Hope is faith that looks forward

A long time ago, I was a hospital chaplain in Appalachia, and I would from time to time find myself working with a patient and family from a country Pentecostal church, which was a very different culture of faith than what I was used to.

Once, I accompanied the family of dying patient who prayed fervently that God would heal the patient. They would pray with certainty that God would reach out and heal this person's illness and pray that the person would walk right out the door. Their preacher led them in laying hands on the dying man, commanding the disease to leave him, invoking God to make the man get up and walk… all while the numbers on the monitors showed a slide towards death.

My training taught me to be quiet, but my brain and my gut would be in turmoil. I said to myself—and sometimes doctors and nurses said to me-- “This preacher is setting them up for a fall! Raising their expectations like this is certain to cause upset when the patient eventually dies!” We worried that they were in fact teaching people, especially the children, to hate God because God was apparently not doing what they wanted.

But when the patient died, something remarkable happened. The group went from fervently praying that God would heal the person to joyfully praising God! 

It was like flipping a light switch. No anger at God, no earth-shattering disappointment (that I could see) but praise and singing that Jesus had taken the person home. 

I was perplexed, so I asked a fellow chaplain on our staff, who was himself Pentecostal, what was going on. 

First, he gently chided me for ignoring the teaching of my own tradition’s Book of Common Prayer, which have prayers for both healing and those for preparing for death printed side by side. These are prayers filled with hope! 

He also suggested that perhaps I was both rationalizing and being a bit judgmental, hearing their prayers as a kind of magical thinking, and their praises after the death as a kind of denial of death.

Okay, I'll admit to that. 

“So, what is really going on then?” I asked him. He said that their theology is grounded in hope. A faith that believes “Everything will be all right.” 

In their view, God is in charge of everything. And God, through the cross and resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit, will make everything all right. They embodied what we call “The Christian Hope.”

The doctrine of the Christian Hope is essentially this: God will make everything all right. 

Don’t believe me? Just look at our Prayer Book tradition, our Catechism, today’s Scripture lessons and, if that’s not enough, look at our own experience.

When a child falls down and skins her knee and comes to us in tears, what do we say? “Everything will be all right.”

I have heard it said in hospital settings: we say it to the anxious and the sick and even the dying. But most remarkably, it’s often said to us by the patients we care for and worry about. 

Time and again I’ve seen it. Just we can’t find the words to comfort them, time and again they comfort us! “Don't worry about me,” they will sometimes tell us. “Everything will be all right.”

And that what the scripture lessons we hear today, and over the next five weeks, remind us: God will make everything all right.

Today’s lesson from the Book of Daniel, which was written to persecuted Jews experiencing a war against yet another invader. The last book of the Old Testament, the Book of Daniel assures us that God is going to save God’s people and vindicate their suffering. The message is: “hang in there. God will make everything all right.”

The 13th chapter of Mark that we just heard, is often called ‘The Little Apocalypse’ because like Daniel and Revelation, it uses strange images and dire predictions to encourage us to remain faithful during rough and dangerous times. Mark remembers and brings forward Jesus' words to Christians, who thirty to forty years after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, were living through the Jewish Revolt against the Roman Empire in 66 to 70 AD. That revolt would end badly with the sacking of Jerusalem, the destruction of the Temple, the scattering of the Jews as a dispersed people. It would also move Christianity from a sect of Judaism into something bigger as more and more Gentile Christians would join up. 

Mark reminds us of Jesus' words to not to put our trust in big buildings made with big stones by human beings—not in places, institutions, or even cherished traditions—but in God.

Jesus reminds us in Mark that God will make everything all right— but perhaps not in the way we expect. 

This is how the Bible speaks to people who are uncertain, who are suffering right now, and who are looking for hope right now.

We don’t have to listen too hard to hear that people today asking the same questions as they did in the time of Daniel, Jesus, and the early church. People still ask “what is God doing?” and “will I/we be okay?”

Here is how the Gospel we hear today answers that question: God will make everything all right. 

It is important because it is true. 

But remember, the truth that God will make everything all right should not make us complacent. We are not called to be helpless victims, but through our faith and in our baptisms and our sacramental living we are called—given power!—to work and pray to care for God's people especially in their suffering!

Saying “everything will be all right” does not mean that we do nothing! When children have fallen down and skinned their knees or hands and blood is all over the place, parents don't just say, "Everything will be all right." There may be bandages and antibiotics applied from the medicine cabinet. There may even be a fast trip to the emergency room. Why? Because parents do all in their power to make sure will be all right for their suffering children.

