvation and disease every day. He might lead us to respond to a family in this country where the breadwinner in the family has lost his or her job, and their home is subject to foreclosure. These are the places where Jesus would probably lead us, for these are the places where Jesus is still to be found. “When you do it to one of the least of these my brothers and sister,” he’s told us, “you do it to me.” And in our baptismal covenant we are called to “seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves.” The cries of the hungry, the homeless, the persecuted, and the sick of this world are the voices through which Jesus calls forth from us a response, and it is to these, our suffering brothers and sisters on this earth, that Jesus will almost certainly lead us if we choose to follow Him. And Jesus teaches us to regard the wealth that is ours as the resource that can facilitate our response. That’s what money is for, to make things happen, for the common good. But when we allow our possessions to possess us, we hang onto our money for dear life (or, more accurately, our money holds onto us for dear life), and we’re trapped. We’re afraid to be generous. We’re afraid to be compassionate. We’re afraid to let go and let God. We’re afraid to respond to our brothers and sisters in need.

And yet the divine words most often repeated in the New Testament are these: “Fear Not!” “Do not be afraid,” and “Perfect love casts out fear.” Our money should liberate us to be free to respond to the needs of a hurting world, but too often the fear of its loss fills us with fear, and leaves us in a word, “stuck.” When our possessions possess us we are afraid to let Jesus take us by the hand and lead us on our way. We are afraid to respond to his call to each one of us: “Follow me.”

There is, as I have said, nothing intrinsically evil about having money. There is nothing intrinsically righteous about being poor. The question for each one of us to ask ourselves, rich and poor alike is this: “What is it in my life that keeps me from surrendering to Jesus, and allowing Him to lead me where He wills? What is it that I’ve worked so hard to have, that it’s ended up having me? What is it that looked at first sight like a pair of wings, but turned out to be a straightjacket instead?

“What must I do to inherit eternal life?” the Rich Young Ruler asked Jesus. “Cast off whatever it is that’s binding you up,” Jesus replies, “Rid yourself of the possessions in your life that are possessing you, and allow yourself to know the wonderful sense of freedom and new life you will experience if you are able to respond with generosity, love, and compassion to the places where your brothers and sisters are hurting, and to which Jesus will surely lead you if you decide to follow Him. For eternal life is not a reward we receive from God for keeping all the rules. Eternal life is the divine gift we receive in the very act of following Jesus where He chooses to lead us, and the liberation we experience as He empowers us to cast fear aside, and allow our money to free us to respond to His call to love others as He first loved us.

The Rich Young Ruler just couldn’t do it. The fear of losing something that he was still hanging onto for dear life was just too great. And he went away sorrowing. The Rich Young Ruler just couldn’t do it, and we sorrow for him and with him, for passing up the liberating joy of giving which is God’s great gift to us when we respond to Jesus’ call to follow Him wherever He may lead. The Rich Young Ruler couldn’t do it, but the question for us as we gather around the Lord’s Table in St. Michael’s Church this morning is simply this, “Can we?”

You don’t have to wait until Sunday to hear, and meet, our new priest! Father Bevan Stanley will present Morning Prayer on Tuesday, October 23rd at 9am in the sanctuary.

Sermon preached in St. Michael’s Church, Litchfield, CT by Fr. E. Walton Zelley, Jr., Rector Emeritus, St. Luke’s Church, Metuchen, NJ
Pentecost 19 (Proper 22) October 7, 2012

Text: Mark 10:2-9 Some Pharisees came, and to test Jesus, asked “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”

To Jesus, this was the wrong question, asked in the wrong way, and for the wrong reason. First of all, it was the wrong question. Please note that the Pharisees asked only if it were lawful for a man to divorce his wife. They did not ask if it were lawful for a woman to divorce her husband. And the reason why they didn’t is clear to anyone conversant with Jewish marriage practices in first-century Israel. In those days, marriages were what we now describe as “arranged.” It was the fusing of two families, when it was financially beneficial to do so, and the piece of property which was the subject of this business transaction was always a woman.

In that patriarchal society, a daughter was a piece of property, pure and simple. She, like her father’s livestock, his servants, his house, and his wife, was his possession until the time that he chose to “give her away” accompanied by a generous dowry, which would serve as an incentive for a would-be groom, also known as the “beneficiary,” to allow the rights to this piece of property known as a bride to be transferred to him. Just in case you might have wondered why we’ve dropped the “giving away of the bride,” where the priest asks the father of the bride “Who gives this woman to be married to this man?” from the rite for the Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage in our present edition of the Book of Common Prayer, this is why.

It is because the church has rather belatedly come to the conviction that the father of the bride could only give the bride away if he owned her. And the idea of a woman being a man’s possession doesn’t sit too well in the minds of 21st century Americans – even if that man is the woman’s father. In first-century Israel, however, where marriage was regarded as the contractual agreement where the bride’s father transferred title, and therefore property rights to his daughter to the groom, what the Pharisees were asking Jesus when they posed the question, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” was simply this: “Does a husband have the right to abrogate a contract into which he once entered with his father-in-law, and ditch his wife at will?

The dominant school of rabbinic thought in the first century ruled that all a husband had to do to divorce his wife was declare that she had done something which was, in the most accurate translation of the Hebrew, obnoxious. That’s just the word they used – obnoxious! But what was the behavior that from their point of view, could legitimately be described as “obnoxious?” The simplest answer was “whatever annoys the husband.” Searching the proceeds of the rabbinic courts of the time, scholars discovered a case where a man was granted a divorce from his wife because she had fixed his eggs the wrong way; another, because his wife “talked too much.” Men who were lousy cooks, or obnoxiously garrulous, however, enjoyed total immunity from having their wives institute a divorce action against them. And why this discrepancy? Simply because, from the first century rabbis’ point of view, the wife was the husband’s property, but he was not hers.

Jesus, however, consistently took a dim view of people being treated as property in any context, and especially so when it came to the covenant of marriage. Jesus regarded marriage as being something much more profound, and sacred, than a mere contractual transfer of property and business transaction that could be broken by the male member of that legal partnership at will. So, for Jesus, the Pharisees’ question, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” was the wrong question. As Jesus saw it, under the laws of that day, it might well have been perfectly lawful for a husband to divorce his wife, but, so what? For Jesus, it was simply the wrong question to ask.

And from Jesus’ point of view, it was not only that the Pharisees had asked the wrong question but that they had asked the wrong question in the wrong way. To Jesus they had asked the question in the wrong way because they had asked it in the language of the law office and courtroom. “Is it lawful?” the Pharisees had asked Jesus, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”

Let’s look for a loophole. Let’s look for an escape clause. Let’s look for a rationalization. Let’s see what’s going to get us off the hook. Let’s talk about what is going to get us into heaven, and what will keep us from being condemned to hell. Let’s talk contracts. Let’s talk quid pro quo. Let’s talk about what I, the male of the species, can expect from that piece of property known as my wife.

After all, I’ve told my wife what I expect of her. I’ve reminded her again and again of what a wife’s role should be in a marriage. I’ve told her the way I want her to behave. I’ve told her the things I expect her to do. I’ve told her what makes me happy and what doesn’t. In other words, I’ve set down the terms of the contract. Now it’s up to her to meet her contractual obligations, as set down by me, as one-sided as that contract might be.

