Terrifying Freedom

In 1905 a Swiss patent clerk named Albert Einstein published in a few short months, four papers the ramifications of which he would spend the rest of his life untangling and which forever changed our world, not least of which because the nuclear possibilities inherent in his thought.

When I think about the inspiration involved, I always have a feeling of vertigo. Any one of these papers would have been enough to earn Einstein the Nobel prize in physics which he won in 1921, but to have four ideas of such magnitude in a few short months, to be able to condense them and publish them while toiling away in obscurity makes my brain hurt.

But whenever I think of one of the theories, I have another wave of vertigo. One of the papers that Einstein wrote lays out what has been called his special theory of relativity and sets aside any absolute theory of structure and movement in the universe. Every motion is measured in relation to a relative point, and this has dizzying ramifications for space and time.

Until Einstein, physicists had been tying themselves in knots attempting to create a grand unified scheme to describe motion across all of space and time.

Einstein simply cut through that Gordian knot with the simple assertion that all motion and movement is relative to whatever point you are using as a reference. It was a commonsensical and elegantly simple solution to a complex problem.Instead of Cartesian geometry and coordinates, and Newtonian physics, in which all motion is relative to two or three central axes, and which all seems so commonsensical to us, everything is relative to its frame of reference, and occurs in a kind of terrifying freedom which it is much harder to describe or predict, whose rules seem alien to us.

We have, in two of our readings today, a similar sense of terrifying freedom. From this letter written to the nascent Church in Galatia, we have a discussion of the freedom that is made ours in the coming of Jesus. Under the old system, "the Newtonian physics" of religion before Jesus came into the world, our relationship with the Creator was defined by a specific and complex set of interactions which hinged on our ability to maintain a strict set of rules and laws, and to atone for our sins through a sacrificial system, through a system of sacrifice and ritual cleansing and atonement.

This is the law given to Moses that the Gospel according to John speaks of this morning. The Law was given, and then in the fullness of time, the Word, the very being and core of God, enfleshed, comes into the world, and that system of law, atonement and sacrifice is fulfilled permanently, for God, taking on our flesh has destroyed the massive "otherness" between humanity and God, and pushed us out into the terrifying freedom and vertigo of the life of grace.

A funny thing happened when Einstein produced those four papers in a few short months. At first no one noticed, and then no one thought he was right, and finally no one could look at the world the same way. Even so with this magnificent event whose anniversary we celebrated this week.Jesus has come to be with us. God has come into the pain and struggle of human life, and in so doing, has redeemed it and made it beautiful and powerful, and has set our existence flaming with a light that the darkness can never dim. The light has come into the world, and burning with a scaring brilliance, has penetrated into the deepest corners of darkness.

At first no one noticed that Jesus had come, and then no one thought he was God, and then no one could look at the world the same way again, for his coming had so altered the way we see things that suddenly there was no return. For his coming cast light into all the corners of the world that had been hid before.

There is a phrase from the Gospel this morning that always strikes me with force. "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not over come it." For those of you who remember the old translation, it is "The light shone in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not." But the effect is the same, there is an event that is ongoing, and the response, the reaction is past tense. The light shone in the darkness, and the darkness attempted, and failed to overcome it, to understand, and so the light shines still.

It is hard sometimes, to think about the light still shining. Surely we find ourselves in a similar darkness to that of Judea during the first century of this era: in the midst of violence, economic crisis, racial tensions.Surely, we have difficulty seeing and believing that the light shines.

And yet the light has burst forth, it has blazed like magnesium ribbon and our retinas are still burning with the vision of it, despite the external indicators that the darkness has overcome the light.

By blazing out with brilliance the light has shown us a new and terrifying freedom and grace. No longer do we need the discipline of the law to keep us out of dangerous and dark corners, for we live in the midst of a world redeemed and yet hurting, a world in which we can see into the dark corners and know them for what they are: dark, yet loved, waiting and longing for us to bear that light of Christ which lives in us into them and set them ablaze and shimmering with light and power.