"How can I make ends meet, when more bills are coming in than income?" We do everything we can… change how we shop, economize, sign on for an extra shift. And God's promise is still the same: “Everything will be all right." 

"I'm having surgery tomorrow and I'm scared." Our presence and prayers—and the skill of those caring for us—say "Everything will be all right."

"The tests for cancer came back positive."

"Everything will be all right."

“My home was damaged or flooded during the hurricane.” 

“Everything will be all right.”

"My brother was just deployed to a war zone."

"Everything will be all right."

"My parent just died."

"Everything will be all right.

It’s not magic. It’s not pie in the sky nor is it wishful thinking. This is the day in and day out life of faith, and it requires time and effort and cultivation within our hearts and minds. 

And trust. Trust in God that everything will be all right.

Hey! God knows truth is that we might experience turmoil and pain and confusion along the way. The life of faith means that we steer into the wave of our hurt and fear and not steer around it. Jesus shows us in everything from his temptation to his healing to his walking with his disciples daily, God’s faithfulness and God’s power and love is healing with us in all we do. Jesus knows all this and remember he carried all of it to the cross. It’s on the cross, where everything that separates us from God, each other, and creation is taken up by Jesus, and dies with him and is left behind in that empty tomb.

We are in a season of hope. As we come to the end of the church’s year and move into the new year in Advent, we are reminded of the power of Christian hope. All of the Scripture lessons for the next six to eight weeks are about hope. 

What is hope? Hope is faith that looks forward!

As Jesus’ disciples, his followers, we learn and do the work of Jesus everyday.

Which is why hope is not passive. It is active! The Christian Hope is the confidence that God in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit will fill all things, heal all things, complete God’s purpose for us and all creation. 

The Christian Hope is that God never, ever, leaves us alone.

The Christian Hope is the knowledge that God gives us everything we need to live abundantly right now as the people God made us to be.

We are a hope-filled people who participate with God in the church’s mission which is to restore humanity and creation to unity with God and each other in Christ Jesus.

You show off that Mission in many ways: just open your bulletin. Laundry Love. Build a Bed. Backpacks and your ministry to Sandy Lane Elementary. Your Eucharistic Visitors and the ways you care for one another. Your music, Bible Study and even your Sunday Breakfasts all show off the many ways that you as a community learn and do the work of Jesus.

So you see…we participate every day in God’s hope-filled future! Hope is faith that looks forward. 

We are not sitting on our hands and waiting for God to vindicate us someday. We are already vindicated! Jesus’ life and ministry show us that God is with us. Jesus’ death and resurrection show us that death is conquered. Our baptism and Eucharist show us that we are God's own people. Our community shows us that we are not alone. And our care for each other and for those people God sends to us reveal to us and the community that God is here and is at work. 

We are a people of hope… hope is faith that looks forward, and everything will be all right!

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Scripture for Twenty-sixth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 28), Year B, November 17, 2024.

Website for The Church of the Holy Trinity, Clearwater, Florida

Here (8 a.m.) and Here (10 a.m.) are the livestreams of the November 17, 2024 Liturgies at Holy Trinity, Clearwater.

Feeding Jesus and Being Fed

You’ve got to love it! The Crucified, Dead, Buried, and now Risen-from-the-Dead Jesus shows up in front of his friends and followers and what does he do? 

Some great miracle? Nope!

Some great act of power? Nah!

He asks for something to eat. 

It’s as if he came in the door after a long day, plops himself in the recliner and says, “Whew! That crucifixion and resurrection is hard work! What’s for dinner?”

Today’s passage from the Gospel of Luke highlights the physicality of Jesus’ risen self. Jesus shows up in person. He shows the disciples the wounds in his hands, feet, and side. And—I love this—he asks them for something to eat. The Risen Jesus chides the disciples' disbelief. I am not a ghost, he tells them. This is Jesus…not a vision, nor a hallucination, but a real person with a real body. 

Today’s story parallels another story in this same chapter of Luke’s Gospel… Jesus’ encounter with Cleopas and his friend on the road to Emmaus. In both instances, the disciples recognize Jesus as the risen Lord when he ate with them. 

To some of us, maybe, the risen Jesus may be an idea, a story, a symbol, or a memory. But to Jesus’ friends and followers, it was a reunion, a face-to-face encounter, with the same Jesus whom they saw arrested, beaten, executed on the cross… and was demonstrably deader than a doornail! 

But no more!

In these two encounters, Jesus shows that what they are seeing is true by eating with them. Which makes sense, because before his arrest, torture, and execution, this is what Jesus did with them all the time as they went around Palestine teaching and healing. He ate with them. 