And there you have it, the complainant’s case against the defendant, his wife, all set down in a legal brief. “And now that you’ve heard the case,” the Pharisees seem to be saying to Jesus, “In whose favor do you think we should rule in this divorce action when it comes before us in the rabbinic court? Is it lawful for this man to divorce his wife?”

Things haven’t changed much in over 2,000 years, have they? The only difference today is that, in our relatively more liberated society, women now are equal-opportunity divorcers and not simply divorcees. One might say that in our 21s t century American society, women now have an equal opportunity to ask the same wrong question, in the same wrong way. “Is it lawful for a woman to divorce her husband?” But the question is still being asked in the language of the law office and the courtroom. “Is it lawful?” Marriage is still often viewed as a matter of contractual obligations, and divorce as a means of redress to a breach of contract. Marriage is still frequently regarded as a matter of quid-pro-quo’s, usually phrased as “This is what I’ve done for you. What have you done for me lately?” Of course, especially when a couple has come to a point in their marriage when one or the other is contemplating divorce, it is almost impossible for either to see how the other has “done as much for me as I’ve done for them.”

When I was still a full-time parish priest, I had a young couple show up at my office to see if I would officiate at their marriage. They came bearing a 36-page prenuptial contact which, with the aid of a lawyer, they had drawn up. Having myself been married over thirty years at that point, and having joined in parenting two children, I was particularly struck with one of the contract clauses which read: “When we have children, the husband will give the children their bath, read to them, and tuck them into bed on Monday, Wednesday and Friday each week and the wife will do the same on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, alternating on Sundays.”

It was all I could do to stifle a throaty chuckle. I thought, “Boy, are you ever in for a shock if you think, even for a moment, that married life could ever be as neat, tidy and well-organized as all that! Other clauses in the contract, from my viewpoint, were equally “off the wall.”

I couldn’t help but ask the couple just what they saw as the purpose of this contract, since the only purpose I could see it serving would be first, to protect themselves from each other, since they didn’t seem to trust each other any further than they could throw each other . . . and second, serve as Exhibit A in what I was certain would be the brief for the prosecution in an eventual divorce proceeding. Marriage for this couple seemed to me to be as much of a business deal as it was for the Pharisees in today’s Gospel. “I have a list of expectations for you,” each seemed to be saying to the other, “and I expect you to meet them. I expect you to meet my ideal of what a husband or wife should be, to meet the terms of the implicit contract which exists in most marriages, and which this prenuptial contract has simply spelled out in detail. As long as you meet the terms of this contract, our marriage will remain intact. But if you fail to meet these terms, I’m going to terminate the contract. I’m going to divorce you.”

The problem is that with the almost inevitable idealization of the other in the first flush of infatuation, we not only set up initial contracts, implicit or explicit, for our marriages but we set unrealistic contracts as well. The author Judith Viorst once tried to spell out the difference between the unrealistic expectations of infatuation and the realistic expectations of Christian love.

“Infatuation,” she wrote, (dating herself as she did), “is when you think he’s as gorgeous as Robert Redford, as pure as Solzhenitsyn, as athletic as Jimmy Connors, as funny as Woody Allen, and as smart as Albert Einstein – and that’s why you love him. Christian love, on the other hand, is when you discover that he’s as gorgeous as Woody Allen, as smart as Jimmy Connors, as funny as Solzhenitsyn, as athletic as Albert Einstein, and nothing like Robert Redford in any category, but you love him as he is.”

For Christian love is unconditional love – love without any strings attached. It is love extended even when the other is the most unlovable; it’s love for another person, warts and all. It is a response to and a reflection of the love God showers on us – a love that became enfleshed in Jesus, and went the limit for us on the cross. It is the love the Bible refers to in a Greek word found only in the New Testament – agape. So, in the opening preamble to our Episcopal Marriage Rite entitled The Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage, the officiating priest reminds us all that “marriage represents the very union between Christ and his Church” which means that marriage represents the relationship the God revealed in Jesus has to you and to me – the relationship of unconditional love. It is a relationship which is, in the words of our Prayerbook’s Wedding Vows, “for better, for worse; for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, loving and cherishing each other until we are parted by death.”

That’s not the language of the law court. It’s the language of faith, hope and love. It’s not a business contract; it’s a loving covenant – a mutual promise sealed by the faith we have in each other. But it’s a loving covenant which takes an almost superhuman kind of loving to live out – in other words, God’s kind of loving, lived out in us. It is the kind of loving which requires that God be the third party in our marriage. Christian love calls for trust, vulnerability, sensitivity, sharing, risk-taking and sacrifice. It’s little wonder, then, that many look at the institution of marriage with more than a little trepidation, and find themselves echoing the sentiments of that great expert on marriage, Mae West, who once said, “Marriage is a great institution, but I’m not ready for an institution yet.” And it’s little wonder also that marriages can die, and divorces will be the result. But when our brothers and sisters in the Christian Community, and the human community as well, suffer the pain of marital death and divorce, as with any death they need time to grieve, to know that God loves them even in their brokenness, and to allow their loving Heavenly Father and their brothers and sisters in Christ to help them move through that painful death into forgiveness, acceptance and new resurrection life.

The Pharisees asked Jesus “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” It was the wrong question, asked in the wrong way. And finally, it was a question posed for the wrong reason. For the Pharisees simply wanted, we are told in today’s Gospel reading, to “test Jesus out.” They wanted to trip him up, to play legalistic mind games, and to lure Jesus into breaking the rules. But Jesus cared too deeply for men and women in their struggles to live out that mutual expression of unconditional love which the Bible described as becoming “one flesh” to get caught up in their contractual gamesmanship. Marriage, as Jesus has taught us, is in God’s intention for us meant to be a lifelong union of mutual love and trust, “for better, for worse; for richer for poorer, loving and cherishing each other until we are parted by death.” But Jesus also understood that a marriage can die for many reasons. And understanding that, Jesus never treated divorce in a legalistic, punitive way. Rather, he saw divorce as a death to be mourned, a pain to be shared, a rejection to be healed, a gift of empathy and support to be extended by those whose lives touch theirs, and the possibility of a new and fulfilling resurrection life to be realized in the future.

Our loving God, revealed in Jesus, does not play legalistic games with human hearts and lives. God loves us even in our brokenness (if not especially in our brokenness), and wills only that if we come to walk through the valley of the shadow of the death of divorce we will know that He is there with us, loving us, supporting us, and offering us a second chance to find joy and fulfillment in a new relationship where we can experience what it is really like to become “one flesh” with another human being, loving each other as Christ has first loved us. And it is love, not laws, Jesus teaches us, that will show us the way.

“Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” the Pharisees asked Jesus. It was the wrong question, asked in the wrong way, for the wrong reason almost 2,000 years ago. It still is.

Sermon preached in St. Michael’s Church, Litchfield, CT by Fr. E. Walton Zelley, Jr., Rector Emeritus, St. Luke’s Church, Metuchen, NJ
Pentecost 18 (Proper 21) September 30, 2012

Text: Mark 9:38-50 John said to Jesus, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us . . .”

