Homily for Sunday 25 May 2014--Our Imperfections Reveal the Works of God

Homily for 25 May 2014:  6^th Sunday of Pascha (the Man Born Blind)

(Acts 16:16-34)

(John 9:1-38)

 

Today’s reading from the Gospel according to St John gives us the chance to consider how God works in ways that are hard for us to understand.  In fact, in order to begin to understand how God works, we have to put aside and get beyond a lot of ideas that we think are just plain facts, just normal situations, just natural conclusions.

This is what happens to the disciples when they ask Jesus about the man born blind.  To them, it’s just obvious and natural to believe that he is blind because either he or his parents sinned.  But Jesus overturns their conclusions when He says, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”  He goes on to teach the lesson that we must “do the works” of God while we have the time, while it is still daylight.

The fact is, no one is perfect.  In a way, all of us are born blind.  We are all born with some imperfection, because all of us, since the first sin of Adam and Eve, the original sin, have fallen away from the perfection God originally intended for the human race.  So doing the works of God, and having them revealed in us, consists of trying to live in a way that eventually will restore—or allow God to restore—that original perfection in us.

Our Byzantine Christian Tradition calls this “theosis”—becoming like God or returning to God.  It’s part of the process of salvation.  All of us are born the way we are so that the works of God can be revealed in us.

Our challenge—our call from God—is to be who God made us, no matter how other people may judge us to be sinful or defective or abnormal or unnatural or any of those other nasty labels, and to live in a way that shows the glory of God to other people.  We have to remember—about other people and about ourselves—that God doesn’t make junk (as Bishop John Elya so often said); God makes us in God’s own image and likeness.  So anything that is natural or born in us is given by God—from hair color or eye color or skin color to being left-handed or right-handed, or male or female, or musical or athletic or mentally gifted.  What we have to do is discover, with God’s help, how to live with what God has given us so that the works of God are revealed in us.

Our church community is the place where we can make this discovery and share the revelation of God’s works in each other.  This is because the church is a special place where God calls God’s people together.  It’s not a business.  It’s not a social club.  It’s not an obligation.  It’s not about numbers.  It’s not about money.  Church is a mysterious, wonderful, beautiful, mutual revelation of God at work, accomplishing God’s will, through the people He loves—in all our sinfulness, all our blindness, all our imperfection, all our diversity.

Through faith and love, through prayer and fasting and works of charity, the church is the place where we recognize the face of Jesus Christ in our own faces and in the faces of all the people around us.  Although we are born imperfect, we are born again through water and the Spirit in Baptism, and we set out on our life-journey to reveal God at work in us and in the world, and at the end of that journey we are made perfect in the eyes of God.

So we don’t complain about, or curse, our blindness and our other imperfections.  We thank God for the chance to show forth God’s love and mercy and justice and righteousness, and we give thanks and praise and glory to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, One God, now and ever and unto ages of ages.  Amen.

Homily for Sunday 18 May 2014--Jesus' Word is Easy and Hard

Homily for 18 May 2014:  5^th Sunday of Pascha (the Samaritan Woman)

(Acts 11:19-30)

(John 4:5-42)

 

Today’s Gospel reading gives us two excellent examples of how people misunderstand what Jesus says.

The Samaritan Woman whom Jesus encounters at Jacob’s Well thinks that the “living water” that Jesus talks about comes from the well.

The disciples think that someone else has brought food to Jesus when He tells them that He has food that they do not know about.

In both cases, Jesus has to explain the real meaning of His words.

We might be tempted to ask, “Are these people just stupid?”  Or is there another reason why they misunderstand?

