The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost                                     The Rev. Carl M. Saxton

Proper 14B                                                                                        August 9, 2015

1 Kings 19.4-8; Psalm 34.1-8; John 6.35, 41-51

Today’s readings are, I think, intimately connected to a scriptural passage that is not a part of these readings. It is found in the midst of Moses’ exhortations to the Israelites at the end of their time in the wilderness.  He says, 

Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments. He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord[1] .

We know this verse, especially its literal and figurative bottom line, very well. But the more we consider the heart of these words, the more meaningful they become.

How would you do it? How would you prove to someone that we do not live by bread alone? What would you give someone to make them understand this? Someone seminary trained in the fine arts of pedagogy, of making people understand, might insist on a sermon, or a lecture, or to try to arrange a spiritual experience. Or if your focus is modern application of adult Christian formation, you might offer a really spiffy adult education class, with professional videos and worksheets and breaking into small groups to go over some discussion questions – maybe that would do it. How about it? What would you give someone so they could understand that we do not live by bread alone?  Well, our ways are not God’s ways, and God’s way is a bit surprising.

1 Kings tells us that when Elijah was at the point of literally begging God to take away [his] life[2] , God gave him bread.  When the Israelites complained that they would rather have died by the hand of the Lord in Egypt rather than have been brought out into the wilderness to kill [the] whole assembly with hunger[3] , God responded by giving them manna.  Manna was literally bread, or bread-like stuff, from heaven. Elijah got ordinary bread. They ate it and it kept them alive. They couldn’t live without it. But isn’t that strange? Why give bread to make people understand that they do not live by bread alone? Of all the things to give, why give the one thing that seems to prove that you can live by bread alone?

This may have been the most important part of Israel’s sojourn in the wilderness, the most important part of their formation into the people of God. Jesus recognizes that they, and we, need to be taught the same lesson again – that the same formation is necessary.

Because if the people couldn’t get this – if they couldn’t figure out what was going on with the manna, or with the miraculous feeding of the five thousand that had just happened, if they couldn’t understand about the loaves – well, then, how could He make them see?

The key to all of this is that God gave Israel and Elijah – and Jesus gave that crowd – bread in such a way that it was obvious that the bread was pure gift – complete grace. They didn’t make it, they didn’t work for it, they couldn’t pay for it – it was just given. So they had the chance to look at bread, at what Fr. Raja told us last week is considered the essential stuff of life and symbolic of food in general, to see bread with clarity. They had a chance to see beyond the thing itself and to see that this vital stuff was also, and most importantly a gift from God. As a completely free gift, no strings attached, it is a sign of God’s love and of God’s call to relationship. Since it was so clearly a gift, they were able to see that the thing, the bread, meant more than what it was all by itself. All real gifts do.

Don’t we always say “It’s the thought that counts?”  Though, to be honest, we often say that today when we are unimpressed with the gift, there is so much truth at the heart of that statement.  Think about it – when we give roses to our sweethearts, they wither and die, but it is the love behind the gift that matters.  Even when you open that package of socks on Christmas morning it proves that someone thought of you, that someone cares about you.

But if the manna, if the five loaves broken to feed 5000, if the stuff that God give us so that we can live is given to us not just to keep us alive, but also to draw us to God and to life with God; then we do not, and we cannot, live by bread alone.

So, oddly, the only gift that can really show us that we do not live by bread alone is free bread. Anything less vital, anything less essential, would allow us to cling to life for its own sake and to make all questions of meaning secondary and avoidable. This is still going on, and even now God gives us life, and the stuff of life, not because life is the most important thing in the world for us, but just exactly because it is not. We are given these as gifts, to help us realize that God, and life with God, are most important.

We see this with special clarity at the altar, where the bread we receive is clearly not about itself alone; but is mystically joined to something much greater. So we can look with awe and reverence upon something as simple as this thin, tasteless wafer, because we know it to be sign, a symbol and the real presence of something much greater than flour and water.

But the sign, symbol and presence of this bread is itself the sign and symbol of everything that we have – of our families, our wealth, our very life.

Part of the point of this bread, the bread of the Eucharist, is to teach us that we do not live by bread alone. This bread is special so that we can understand that all bread, all that we have, all that is necessary for life, that this, too, is special. It’s all given to us by grace as a sign, symbol and occasion of God’s love. Christ comes to us in bread in the Eucharist to draw us past the bread itself and past ourselves, so that we, seeing both the gift and the giver, will respond to the giver in love and in service. Creation, all of creation, is sacramental, an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace[4] , in this sense.

So it’s all interconnected, interwoven, and inseparable. The bread we eat every day, and Israel’s manna in the wilderness, and Jesus being the bread of life, and our weekly Eucharist – they all intersect and interrelate.

Here is one way into wrapping our minds around this. There’s an old rabbinic admonition that insists, about anything and everything, “If you don’t give thanks for it, it’s bad for you.” The food you eat, the clothes you wear, the air you breathe, the people and things in your life, if you don’t give thanks for it, it’s bad for you.