Amazing, isn’t it? John, one of Jesus’ inner circle of disciples, is reporting to Jesus that he, and some other disciples, had done all in their power to stop a man from doing something that they were sure Jesus would not have wanted him to do – casting out demons in Jesus’ name. Now demon possession is the name first-century Jews gave to the phenomenon that we in the twenty-first century would describe as a psychiatric disorder or, in a more popular term, mental illness. Therefore what this man was engaged in was an act of healing, and he was engaged in this ministry of healing in the name of the one whom he believed to be the source of all healing – Jesus the Christ. When this man was engaged in the healing act of “casting out demons,” he was doing something that Jesus spent a good percentage of his earthly ministry doing himself. He was performing a ministry that Jesus, again and again, had called those who would be his disciples to be engaged in. So why would John and the other disciples have tried to stop him?

In his report back to Jesus, which I have chosen for my text this morning, John gives us the answer to this question. “We tried to stop him,” John explains to Jesus, “because he was not following US! John might just as easily have said, rephrasing Frank Sinatra’s signature song, “We tried to stop him because he was not doing it OUR way. We might say that it was John’s way or the highway, because John believed so fervently that his way and Jesus’ way were one and the same. And we can be pretty certain that John never perceived, even for a moment, just how arrogant his conviction was.

And things haven’t changed much in the attitudes of self-appointed guardians of Christian orthodoxy in our day, either. On the surface, members of different Christian communities may give lip service to tolerating differing theological positions, different approaches to biblical interpretation, differing liturgical styles, and differing ethical norms, while continuing to firmly believe that their way alone is truly Jesus’ way, and that they alone have the authority to decide who it is that may legitimately minister in Jesus’ name as they believe they have exclusively been commissioned to do. Too many of us in the Church today – and regrettably in our beloved Anglican Communion lately – have begun to take seriously the sentiments that a cynic once voiced in jest, saying to those outside our faith community as well as some within it, “We all worship the same God: you in your way, I in His.”

What does it mean to “do it our way” as disciples of Jesus in his church today? What caused John to try to stop the man engaged in a healing ministry in first-century Israel? Was there something about the man which would have disqualified him in John’s eyes for ministry in Jesus’ name? And are there things that can cause those of us who consider ourselves to be disciples of Jesus in our day to challenge the legitimacy of the call others might believe they have received from Jesus too the ordained ministry of his Church as well, declare ourselves out of communion with those churches and church people who support them in their call, and try to stop them in their tracks, just like John did? Today, might it be all about the person’s gender, marital status, or sexual orientation, for example?

For a long time in the Episcopal Church and in the Anglican Communion of which we are a province, it was believed that women, by virtue of their gender, were disqualified from serving in the ordained ministry of Bishops, Priests and Deacons. And the Bible was freely quoted to justify this ban. “The Bible says it, and that settles it!” was the battle cry of those who would deny that women were qualified to be ordained. Citing the Bible as their authority, they argued that when God took on human flesh in the Incarnation, He took on the flesh of a male named Jesus, and that ordained clergy are meant to be “icons” of Jesus when they stand in his place, for example, in the reenactment of his sacrifice in the Eucharist. But a few decades ago, the Episcopal Church, wisely I believe, determined in General Convention from which the canons that govern the ordained ministry to over 50% of our communicants who had been denied it, than there were passages which seemed to prohibit it.

If Scripture says that we become one with Christ in Holy Baptism, and we don’t place signs over the Baptismal Font that says, “males only need apply,” it was argued, why can’t women be one with Jesus in sharing his ministry as well? And the rest is history, as in our day, the Presiding Bishop – the primate of the entire Episcopal Church – is a woman, and female deacons, priests and bishops continue to make valuable contributions to the life and ministry of our church. And most Episcopalians today wonder what took us almost three centuries to come to the decision we did. Some diehard opponents of women’s ordination have suggested that if God had wanted us to have women priests, it wouldn’t have taken Him 2,000 years to tell us, while defenders of a woman’s right to ordination suggested that the problem was not God’s failure to keep us informed. . .but our failure to hear His voice.

Again, until recently in the Episcopal Church a divorced person could not be ordained, and if a Bishop, Priest or Deacon got divorced after they were ordained, they were immediately defrocked. And it can hardly be denied that there are certainly biblical passages in which Jesus Himself teaches that a lifelong monogamous relationship is God’s will for those who, in the words of our Prayer book’s Marriage Rites, “become one flesh in Holy Matrimony” – and that divorce might therefore be seen as a sin, a failure to live up to the Christian ideal. But then, of course, there are all those pesky verses in the Bible about forgiveness, new beginnings, and other passages that questioned why divorce, and especially remarriage after divorce, appeared to be the only unforgivable sin. And that prohibition went by the boards as well, as the church having gained some humility decided that we all fail to live up to the Christian Ideal in some aspects of our lives, and that one particular instance of failing to live up to a Christian Ideal should not be seen as providing grounds for the denial of ordination. And because that ban was lifted, we have been blessed in the Episcopal Church with the ministries of some of the most outstanding Bishops, Priests and Deacons this church has ever known. And now, of course, it is the legitimacy of the ministry of gay and lesbian men and women that has been the cause of great dissension in the Episcopal Church, and in the world-wide Anglican Communion of which we are a province.

And, again, Scriptural passages are trotted out that might challenge the legitimacy of men and women who share this sexual orientation from being ordained. It’s interesting, though, that most of the passages cited in denying Holy Orders to gay and lesbian Christians come from the Purity Codes of the Old Testament, adherence to which, I have always understood Christian men and women to be excused from. I always get a kick out of those who loudly argue that the Bible condemns homosexuality while they munch on a ham-and-cheese sandwich, which would have been a behavior far higher in the hierarchy of first-century Jewish prohibitions than homosexuality would ever have been. And once again, when it comes to ordination in a church, that proclaims that we become one with Christ in Holy Baptism, but displays no signs over the Baptismal Font which declares “straights” only need apply, it is hard to understand for this priest, at least, why gay and lesbian Christians cannot become one with Christ in Holy Orders as well. Finally, like most of the clergy of this church, I know many gay Bishops, Priests and Deacons who, of necessity, have remained deeply closeted when it comes to their sexual orientation, but whose lives and ministries eloquently demonstrate that orientation is in no way an impediment to their effectively and lovingly ministering to the congregations commended to their pastoral care and to us who have been privileged to have them as our colleagues in ordained ministry as well.

But then, maybe it wasn’t who the would-be healer was that caused John in today’s Gospel reading to try to stop the man from performing his ministry of healing, but rather how it was that he was exercising it. Maybe it was because he was never seminary trained. Maybe he entertained come unorthodox ideals of what Christian healing entails. Maybe it was the words he used and the rituals he employed in performing his healing exorcism. Maybe John was reacting like the woman who in the story I’ve told many of you, was seeking to stop those who were trying to revise the Prayer book, and when she encountered the Chairman of the Prayer book Commission scolded him saying, “If Jesus were to see what you’ve done to His Prayer Book, He’s roll over in His grave!” Maybe it was because he wasn’t official – because he had not received the laying-on-of-hands. There were probably lots of ways in which this would-be healer just wasn’t doing it John’s way. And since John believed that his way along was Jesus’ way, there could have been a lot of reasons why John would have believed that this man simply had to be stopped.
But let’s go back into the pages of the four Gospels and ask ourselves, just what were the conditions that Jesus set down for accepting people into his apostolic band? Did he ever question their gender, their marital status, or their sexual orientation? Did he ever administer a theological examination to assure himself of their Biblical orthodoxy? Was he big on their adherence to Jewish ritual law? How interested was Jesus in the niceties of ritual observance, or the language of worship? Did he ever insist that those he called to discipleship enroll in a rabbinic seminary? Did he ever suggest that there was only one way of interpreting scripture which alone he would entertain – He who, himself, so frequently interpreted Scripture in ways that were anathema to the religious establishment of his day? Or did Jesus simply say to all whom he encountered, “My brother or my sister, follow me! I ask only that you be willing to walk the walk with me, which is the way of the cross, and carry on my ministry of love, reconciliation, justice and healing in this world.”