But we need to be very careful about calling them stupid—because we also find it

• Easy to misunderstand Jesus’s message, and
• Hard to comprehend what He really means.
  Let’s look at a couple of examples:
  When Jesus says, “You must deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me,” we think he’s imposing a burden on us.  We forget that the Holy Cross is the key to the gate of Heaven, and unless we are willing to carry our cross, as Jesus carried His, we will have a hard time entering His Kingdom.
  When Jesus says, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” we think to ourselves that it’s not natural to love everybody.  But in fact we usually don’t really love ourselves, so we can’t love our neighbors.
  When Jesus says, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter Heaven,” we despair, because we all want to be rich—maybe even more than we want to be saved.  But it is attachment to wealth (a form of idolatry, loving money as a god), not wealth itself, that blocks our entry into Heaven.
  Jesus’s teachings are often easy to misunderstand and hard to understand because God’s ways are not our ways—even though they should be, because we are created in the image and likeness of God.  Sin prevents us from being in sync with God’s ways.
  This sometimes even extends to our idea of what the Church is.  Don’t we sometimes think of St Joseph’s as “the Arabic church” and of Latin Catholic parishes as “the American church?”  But isn’t the Church for everyone?  It’s God’s church for God’s people, not “our church for our people.”
  The Samaritan Woman talks to Jesus about her people’s beliefs in contrast with Jewish beliefs, but He tells her that soon “true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth . . . neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.”
  And today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles says that the early Christians left Jerusalem because they were being persecuted and they preached about Jesus as the Messiah as far away as Phoenicia (that is, Syria and Lebanon), Cyprus, and Antioch (now in Turkey)—but only to Jews.
  Then, some also preached to Greeks and Greek-speaking Jews in Antioch, and many of them believed in the Lord.  The Church leaders in Jerusalem heard of this and sent Barnabas especially to work in Antioch.  They adapted to changing circumstances and broke out of their usual way of thinking about the Church.  Barnabas, as it turned out, had great success, and in Antioch the disciples were first called “Christians.”
  The lesson for us is clear—especially since we are the Church of Antioch, and we wouldn’t be Christians now if the original Jewish Christians hadn’t decided to include Greeks in the Church.
  Jesus Christ came for all people and His Church is for all people.  We never forget where we came from, but we have to live where we are now, and reach out to strangers, as Jesus did to the Samaritan Woman and as Barnabas did to the Greeks in Antioch.
  This is easy to understand—it’s not hard to get—the Church is not limited to a mountain or a city or a language or a country.  True believers worship in spirit and in truth, inviting everyone to hear God’s word and to share God’s love.
  The truth never changes, but the Spirit leads us where we need to go—which is not always where we expect to go or want to go.  We have to open up our minds and our hearts and our church so that we can let everyone learn about Jesus and discover, like the Samaritan Woman, that He is “truly the Savior of the world,” and give thanks and praise and glory to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, One God, now and ever and unto ages of ages.  Amen.

Homily for Sunday 11 May 2014--Healing for Body and Soul

Homily for 11 May 2014:  4^th Sunday of Pascha (the Paralytic)

(Acts 9:32-42)

(John 5:1-15)

 

Sometimes when we read this story of Jesus healing the paralyzed man at the Pool of Bethesda, we pay so much attention to the events leading up to the healing that we don’t pay any attention to what happened afterwards.

But there are two main things worth thinking about in the second part of the story.

Number One is the reaction of the religious authorities.  (The Gospel just refers to “the Jews,” but clearly they are the authorities who are experts in the Old Testament Law.)  They don’t seem to notice or to care that the man has been healed and can walk again after being paralyzed for 38 years.  All they care about is that he is breaking the religious Law by carrying his sleeping mat on the Sabbath.  That counts as work, and work is forbidden on the Sabbath, the day of rest.

Number Two is the reaction of Jesus.  Jesus doesn’t want to be noticed after He heals the paralyzed man, so He blends into the crowd.  But He isn’t finished with the man.  When we encounter God, we have to learn something.  So Jesus goes hunting for the man, and finds him in the Temple area.  Then He warns him, “You have been made well.  Take care not to sin anymore, so that nothing worse may happen to you.”

Obviously, the religious authorities and Jesus have very different ideas of sin.  The authorities are concerned that the man has violated the Law by working on the Sabbath.  They don’t seem to connect physical healing and spiritual healing.

On the other hand, Jesus doesn’t seem concerned with the Law.  But for Him, the physical healing of the paralytic is just the first step.  He has to make sure that the man understands how profoundly his life has been changed—how his physical healing is just the sign of a deeper spiritual healing.