And even today, we see him in this most ordinary, tangible way. At the Last Supper and in the Holy Eucharist, Jesus gave us a way of recalling him to our presence and, by eating from his body, to become his body. 

Every day the Risen Jesus shows us that God redeems and makes holy every sphere of our existence: the physical, the rational, and the social elements of our existence are all addressed in Jesus’ resurrection.

The first thing that God redeems and makes holy is the physical world. Our baptism into the church and the promise of resurrection means that we are to value the physical world that God has placed us in and made us part of.

We are to care for the creation and care for our bodies and care for each other, even strangers and people we’ll never meet in person. We are to have environmental concerns and health concerns; the biological and physical sciences are part and parcel of our participation in God’s redemption. We are not to abandon the world we live in, but we are to improve it in whatever small ways we can. 

Another thing that God redeems in the resurrection is the way we know and see the world. Because we encounter the risen Jesus in sacramental living, in prayer, and in the changed lives we both encounter in others and experience ourselves, we discover that God works on every part of our knowing. Rational thinking and faithful being are not polar opposites, always at war, but different ways of knowing the fullness of the creation we live in and care for.

Finally, the physical, risen Jesus redeems our relationships. Christians do not abandon the social world we live in, but we are called to improve it whenever we can, working against evil and promoting justice. The fact that our bodies will be redeemed and raised emphasizes our need to be involved in the world in a positive way. We are not escapists, merely biding time until time ends, but we are involved, letting Christ live in us and grow in us until we are raised with him in glory and we see him as he is and we share in his eternal joy.

In today’s Gospel we find Jesus eating another meal with his disciples. He made eating and drinking together the primary way of experiencing the Resurrection. He uses eating and drinking to teach us and draw us to him. He uses this most universal way people affirm and experience relationships in community. We eat with Jesus. We eat of Jesus. We eat his body, and we become his body. 

Maybe you remember my definition of what a disciple is? A disciple is “a friend and apprentice of Jesus, who learns and does the work of Jesus every day.” So you are all friends and apprentices of Jesus. And you are all learning and doing the work of Jesus.

But lots of people call themselves followers of Jesus... how do you know an actual disciple when you see one?

Well, as the old proverb (that most people get wrong, by the way!) reminds us: "The proof of the pudding is in the eating!"

Clergy and Eucharistic Ministers are the ones who distribute communion, giving bread and saying, “The Body of Christ.” And, if you think about it, we all distribute the Body of Christ in all kinds of ways. 

Imagine when you give a check to the church or a worthwhile charity, placing it in the treasurer’s hand and saying, “The Body of Christ, given for you.” 

Imagine delivering Meals on Wheels or giving a meal to a needy stranger in downtown Clearwater, saying “The Body of Christ, the bread of heaven” when you place the meal in the hands of that homebound senior. 

Imagine visiting a person in prison, extending an encouraging word of love and adding, “The Body of Christ.” 

Imagine teaching the truths of God to a Church school class or in a Bible Study, or prayer group, and concluding by saying, “This is the Body of Christ, given for you.”

Imagine sharing the Word of God in Bible Study, in prayer, daily devotions, or as part of the Daughters of the King, as an act of sharing the Body of Christ.  

Imagine spreading the Good News to those who do not know the Lord, telling others about the joy you find in your faith, and declaring, “Share with me the Body of Christ.”

Imagine being the quiet listening presence to someone who is lonely or in pain, and as you pray with them, recall that we are, as the Apostle Paul wrote to the Christians in Corinth, “Now we are the body of Christ, and individually members of it.”

Jesus rose from the dead, not a ghost, but flesh and blood, in person– his personality, memory, relationships, compassion, and humor intact. Everything he knew is risen and made whole and new and holy. Saint Paul reminds us that when we were baptized, we were all baptized into Jesus’ death and resurrection. So as baptized people, we all share in his resurrection, and every day we show off the risen Jesus to everyone we meet. And God uses everything we are, and everything we have, and all our skills and talents and memory–all of us!-- for God’s purpose: to restore all people to unity with God, creation, and each other. 

So, people of St. John’s, Clearwater, my companion friends and apprentices of Jesus, as we gather around this Eucharistic table, as we dash over to the parish hall for delicious nums-nums, and before I turn in my keys and as you get ready for your next era of ministry in service, remember this: in everything you do as a community and as individuals, feed others in Jesus’ name. 

In so many great and simple ways, we reflect the words of St. Augustine, who wrote: 

You are the Body of Christ. In you and through you the work of the incarnation must go forward. You are to be taken. You are to be blessed, broken, and distributed, that you may be the means of grace and the vehicles of eternal love.