So when John reported to Jesus that he had tried to stop a man from exercising a ministry of healing in his name, because the man had not been doing it John’s way, how did Jesus respond? “Do not stop him,” Jesus admonished John, “for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us. For, truly I tell you, whoever gives a cup of water because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose their reward.”

What I hear Jesus saying is simply this, “to do it My way does not mean to be the right gender, have the right marital status, have the correct sexual orientation, say the correct words, engage in the right rituals, hold to the right version of Biblical interpretation or adhere to rigid standards of theological orthodoxy.” To do it His way, not John’s way, or anyone else’s way, Jesus tells us, is to do what Jesus did and still does through us, continuing his work of healing, reconciliation, compassion and justice on this earth. It’s not our business as Christian men and women to say to any of our brothers and sisters in Christ, “Do it my way or I’m going to do all I can to stop you from ministering in this church. Do it my way or I can’t remain in communion with you.”

The story is told of a Kindergarten Sunday School teacher who always closed her classes by having the children engage in the finger play, Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the doors, and see all the people. At the end of the first session of Church School on September Sunday, the children had begun putting their hands together and repeating the familiar rhyme, when the teacher noticed, to her horror, that one of the children had only one hand. As she was desperately searching her mind for a way to extricate herself from this potentially embarrassing and hurtful scene, she noticed a small boy, seated across the table from the girl who had only one hand, reach his hand across the table and heard him say to her, very gently, “Here, let’s make a church together!”

May we never forget that God works in many ways, through many different people, some of whom might be the last one we would expect God to work through. And instead of saying, “Stop! Unless you do it our way, it can’t be the work of Christ,” let us reach our hands across the table and say, “My brother or my sister, the acts of love, mercy, caring and justice that I see so evident in you are clearly the work of God. We may not have the same theology. We may not interpret Scripture in exactly the same way. We may not worship in the same way or using the same words. We may not have the same views about authority and ordination. We may not share the same lifestyle. But you’re doing what I believe Christ has called us to do. Now, let’s make a church together – a church without walls, a church for all people who serve God the Father as His children, and therefore are our brothers and sisters in Him, a church as inclusive and all-embracing as our Heavenly Father’s love. And I firmly believe, my brothers and sisters in Christ, that whenever, through God’s grace, we involve ourselves in this kind of healing ministry, there won’t be any stopping us at all!

Sermon preached in St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, Litchfield, CT by Fr. E. Walton Zelley, Jr., Rector Emeritus, St. Luke’s Church, Metuchen, NJ
Pentecost 13 (Proper 16) August 26, 2012

Text: (Ephesians 6:10-20) “Finally be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of his power. Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.”

The Hymnal 1982, which is now the official hymnal for use in worship in the Episcopal Church, was the first revision of our hymnal in almost half a century – the previous hymnal having been published in 1940. A commission was established by the General Convention of our church to initiate the process of revision. Overseeing the work of revision was Raymond Glover who had been appointed to be the Editor of the proposal new hymnal. It was my privilege to attend a clergy conference which Dr. Glover led, designed to inform us about the philosophy which underlay hymnal revision, and the difficulty which members of the commission had encountered in bringing the new hymnal to birth.

One of the problems the commission faced was trying to be sensitive and accommodating to various special interest groups within the church who were insistent that hymns from the 1940 Hymnal which contained symbolic language which those groups felt were inappropriate for Christian worship should either be edited or else excluded from the new revised hymnal.

There were, for example, groups which had emerged from the civil rights movement in our country and in our church, who were concerned that the hymnal revisers remove symbols that were fundamentally racist in tone, using darkness or blackness as a symbol of evil, and light or whiteness as a symbol of the divine. They wondered what images were engendered in the minds of Episcopal worshippers when they sang, “Cast away the works of darkness, all you children of the day.”

Now it might be argued that the images of night and day, and darkness and light do not have a lot to do with skin color, and racial characteristics. But set within a context of group consciousness in this country where, in our popular Westerns, the good guys always wore white and the bad guys, black; and in our liturgical practices until recently where white vestments signified the themes of joy and new life – the color or weddings, baptisms and other joyful events; while black was the color which signified death and mourning, used only in the service of the Burial of the Dead.

I’ll never forget the great African-American humorist Dick Gregory’s story about going into a drug store and purchasing a box of flesh-colored band-aids but, having opened the box was forced to conclude, “They just didn’t have me in mind.” This, it would seem, would not be a message we 21st century Episcopalians would want to communicate in the hymns we sing each Sunday. And yet is there not an important message for Christians when the Gospels talk about Jesus as the Light of the World who sheds light on the demonic deeds we perform under cover of night, and of which we prefer ourselves to remain in the dark. It’s a clash of symbols that is not very easy to reconcile or resolve. But this was just the beginning of the Hymnal Revision Commission’s problems.

Another special interest group who had concerns about the language of our hymns were the women of our church who were beginning to assume positions of responsibility in the life of the church – the same Episcopal Church which until late in the 20th century did not allow women to sit on vestries, represent their parish at the annual Diocesan Convention, represent their diocese at the triennial General Convention, or be ordained a deacon, priest or bishop in the Church. Therefore, the women of the church were quite naturally concerned about words and symbols in our hymnody which were exclusively male, and represented a patriarchal and sexist perspective which, mercifully, in other areas of our church life had begun to disappear. They were concerned about such lines as “Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide. In the strife of truth with falsehood. For the good or evil side.” Women, ostensibly, were left to wallow in their procrastination and indecision when it came to choosing between the “good and evil side.” Another classically sexist hymn was “Rise up O Men of God, have done with lesser things. Give heart, and soul, and mind, and strength to serve the King of Kings.”

In a masterpiece of irony, the then-very-conservative Dean of the Cathedral in my home diocese of New Jersey had chosen this hymn as the Processional Hymn at the service of Ordination to the priest of five candidates, one of whom I was presenting, and all of whom just happened to be women. Before the service began, I suggested to my candidate that she and the four other female candidates for ordination to the Sacred Priesthood could remain seated while the men in the congregation rose to their feet, and continue to occupy themselves with lesser things, as alien to the vocation of Priesthood as that would seem to be.

No, it really didn’t seem too much to ask the Hymnal Revision Commission to avoid this kind of liturgical lunacy by editing the hymns they would be proposing for inclusion in the new hymnal to reflect a more inclusive language. It would seem especially appropriate for them to do so in a church where more than 50% of its communicants are women; where more than 50% of the candidates for the Ministries of Bishop, Priest and Deacon in the past two decades have been women; and today the Presiding Bishop of the whole Episcopal Church is a woman. No, I don’t think it’s asking too much at all.

