The Yoga of Christ: Sermon for Proper 9, July 9th 2017

Sermon preached on Sunday, 9 July 2017, at Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Eugene, Oregon

Scripture Readings for Proper 9: Zechariah 9:9-12; Psalm 145:8-14; Romans 7:15-25a; Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

Every religion tells followers to accept a yoke, a discipline that is thought to help transform the adherent into a better self. If you were Hindu, you might engage in regular fasting, or practice body postures, or memorize and recite Hindu Scriptures, or study philosophy, or one a a handful of other disciplines each of which is known as a yoga. The Sanskrit word yoga is actually etymologically related to the English word yoke. A yoke is a piece of wood that harnesses a pair of oxen so that they can work together to pull a wagon or a plow. Both the Sanskrit word yoga and the English word yoke have that literal meaning, but they also have two metaphorical meanings: (1) a discipline to which one submits willingly, and (2) enslavement to a discipline imposed by others. The first of these metaphorical meanings articulates powerfully what a religion means and how it accomplishes the good toward which it aims. When Jesus invites His followers to take on His yoke, he’s asking them voluntarily to adopt the way of life that he embodies: humility and gentleness, and trust in God’s goodness.

Like Hindus, we Christians have several different yogas, different yokes or disciplines, that we think will bring us closer to God. For some of us, prayer and reading of Scripture are spiritual yokes that we do our best to shoulder. Others of us focus on giving alms, or serving the poor and downtrodden, or regular attendance at Mass. Monastics take on the yoke of submission to the chain of authority in their order. If we were Jewish, we might take on the yoke of keeping a kosher home, or studying the Torah and the Rabbis.

But the second metaphorical meaning of a yoke, oppressive enslavement by others to their agenda, is something we all have to deal with. Our culture is obsessed with striving. We’re offered countless programs for self-improvement, everything from weight loss and smoking cessation to improving memory and emotional stability. We’re bombarded with messages about our culture’s ideals and how we fall short of them. We’re taught that constant attention to self-improvement is noble and we’re warned against the dangers of stagnation and acceptance of the status quo. We’re saddened when we notice someone who fails to live up to their potential, by which we mean that they don’t meet our culture’s standards of effort and accomplishment; we think they’re wasting their life and talent.

Our yokes can make us arrogant and intolerant if we’re not careful. If I take on the discipline of sobriety, it’s easy to be judgmental about anyone else who doesn’t. If I express my faith mainly by working for social justice, then I may be tempted to regard as inferior those who seek God in lives of solitude. Christians who are peace activists may be tempted to think the Christianity of the crusaders is in debatable. It’s so easy to praise ourselves by dismissing others’ efforts. But if I’m honest with myself I realize that the challenge of living a Christian life, even by my own standard, is one that I repeatedly fail to meet. There’s just too much that has to be done, and I’m just one person. I get overwhelmed by the vast gulf between the world’s need and my ability to meet that need. Even just for myself, there’s too much work that needs to be done, too much to strive for. If meeting a supposed Christian ideal of life and character is what it means to be a Christian, I’m afraid I’ll never make it.

Of course there are some people who maddeningly manage much of the time to do what they set out to do. Yet I suspect that even they may not feel as successful as they seem to others. Maybe the worst thing about the self-improvement obsessed culture we live in is the fact that it robs from us our ability to relax. There’s always some project on which we should be working — learning a foreign language, training for a marathon, working off those pounds, working on being a better spouse and parent — and if you’re like me you sometimes feel buried under the seemingly inexhaustible supply of things that need to be improved, each one worthwhile and some even essential. There are so many important yokes to bear.

And Christianity teaches us that the main yoke we must bear is a cross. When Jesus invites us to follow Him in bearing our crosses to Calvary, he is bidding us suffer and die with Him, and and promising resurrection. He’s inviting us to yoke ourselves together with Him in His project to save the world. The cross is a yoke that can only be taken in gentleness and humility, because even the slightest impulse of pride causes us to throw that yoke off. It goes something like this: “I shouldn’t have to suffer in that way. I deserve to be treated better than that. It’s beneath my dignity. I’m not going to stand for this kind of treatment.” But to bear the cross-shaped yoke is willingly to submit ourselves to humiliation and pain, again and again, not defending ourselves, not resisting evil, offering the second cheek when the first has been struck. That’s the yoke of Jesus that he calls us to bear.

But riddle me this: How on earth can he call that yoke easy and that burden light? The way of self-denial, of submission to torture and death, the way that feels often enough like “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” That doesn’t sound easy, so why does he say it is? I think it’s because we don’t have to be successful; we just have to bear up. Success is in God’s hands, not ours; all we have to do is trust that God’s Kingdom is victorious. If we will accept this yoke that leads us through the lowest, most ignoble defeat, then we are assured of success.