I don’t think that Jesus means that sin leads directly to illness.  Or that illness is direct punishment for sin. But sin can literally make us sick.  It can paralyze our ability to make moral decisions.  It can make us sick with guilt.  It can poison our relationships with other people and with God.  It can lead us to do stupid and dangerous things.

Very often we don’t think much about the connection between sin and health, between our spiritual and physical condition.  It doesn’t seem that the paralytic does this, either.  Before he’s healed, he just complains that no one will help him, and afterwards he just seems to be glad that he can walk.  He’s focused entirely on his physical condition.

The religious authorities also don’t seem to connect the physical and the spiritual, except for them the spiritual dimension is missing entirely.  They consider only the physical aspect of sin:  it’s just a matter of breaking the law, rather than dealing with what’s in the heart.

What Jesus shows the paralytic—and us, too—is that both of these attitudes are wrong.  We can’t take health—or any other part of physical existence—for granted, and leave God out of it.  And we cannot reduce our relationship with God to following the rules.  We also cannot judge other people and their relationships with God on how well we think they follow the rules.

When Christ comes into our lives, He brings healing for body and soul.  He frees us from paralysis, from sin, from obsession with rules.  But He frees us not just from things; He frees us to do things:  to live holy lives of love and mercy and justice, to be humble and respectful and generous, and to give thanks and praise and glory to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, One God, now and ever and unto ages of ages.  Amen.

Homily for Sunday 6 April 2014--Do We Get It?

Homily for 6 April 2014:  5^th Sunday of Great Lent

(Hebrews 9:11-14)

(Mark 10:32-45)

 

Today’s Gospel story seems to tell of another incident in which the disciples don’t really understand what Jesus is saying to them.  It should make us stop and think:  Do we get it?  Or do we also miss the point of what the Lord is saying?

In this story, it’s James and John who don’t get it.  Usually it’s Peter.  Jesus has amazed and frightened them by telling of His coming betrayal, condemnation, mocking, death, and resurrection.

But the only way they can react is to ask that He will guarantee them the best seats in Heaven.  This is a very childish response.  It’s like when a child says, “Mommy, you have to promise to give me whatever I ask for!”

Mothers are smarter than that.  They will always say, “I can’t promise anything until you tell me what you want.”  And often children ask for things they can’t possibly have, or that they don’t understand, or that Mom has no power to give them.

Similarly, Jesus reminds James and John that they don’t really know what they are asking for.  It’s a lot harder and more complicated than they think.  They will have to suffer as Jesus suffers, and there’s no guarantee that they will receive a special place of glory in Heaven.  Jesus tells them that He doesn’t have the power to promise that.

What about us?  Do we sometimes act childishly when we are talking with God?  When we pray, maybe we say to God, “You have to do this or that for me, because I’m a good person, and I pray, and I go to church.”  In fact, we can’t dictate to God and we can’t give orders to God and we can’t have a guarantee of special honor in Heaven.

We do know that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, offered Himself as a perfect sacrifice to take away our sins.  We do know that God loves us so much that God’s only Son did this—sacrificed His own life—willingly for us.

We do know that we can’t buy or trade or earn our salvation, because as St Paul says, works or actions are dead and God is alive.  This means that we do good and we don’t seek our own glory and we don’t use power over other people—simply because that’s the way God wants it.  That is the way of the Living God, who came not to be served, but to serve—and who gave His life to save our lives.

So let’s grow up in our relationship with God.  With Jesus, we are children of God; but we are also heirs to the Kingdom with Jesus.  We are made in the image and likeness of God.  We lack God’s perfection of love and justice.  We lack God’s Almighty Power.  We cannot save ourselves.  But we are called to live up to our creation in God’s image and likeness; we are called to be like our brother Jesus Christ—humble, giving service, sacrificing ourselves for the good of others.

We have to accept the place that has been prepared for us, and we can’t dictate what it will be.  So when we pray, we should pray that God’s will may be done, and that God’s mercy and love will bring us to accept and follow God’s will, for we know that He is good and the Lover of All People, and we give glory, honor, and worship to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, One God, now and ever and unto ages of ages.  Amen.