Well, the third special-interest group which sought to influence the choices made by the commission for inclusion in the new hymnal, and the one whose concerns were most applicable to the imagery contained in my text from this morning’s Epistle, was the Episcopal Peace Fellowship, and other Episcopalians who shared their pacifist view. They, of course, wanted to rid the hymnal of all hymns which utilized militaristic (if not, simply military) imagery. And were there ever a lot of hymns in the 1940 hymnal which were loaded with that kind of imagery. And some of these were among the most beloved “top ten” favorites among many Episcopalians; and, for that matter, among most Protestant worshippers in general. You know them as well as I do. We grew up with them.

“Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war . . .” “Stand up, stand up, for Jesus you soldiers of the cross.” “Soldiers of Christ arise, and put your armor on.” “Fight the good fight with all your might.” “Lead on, O King eternal, the day of march has come.” “Go forward, Christian soldier, beneath his banner true, the Lord himself thy leader, shall all they foes subdue.”

You can’t get much more militaristic than that! And how can we as 21st century Episcopal Christians fail to sympathize with those who sought to remove this kind of militaristic imagery from the hymns we sing in the most sacred rites of our worship as we direct our prayers and praises and seek to enter into a Holy Communion with the One who has been called the Prince of Peace?

The first thing to be pointed out, it seems to this preacher, is that the hymn writers did not create the militaristic imagery in some of the hymns in our hymnal out of whole cloth. And if we have any doubt about that, we need only look at the passage from Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians which I have chosen as my text this morning. Paul might not be talking about flak jackets, bulletproof vests, automatic rifles, machine guns, guided missiles, bombs launched by unmanned drones and all the other accoutrements of modern-day warfare. He does, however, cover all the military hardware employed in the warfare of his day: armor, breastplates, shields, helmets and swords. And he talks about the struggle; about the need to stand firm; about powerful enemy forces; and about depending on the Commander-in-Chief and on the power of the rank he holds. This is all-out warfare that Paul is talking about. It is a call to arms he is issuing. And it’s all in the face of overwhelming enemy forces.

“Our struggle as Christians,” Paul warns us, “is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”

No, it’s not flesh-and-blood adversaries he’s talking about. It’s not the Taliban, or El Qaeda, or Assad’s butchers in Syria. It’s a cosmic adversary he’s referring to in his Letter to the Ephesians. It is the struggle for the hearts and souls of the people of this earth. It’s a demonic adversary, which we don’t have to believe in a guy in a red leotard with a pitchfork to acknowledge. It is a force of evil. It is a seductive force which can set spiritual roadside bombs on our way that will demolish the values which we as Christians are called to hold dear.

“Never underestimate the enemy,” Paul admonishes us in today’s Epistle. “Know what you’re up against, and arm yourselves adequately and appropriately with the equipment designed for spiritual battle. For it is the spiritual battle with which we are engaged in these troublesome times that will destroy our life on this planet quicker than any kind of guerilla warfare, or the deployment of nuclear weaponry, or anything else of the sort could ever begin to do.

Our forbears in the faith used to give names to the platoons of enemy combatants arrayed against us in the world today. They called them the “seven deadly sins.” Let’s try lust or concupiscence for starters. How did we ever get into the economic mess we’re in today which is destroying jobs, rendering hordes of people jobless and homeless, breaking u families, reducing industrial giants into corporate welfare recipients? Has it not been the forces of greed – the siren song that proclaims “as long as you can amass a small fortune for yourself, the ends will justify the means,” and seduces us into believing that true happiness and the fulfilled life is to be found in the wealth we amass, and the big-ticket consumer items like expensive electronics and automobiles that cost more than the homes we live in once did?

How did Bernie Madoff drop the ethical and spiritual nuclear bomb that he did? Because in his quest to be a billionaire many times over he, by his own admission, didn’t care who he hurt. He didn’t mind destroying the lives of people who had trusted him, who were his close friends, who headed the charities he claimed as an active member of his faith community to cherish. And he knew that in the fight against the demonic forces unleashed in this world, he, as a prominent foot soldier in those demonic forces could easily convince us – of Onward Christian Soldiers fame – to throw off the ethical and spiritual armor that would help us remember that if something sounds too good to be true it probably is. There’s a full-blown demonic assault on our souls these days. And it ill-behooves us to underestimate the enemy.

But it’s not only monetary gain that we battle against; it’s the life-destroying, spiritually death-dealing demonic forces that we’re up against as well. And again, it ill-behooves us to underestimate the enemy. Have you ever done battle with an addiction? Then you know what St. Paul is talking about when he says, “Our struggle is not against entities of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic power of the present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” In other words, we’re up against overwhelming odds.

And it’s high time to break out the equipment, drawing on St. Paul’s inventory of spiritual weapons in today’s Epistle: Openness to the guidance and protection of God and obedience to his will which Paul describes as “the whole armor of God.” Standing firm for what we believe to be true in the face of seductive voices which lure us into jettisoning those basic values – which Paul describes as “putting the belt of truth” around our waists – striving to live a righteous life, seeking freedom and justice for all, and not just things and more things for ourselves no matter how many moral compromises we make to get them, which Paul describes as “putting on the breastplate of righteousness.” Stepping into good walking shoes which will enable us to share the “Gospel of Love” with others. And, finally, putting our whole trust in Jesus and in the power of his unconditional love, being willing to follow wherever He may lead us.

War is hell, it has been said of flesh-and-blood military encounters. But war is heaven when it is spiritual warfare that we are waging as Christian soldiers led by Christ who has defeated the forces of the demonic, and won for us the victory of new, resurrected life. So I’m glad that Onward Christian Soldiers made it into our present hymnal and now “On then Christian soldiers . . . on to victory! Hell’s foundations quiver at the shout of praise. Christians lift your voices, loud your anthems raise. Onward Christian soldiers marching as to war . . . with the cross of Jesus going on before!”

Sermon preached in St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, Litchfield, CT by Fr. E. Walton Zelley, Jr.
Pentecost 11 (Proper 14) August 12, 2012

Text: John 6:35 – Jesus said, “I am the Bread of Life; whoever comes to me will never be hungry and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”
Little Sally was shut up in her room totally engrossed, as only a four-year-old could be, in developing a complex scenario about a make-believe family, populated by all her favorite dolls. Around two in the afternoon, she became aware of a gnawing feeling in her stomach. She rushed downstairs to inform her mother that she had a tummy ache. “No wonder you have a tummy ache,” Sally’s mother replied, “you’ve been so busy playing that you didn’t even stop to get some lunch, so your stomach is empty!” Sally was quite satisfied with that explanation, and proceeded to wolf down the huge peanut butter and jelly sandwich her mother had prepared for her.

There are many aches which you and I experience which are not confined as Sally’s ache was to our stomachs. There are hungers which peanut butter and jelly sandwiches will never be able to relieve. So I invite you to join with me this morning in considering another kind of ache from which almost none of us is immune – the ache which we commonly refer to as “heartache.”