So, if you have enough to eat, and the strength to go on for another day, and people who care about you – if you have all of that and you don’t give thanks for it, then it’s bad for you – all of it.

It’s poisoning your soul, and shrinking your life. Really.

That’s because giving thanks for something puts it in its proper place, it places the thing as part of our relationship with God and God’s relationship with us. That’s where things, all things, properly belong. Anything, especially bread, is understood properly only when it is understood in relationship to God.

On the other hand, if we do give thanks for it, then it can be good for us. If we give thanks for it, then every part of our lives can draw us toward the only source of meaning and hope that makes any sense.  In fact, that’s what the Greek verb εὐχαριστέω (eucharisteo), from which we get the word Eucharist, means: to give thanks.  It’s central to our Christian lives and as the Prayer Book says, our principal act of Christian worship[5] .

It’s very easy to forget this. It’s very easy to value the things of creation and of our lives for themselves, to take them outside the context of our relationship with God. When we do this, when we see only what is right in front of us and no more, then we are made poorer for it, we are barely living on the surface of our lives and of our world.

That’s what it means to live by bread alone. To live by bread alone means to see no farther than the things themselves, and to miss the presence, the love, and the call of God that are really a part of every piece of bread we have. It’s to miss the gift, and the love behind the gift.

All that we have, all that we are, all that we think makes us who we are is like the bread God gave to Elijah and to Israel, like the loaves Christ broke for the multitude.  They are grace, the free gifts of God’s love, and they exist to call our attention beyond them, beyond ourselves; and call us to understand that we do not live by bread alone.

---

Deut. 8.2-3

1 Kings 9.4

Exodus 16.3

BCP 1979, Catechism – The Sacraments, p.857.

BCP 1979, Concerning the Service of the Church, p. 13.

The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

Proper 11B

Mark 6. 30-34, 53-56

Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.

Rest.

When I was a boy, maybe 9 or 10 years old, I lived in a mobile home park.  The lot next door had been empty for probably two years.  It was a place where my younger brother and I played all the time.  That empty lot became a battle ground fraught with danger, a desert where we could discover and unearth the mysteries of Ancient Egypt, and the surface of the moon full of wonder and imagination.  Then, that summer, an enormous truck came along pulling a brand new double-wide and parked it right there in the middle of our playground.

This new place came with something hardly seen at the time, a carport with a roof as high as the house – maybe higher.  My younger brother and I were amazed and curious what this thing could be for.  The new owners and my parents were friendly, and after a while I overheard a conversation about that carport.  The new guy, Joe was his name, was in his early 50s and had retired from a police force somewhere up north and had always dreamed of travelling with his family – a son slightly older than I and a teenage daughter.  He had taken a job doing security work so he could buy one of those big, fancy camper homes – you know, the ones as big as a charter bus with all the amenities of home.

Two years later, Joe had a massive heart attack.  He lived through it, but the brush with mortality gave him a new view of the world.  I can vividly remember him saying to my father, “I should have just gave up the camper and spent the last two years camping in a tent with my family.”  His drive for something bigger, better, flashier had made him forget what his real priorities were.

Rest. A break from all the bustle and activity. Rest. A chance to renew, to stop, to slow down. Rest. An end of work, if only for a little while. Rest. An opportunity to stop doing that you may simply be. Rest.

I was struck by a study out of UCLA from several years ago  that looked at the typical week of thirty-two middle class families in the Los Angeles area. The idea was to take a detailed snapshot of American family life early in the 21st century. The results, according to one researcher, were "disheartening." So consumed with working, collecting, amassing, and generally "getting ahead," they actually spent very little time together enjoying what they were working for. As reported by the Globe, Jeanne E. Arnold, lead author and a professor of anthropology at UCLA, shared her particular dismay at how little time family members spent outside: "Something like 50 of the 64 parents in our study never stepped outside in the course of about a week," she said. "When they gave us tours of their house they'd say, 'Here's the backyard, I don't have time to go there.' They were working a lot at home. Leisure time was spent in front of the TV or at the computer."

They don’t have time, in other words, to rest.

We're familiar with the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy. But usually we interpret that in light of 1) a negative reaction to commandments and 2) the assumption that Sabbath means church. But, this commandment -- or, better, teaching -- would have been unbelievably good news to people who were recently slaves whose time was never their own and who never, ever had a guaranteed period of rest. "Wait a minute," you can imagine them saying when hearing the 10 Commandments read, "You mean we get to rest? We even have to rest? Hallelujah!"

I have this hunch that more and more of us find ourselves in a place not all that different from the Egypt where the ancient Hebrews languished. Except our slavery is self-constructed, self-imposed, and therefore far more difficult to detect or overcome. We are enslaved to notions of success, and therefore put few limits on work. We are enslaved to ideas about our children having every opportunity possible, and therefore schedule them into frenetic lives and wonder why they have a hard time focusing. We are enslaved to the belief that the only thing that will bring contentment is more -- more money, more space in our homes, more cars, more things to put on our resumes or in our closets, more.... Go ahead, name that thing you've fallen prey to wanting more of. And such levels of wanting, quite frankly, don't permit much time for anything but work.