That’s why this passage from Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans has always held such power for me. I remember even as a teenager deriving a lot of hope from the fact that Saint Paul himself, a man of huge importance, struggled with failure. I identify with his frustration at being unable to make much headway in the project of self-reformation. I’m as caught up as anyone in our general cultural idea that life is all about becoming a better version of oneself, but more often than not I fail at the yogas I attempt to live by, and even when I don’t fail, those yogas don’t accomplish what I hope they’ll accomplish. The thing I want to do is the very thing I don’t do, and the thing I don’t want to do, that’s what I do. I know well enough what I should do, but find myself unable to meet the challenge consistently. Given my inability to pull myself up by my own bootstraps, how is any improvement possible? Paul’s answer resounds, “through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Because the thing is, when we take on Jesus’ yoke, the partner we’re yoked with is the very Son of God. He is like the powerful ox that pulls the cart inexorably to its true destination. Our contribution, compared to His, is minimal. Yet, if we take on that yoke, He takes our half-hearted, week-kneed, feeble efforts and strengthens them so that they become part of the transcendent story of God’s victory. Success is certain, indeed it’s already accomplished. We can stand up under our yoke and keep walking with Jesus through suffering and death, and right on through resurrection and ascension. He will recreate us as the version of ourselves that we ought to be, and that will be better than a thousand self-help programs. If we trust Him to do that, we will find peace.

The Good News of the Trinity

Sermon preached on Trinity Sunday, June 11 2017, at Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Eugene, Oregon

Scripture Readings: Genesis 1:1-2:4a; Psalm 8; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20

Collect: Almighty and everlasting God, who hast given unto us thy servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of the Divine Majesty to worship the Unity: We beseech thee that thou wouldest keep us steadfast in this faith and worship, and bring us at last to see thee in thy one and eternal glory, O Father; who with the Son and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

Trinity Sunday. We worship God in the Holy Trinity every week. But unless you’re a theologian, or at least a wannabe theologian like me, you may not see the point of reflecting much on the nature of this notoriously intractable doctrine of the Church. Of course there are others who have different ideas about the nature of God. To Muslims and Jews our talk of a Trinity sounds a lot like straight polytheism. Dualisms in which there are two equal powers, one good and one evil, are also pretty popular. But Christianity offers a distinctive way of thinking about ultimate reality not found elsewhere: a way that has a lot to teach us if we’ll let ourselves be taught.

This morning’s Collect states that the Trinity is an important doctrine, but doesn’t really say why. Is the Trinity just a point of doctrine that must be accepted and serves only as a kind of litmus test for who’s in and who’s out? Or is there good news there that deserves to be heard afresh? The Trinity is a mystery that tickles the mind, but is it good news? There are lots of mysteries I don’t comprehend, after all — the size of the universe, the power of music to lay my emotions open, the nature of free will — mysteries for which I’m grateful, because they affect me so powerfully and because their power is precisely in their mystery. I hope to show you that there the Holy Trinity is that kind of mystery and to think together with you about what it means.

Here’s something interesting: You’ve probably noticed, that both the Nicene Creed and the Apostles Creed are arranged in three parts, corresponding to the three Persons of the Trinity. What you may not have caught is that all of them, Father, Son, and Spirit, are integral to creation. “I believe in God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth….And in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord…begotten of His Father before all worlds…by whom all things were made….I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life.” They are separate persons, but their work is always unified. I think this is why we read Genesis Chapter One the Old Testament lesson for today. Almost no one would argue that the writer of Genesis was thinking of the Trinity in that passage. But pretty much all the early Christian readers of this passage agree that all three persons of the Trinity are actively present in creation. When God says, “Let Us make humanity in Our image,” all the early Christian interpreters agree, this is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit speaking to one another. But before that…let’s back up a bit.

In the beginning, God. Before the heavens and earth came into being. Before the Big Bang. Before there was any matter or energy or time. When there was no here or there, no now or then or yet to be, no times or places or beings or things. For endless eons of undifferentiated time: God. Christian theology teaches us that in this timelessness, God was “eternally coexistent in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” (By the way, the traditional formulation is male, but we must understand that we’re not talking about maleness or femaleness, we’re talking about Divinity using human relationship as the metaphor. We should always remember the metaphorical character of these names.) The Father is the Begetter and the Source; the Son is the Begotten One; the Holy Spirit is the One Who Proceeds. These Persons are equal but not the same. One image I have for this is a musical trio: none of the parts is the same, and without their differentness there can be no trio. Now the terms “beget” and “proceed” sound a lot like there must have been a time when the Son didn’t exist yet, or a time when the Holy Spirit had not yet proceeded from the Father. But that’s a mistake, which is why the Nicene Creed says explicitly that the Son is “eternally begotten of the Father.” God, the One who lives in eternity and stands outside the universe of created things, this God has always been Three Persons in communion with one another so lovingly, so intimately and so deeply, that they are really one Being.