A heartache, unlike a stomach ache, is not caused by a physical emptiness but rather, by a spiritual emptiness. And this latter kind of emptiness can only be filled by the One who has revealed to us in his life and ministry, and still offers to us today, what St. Paul once referred to us “all the fullness of God.” And I want you to join with me this morning in thinking about these things, as we are gathered together in the sanctuary of St. Michael’s Church to break bread together, and receive the Body of the Risen Christ, sacramentally present, who in today’s Gospel reading proclaims to us, “I am the Bread of Life; whoever comes to me will never be hungry and whoever believes in me will never thirst.”

‘Is there an ache tearing at your heart this morning,” Jesus asks each one of us who has gathered here in his name to celebrate the Holy Eucharist. Are you experiencing an emptiness, deep down in your soul, which all your attempts to fill have proven to be miserable failures? Has all that you’ve fed upon in your attempt to ‘get a life’ proved to be dead bread, stale bread . . .bread that, in no way, fills that void in your heart and in your soul?

“I am the Bread of Life,” says Jesus, “feast on me and come alive again. I am bread – wholesome bread – warm and filling bread that can fill the spiritual emptiness which has caused your heart to ache.”

“Man does not live by bread alone,” writes one of my favorite spiritual authors, Frederick Buechner, in his book Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, “but he also does not live long without it. To eat is to acknowledge our dependence both on food, and on each other. It also reminds us of other kinds of emptiness that not even the Blue Plate Special can touch. It is these “other kinds of emptiness” that Jesus, who comes to us as the Bread of Life promises that he will “fill with all the fullness of God.”

When we’ve experienced the heart hungers of the human spirit, most of us at some time in our lives have attempted to fill our inner emptiness with spiritually stale bread . . .with empty calories . . .with spiritual junk food that can never succeed in filling the void in our souls. We may have gorged ourselves on the financial portfolios we have managed to build up; with the fruits of conspicuous consumerism we’ve amassed; with the chemical forms of escapism like alcohol and other so-called recreational drugs we have compulsively ingested in a futile attempt to direct our attention away from the emptiness we feel.

We may also have attempted to fill our spiritual hunger with a driven kind of sexual expression where we have sought in death-dealing impersonal and compulsive encounters to fill an emptiness which only a deep and abiding loving relationship can ever hope to fill. But all of these attempts to fill the emptiness within have proven to be meals of “dead bread” which, rather than filling our emptiness, have only succeeded in increasing the void within. We have fed ourselves to satiation on these death-dealing “breads” rather than feasting on Him who has described himself as the Bread of Life, the Living Bread that never leaves us hungry. And so the emptiness remains, and our heartaches remain unhealed.

Our counterproductive diets of spiritually “stale bread” deal death to the human spirit, and leave us still with an unfilled emptiness within. What we need, Jesus tells us, is a steady diet of the Bread of Life – the Bread that truly enables us to ‘get a life’ once again. What we need in our lives when we’re feeling an emptiness inside, and our hearts are aching, Jesus tells us, is to feed on Him who is the Bread of Life and to experience what it really means to “come to life.” And it is a very special kind of life for which we are empowered when we become one with Him who is the Bread of Life in Holy Communion.

It is the kind of life that Jesus lived when he walked the paths of this world thousands of years ago. It is the kind of life that we are called to share with Jesus as he “comes to dwell in us and we in him.” The kind of life where we, as Jesus did, find ourselves fed in feeding others; loving others as we have been loved; forgiving others as we have been forgiven; and accepting others as we have been accepted. In other words, it is when we cease dwelling on our own emptiness and concentrate on filling the spiritual and material hunger our brothers and sisters in the world are experienced day by day, that we end up finding ourselves in the process becoming “filled with all the fullness of God.”

I had a parishioner in the New Jersey parish from which I retired when Milbrey and I moved into our retirement home in Copake Falls, who informed me that she was leaving St. Luke’s and joining a local Pentecostal Church because she did not feel that she was being “fed” by the liturgy and life of the Episcopal Church. This was a woman whose priority in life was first, foremost and always the salvation of her own soul, and who spent little or no time reaching out to others and seeking to heal the heart hungers they were experiencing. I told her that she might want to check out those passages in the Gospels where Jesus suggests that we are most likely to find ourselves fed when we are about the business of feeding others; that is in the service of God and of our brothers and sisters in need that we are most likely to find ourselves fed – “filled with all the fullness of God.”

It has been the experience of Christian men and women throughout the ages, that it is when we feed on Jesus who is the Bread of Life – in worship, prayer, sacrament, scripture and song, incorporating his life into ours – that we are most likely to ’get a life’ once again. It is when we take seriously what Jesus was talking about when he said, “I was hungry and you fed me” and when we asked him when we had done that, answered us, “When you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me” that the emptiness in our souls is most wonderfully filled. It is when we understand what St. John the Evangelist was talking about when, in one of his letters to the infant Christian community, observed that “we love because God first loved us” and that we find our bread plate full to overflowing when we share that Bread of Life with others, as we allow God’s life and love to flow right through us to them.

For to open ourselves to Jesus the Bread of Life in prayer; lift up our hearts to him in worship; become one with him and he with us in Holy Communion; allow Jesus to address the hungers of our hearts in his Holy Word; and to be confronted by Jesus in the faces of our hurting brothers and sisters in the world that we find ourselves gradually transformed into what St. Paul refers to us “Christ’s Body the Church: His hands and his feet, his eyes and his ears, his heart and his lips in the world. For it is then that we display in our lives , by word and example, the “Good News of God in Christ” and the Good News of how Jesus has proven himself to be for our aching hearts and our empty souls the true and Living Bread who has “come down from heaven to give life to the world.”

Someone once defined Christian Evangelism which is, very simply, the sharing of this “Good News of God in Christ” as ‘one hungry person telling another hungry person where to find bread.’ For when we feed on him who is the Bread of Life, the emptiness in our souls is filled to overflowing, and God’s unconditional, all-inclusive love flows right through us to others.

Feeding others as we have been fed, and finding ourselves fed in the feeding itself, is an ethic of gratitude, of thanksgiving, of sharing the gift. That is why we call the Sacrament we are celebrating this morning the Holy Eucharist – Eucharist being the Greek word which is translated into English as “thanksgiving.” As we gather around the altar and stretch out our hands to receive the Bread of Life, we do so in order that we might be empowered to be Christ Bearers in the world – sent out to “love and serve the Lord” in the faces of our brothers and sisters whose souls are empty, and whose hearts are aching, feeding them as we ourselves have first been fed.

One of my favorite columns in the New York Times is entitled “Metropolitan Diary.” It chronicles some wonderful and often humorous vignettes about life in the Big Apple. In a column I’ll never forget, a female contributor shared something she had recently experienced on the streets of Manhattan. “I left a showroom in Soho just before 6pm,” she wrote, “and headed across Spring Street for the subway. It was raining and cold, and I was without an umbrella. I had about seven blocks to walk and, of course, cabs evaporate in the rain. I reached a corner where I had to stop for a Don’t Walk sign and, as I stood there getting wetter and wetter by the second, an umbrella was suddenly extended over my head. I turned and woman in her late 20s said, “I’ll share with you.” She asked where I was going and I told her the subway at Sixth Avenue. She said she was going almost as far, we could continue to share. When we came to her street, she said that she had time, and would I like her to walk me the rest of the way to the subway – about a block. I refused. She had done more than enough. After thanking her, I said I hoped someone would do something that nice for her someday. “They have,” she said, “they have.” And she walked away.”

When we as the Community of the Baptized have been fed with the Bread of Life, that “living bread that came down from heaven and gives life to the world,” and have allowed that divine love which has nourished us, and filled the emptiness in our souls, to flow right through us to others in acts of Christian love and compassion, the recipients of our loving acts may one day say to us as that women said to the stranger who so lovingly extended the protection of her umbrella to her, “I hope that someone will do something that nice for you someday” and we’ll find ourselves responding, “God has, my brother or sister, God has.”

Confronted with the heartaches we all experience, the “dead bread” to which we so often turn to fill the hunger within, provides nothing but empty calories for our souls. Confronted with the emptiness all of us have known at some time or another in our lives, and may well be experiencing even now, “dead bread” simply won’t do. It is only when we turn to Jesus, the Bread of Life, and allow him who empowers us by his love for us, to share that Bread of Life with others, that we will find ourselves, as countless other Christian man and women who have gone before us have, “fed in the feeding,” as the heartaches of our lives are healed, and the emptiness in our souls is “filled with all the fullness of God.”

Proper 11, Year B July 22, 2012
Sermon preached in St. Michael’s-Litchfield by Rev. Estelle Webb

There is a tendency among religious people to mentally separate our spiritual and physical lives. When we do that we are able to justify erecting barriers between ourselves and those with whom we would rather not associate – physical and psychological barriers.

In today’s letter from St. Paul the people of Ephesus and we are reminded that through Christ all of us are one and our lives are an integrated, incarnational whole. That idea was a difficult one for the people of St. Paul’s time and it is also a difficult one for us to wrap our minds around. For them it was clearly a religious question, for us it is more a cultural one.

Ancient Israel was a theocracy. In their belief system, they and they alone were God’s people. Because of this they were a holy people and others were aliens. Anyone who was not part of their community, the Hebrew community, was considered “far off”. If a person wanted to become a Jew they would need to word their request to the Rabbi in these terms: “bring me near.” The Hebrews had the hope of a Messiah, the Gentiles had no hope. But, that was before Christ came, as Paul tells them in today’s letter to the Gentile community in Ephesus. He writes: “so then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord’ in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.” Remember that St. Paul is a Jew.

Even the Jewish temple was built to reflect the belief of separation between the Jew and “the other”. The temple consisted of a series of courts, each one a little higher than the one that went before, with the Temple itself in the inmost of the courts. First there was the Court of the Gentiles; then the Court of the Women; then the Court of the Israelites; then the Court of the Priests; and finally the Holy Place itself. A Gentile could only come into the first of the Courts and between them and the women was a wall, a screen of marble, actually. Historians say that it was beautifully wrought and at intervals were placed into the walls tablets which announced that if a Gentile proceeded any further he was liable to instant death. Paul knew this barrier, and it is written that it was that barrier that led to his final imprisonment and death. Because he was falsely accused, it is believed, of bringing an Ephesian Gentile, into the Temple beyond the barrier. So, essentially, according to the custom of the Jews, that wall shut out the Gentile from the presence of God.

In his letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul is trying to explain the radical change that has occurred through Christ. No one who believes in Jesus Christ is far off anymore; all have access to God through Christ. He also writes that we are saved by God’s grace in Christ, not by any works that we do.

Throughout this Epistle it is made clear that all are welcome in the church of Christ, all who believe in Christ as their risen Lord and Savior. No one need be far off. In Christ all are equal.

The great twentieth century spiritual writer, Evelyn Underhill wrote that we cannot make the distinction between our practical and spiritual life because, if God is All to us, then he is in reality the grounding principle of all that we do. We are “creatures of sense and of spirit” she wrote, “and must live an amphibious life.” “Christ’s whole Ministry was an exhibition, first in one way and then in another, of this mysterious truth.” When we live a spiritual life, all that we do stems from our center in God. To quote her again: “It is through all the circumstances of existence, inward and outward, not only those we like to label spiritual, that we are pressed to our right position and given our supernatural food.”

This beautiful building is filled with spiritual significance and symbols so that we might not forget that we are the church, Christ’s body, who worship inside this place. This altar is the place where heaven and earth meet as we celebrate the offering our Lord made for us and announce His glorious resurrection.

In Ephesians 4 Paul also wrote this:“There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.”

Unlike the Jewish temple, our doors are open to all. But it is our duty, our calling, our responsibility, to welcome all in the Name of Christ, and if they do not know or believe in him, to help them come to the understanding that it is He, and He alone, who brings us here and motivates us to the good works that we do.

A life centered on God and given to God through Christ will help us remember that both the spiritual and the practical life needs to be lived as one life, not two separate realities.

I close with this prayer that St. Paul offered to the Gentiles in Ephesus:
“I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.”

Sermon preached in St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, Litchfield, CT by Fr. E. Walton Zelley, Jr.

Day of Pentecost   May 27, 2012

Text:  Acts 2:1-11 “When the Day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.  And suddenly from heaven, there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.”

            Hardly a day goes by when this preacher does not tell himself, “Zelley, you really need to get into a regular routine of aerobic exercise if you don’t want to shorten your life.”  And hardly a day goes by when I don’t ignore my own admonitions to myself.  There was, however, a day when I pursued a program of aerobic exercise in what might have seemed to be an appropriate way for me, namely, “religiously.”  In the last years of my rectorate in St. Luke’s Church of Metuchen, NJ, I reported every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7am to the Life Style Institute at our local hospital, ready to begin another round of the “E” word – Exercise.   First, there was a workout with weights, engaging in what was indelicately referred to as “the squat.”  It was not a pretty sight!  Then my trainer told me it was time to change to what was very appropriately referred to as the “military press.”  I was tempted to cry out, “Leave it to the Marines!”  Then it was on to the “bicep curl,” or in my case, more accurately described as the “pancake puff.”  Finally it was up to the stage for the dreaded regimen known as “aerobics.”

            Doing aerobics, of course, was the principal reason why I made my way to the Life Style Institute those three mornings each week.  My engaging in the aerobic program was partly in response to the pastoral approach taken toward me by my primary physician at the time, Dr. Maria Flores.  Time and again, she told me quite sweetly and tenderly, “You have two alternatives before you for your consideration, Fr. Zelley; you either do aerobics regularly, or you die.”  Dr. Flores had a wonderful gift for simplifying complex medical phenomena, and I usually managed to catch her drift.  “It’s real simple,” she continued, “If you breathe right, you get the oxygen you need.  If you get the oxygen you need, your lung capacity increases.  If your lung capacity increases, you breathe even better and you get even more oxygen in, which enriches your blood, and enriched blood makes your heart beat more efficiently.  If you stop breathing right for extended periods of time, you die!  Get it?”  I got it.  “You might say,” she concluded with a flourish, “that when it comes to nourishing healthy lungs and a healthy heart, it’s either inspire or expire.  Breathe right, or breathe your last!  It’s as simple as that.”  (Exactly!)

            Well, it will not come as a news flash, I am certain, to Episcopalians like you who have endured years of sermons on the Day of Pentecost, that the Greek word which is translated “wind” in the story of the First Pentecost from which I have taken my text this morning can also be translated “spirit” or “breath.”  And I am sure that you have also been made aware that the word “inspire,” which literally means “breathe in the Spirit,” can also mean “be moved to creativity, as when we speak of a writer, painter or musician as being inspired.  But the word inspire can also be simply translated “breathe in.”