In light of all this, listen again to Jesus' simple invitation to Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest awhile. This is not just an invitation to take an afternoon off or go on vacation -- though those can be important parts of rest -- this is an invitation to loosen our shackles and climb out of the cages we've constructed from a culturally-fed belief that more is the ticket to happiness and that work is the ticket to more.

Now hear the opening verse of Psalm 23:  The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.  While we tend to focus so strongly on the powerful imagery of the first half of the verse, that imagery simply makes no sense apart from the second half of the verse. Because the Lord is my shepherd, that is, I shall not want. Because I trust God for my good, I shall not cave in to the loud din of my culture enticing me to want and want and want at every turn and corner of my life. Because God has promised to take care of me, I will get off the treadmill of work and accumulation so that I can rest, and notice the abundance, and rejoice.

And that's the key thing about Sabbath rest, I think -- it invites a chance to step back and stand apart from all the things that usually drive and consume us that we might detect God's presence and providence and blessing, experience a sense of contentment, and give thanks.

Christ came that we may have life and have it more abundantly.  Life is what we are meant to have more abundantly.  We often see “abundant” as a quantitative term, a term of multiplication; but God’s abundance is a term of quality, abundant life is life together, life with our loved ones, our families, our friends; a life more connected to God and one another.  The Gospel does not call us to have stuff and have it more abundantly, it calls us to life.

Make a commitment to yourself, to your family, to God that there is one thing you will not do this week: one evening you will shut down your computer or turn off your cell phone, one appointment you will refuse to make, one obligation or opportunity you will forgo. And also commit to one thing that you will do this week in order to rest: one walk you will take with a friend or spouse, one game you will play with a child or a neighbor, one opportunity you will take to sit, alone or with others, not in front of the television but simply to contemplate your blessings and abundance so that you can go to bed content and grateful.  Write these down and put them on your refrigerator, or computer monitor, or in your Bible – wherever you will see them to remind you that God calls you to abundant life.  

Come away, He says, to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.

Lent 4B                                                                      The Rev. Carl M. Saxton, II

Ephesians 2.1-10; John 3.14-21                                                  15 March 2015

So here’s that verse, the one we all know.  It’s probably the most famous verse in all the Bible: you know, John 3:16; the verse that’s been translated into more languages than any other piece of literature, it’s the very first verse I ever memorized in Vacation Bible School and I’ll bet many of you learned it that way too.  It’s the verse that is so famous that it’s held up on placards at sporting events, and Tim Tebow is known for printing the reference in the eye-black beneath his eye.  In fact, it’s so famous that the whole verse doesn’t even need to be printed in order for people to recognize it – so much that even if you just print “3 colon 16” on a sign in your yard, nearly everyone knows what it means.

For God so loved the world that he gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life.

That’s the one.  This most famous of verses. But, you know, there’s something very uncomfortable about this verse.  Here’s a question that might illustrate what I mean:  What would it be like if someone died for you?  First, I’d guess we’d all feel a deep sense of gratitude for that person.  Now, however, imagine that it wasn’t just some random act of bravery, like someone pushing you out of the path of an oncoming car, but someone knew you were in mortal danger and actually exchanged their life for yours.  That sense of deep gratitude suddenly becomes an overwhelming sense of debt, one that is impossible to repay.  What could you possible do to ‘make it up’ to someone who has given so much, quite literally everything?  Well, this is the picture Jesus gives us of God in today’s gospel reading.  The giving of the Son is just sending Jesus to deliver a message to us of how to live a better life, it’s giving Jesus over to die, to die on a cross, to die on a cross for us. 

That’s why there is something so very troubling at the heart of this most well-known and well-worn verse from John’s Gospel.  God didn’t ask our opinion of all of this first, God didn’t ask permission, or try to get us ‘on-board,’ or work to get our ‘buy-in.’ God didn’t allow us to register concerns, complaints, or objections to His plan, He just goes ahead and gives His Son into the hands of sinners to die…for us.

If you think about the implications of that…it’s possible to be both deeply, deeply grateful and a little annoyed at the same time.  I mean, this puts an awfully huge claim on our lives, and God didn’t even take our plans, what we want, into account at all.  It takes all control…out of our hands!

God’s giving of His Son without our consent, or even consultation, is a lot like the scandal of infant Baptism.  After all, we too bring babies to the font without first getting their approval and dictatorially immerse them in the love of God.  There are those who would argue that what we do is offensive; that we don’t wait until they are ‘of age’ and can make such a life-changing decision for themselves.  But, that’s the whole point, the very heart of infant Baptism if you think about it; God just accepts us, adopts us, makes us His own, and promises to be both with us and for us forever.  This all happens whether we’re ready, interested, or eager to receive it or not!  I read, in fact, one priest who claims we should add four little words to our service of Baptism:  “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit…like it or not!”