That communion is so close, that the apostle John could make the straightforward claim that “God is love, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.” The thing about love is this: love requires an object. (This reminds me of a joke: Did you hear the one about the guy who loved perfectly? Neither did I. Seems the fellow was foiled by contact with actual people.) There must always be an object of love separate from oneself; it’s what love means. If God is love, then there is a natural threeness that is entailed. The lover, the one beloved, and love itself. The Doctrine of the Trinity, says Saint Augustine, is primarily about understanding that the basic nature of God is LOVE, and secondarily it is about understanding what God has done for us.

The love of God, if it were a little less potent, might have remained fully and beautifully expressed among the Three Persons of the Trinity, as it had been forever. But love is magic: the more you love, the more love you have to give. Love cannot be bottled up even by the infinity of God, but spills out and overflows, and a universe springs into being, a universe with the capacity to participate in the divine love-life. But note the heartache God endures as a result of this creation, which began almost immediately to resist God’s love. No sooner did creation spring forth than love took on a new attribute: self-sacrifice. When love is reciprocated, its selflessness is a joyful, painless thing. But when love goes unanswered the pain of it is incredibly hard to bear. But this God, oh He’s willing to endure the pain for the sake of His creation. So the Begotten One, saves the world by becoming part of it, in the Incarnation, the second great mystery of Christian teaching. He lowered Himself to become human, with everything that means. But through a kind of divine sleight of hand, this doesn’t debase God to being less-than-God; rather it elevates humanity to divine status. Saint Gregory Nazianzen, one of the great trinitarian theologians, says that when Jesus was crucified, raised, and exalted to the right hand of God, that was His humanity that was crucified, raised, and exalted, and our humanity with His. When we cry to God “Abba, Father” we do so in the power of God’s Spirit as children of God, a status to which we are elevated by means of Christ’s work. Jesus teaches us to pray “Our Father” not so much because God is our Creator as because we are brought into the divine Sonship.

When we name God as Trinity, this is at least part of what we mean. This is a God who risks relationships even though they lead inevitably to pain and heartache. This is a God who, having created, is not satisfied to leave creation to its own devices, but continually steps in to redeem what would otherwise be lost. This is a God whose purposes cannot be thwarted, whose love is so powerful that even when He empties Himself He’s still too strong for Death! All that’s really good news, but here’s the bit that blows my mind: Because of what the God did in the human Jesus, humanity is brought into the life of the Trinity, where that same Spirit of love transforms us into persons worthy of communion with God. We already have glimpses of that communion even now, in the Eucharistic feast and in our love for one another. Because it is all God’s work, from creation to redemption to exaltation, we can have indomitable hope for ourselves and for one another, and indeed for the whole world. “Look!” says God, “I am making all things new.” This God, whose whole song is Love, simply cannot be stopped until the trio is joined by a whole choir.

Holy God, Holy People — Sermon for 2/19/2017

Sermon for Epiphany 7A, 19 February 2017

Preached at Saint Matthew's Episcopal Church, Eugene, Oregon

Lessons

Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18
Psalm 119:33-40
1 Corinthians 3:10-11, 16-23
Matthew 5:38-48

Once there was an old farmer who worked a small family holding in northern China. The winters were hard there, and he was barely able to grow enough food for him and his family to eat. But he was content. One day his young son went outside and discovered that an animal had come into his garden and eaten the tops of the turnips. The boy ran inside and said, “Father, the most terrible thing has happened!” But the father just said, “Perhaps.” He went outside and saw that the turnips had indeed been ruined, but then discovered the culprit, a fine horse that was worth more than he could have afforded even by saving for years. He caught the horse and began to be able to plow more ground, and farming became easier. The neighbors noticed the man’s good fortune and told him that he was the luckiest man they knew. “Perhaps,” said the man. One day, when his son got to be a teenager, he was out riding the horse, and fell off and broke his leg. “Oh no!” said the villagers, “What a calamity!” For they knew that the father had come to rely on his son’s help with the chores. But the aging farmer just shrugged his shoulders and said, “Perhaps.” The next day, soldiers came and conscripted all the young boys of the village into the army. Since the farmer’s son had a broken leg, he was excused from duty. The story goes on, as all stories do, and after each episode the father repeated his: Perhaps.