Homily for Sunday 30 March 2014: The Power of God and the Importance of Faith

Homily for 30 March 2014:  4^th Sunday of Great Lent

(Hebrews 6:13-20)

(Mark 9:17-31)

 

Today’s Gospel story of the man whose son was possessed by an unclean spirit teaches us about the power of God and the importance of faith.

The boy whose father brings him to Jesus is possessed by a demon or spirit that tries to destroy him.  It makes him unable to speak; it takes control of his body and throws him around, even into the fire and into water.  In fact, it sounds a lot like what we would call epilepsy.  We now understand that epilepsy and other diseases are not caused by demons, but they still cause pain and destruction and they still need healing.

In fact, we can look at this Gospel story as a metaphor or image for any kind of affliction over which we have no control and which works to destroy us and to affect those around us.  This could be illness of the body, such as cancer or heart disease or AIDS.  It could be illness of the mind, such as severe depression or schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.  It could be an addiction, such as to drugs or alcohol or gambling.

Every human being has some sort of affliction or addiction, and every human being also knows and loves someone else who also has some sort of affliction or addiction.  We all know how destructive these afflictions are; truly they do seem to come from unclean spirits, or demons.  In the Gospel story, the spirit attacks the boy, which also hurts the father.  It is as though the Devil was trying to destroy the father’s faith in God by attacking his son.

When the demon sees Jesus, it immediately attacks the boy:  it knows that Jesus has power over it, so it tries to scare the father away from asking Jesus to heal his son.  But the father is desperate and determined.  He says to Jesus, “If you are able, have pity and help us.”

At this point, he is not fully aware of Jesus’ power as the Son of God, so he says, “if you are able.”  Jesus notices the father’s anxiety and uncertainty, and tells him, “All things can be done for those who believe.”  This leaves no doubt about God’s power—“all things can be done.”  But at the same time it emphasizes the need for our faith—“for those who believe.”  So the father cries out, “I do believe, but help my unbelief!”

Belief, or faith in God, is our decision to accept God’s power and authority and control of our lives.  Illness and pain and suffering can be used by the Devil to try to weaken or destroy our faith, so we also need to ask God to “help our unbelief,” as well as to have pity and heal us and those we love.  The more we turn to God for help, the more God can help us, for “all things can be done for those who believe.”

Believing, and then holding on to our belief, takes work.  As Jesus told the Disciples, some spirits can be driven out only by prayer and fasting.  Keeping our faith requires discipline and determination.  And we have to keep on even when what we hope and pray for doesn’t happen, or when we can’t understand what does happen.

When we have faith, all things can be done for us.  There is no guarantee that they will be done, or that what we want will be done.  We can’t dictate to God; we can only pray, “Have pity on us and help us, and help our unbelief.”

And we can and must always give thanks and praise and glory to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, One God, now and ever and unto ages of ages.  Amen.

Homily for 23 March 2014: The Holy Cross is a Gift, not a Burden

Homily for 23 March 2014:  3^rd Sunday of Great Lent

(Hebrews 4:14-5:6)

(Mark 8:34-9:1)

 

When we have finished the 40 days of Great Lent, at the end of Great and Holy Week, we look upon the Cross as the terrible instrument of the Lord’s suffering and death.  We see Him nailed and set up on the Cross like a common thief.  We take down His precious and wounded Body and lay Him with tears and flowers in the tomb, and we erect the empty Cross as a sign of our grief, but also as a sign that the tomb will soon be empty, Christ will be risen from the dead, our grief will turn to joy, and defeat will turn into victory.

Today we are half-way through the 40 days; half-way to the tragedy of the Crucifixion; half-way to the triumph of the Resurrection.  And today also we focus on the Cross.  It stands in the middle of Great Lent like a shady tree in the middle of the desert; like the Tree of Life in the middle of the Garden of Paradise.

In the Gospel reading for today, Jesus tells us that if we want to be His followers, we must deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Him.  This reminds us that we have choices on life’s journey, but only one choice will lead us after our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ through death to everlasting life.