And may God go with you in all you do!

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Bulletin for Worship for the Third Sunday of Easter Sunday, April 14, 2024 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for Easter 3-B, April 14, 2024

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida for April 14, 2024

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on April 14, 2024

Six little words

I love word games. I also love clever haiku, and a good joke. So it won’t surprise you that like many of you, every day I go to the New York Times games app on my phone to play Wordle, Connections, and Spelling Bee. I do the Daily Mini-Crossword, and at least on Mondays and Saturdays, I tackle the NYT Crossword (although, even after all these years, I am still not tough enough for Sundays!).

Another thing I love is something I learned in a religious writer’s workshop a few years ago. It is the practice of writing little six-word stories or memoirs. There is a wonderful website put together by an online magazine called SMITH that collects these six-word memoirs. People both famous and ordinary have sent in these little six-word distillations of their lives, highlighting what is important or interesting about them. The best of the stories has been collected in books. The first was called “Not Quite What I Was Planning,” and another “It All Changed in an Instant.”

Some six-word stories are poignant: “I still make coffee for two,” wrote someone recovering from a breakup.

Some are clever. Comedian Stephen Colbert wrote “Well, I thought it was funny.”

Screenwriter Nora Ephron wrote: “Secret of life: marry an Italian.”

I bring this up, because for all the joy and fanfare of Easter, for all the complexity and mystery of our whole religious life together, and for all the billions of words we use to try and explain it, Christianity itself has a six-word autobiography, and it goes like this: “Jesus is risen from the dead.”

Think about it. There are 775,000 words, more or less, in the 66 books of the Bible, and not one of them makes sense without these six words. And there are roughly 2 billion Christians around the globe, and not one of us has a single thing to say without these six words.

All four Gospels agree that Mary Magdalene was the first witness to the resurrection, and is the news she and her companions carried from the empty tomb to the upper room where the other disciples were in hiding. And while she reduced it to five when she proclaimed "We have seen the Lord!" The story is still the same: "Jesus is risen from the dead."

These are the words that have been passed from person to person, from community to community, every day since then – sometimes in secret, sometime in awe, in triumph, in darkness, in celebration, in song, liturgy, art, and theater. “Jesus is risen from the dead.”

These six words that have taken us from being a scattered, broken people who are lost to the largest, most diverse, religion in the world. It is these six words that have found countless individuals whose lives were nearly or already dead -- broken by pain and suffering, by grief and loneliness, by sin and darkness -- and given them new life.

These are the words that are whispered at bedsides and shouted from rooftops and shared at dinner tables and workplaces and in neighborhoods. These are the words that have been forbidden by governments both ancient and modern, and yet somehow they have still been spoken, still been shared.

“Jesus is risen from the dead.”

These are the words that the martyrs sang as they were being burned at the stake, attacked by persecutors, and heckled by cynics. These are the words that Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German martyr who opposed the Nazis, taught his students in the secret seminary that he founded.

These are the words that Oscar Romero was speaking as he was gunned down while celebrating the Eucharist in El Salvador. These are the words that Martin Luther King Jr. held fast to as he opposed the violent racism of our culture. These words inspired Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s work in South Africa. These are the words that Mother Teresa hung on to even as she experienced her own crisis in faith while continuing her work with the poor.

“Jesus is risen from the dead.”

Are these words true? If they are not, Paul says to the Corinthians, then “we are of all people most to be pitied.”

Of course, we hear all the time that Jesus’ resurrection cannot be proven, because nobody saw it; that it defies science; that it cannot be true, because people still suffer, they still die; that we cannot believe it, because it seems so utterly unbelievable. And all too often, whether for political gain or to make a quick buck, some have tried to reduce these six words to a mere slogan, chant, or meme.

But the truth and power of these six words knock down such malarkey just as easily as the stone was moved aside, as powerfully as God leading His people through the Red Sea, as wonderfully as the Spirit’s arrival on that first Pentecost.  “Jesus is risen from the dead.”

How many lives have been transformed, starting with Mary Magdalene and her companions, falling to the ground in utter shock, upon hearing these six words? How could we possibly count the ways that billions of hearts have been, in the words of John Wesley, “strangely warmed,” by hearing these six words?

What could we possibly use to measure the impact that these six words have had upon the world -- the ways in which forgiveness, joy, reconciliation, self-giving love and charity have wrought healing, miracles, and abundance on the face of this earth in the time since we have first heard these that Jesus is risen from the dead?

Is it true? Listen to the stories.