The point of that story, of course, is that you never know where you are in history. The Israelites went down to Egypt thinking that they were being saved from the famine; and so they were, but then they were enslaved and escaped only by means of disaster against the Egyptians. They came and had a marvelous “God moment” at Sinai, with thunder and lightning and God’s booming voice, and received God’s commandments that, by keeping them, they would receive huge blessings. But I want you to notice that not everyone felt like those commandments were a blessing. The divine requirement, “Be holy for I the LORD your God am holy,” meant that some behaviors could not be tolerated, and this clearly placed restrictions on people’s tendency to be selfish. God was giving them land, but they weren’t allowed to use the land however they pleased: they had to harvest the crops in such a way as to deliberately leave some produce for the homeless. They had to be truthful with one another and honest in their dealings, even if it meant putting themselves at a financial disadvantage. In short, they had to be as concerned about the welfare of their neighbor as they were about their own welfare. They had to love their neighbor as they loved themselves.

The thing to get about this is that it’s a corollary of the character of God. Jesus makes the same argument, grounding His moral teaching in his observations about God’s behavior. We’re to do good to people without discriminating between who deserves it and who doesn’t, as he says, “so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” This principle of what theologians call imitatio dei, “the imitation of God,” underlies all the moral teaching of both the Old Testament and the New Testament. That’s not to say that it’s all necessarily correct for all times and places. Notice that Jesus’ observation about God’s character leads him to a slightly different teaching than the one in Leviticus. Notice that St. Paul, who is still concerned about the holiness of God, now as manifested in His Temple, applies the principle of the Temple’s holiness to the Church at Corinth, beginning a line of reasoning that he’ll work out into many implications in letters to them. The body is God’s temple, and here he means both their individual bodies and the Church as a whole, the Body of Christ. The temple is holy; therefore it must not be destroyed. The temple is holy; therefore it must not be joined to a prostitute. The temple is holy; therefore we mustn’t think of our fellow Christians as more or less important than one another. The temple is holy; therefore we belong not to ourselves but to God. The temple is holy; therefore its priests deserve financial support. The temple is holy, and our body is God’s temple; therefore God lives in us.

Now we could spend quite a long time unpacking the idea of holiness. Whole books have been written on the subject. But what I really want to get across to you is this central fact that the holiness of God and of God’s people requires different responses in different ages, because although God sees the big picture of history we do not. When the temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in the sixth century BC, the prophet Ezekiel had to wrestle mightily with the question of “Does this mean that God’s holiness is gone from us? Or is it that God’s holiness will be with us in a new way?” The answer, as we now know, is that God was still among God’s people, but didn’t require a temple to be among them. But then a Second Temple was built by returning exiles, and that temple was important enough that the only time we hear about Jesus being violent it was in defense of that temple’s holiness. When the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in AD 70, the question re-emerged: Is God still among His people? Jews gave the answer that God was still powerfully present with His people in Scripture and in prayer, but some Jews who believed that Jesus was the promised Messiah, along with their gentile fellow-believers, reinterpreted the Temple to be composed of partakers in the sacrifice of Jesus.

Today is the only time in the entire three-year lectionary cycle that we read from the book of Leviticus. That’s unfortunate, in my view, because it gives the impression that we get to cherry-pick the passages of Scripture that we like and disregard the others. To me it seems better to read all of Scripture and acknowledge that some of it contains things we can no longer agree with. This is exactly what Jesus does. He reads, “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth,” which appears in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy and contains the important principle that our punishment must fit the crime, but then he sets it in light of the higher principle of doing good to good and evil people alike. Why? Because that’s what God does. If that law is subject to reconsideration in light of God’s grace, then surely the other laws we find troublesome on Leviticus and elsewhere can be reconsidered as well. Instead of simply refusing to read them, let’s read them and then ask where the Spirit of God is moving. Because we don’t know where we fit into history. We don’t know how what we see now will turn out. The only thing we can be sure of is the character of this God whose mercies are new every morning and who calls us to imitate Him. As God has forgiven us, so we must forgive those who’ve trespassed against us. As God blesses all creation with abundance, so we must bless those who are in our power to bless. As God has loved us while we were yet sinners, so we must love others regardless of their worthiness. Quit worrying about whether the Church is flourishing or dying; don’t be immobilized by whether there’s the right or the wrong government in power. Even if there are wars and rumors of wars, the end is not yet. Well, maybe it’s the end. Perhaps. Or maybe there’s another chapter yet to be written. What’s needed from us in any case is for us to be holy, to imitate God, to make God’s mercy present in the world he made. Holy, holy holy, LORD God of Hosts. Heaven and earth are full of God’s Glory. May we be signs and sacraments of God’s holiness. Amen.