            In biological life, if we don’t inspire, that is, breathe in fresh air, our heart eventually shrinks and we experience biological death.  In our creative life, if we don’t allow ourselves to be inspired, our creativity shrivels and we experience the death of our creative life.  Just so, in our spiritual life, if we don’t find opportunities to breathe in the spirit of God, our hearts shrivel and we experience a spiritual death.

            It’s also a biological fact that when we’re anxious and tense; when we’re guild-ridden or depressed; when we feel frightened or abandoned, we don’t breathe right.  We take small shallow breaths or we hyperventilate.  We shut out the good air, and it begins to take its roll.  It is not an accident that most cardiac rehabilitation programs include a lot of breathing exercises and a full regimen of aerobics.  Dr. Flores, it seems, was absolutely right.  Inspire or expire.  That’s our choice.

            In the familiar Pentecost story from the Acts of the Apostles which we read as our first lesson this morning, we begin with a group of men and women who were anxious and tense.  Their leader had been executed and the religious authorities were hunting them down.  “They were all together in one place,” we read, and that place was a hideout.  These men and women were also guilt-ridden and depressed.  They had, almost every one of them, abandoned at His darkest hour the man to whom for three years they had devoted their lives as the inner core of His disciples.  We meet men and women who felt isolated and alone, since the man to whom they had surrendered their lives had, in His Ascension, withdrawn from them, it seemed, into Heaven.  You can bet their literal breathing, as well as their spiritual breathing, was coming in shallow gasps.  You can bet the love which had irradiated and inspired their lives, filling them with a sense of joy, and a sense of new birth and new beginnings, had become pale and impoverished as they had ceased to draw upon the Spirit of God for spiritual sustenance, resulting in the shriveling of their souls.  Inspire or expire – that was the choice for these disciples.  But this band of disciples . . . in their fear, depression and isolation . . . was consistently making the wrong choice. 

            There was a good chance that in that Galilean hideout, where the disciples of Jesus were huddled “in one place,” panting with fear, the Christian Church in its infancy might have breathed its last, and suffered “crib death” as it were, soon after it had come to birth.  For it is the Spirit – the Breath of God – Scripture tells us, that gives the Church its life.  And you and I, like the disciples on that first Pentecost morning, are the church.  We are members of that Community of the Baptized in which the Spirit of God continually seeks to dwell.  We are called to breathe in that Spirit by receiving the Sacraments of Grace, by reading and meditating on God’s Holy Word, by opening our hearts to God’s inspiring presence in prayer, by responding to God as He confronts us in the hungry and the homeless, the despised and the rejected, the ignored and the abandoned, and gives us the privilege of discovering His Divine Presence in them.

            The Church might have expired in its infancy in that tightly locked room where breath came in panting, and hearts began to shrivel.  But it didn’t, and it never will.  The Church did not expire on that first Pentecost, and never will, because God never leaves all the spiritual breathing to us.  He breathes His breath into us.  He is like a Divine respirator, empowering us to breathe deep draughts of the Spirit when, left to our own devices, the best we could produce would be shallow panting.

            The Spirit, the breath, the wind of God, we are told in the passage I have chosen for my text this morning, descended on those men and women huddled in that locked-up, death-dealing hideout, with power, “like a rushing, mighty wind,” and it infused them and filled them, and propelled them with courage and conviction out of their hiding place into the streets, proclaiming Good News of New Resurrected life.  The early disciples discovered that it wasn’t the power of their own spiritual emphasis, or their own definition of Biblical orthodoxy, or their own brand of moral absolutism, or anything else of the sort, that ensured them and continues to ensure in our day, the survival of the Christian Church.      

            The message of Pentecost is one which we Anglican and Episcopalian Christians desperately need to hear once again, as we all head for the hills to our fear-driven hideouts, so obsessed with the rightness of our position, and the wrong-headedness of those whose positions differ from ours that we become deaf to the Holy Spirit of God who seeks to come and dwell in our hearts.  And we become blind to the way that the Spirit has been at work in the lives of our brothers and sisters in Christ who may have experienced that Spirit of God in a different way, from the way we have.  We become closed to the Holy Spirit who, in the words of Holy Scripture “makes all things new,” forgetting that when it comes to the Breath of God, we either inspire or expire.  It is time for us . . . who are the Church . . . to stop withdrawing into our own fear-focused hideouts, spending less time defending our own ecclesiastical and doctrinal turfs, and more time getting back to the business of the Church, which is to be a kind of spiritual Life Style Institute where our first priority is to engage ourselves in spiritual aerobic exercises, breathing in the Breath of God.

            “Breathe on me breath of God,” the beloved hymn urges us to pray, “Fill me with life anew, that I may love what thou dost love, and do what thou wouldst do.   Breathe on me breath of God, ‘til I am wholly thine, ‘til all this earthly part of me glows with thy fire divine.  Breathe on me breath of God, so shall I never die, but live with thee the perfect life of thine eternity.”  If we let Him, God does the inspiring when He finds us expiring.  What God did in the beginning of Creation, He continues to do in our lives.  God breathes into us the breath of life, and we are born again.

            When church people gather “together in one place” to be what we’re supposed to be about: disciples making disciples; letting each parish church become a mission outpost, and a temple in which the Spirit of God dwells; seeking and serving Christ in all people, loving our neighbors as ourselves; and dedicating our lives to be agents of God’s unconditional love – displaying god’s “love to the loveless that they might lovely be” – God by His own promise will continue to visit us like a “rushing mighty wind,” filling this sacred place where we gather on this Day of Pentecost, emancipating us from the fear-ridden spiritual hideouts we might have sought to take refuge in, and making St. Michael’s Church a staging area from which the Spirit fed people of God go forth to proclaim by the witness of our lives, the unconditional all-inclusive love of God in a language that anyone can understand.

            When we gather together in one place here at St. Michael’s, and are open to the stirrings of the spirit in our midst, we may find that things happen here just as they did on that first Pentecost.  The Church comes to life as we the members of this Christian community come to life.  We find the breathing in of God’s breath to be intoxicating and life-affirming.  We are inspired.  We find power to forgive that we never knew we were capable of.  We find a new joy in our hearts that we had never experienced before.  We find a oneness with our brothers and sisters in this world, no matter what their station in life might be, or what religious ideology they might embrace.  We experience directly why it is that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is translated “the Good News.”  We experience new power in our lives, the power of healing in our inner lives, in our relationships, in our communities, and in the world.

            Inspire or expire.  It was the challenge of the Church 2000 years ago.  It is the challenge of the Church in our day.  Pentecost is not simply a chapter from the pages of Church History.  It must be the story of the Church History.  It must be the story of the Church in our day as well if we, as Christian men and women, who have been made one in the Spirit in our baptisms; one in the Lord that we serve; one in the love that binds us together in one Body and one Spirit if we can ever hope to be taken seriously by a broken world that longs to hear the Good News of God’s all-embracing reconciling love.  Let’s all take a deep breath of God as we gather around the Eucharistic Table on this Day of Pentecost.  Then, “let us go forth into the world, rejoicing in the power of the Spirit” communicating by the example of our lives the language of love in such a way that all whose lives touch ours might hear in their own language the wonderful works of God.