C.S. Lewis once said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

This is the story of our lives, the story of the life of the world, the story of life itself. It is the story of how life is stronger than death, how God’s love for us is stronger than death. It is, in the end, the only story that there is.

And so, in Easter, we hear these six words again: “Jesus is risen from the dead.”

How will these words change your story?

Where in the essence of who you are do you hear the call to new life -- to come out of the tomb you’ve been sealed in, the tomb of fear or the tomb of hopelessness or the tomb of dreams that have been lost or delayed? Where are you looking for the living among the dead? How will you receive this news that has been handed from life to life, from heart to heart, from age to age, that is now handed again to you?

And how will these words change the world? What does our story still have to say to a world gripped by terror, a culture that is forgetting how to even listen or talk civilly, a culture at odds, a people in pain? How will we be sure that they will hear our story of hope?

Every day we write our story again, and we say that it is no less true today than it was on the first day; it is no less miraculous today than it was on the first day -- no less shocking, no less joyful, no less important, no less life-changing and meaningful. Run and tell the others what you’ve seen and heard: “Jesus is risen from the dead.” Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

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Bulletin for Worship for Easter Sunday, March 31, 2024 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for Easter Sunday, March 31, 2024

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida for March 31, 2024

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on March 31, 2024

Rescuing us

Holy Saturday, April 3, 2010, 

Revised March 30, 2024

If you have ever experienced your faith as being absent, today is your day. 

If you have ever experienced deep emptiness from your soul to your bones, today is your day. 

If you have ever known loss that cannot be filled, today is your day.

If you've ever looked around at the world and see war, violence, greed and corruption, and wonder if things can't get any worse, then this day is for you.

If you have ever discovered, as C.S. Lewis did, that grief feels very much like fear, then this is your day. 

If you have ever gone through the motions because you don't know what else to do, this is your day.

Holy Saturday is a day very easy to jump over. Today is a gorgeous spring day. People are out planting flowers and going to the store to buy for Easter dinner. Easter dresses are being tried on and egg hunts in the parks are happening as we speak. 

The world is busy and alive, and here we are in a darkened church before a bare cross and it feels empty. 

This is the kind of emptiness that any who has grieved the death of a loved one knows. It is like going through the motions at work, and confronting that first thanksgiving or Christmas or birthday knowing that the one we love is dead. 

I will bet that the followers of Jesus had the most somber, depressing Passover meal on record. But if they are at all like a lot of people I know, they will have done it. They will have read the words, and eaten the bitter herbs and the lamb, because...because what else could they do? Even if it was by rote, it was something. Something to anchor. Something to hold on to when there was nothing else. 

Holy Saturday is a day of absence, emptiness and numbness. If you have ever felt this way, this day is for you. 

The thing about Holy Saturday that is special is that it is the last day of the Old Creation. It's just that we don't know that yet. Just as we won't know that we have passed through the darkest moments of our grief until we suddenly find ourselves feeling again. We won't know until we look backwards. 

And here is the dreadful and true part of Holy Saturday. There is nothing we can do about it. All we can do is what I've said: slog through, go through the motions. We steer into the wave and hope that our boat is not swamped as the wave crashes over our heads. But the feast also tells us that as we wait, as we slog through our fear and emptiness, Easter is coming. 

The disciples hiding and fearing for their lives in the locked upper room did not know that yet. We never know it when we are in it. But Easter is coming. 

Our creeds and tradition say this is the time when Christ descended into hell and went among the dead. 

So, what Jesus was doing on Holy Saturday? Was he, like John's Brown body, "a-moldering in the grave," as the old civil war song goes? Was he walking around the tomb waiting for the angels to come and roll away the stone, folding up his burial cloth before stepping out?

My favorite answer is visual. There is an old icon known as "The Harrowing of Hell" that answers the question of just what Jesus was up to on that otherwise ignored middle day? it shows Jesus entering into hell, into the place of the dead, and he is standing on the lids of the graves of Adam and Eve, the first humans, literally representing all of humanity, and is lifting them out of their coffins to bring them with him back to heaven. In some versions of the icon you see broken chains, locks, handcuff, and tools lying about with a person (the devil perhaps? Maybe death itself?) lying bound and gagged below. 

When I see this icon, I am reminded again of what Holy Saturday shows us:  that even in the emptiness, Christ is there. If we go down to Sheol, and walk among the dead, Christ is there. There is no place where we can go to escape God's love. 

But we don't know that now. We will know that tomorrow. In the meantime, this day is for you.

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Here are the Lessons for Holy Saturday, March 30, 2024

Strange Normalcy

Doesn’t it seem strange to you how normal everything is today?