There is a funny thing about light. You can see the source of light, and you can see where the light strikes, but you cannot actually see light. When it passes through dust or fog or mist, you can see its trail, but light itself is invisible. That is why the world seems so dark. We can see the source of that burning brilliance, Jesus the Word, and we can see where that light shines, in the darkness around the world, and down into the midst of Philadelphia, but we cannot see how extensive its reach, how broad its arc, how full of energy and warmth that light is.

And so, in some ways, our calling seems inexplicable, our course madness. Those who cannot see the source or the actual light have no idea what we do here. But we have seen his glory, and the seeming foolishness of our course is nothing when we look at it in the light which has blazed into the world.

Like Einstein, toiling away in obscurity, and finally having the genius intuition to simply scrub the whole unified motion problem, we operate here in intuitive ways. For we have seen his glory. We have seen the radiance of his coming into the world, and we have seen where his light shines. We have been adopted and made heirs of him, and we speak now to God, not as Lord or King or Judge, but as “Abba,” as Daddy.

Preached by the Rev'd Andrew N. Ashcroft

28 December 2008

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Performative Utterance

“Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” is the rhyme that children chant in the schoolyard, during recess. But we learn, early on as children, that words do in fact hurt, and can heal. Words create whole worlds, and destroy them with a disturbing ease. Think of words like “I do.” “Go to hell!” or “I have a dream.”

Human beings use words with power. How much more so for God? Indeed, running throughout the Scriptures is a God who speaks. In a tone of the very first things Scripture tells us that God creates by using words. God speaks and worlds become. “Let there be light and there was light.” God speaks to Moses from the burning bush, and to Israel through the judges and prophets. There is something fundamental about God which is about speaking, about language and about words.

It is natural that John turns to the metaphor of language when wrestling not only with what Jesus did and what happened in the life of Jesus, but with who Jesus is and what Jesus means. Luke which we read last night records a different version of the Christmas story, Jesus was born in squalid conditions, there were signs and wonders which surrounded his birth, Herod the local ruler got a bit exercised about the talk about his birth, shepherds, angels, stars, all that has come to be recognized and over advertised in our culture today, all that which comes out for Christmas pageants and Christmas cards.

But this morning’s gospel reading hasn’t inspired many nativity plays or Christmas cartoons.John’s account is rather abstract, after all. John, writing seventy or a hundred years after the other Gospels is attempting to come to terms with the assertion and intuition that the Church has that the baby in the manger is not just a prophet or a sage, not just a hill country preacher, but somehow God, come down to live among us. So the writer to Gospel of John or the editor collecting the writings begins the work with the passage that we heard read this morning, the abstract and famous piece which seems to be one of the earliest recorded Christian hymns.

“In the beginning, was the Word,” and immediately we run up against the barrier of language. The Greek word here for “word” is “logos” and “logos is a little hard to translate. It means not simply speech like “Hi, how are you?” or “The sky is blue.” In Greek, “logos” denotes something that is concerned and linked to being, to the innermost places of our hearts and lives. The Greek word has given birth to our word “logic” and that somehow makes for a much better sense of what the composer of the hymn is trying to convey. Jesus is the intimate logic of God, the core being and principle, inscribed in flesh for us.

In college I took a linguistics class and while I've lost or repressed a great deal of what I learned then, there is one concept from modern language theory which has always fascinated me. The idea that there are some speech acts which are substantively different from most of the language that we use. Most of the time we use language as filler – we use it simply to describe, or to communicate something obvious: the dog is brown or the sky is blue or the egg on my breakfast plate is hot. But modern language theorists call certain parts of our speech "performative utterance," a performative utterance is the speech act that actually does something; rather than describing reality that is, performative utterances create reality by speaking. Like a magic spell from a fairy tale, by speaking the words we bring about what we say. When we stand across from another person and say "I take you to be my wife or my husband," we aren't simply describing a relationship that already exists, by speaking those words we are actually marrying someone. When we take a new child and wash them in the waters of Baptism and proclaim the words "I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit," we are doing precisely that, joining a lovely little one into the Church and making them one with the Body of Christ. When Sean or I are standing as the focus of this community gathered, and we say "This is my Body" or "This is my Blood" we are not describing a mystery or enacting a ritual; we as a body, as clergy and laity, are making of bread and wine, the Body and Blood of our Lord.