One night, a father is having a hard time getting his six-year old son to bed.  After nearly an hour of dad standing firm on bedtime, the boy, Benjamin, became so frustrated that he said, ‘Daddy, I hate you!”  Dad, having more presence of mind than most folks dealing with a six-year old in the midst of tantrum, replied, ‘I’m sorry you feel that way Ben, but I love you.’  And we’d all expect that little Ben would respond with, ‘I’m sorry Daddy,’ or ‘Oh, ok,’ nope.  Instead little Ben yelled back at his father, ‘Don’t say that!’  Surprised, dad said, ‘But, Ben, it’s true—I love you.’  ‘Don’t say that, Daddy.’ ‘But I love you Ben.’ ‘Stop saying that, Daddy! Stop saying it right now!’  Dad responded, ‘Benjamin, listen to me: I love you…like it or not!’

Even at the tender age of six, you see, little Ben knew that he was absolutely powerless in the face of unconditional love.  If there had been some negotiation, some wiggle room – I’ll love you if you go to be when you’re told – then Ben might have played along: OK, this time, but I’m not eating broccoli for a month!  But once it was clear that there was no negotiation; that the dad’s love for his son was not contingent on something Ben did, then Ben could only either accept that love or run away from it.

We live in the same conundrum.  If God makes His great love for the world, and us, based on something that we do, then we suddenly have tremendous power, power over God.  We can negotiate.  We can threaten to reject God’s love unless our terms are met.  But, when God just loves us – completely and unconditionally – and then just goes and dies for us, then the jig is up; there’s absolutely nothing we can do to influence Him.  That’s just what happens in this verse: 

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

And there it is, as Martin Luther said of John 3:16 – the Gospel in miniature – God, in Jesus Christ, has made His decision…and it is for us.  Sure, we can run; but, we cannot ever change the fact – irrefutable if we believe that Christ was born, crucified, and was raised from the dead – that God loves us, that God loves the whole world more than we could ever imagine.  So, no wonder that this is the world’s favorite Bible verse, that it’s taught to children and posted everywhere, because it is good news, in fact, it may even be the best news ever.  But first it’s hard.  Hard because we’re not in control.  Hard because it’s not up to us.  Hard because every time we hear that God loves us, we also know that we had nothing to do with it, we cannot influence it, and therefore are completely out of control.  And being out of control can sometimes make us afraid.

Let’s face it, life can be harsh at times, and maybe we’ve been trained by experience that, ultimately, no one can really be trusted, or that life is so chaotic that the only way to safety is to remain in control at all times.  In the face of a society that says you are an individual before everything else, with no responsibility but to and for yourself, and you are in control of your life: God’s unconditional, uncontrollable love can be frightening. John’s Gospel says as much in this morning’s reading:

And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.

Trying, desperately, to cling to some semblance of control at any cost, we sometimes run from the light, running away from God’s loving embrace, only to find ourselves trapped in darkness of our own making.

But then along comes life, or tragedy, or God, or destiny, fate, whatever you want to call it; something happens that upends our life, shakes us up, shows up with something utterly beyond our ability to cope, and drives us to our knees – like the end of an important relationship, or a marriage, the loss of a job, the death of a loved one, or the return of an illness we thought we had vanquished – and we realize in a lightning flash of supernatural insight…that we were never really in control.  Not of our lives, of our circumstances, and certainly not of God.  And all of a sudden this difficult, troubling verse about God’s grace becomes the most wonderful news imaginable.  Because, here’s the thing:  precisely because we’re not in control of God and therefore not in control of our relationship with Him, we realize that it’s the one relationship in our lives that we can’t screw up, the one relationship we have no power to destroy.  God has taken responsibility for this one, and He has promised to bring it to a good end.

That’s why this verse is so troublesome…and so wonderful and desperately hopeful and life-giving at the same time.  This is why it is both one of my favorite verses found in the Bible, and the most difficult live with:  because it promises that God will never let us go, that He won’t take “No” for and answer, that He will pursue us like Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven until we are His own.

This doesn’t mean that we are mere passive players in this immensely important relationship.  Once we come to our senses and realize that we are loved so fully, so completely; we can respond in love, honoring God and sharing the news of His love with the whole world.  And we can love each other, diving into both the celebrations and the struggles all around us, always working for the good of our neighbor and the healing of the world always motivated by the knowledge that God loves us and the world so deeply.  So there’s plenty of work to do:

For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life. [Ephesians 2.10]

But we do it all with the sure understanding that we are only messengers, witnesses to what God has done for us, not managers.

So hear both the judgment and promise of this passage once again.  You are not in control – of this world or even your own life, not really.  The God who created the infinite universe will hold you close amid the chaos, love you when you feel the most unlovable, and bring you to eternal life.  As St. John writes, and the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ guarantees,

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

Like it or not.

The Rev. Carl M. Saxton, II

The Third Sunday after the Epiphany

Mark 1.14-20

In today’s gospel reading we hear the very first words spoken by Jesus in the gospel accounts.  Scholars believe that Mark’s gospel was the first to be written down, the very first record of the life and ministry of Jesus that would be passed down to us, His followers who have never seen and yet believe.  So, in a strange and mysterious way this morning we hear the first words to pass the lips of our Lord and Savior: Follow me; and two thousand years later we are still answering that call.

But, long before us, Simon and his brother Andrew are the first pair of disciples to be called. Jesus sees them doing their job: throwing their nets, fishing.  Mark doesn't tell us any of the details--what Jesus and the brothers saw in each other, why Jesus picked them, what kind of conversation they might have had, what questions they might have asked, how these fishermen felt. Mark skips right to the heart of the story. Jesus says, "Follow me," and without a word they get up and they go.

James and John are next. A little farther down the beach these brothers are sitting in a boat with their father mending their nets. Again, Mark gives us the story in fast forward--Mark doesn't show us anything but the important points. Jesus comes to them, he sees them, he calls them, they go.

It can be difficult to have an emotional connection to these stories as Mark tells them. He doesn't give us any sense of the visceral inner struggle that's involved in making these kinds of  life changing decisions - in discerning a life's purpose. Mark completely leaves out the process of deciding, discerning, choosing--all the stuff that would be really helpful to us some two millennia later.

Perhaps Mark leaves out the process because, in the end, the process isn’t the point. The point is that Jesus finds us, calls us, and the call is to go with him. This is about entering into a relationship with the person of Jesus Christ. It's not about committing to a doctrinal statement or a program, it's about coming face to face with Christ. Jesus didn’t say, "Come, be a Christian" or "Come, embrace this philosophy" or "Come, do this ministry." He said, "Come with me, belong to me, follow me."

When most of us think about the issue of "our calling"--we automatically think of something we're supposed to do or some career God may be asking us to embrace. Some of us can get really worked up about this, right?  We might even get a little frustrated that we don't have a better sense of what we're supposed to be doing. "God, why don't you show me what you want me to do? What's my calling? How can I find it?  If you’d just talk to me!!"

But here's the thing: The Scriptures are amazingly silent and calm about these things. For followers of Jesus, the most important calling comes first. Give yourself to the person of Jesus Christ. Know him, follow him, love him, listen for him; in doing that we will find that life opens up and we have freedom to do what we do best, to do what we love best, but we have to remember that that's not the main thing! Our first calling is to belong to God in Christ.

Isn’t that good news? If our essential calling is to belong to Jesus, then we are given enormous freedom to change the nonessentials along the way--to grow and to become! Jesus has no investment in putting anybody in any kind of vocational straight jacket. Who doesn't assume that the details of our lives are going to change over the next 10, 20, 40 years? We can’t begin to predict how our lives are going to unfold.

I recently read a story about a man in his late 60's. He studied at a prestigious university in the East some years ago, and then he moved to Texas to work on his doctorate. But somewhere along the way he became addicted to cocaine. He lost his family, lost his place in graduate school, lost big pieces of himself. Somehow he ended up wandering into a good church. When he did, he was so fragile--he looked like he'd been "rode hard and put up wet"--as they say in Texas, but the people in that church welcomed him into their community and slowly he started to heal. Eventually, maybe even miraculously, he was even reunited with his wife and children.

Talking with some of those wonderful people who welcomed him into their lives he said, "I want to believe that my best days aren't behind me, and that my life can still count, can still make a difference." He sat there with his head in his hands. "I just can't help but feel like I've blown all of my best chances," he said. That's when his wife reached over and took his hand and said, "Baby, you've got to take your sticky fingers off that steering wheel. If God could yank Jesus out of a grave, I figure he can make something beautiful out of busted parts."

Remembering our first calling - to belong to Jesus, to follow Him - gives us freedom to change, to grow, and even to mess it all up and find our way back again.

That our essential calling is to be in relationship with Christ is good news for another reason: In those long seasons when our calling doesn't change; and in fact sometimes seems unbearably demanding or dull, remembering our first call, to belong to Christ, will help us become better servants to His people. Ministry is hard. Sometimes it's hard being a Christian because even though you’re trying hard to follow Jesus people can make you nuts!  You can feel like Moses in the desert when he said

Why have you treated your servant so badly? Why have I not found favor in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me? Did I conceive all this people? ...If this is the way you are going to treat me, put me to death at once. [Numbers 11. 11-12, 15]

On those days you might want to crawl into a deep, dark hole and hide from the world, but God won’t let you hide away for long.  Whenever those times come, think of the story of Jesus recorded just a couple of chapters after this one.  After traveling all over Galilee, healing people and preaching the good news, Jesus returns home the Bible tells us.  But such a great crowd came together outside the doors of the house that Jesus and His disciples couldn’t even eat.  Weary, hungry, they sit down to eat but the lost and the forgotten of God’s children cry out to them.  Instead of sending a disciple to the door to tell the people to come back tomorrow, Jesus gets up and goes out to them.  Belonging to Jesus means that His light is there to shine into our darkness, and He’s there to hold us up when we think we’re too tired and hungry to move forward.

There is, however, one constant in the stories from Mark today and it's this: everyone who answers the call of Christ leaves something behind.  Andrew and Simon leave their nets; James and John leave their father. Following Jesus means being willing to change both what's in our hands and what's in our hearts, to leave more and more of the past behind to move forward in the light of Christ.

So I wonder, if Christ is calling you and me today--and He is, because His calling comes new with every day--what may we need to leave behind to be able to get up and go? To follow Jesus means to be changed, to grow, to leave some things behind. When Jesus says, Follow me, and we say, yes Lord, we can’t predict where that's going to lead us. It's all right not to be sure of what it all means and how it'll all turn out. All that matters is that Jesus sees you as you are, loves you and calls you to follow Him.

04 January 2015

The Rev. Carl Saxton

Epiphany 2015

Ephesians 3.1-12; Matthew 2.1-12 

If there is any image that captures this time of year perfectly, it’s the sad sight of a Christmas tree dumped on the curb. You see them everywhere.  Just driving around town you can see them in just about every neighborhood: piles of them, some with limp strands of tinsel still clinging to a few needles.  And these days as you go along, you see people pulling down wreaths from the front door, or throwing poinsettias in the dumpster or unplugging lights wrapped around hedges or strung around door frames.

The traffic on I-10, 95 and 295 let you know that the holiday visitors are headed home, clogging up the roadways in their race back to their “regular lives.”

There’s no mistaking it.  Christmas is coming to a close.

It’s tempting to wrap up our Christmas mindset with the decorations – to put away the good feelings of the season along with the “elf on a shelf” or the holiday ornaments.

Just when we thought it was over, along comes Epiphany.  Just when we thought it was time to get on with our lives…along come the Magi, strangers from the East, with the question that hangs over this last Christmas moment:

“Where is the newborn king of the Jews?”

If our answer is “Wrapped in tissue paper in a box, stuffed back up in the attic until next year”…well, wrong answer.

Where is the newborn king of the Jews?

Where have we put Jesus Christ since Christmas?

In the mind of the western world, the Christmas season is a time for sentiment, and family, and sudden bursts of generosity. We feel the urge to slip on an apron and bake – or maybe even give gifts to strangers, volunteer at a soup kitchen, or send an extra check to a favorite charity. We give gifts to the postman and wish “Merry Christmas” to strangers; we offer warm greetings to people we might normally go out of our way to avoid.  We cry at the end of “It’s A Wonderful Life” and feel a lump in our throat when Ebenezer Scrooge embraces Tiny Tim in “A Christmas Carol,” and remember for a little while what this season is all about.

So often, though, when the decorations come down, so does our good will.  Christmas is over.  The holiday is done.  Vacation is finished.  It’s back to the daily grind.

Maybe this is why the Magi appear on the scene here and now.

We need to be asked, now more than ever: where is the newborn king of the Jews?

Where is Jesus Christ in our world?  In our hearts?  In our lives?

Have we forgotten the deeper meaning of this season?  Have we lost track of Jesus?

The magi, the gospel tells us, had to search for Him, they had to seek Him.  The newborn king wasn’t where they expected Him to be.  They didn’t find Him in the palace, with the puppet king Herod.  They had to go outside the city, and travel further, to an out-of-the-way place, guided by the light of a star.   And there they found Him, in a humble setting, with only his mother. 

My wife spotted a sign just a few days ago, it might have been the sign in front of a church, it said:  Wise men still seek Jesus.  It got me thinking about those Wise Men of the Gospel story.  These Wise Men were definitely not Jews...they are described in one commentary as “Gentiles in the extreme!”  They were probably astrologers, star-readers, from Persia or Babylonia.  They were not people steeped in the Torah, though they may certainly have had a passing knowledge of the religion and scriptures of their neighbors to the West - and an interest in the possibility of a new ruler for Israel that they read in the rising of that star.  They followed the light of that star, knowing it would lead them to “the newborn king of the Jews” so that they could pay homage to Him.

Seeking Jesus is at the very center of who we are as Christians.  We can often get comfortable, thinking that we’re baptized and confirmed, attend church regularly, and even volunteer now and again; but even those of us who would declare that we are Christians should remember to seek Jesus.  We should seek Jesus, just like those strangers from the East, always striving toward the light, every day.

We might ask, what were they seeking when they followed that star?  What drew them to seek the “newborn king of the Jews?”  I think the answer can be found in the gifts they brought to the Christ child when they paid him homage.  Matthew’s gospel tells us that the three gifts were gold, frankincense, and myrrh.  Traditionally these gifts have been seen as symbolic of the roles Jesus took on when he came into the world on Christmas, in that lowly stable.

The first gift was gold, a gift worthy of royalty.  Christian tradition tells us that this gift of gold represented Christ’s Kingship over the world.  These Wise Men were seeking a king, a ruler, and the same instinct lives in us today.  We are all seeking the one thing that gives our lives meaning - something to live for.  In our materialistic world the ruler of our lives has often become the amassing of more wealth, more stuff, maybe more prestige.  All of these are false rulers - they draw us away from one another, away from our families and communities.  Seeking material wealth will never bring peace to the heart, mind, and soul.  I believe no one will ever find themselves lying on their deathbed thinking: I should’ve spent a few more days at work or, I wish I had gotten that 60 inch TV.