We can choose not to take up our cross and follow Jesus.  We can choose not to deny ourselves—in other words, we can choose to live for pleasure, or money, or power, or food, or drugs, or work, or whatever we want.  But that choice will not make us followers of Christ.

We can become followers of Christ only if we choose, as Christ chose, to take up our cross.  For us, the Holy Cross is like a staff or walking stick that we use to support ourselves on our journey through life.  It is strong enough for us because it has already carried Jesus our Savior.  It will not fail to bring us back to Paradise.

At first, today’s reading from St Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews might not seem to be about the Holy Cross, but when we read it carefully and understand how St Paul talks of Jesus’ sacrifice as High Priest, we realize that Jesus’ sacrifice for the sins of the people was His death on the Holy Cross.

St Paul shows us that every high priest chosen from among the people made sacrifices for the people and for himself—but Jesus, since He was God as well as Man, made a sacrifice of Himself, not of a lamb or other animal.  He was the perfect sacrifice, so no more blood sacrifices have to be made.

But because Jesus is human as well as divine, He understands how we feel.  He knows our self-doubt and our self-contempt because we sin.  He knows we need a way to sacrifice something for our sins so that we can come closer to Him.  So He gives us His Cross to carry, so that we can share His sacrifice and follow Him to death and resurrection.

For us, then, the Holy Cross is a gift, not a burden.  It is a help, not an obstacle.  It is the way, not the destination.  It is not the end—it is the beginning of eternal life with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, One God, now and ever and unto ages of ages.  Amen.

Homily for 16 March 2014: Working Together We Come Closer to God

Homily for 16 March 2014:  2^nd Sunday of Great Lent

(Hebrews 1:10-2:3)

(Mark 2:1-12)

 

Today’s Gospel story of the paralyzed man gives us an opportunity to reflect on how we need to work together as people of faith to come close to God.

Obviously the paralyzed man couldn’t go by himself to the house where Jesus was staying and teaching the crowds of people—he was paralyzed.  And even if he had got some friends to take him there, he could not have seen Jesus—after all, he was lying on a stretcher.  And even when he did get some friends to bring him to the house, they couldn’t get through the crowd.

He had a need; he had the will to get close Jesus; he even had he means to get there; but he couldn’t quite accomplish his goal, even with his friends’ help.

At that point, they must have gotten serious about getting their paralyzed friend close the Lord.  There was a whole group of them with him—four carrying his stretcher and others with them.  They had to work together to come up with a plan and carry it out.  They had to decide on one common goal, and they had to agree on the one best way to accomplish it.

They probably had a little discussion—and since they were Middle Easterners, the discussion was probably pretty lively, with lots of loud opinions and waving hands.  In the discussion, it became obvious that they all had different talents.

Some were good at coming up with ideas, others were good at making the ideas into plans.  Some were sort of small and athletic, so they climbed on the roof and opened it up.  Others were strong and tall, so they lifted their paralyzed friend up and then lowered him down through the hole in the roof.  One or two were good talkers, so they approached Jesus and the owner of the house to explain why they were climbing on the roof and opening a big hole in it.  Others calmed the excited crowd and kept things peaceful.

What they all had in common was faith that Jesus could help their friend, whom they loved and cared about.  Maybe it wasn’t easy for them to work together—everybody would have had his own idea of the best way to do this, and someone was probably pointing out that they had never done it that way before.  But this was an important opportunity to help their friend, and they couldn’t let their egos get in the way of their common goal.  There was no place for arguing over whose plan was better and who was going to have the special honor of some particular part of the job.

And what happened?  Their friend encountered the Lord.  His sins were forgiven.  And his paralysis was cured.  He received healing of soul and body, and everybody’s faith was made stronger, and they all went away praising God and saying that they had never seen anything like this before.

The lesson for us as a congregation is obvious.  We have a common goal of coming closer to the Lord and being healed in our souls and bodies.  We have all kinds of talents that we can put to use to accomplish our common goal.  So we have to overcome our differences and work together, like the friends of the paralyzed man.

Then everybody’s faith will be strengthened and we can all give thanks and praise and glory to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, One God, now and ever and unto ages of ages.  Amen.