I mean, here we are at what it is arguably one of the most holy days of the Christian year… especially when teamed up with Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday for what we traditionally call the “Triduum” or “The Great Three Days”… and yet nothing is different.

If I wanted to, I could have stopped at the bank, the post office, and the grocery store on the way to or home from church. Maybe you will too, buying last-minute groceries or stuff for the (grand-) kids Easter baskets.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not here to rail against the unpiety of the culture or some such righteous nonsense. My point is not to shame people who have lives to live and very little time to get stuff done. God forbid! As you’ve heard me mention before, I certainly remember growing up in New England in the last days of the old Blue Laws where the state enforced the closing of business on certain religious holidays. But this is not an exercise in nostalgia, either. It’s just an observation. And one that I think is worth noting.

Because, as much as some might say, this is not new. The world has been going about it’s business while God has been doing God’s work right before our eyes since time immemorial.

When I was a kid, my home parish, the Church of the Good Shepherd in Hartford, CT, would take part in a public stations of the cross with the other churches in the downtown of Connecticut’s capital city. It was the 1960’s, and influenced by the civil rights movement and the peace movement, the churches would do the fourteen stations of the cross around what was then a bustling commercial, business, and governmental downtown, stopping at the Federal Courthouse, the main offices of big banks and the headquarters of insurance companies, the city jail and police department, the juvenile hall, and so on. You get the idea. And even then, as we processed with our cross and led by clergy in vestments, and reading scriptures and saying prayers, people would bustle past us, buses would stop and go, horns would honk… the world was going on about it’s business.

One of my favorite American artists, Allan Rohan Crite, the late 20^th century African-American artist from Boston, who was an Anglo-Catholic Episcopalian, and he not only created the covers for my parish’s weekly bulletins, he drew the passion a lot. And he typically located it, as with all his Biblical scenes, in the middle of the city, in downtowns, neighborhoods, and tenements. One of his renderings of the stations has stayed with him since adolescence. It showed Jesus carrying his cross through a modern busy city of the 1940’s, people rushing past to and fro, hardly aware of the African American man carrying a cross, scarred and barely dressed, wearing a crown of thorns.

And that is not far from the truth. Because in the busy world of downtown Jerusalem, ruled by the Roman Empire, crucifixions were a dime a dozen. They executed their condemned on the roads into the walled city to attract attention, but they were as part of background every bit as much as billboards are today. We see them, sort of… but few stand out, and mostly they just block the view.

No, the crucifixion of Jesus was just the business of the day. Except to his followers, friends, and family… and certainly Jesus…! It was nothing special.

But not for God

It is precisely in the midst of the everyday… the everyday business, the everyday boredom, the everyday cynicism, the everyday cruelty.. of human life that God placed Jesus and in the midst of such sin that we are so used to that we hardly even notice, where God stakes a redemptive claim. Here is where it ends. Here is where love conquers hate. Here is where it ceases to divide us from God, each other, and ourselves. Here is where death ends even on a cross planted on a busy thoroughfare where traffic buzzed past.

This is where God does redeeming work: The Passion happens in a busy city going about it’s business.

The sign of that victory will come on the third day.

But right now… life goes on. God redeeming love happens, but no one notices. Not yet, anyway.

We wish to see Jesus!

If you ever have the chance to go on retreat and don’t mind the travel, I like to go to the Holy Cross Monastery in Hyde Park, NY, which overlooks the Hudson River about an hour and a half north of New York City. In their chapel hangs a huge icon. It’s a crucifix modeled on the icon known as the San Damiano Cross. The San Damiano Cross is the one St. Francis was praying before when he had a vision from God to rebuild the Church. The original cross presently hangs in Santa Chiarra (St. Clare) Church in Assisi, Italy. All Franciscans cherish his cross as the symbol of their mission from God. 

When Francis had his vision, he was praying in a church that was quite literally falling down into a heap of rubble. He started to rebuild the church building brick by brick, but in the middle of the project he realized that what Jesus was calling him to do was not to restore a building but to rebuild all of God’s church…all of us…not just a structure!

When I contemplate that icon, I became aware of what Jesus is talking about in today’s Gospel.  Today’s story from John starts out when some Greeks come looking for Jesus. These were religious and curious Gentiles who were attracted to Judaism but turned aside from conversion by the requirement for circumcision. They’ve heard about Jesus and his message and so come to Philip and then to Andrew, asking about him.