Performative utterance unites intention and action in a marvelous and powerful way, where saying becomes doing, and doing saying; where speech and action are one.

Which may seem like rather an abstract way to get around to talking about something substantive this morning. It is hard for me to imagine that a host of you are going to go home and, in response to the question about what the sermon this morning was about, reply “Performative utterance.” But sometimes I think the only way to understand this famous passage from John is to think of it in rather unusual terms.

Jesus is the performative utterance of God, the Word who, simply by being spoken, draws us into the heart of God.  Jesus is the word whose speech creates the world and Jesus is the word whose speech redeems the world.  Jesus is the intimate logic of God, the sentence who interrupts our darkness with a word of light that creates light,  a word of peace that creates peace, a word of love that creates love.

As we celebrate the birth of Jesus, we are celebrating the Incarnation, that powerful and tremendous blending of speech and action, where doing and saying become one. Where God’s speech act, God’s logic, that word which is at the core of God’s being becomes fully human and comes to live and be with us in our frailty and our humanity.

And the world is never the same again. For we have seen his glory, we have heard that word roll out like thunder. He unites earth and heaven. He becomes human that we might become divine. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory.”

Preached by the Rev'd Andrew N. Ashcroft

Christmas Day 2008

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Irrational Exuberance

On the fifth of December, 1996, when the New York Stock Exchange closed, the Dow Jones Industrial Average stood at 6,437.10 points. In a speech that day, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, wondered how we would know when “irrational exuberance” had so inflated the value of assets that the market could no longer sustain such lofty heights. Greenspan was discussing the phenomenon we have come to commonly call a “bubble.” And he was wondering when it would burst.

That was the beginning of the so-called “tech bubble.” Since then we’ve seen a housing bubble, perhaps an energy bubble, and recently the whole stock market seems to have burst like one, big, over-blown bubble.

These economic bubbles occur when people are willing to pay a lot more for something than it is actually worth. And some would say that starting the day after Thanksgiving, most of America participates in a sort of Christmas bubble as we spend the next month or so buying gifts, decorating trees, stringing up lights, baking cookies, sending out cards, traveling to see family, carving up turkeys, reveling at parties, and, yes, even going to church.

There is much to be skeptical about in our American preparations for Christmas – not least the way we spend money. And it is fair to ask whether or not we get what we pay for every year in our Christmas bubble; fair to wonder: is Christmas worth it?

And if there is a Christmas bubble of shopping and spending and singing and partying, then Midnight Mass is the bubbliest of Christmas bubbles – when we have stayed up late, gotten dressed up, readied our voices, tuned our instruments, hung up all the greens, pulled out all the stops, lit up all the candles… and for what? Is tonight all just so much irrational exuberance that far exceeds the value of whatever it is we think we are doing here?

More and more this attitude takes hold in our collective thinking. This story of Jesus’ birth – very nice for the kids – but a bit far fetched, isn’t it? A star in the East? A baby born in a manger because there’s no room at the inn? Angels singing to shepherds? Wise men riding on camels? Who are you kidding?!

And if this baby born tonight is everything we say he is why is the world still so crazy, mixed up, and dangerous? If he is so Wonderful how did things get so bad? If he is such a good Counselor why are so many homes in foreclosure? If he is king of kings why has he not brought order and justice to places we hear about every day where despotic rulers still make the lives of ordinary people miserable? If he is lord of lords why has he not found a way to house those who sleep on the streets in the cold, to feed those who are hungry, to help those who struggle with addictions, to free those who are stuck in abusive relationships? If he is the Prince of Peace why do wars still rage, why do terrorists still get to do their cruel killing, why are there still so many people shot dead in the streets of our own city every year?

We have come here tonight, it is true, to be exuberant, but the question – like the question about all bubbles – is this: Is our exuberance irrational? And that depends entirely on this baby Jesus, whose birth we re-visit again tonight. Does the celebration of this birth mark just the beginning of a little bubble of joy that will have burst before the wrapping paper from tomorrow’s gifts has even made it into the recycling bin?