Seeking Christ brings peace.  If Jesus is the king of our lives, if He is the thing that gives meaning to our lives, then He will draw us closer to one another.  Remember the second greatest commandment: Love your neighbor as yourself.  Love is the only thing that can really bring peace into our lives - love of God and love of every other child of God.

The second gift brought by the Magi was frankincense, which is a hardened resin or sap from a particular plant.  Frankincense has been traded on the Arabian Peninsula and in North Africa for more than 5000 years. In fact, a mural depicting sacks of frankincense traded from the Land of Punt can be found on the walls of the temple of the ancient Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut, who died nearly 1500 years before Christ.  This hardened resin is used a incense, and in particular, it was one of the consecrated incenses used in the Jerusalem Temple and was used as an accompaniment of the meal-offering [Leviticus 2:1, 2:16, 6:15, 24:7]. It was seen as a symbol of the Divine name [Malachi 1:11; Song of Solomon 1:3] and as a representation of prayer [Psalm 141:2].  Christian tradition holds that it was given to the Christ child as a sign of His divinity.  Those Wise Men two thousand years ago were seeking the Divine.

We still seek the Divine, we want to find the source of all things and to know that there is a Creator who loves us and cares about what happens to us.  We believe that Jesus is the Son of God, that He came to reunite us with the Creator of the universe when we had fallen away and “become subject to evil and death.”  C.S. Lewis made a very good argument for Christ’s divinity.  He said:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.  [C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity]

We seek the Holy, the Divine...we need God.  Christ Jesus is the answer to that need.

Finally, the Wise Men brought Jesus the gift of myrrh.  This is another plant resin that can be used as incense, but because it was used in the mummification process in ancient Egypt Christian tradition tells us that it was brought to symbolize eventual death, that His crucifixion was inevitable from the moment of His birth.  As hard as it is, at this time of the year when we associate the name of Jesus with the infant first laid in a manger, and then visited and worshipped by the Wise Men of the East, Christ’s death is a very important part of the story of God’s reaching out to us in His Incarnation.  I have often been asked, in the months that I have been here at St. John’s, why I wear a crucifix rather than an empty cross.  Some, like my own mother, say that Jesus is alive, He’s no longer on the cross, and I can agree with that.  I believe, though, that it’s too easy for us to look at an empty cross and forget the suffering, the pain, that He was willing to experience.  I wear the crucifix because it reminds me, and I hope every one of you who sees it hanging here around my neck, that you, in the mind and heart of God, are someone worth dying for.

Where is Jesus in our lives?

This is a time to put away the ornaments and the lights; it’s not a time to put away Christ.

This is a time to remember what His coming meant to our world, to remember that He is the answer to those things we, as human beings, seek – and to hold on to the sense of charity, and generosity, wonder, and joy that are all the hallmarks of the Christmas season. I’m sure we’ve all read or heard the phrase, “Keep Christ in Christmas” over the last few months.  Well, that’s just the beginning.  We need to keep him in every day, in every season - and remember that if we are wise men and women, we still seek Him.

The Feast of the Incarnation (Christmas Day) 2014

Rev. Carl M. Saxton, II 

John 1.1-18

This prologue to the Gospel of John is a Christmas story unlike the one we are familiar with.  In our experience the story of Christ’s birth is a story of the Holy Family’s search for safety and comfort.  We know the story of the angel announcing to Mary that she would conceive a child by “the Power of the Most High.”  We know the story of an angel coming to Joseph in a dream and assuring him that the child Mary carried was of God and that he, Joseph, had been entrusted to keep that child safe.  We’ve heard, all our lives, the story of Joseph and Mary returning to Joseph’s hometown in order to be counted for Roman tax purposes.  How the pregnant Mary and Christ’s foster father were forced to take shelter in a stable.  How the angels appeared to shepherds to announce the birth of the Savior, and the coming of the Three gentile Wise Me or Kings.  We know the story of Herod, who terrorized the mothers of Bethlehem in his bid to ensure his position of power and the Holy Family fleeing into Egypt to avoid Herod’s wrath.

Matthew and Luke tell us these details of the life and time surrounding the Holy Family at Christ’s birth.  They give us what we, as men and women, want to know about Jesus’ birth and early days.  Even now, two thousand years later, one of the first things we ask new people when we meet them is, ‘Where do you come from?  Where did you grow up?  Where’s your family from?’  It is a deep-rooted part of our nature that we need to know about origins - our’s and other people’s.  That’s the question Matthew and Luke were answering in their recounting of shepherds, angels, dreams, the stable, and the manger.

John is answering a completely different question.  For John, the real truth of Christ’s birth lie not in the earthly details of Joseph and Mary’s search for a place to sleep and eventual flight into Egypt...the real truth lies in the spiritual reality of who Christ is and where He came from.  John’s Christmas story highlights the heart of the Christmas story: the good news that God's amazing love for us is expressed in the birth of Mary's son. We have come to call this time of year Christmas (Christ’s Mass) but, even today the Church’s name for this most important feast is the Feast of the Incarnation.  It is the mystery of the Incarnation which John expressed in these words: 

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of the Father's only Son, full of grace and truth.

The Word became flesh. The Word, or in Greek the Λόγος (logos), was a term used in the ancient philosophies of Plato and the Stoics. John’s use of the term is probably more influenced by Jewish and Early Christian understandings.  The Jewish author Philo, who was probably a contemporary of John the Evangelist, used Λόγος to refer to the generative or creative force of God.  But the Fourth Gospel says that the Word lived in community with God, and at the same time was God. The Word was eternal, existing at the beginning of time. The Word was the very creative essence of God, through whom all things were made. The Word was the source of light--that is, of goodness and truth--and of life at every level. 

The Word became flesh; what an amazing thing!! If you really think about it...it’s impossible to wrap your mind around.  It’s that ‘not being able to understand the things of God’ that we call a divine mystery.  We call it the Incarnation, but Incarnation is really too limited a term to encapsulate such a mystery. Incarnation means "putting on a body." But, the Word became flesh means the Word took on our entire human nature. The Word became one of us; except for sin, totally human. In that child born in Bethlehem, nothing human was lacking. He had a body just like ours, He had a mind like ours. He had emotions like ours. At birth he was a real baby, totally dependent on his parents. He became a real child, who had to learn how to walk and talk and read and write. He went through puberty, just like we do, and turned from a boy into a man. He learned the trade of carpentry from Joseph and only honed his skills through hard work and practice. Jesus was completely one of us, a human being.

The Word became flesh. Both sides of this statement of one of the central mysteries of our faith are important, and we need to hold tightly to both of them. The Son of God became a human being and lived a human life among other humans. That's the first part of the Christmas story, the part that gets the attention at this time of year, and it’s really important. Sometimes, though, we try to separate God from the hustle and bustle of human life, as if God has nothing to do with the messiness of life as we know it. The Incarnation tells, shows us, proves to us that we can't do that, because God came into our world as one of us, and nothing earthly or human is beyond His experience.

There's also a second part to John’s Christmas story: we have seen God's glory. That's what John tells us. What does John mean by that? Is he talking about some special, unique part of Jesus' life and ministry? I don't think so. I think that the glory of God was revealed in Jesus’ life. His disciples, who knew him best, saw that he was full of grace and truth.

Jesus reflected and radiated the unconditional love of God. He loved the Pharisee and the tax-collector, the Jew and the Samaritan, the lovely and the unlovely, the sinner and the righteous. His love was never a reaction to the love of others; he reached out even to those who hated him. He displayed God's grace. He offered acceptance and salvation to Zaccheus, the outcast tax-collector. He challenged the rich young man to escape the slavery of riches. His lament over Jerusalem, when he cried

Jerusalem, Jerusalem!...How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!  [Matthew 23.37-39]

was a plaintive expression of God's love and grace. Even his words to Judas at the moment when Judas betrayed him, ‘Judas, is it with a kiss that you are betraying the Son of Man?’ expressed deep love and concern.

Jesus expressed the absolute faithfulness of God--and faithfulness is central to the Hebrew idea of truth. You could depend on Jesus. You could depend on Jesus to satisfy needs: to feed the hungry, heal the sick, bless the children, cast out demons, raise the dead, break the chains of sin. Jesus was utterly dependable: he reflected the righteousness, justice, wisdom, and truth of God the Father. When the disciples saw Jesus in action, they saw God with a human face.

So in this Christmas season we need to be open to the continued work of God in Jesus Christ. For the Christmas story does not end in Bethlehem. It goes on. It includes the death and resurrection of Jesus. It includes everything that made Jesus the one who would save people from their sins. It includes the fact that Jesus is still alive with God, that Jesus is still active, that Jesus is still reflecting the grace and truth of God to those who are willing to receive it.

We are here today because we believe that God is still working through Jesus Christ. Right? We're here because we believe that Jesus Christ can satisfy the needs in our lives and in our world. Even if you have doubts and questions about Jesus and about Christianity, being here today says that you haven't closed your mind to the possibility that God is still working through Jesus Christ.

God works through Jesus Christ, but Jesus Christ works through us. That’s why we celebrate the Holy Eucharist. In the Eucharist Jesus comes to us, Jesus meets with us, Jesus feeds us with his grace. The Eucharist is an extension of the mystery of the Incarnation, of Christ’s coming to us in humble and earthly form. As we receive the consecrated bread and wine we confess that Jesus is alive, that he is still with us, that he makes it possible for us to live as he lived.  When we strive to live as Jesus lived, reflecting the unconditional love and the incredible faithfulness of God, then Christmas will truly continue here in our world and in our lives; and Emmanuel, God with us, becomes our everyday reality. ‘And the Word became flesh and lived among us’ - thanks be to God for the mystery of the Incarnation - the joining of humanity and the grace and truth of God.