Remember Philip and Andrew? They were the ones who saw Jesus and followed him and took the news to their brothers, Nathaniel and Simon Peter.  Now John’s Gospel tells us that some people from outside Judaism are looking to see Jesus just as Philip and Andrew had once searched for him themselves.

It is only when these two people from outside of Judaism come calling that Jesus says out loud that his time has arrived: the time for him to be glorified. 

Well and good, except that Jesus’ idea of “glory” and ours are radically different! When we think of glory, we think of fame and fortune.  We think of power, influence and our name up in lights. Not Jesus. He is thinking of the cross.

For Jesus, glory means embracing the cross, the epitome of suffering. As the Gospel says:

“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. … Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say – ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. … And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”

Jesus is not for a small group of insiders. Jesus is for everyone. And for that, the Gospel tells us, Jesus is glorified on the cross.

It will be on the cross where God will destroy the division between God and humanity. It will be on the cross where God renews creation.  We tend to think of the cross as a failure and a futility that God miraculously turns into something new with the resurrection. Don’t worry, we are in good company—the apostles thought that, too! It’s all over popular culture! But the cross is not a defeat, it is the  completion of what Jesus came to do, and it is the place where he is glorified.

When Andrew took Peter to see Jesus and when Philip brought Nathaniel to see Jesus, they saw him face to face. The Greeks wanted to see Jesus, but they will see him on and through the cross.  And that is where most of us will see Jesus… on and through the cross.

Today, those coming to seek Jesus have one more place to look. And that is to us.

Phillips Brooks, author of the Christmas carol “O little town of Bethlehem,” was Bishop of Massachusetts and instrumental in building the magnificent Trinity Church in Boston’s Copley Square. One feature of Brooks’ design is visible only to those who preach in Trinity church. Brooks had these words carved on the inside of Trinity’s pulpit: “Sir, we would see Jesus.”

Episcopal priest, the Rev. Dr. Barry Vaughn writes:

Phillips Brooks knew that everyone who steps into a pulpit and presumes to preach the gospel needs to think about those words, because the great temptation of preaching is to give our hearers something other than Jesus….

But it is not only preachers who do this. All around us are people who want to see Jesus. Do they see him in us? Do they see the Servant-Lord who washed the feet of his friends? Do they see the prophet who cleansed the Temple? Do they see the healer who made the blind to see? If we are to let people see Jesus in us, then we must go ourselves and sit at his feet, let him heal us, feed upon his body broken for us, and above all stand at the cross and wonder as the Word that spoke out of the void lapses into silence and death.

As we approach the end of Lent: with Passion Sunday, Holy Week and the Great Three Days coming up, we are at once like those Greeks looking for Jesus who came to Philip and Andrew, and we are like Philip and Andrew who show Jesus to others.

 We want to see Jesus. We are not alone. Many people seek Jesus. They could be at work, or in a faraway place or they could be as close as home.  And we, the baptized, are the ones who show off Jesus. We show in our faithfulness, in our attitude towards others, and in our care for those in need that Jesus reigns, and he reigns from the cross.

When Francis went into that broken-down, dark neglected church and prayed before this icon of Jesus crucified, he had a vision of Jesus looking at him and saying, “rebuild my Church.” Francis started with the building-- with the Chapel of St. Damiano. He used his own money and his own bare hands to repair it.  That was a good place to start. Definitely good practice. But it was not enough.

He realized that the Church that Jesus sent him to rebuild was the people of God: people who needed a space and a method to pray, people who need purpose and hope. People who follow Jesus need a mission. The heart of Francis’ call was to show people the very same thing he had been shown. He showed them Jesus. The savior who walked and lived among us is glorified on the cross, where we see God’s love is so great that not even death can stop it.

All the time people come to us and ask of us “we would see Jesus.”  Maybe not in those words, but in their need, their hope, and their curiosity. And in everything we do, as a parish family and in our daily lives, we are called to show them Jesus. And every time we show them Jesus, we are rebuilding his church.

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Bulletin for Worship for the Fifth Sunday in Lent, March 17, 2024 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for the Fifth Sunday in Lent, March 17, 2024

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on March 17, 2024.

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on March 17, 2024

Wrong Savior Syndrome

Do you want to know what my problem is? My problem is that I keep trying to follow the wrong savior. I keep getting my messiahs mixed up. My bad!

You see, I keep wishing that Jesus will come and take away all my troubles as if he were one of those great designer drugs they advertise on TV. You know the ones I mean, right?  The ones where everyone is happily riding bikes or rowing boats or hiking mountain trails while the announcer quickly reads off all the possible side effects in a very low voice. These ads do remind us that prescription drugs are serious things and that talk to our doctors; but my emotions say “hmm… bike!” or "ooh… vacation!”

I like my Savior the same way. Yeah, sure, I hear all about taking up my cross and following him. But what I really want is for God to fix everything, and a savior who will solve all my problems, so life won’t seem so hard.

Oops!  Wrong savior! 

If you have ever suffered from wrong-savior syndrome, you are not alone! Peter had the exact same problem! Even after he confessed that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the Living God, he cannot bear to hear the truth that this same Jesus, this same Messiah, would have to be arrested, handed over to his persecutors, tortured, killed and then on the third day rise from the dead, so he blurts out: “God forbid!”

If ever there was a case of wrong savior syndrome, this is it!

Jesus knew that Peter and the others were just a little mixed up about this. But look at where he decides to clarify this! Mark says all this happens, not in Jerusalem or in a local synagogue but in a Roman garrison city called Caesarea Philippi, a city specially built as the local expression of Roman power in an occupied land. This was where their troops were stationed and supplied. From here they could monitor and even, if necessary, shut down the sliver of land between the sea and the mountains that connected Africa, Asia Minor, and Europe. And here the Roman gods could be worshipped out of sight of the local religionists.

Mark’s Gospel tells us that Jesus chose this center of Roman imperial power to start telling his followers about what it means to follow him. 

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.  (Mark 8:34-35)

Jesus tells his disciples that following him is like carrying your own cross—in the very place where they make, store, and deploy crosses by the truckload!

For those of us prone to wrong-savior syndrome, it feels like a cup of ice water thrown in the face! He is telling us to “snap out of it!” so we don’t get our saviors mixed up.

Peter and the rest know by heart the original covenant promise to Abraham that we heard this morning was for many fruitful descendants, all of whom would be loved and protected by God. It was a covenant promising a future of life.

Now Jesus is renewing and reviving that covenant of life– but it looks a very different from what we’ve grown to expect. Jesus promises life to us if we have the courage to face death.

Looking at it that way, I kind of think that Peter’s urge to take Jesus aside and rebuke him starts to make a lot of sense.

At least to me!

Our lesson from Romans tells us what we need to enter into this covenant when Paul says that “it depends on faith….” Paul reminds us of Abraham and Sarah who, hoping against hope, [Abraham] believed that he would become ‘the father of many nations.’ … He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead. … No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.”

Many of our Christian brothers and sisters around the world, may pay that cost of discipleship with their literal, physical lives, but the truth is that most of us won’t go out in a blaze of martyred glory. Most of us will carry our crosses one small step at a time, one spiritual discipline at a time, one act of generosity, sacrifice, or love at a time.

How ever we end up carrying our crosses, following Jesus will cost us one thing: change!

When Abram and Sarai committed to God’s covenant with them, they were changed at such a fundamental level that they got brand-new names, Abraham and Sarah, that echoed their former selves but with brand new identities.

When we sign on to Jesus’ covenant of life, we start a journey through our own deserts and wildernesses, and we emerge on the other side deeply changed. We can finally let go of our urge to rebuke Jesus, to remake him in our image, because he will remake us to be like him.

Instead of Jesus taking away all our problems, he gives us the strength, the grace, and the courage to take on our problems—to carry our cross.

Following Jesus makes a difference because he makes the life of faithfulness possible.  Jesus blazes the trail for us to follow.  He creates a truly human life possible, lived under the mercy of God.

This is the cure for wrong-savior-syndrome. Jesus’ cross helps us carry our crosses every day. When we choose to be open and honest about our faith in a way that tells the truth without being obnoxious, then we discover what is means to not only carry our cross but also how to follow Jesus.

But I have to tell you, I still get my saviors mixed up. Whenever I am tired or overworked or feeling pressed upon by a world changing faster than I can handle, then I go for the fake savior…the one who will knock heads and take names, or the one who agrees with all my opinions, or the one who judges everyone else but not me. Or at least the one who is comfy and cozy and never challenges me to grow.

The good news is that there are things we can do to help us get back to the Real Jesus, to follow our Real Savior: a good place to start is to go back to our baptisms, and to go back to the broken bread and poured out wine of the Sacrament, to look to our Christian companions. When we go back and confess Jesus as messiah and savior and, without shame or fear, orient our lives towards him, then we discover that God has given us everything we need to follow him.

And the best part of all, even though we are prone to wrong savior syndrome, Jesus, our real savior has never, ever forgotten us. 

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Bulletin for Worship for the Second Sunday in Lent, February 25, 2024 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for the Second Sunday in Lent, February 25, 2024

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on February 25, 2024.

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on February 25, 2024