Most of the evidence these days seems to point to the bursting of the Jesus bubble. Fewer and fewer people go to church regularly, the churches themselves are mired in scandal, natural disasters and the progress of climate change don’t say much for a supposedly benevolent God, and the more we know about the truths of the world we live in the harder it is to believe in the myths of a religion like this one, that tells stories that don’t necessarily add up.

And so it has become easy for most of us to stop searching for God, to give up the prayers we were taught as children (and have learned to think of as childish), to rely only on ourselves, to put no trust in God, and certainly not in any church or institution claiming to represent him. Instead of reaching up for God, we put our hands to good use raising our children well, making a decent living, doing an honest day’s work, improving ourselves as best we can.

But here on this night, as we enter this Christmas bubble, it is not actually the time for reaching out to God, not the time to stretch up on your tippy-toes and see if tonight you can get close enough to catch the bubble of God’s love and keep it in tact. Tonight is a night for bending low by a cradle, for seeing that the glory of God is nothing more than a child who does not ask us to reach out to him, because he is already reaching out to us, as only babies can, reaching out for his mother, or his bottle, for a shoulder to be burped on, reaching out to grasp your finger with that surprisingly strong grasp that never fails to delight us, and that makes us wish the baby would hold on like that for a long, long time.

Tonight the God whom we have more or less decided is not powerful enough to rule our lives reaches out to us in perfect weakness as if to prove us right.

(Does it occur to us that God could have sent his angels as an army to compel us to do his will, instead of a choir of singing messengers of the birth of this child?)

The baby looks at us, and we are smiling stupidly, (after all, we have been to his crib last year, and the year before that, and so on). And of course this exuberance is irrational! It made more sense to put our faith in the stock market, than in the hope that this infant’s birth means more that it appears to mean, holds hope for the whole world.

Tonight is a night for irrational exuberance precisely because the God of all creation, who holds the stars in his hands, and stirs the wind and the seas with his breath, the Mighty God came to us with all the weakness of a baby. And knowing what we know – that things have gotten bad, that money is tight, that the world is a mess, the hungry are still hungry and the homeless still without a home, that war and terror and gunfire still rage in our streets and abroad – what other kind of God could we believe in, than one who is willing to be as weak as the weakest child? Having turned our eyes from heaven, what other kind of God could we ever relate to, than one who reaches out his needy little fingers to us, when we will not reach out to him?

And that is what is happening here tonight: a little baby has been born. And although nothing seems different yet, we have heard the song of promise from the angels, we see how even simple shepherds could tell that something unique was happening, we remember how this story meant so much to so many generations before us. And we realize that we have had a tendency to get irrationally exuberant about all the wrong things. (How can anyone truly be irrationally exuberant about a credit default swap?!)

But if we close our eyes, we can almost see that baby reaching out from his cradle and opening his pudgy palm to grasp just the tip of our finger (that’s all he needs!). And the God to whom we had not thought to reach out is reaching out to us. And there is nothing threatening or frightening at all about being so close to God. There is only this baby, so near to us, so much in need of milk and of sleep (which is why we always sing a lull-a-bye on this silent night), holding onto our fingers, almost as if he may never let go.

And you can’t even remember Alan Greenspan’s name, or what your monthly mortgage payment is, or why you were mad at your sister, or any of the long sickness before your beloved’s death, or why two nations would ever be at war, or why you thought you couldn’t face this challenge, or what your objection was to asking for help, or why you thought you weren’t good enough.

Because this baby has you by the finger. And the exuberance you feel while that baby holds on tight, is surely irrational, because not one thing in the world is any different than it was a moment ago…

...and yet the whole universe is changed by this love, born in this bubble of holy time and space.

And we wonder how long the world, or this congregation, or even our own hearts can sustain these lofty heights, the value of which is awfully hard to pin down, in any case.

And do we dare to hope, that if we are very, very careful with the love of this child; if we sing his lull-a-bye very softly; maybe this bubble will not burst?

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Christmas Eve 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia