The Days are Surely Coming

You may listen to Mother Erika's sermon here.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, and the people flinch. They have heard enough from this insistent prophet Jeremiah to know that whatever is coming cannot be good. They have heard, day after day, that God’s great reckoning has come upon them because of their chronic unfaithfulness. They have heard God call them degenerate and false, wild, perverse; they have even heard the word whore. They have heard God tell them that He will smash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel, that He will “bring such disaster” upon them that the “ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle.” They have cried, “Peace, Peace!” but there is no peace, and terror is all around. The days are surely coming, they think, when…what? When you will utterly forsake us? When you will finally wipe us from the earth? When you will leave us to fend for ourselves while you go find another nation to bless, another people to call chosen? The days are surely coming, says the Lord, but the people already know how that sentence will end. For they have heard the hardest words of disappointment and judgment, and they have taken them to heart. Nothing good can possibly be coming.

The days are surely coming, we hear, and we, too, flinch. For we have seen enough of the terrors of this world to worry that whatever is coming cannot be good. We have heard, day after day, that there is to be a reckoning upon us because of our waste and our arrogance. We have heard that Creation itself is spinning out of control because of our abuse, that this vibrant, vulnerable planet will burn and storm and rage more and more. We have heard that our best days as a nation are behind us, that the great American experiment will fall victim to terrorism, or greed, or an ever-widening and aggressive polarity. We have heard that we can no longer hope that future generations will live better than we do, that the rich will only grow richer and the poor poorer. We have even heard that the Church is dying, that one day the seduction of secularism and the drain of our busy, busy, busy-ness will simply prove too much, and that on some Sunday in the not-too-distant future this church will offer its last Mass, whisper its last prayers, and close its beautiful red doors forever. Peace, we cry, but there is no peace, and terror is all around. The days are surely coming, we hear, when…what? When the planet finally becomes uninhabitable? When the United States is shattered like a piece of pottery? When the Church stumbles, finally falls, never to rise again? The days are surely coming, we hear, but we can already imagine how that sentence might end. For we hear the threats of the world, and it is so easy to take them to heart and imagine that nothing good can possibly be coming.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, and at first the people flinch. But then the Lord continues to speak: “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will do something new, when I will reach out to you again, my own people, heart of my heart, and rescue you. This time, there will be no tablets of stone that you can break into pieces; no, this time, I will engrave my promises upon your very souls. This time I will plant my own righteousness deep within you so that you cannot, finally, forget me, so that even when you turn away from me you will take me with you in your own hearts. This time, I will make my words so shine within you that you will only have to gaze upon each other to see my promise. Yes, the days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will do this new and wondrous thing for you.

How remarkable this is – that “The days are surely coming” turn out to be words of blessing, not of condemnation. After everything that His people have put Him through, God chooses them again. They have broken His covenant, but He will not destroy them. They have betrayed Him, but He will not forsake them. Instead He chooses to do something different, to offer himself to them in a new way so that they cannot be lost to Him forever. He will not walk away; He refuses to give them up, for he is God, and God’s righteousness is not like our righteousness, His mercy is not like our mercy.

And what you and I cannot forget, what we must never forget, is that God has not changed. The God who offered Himself to an old man named Abraham and made of him a people, the God who rescued that people by the hand of a man named Moses, the God who remained faithful to that people through forty years of whining and wavering in the wilderness, the God who showed loyalty to that people even when its kings rose to great power and fell in great disgrace – the God who touched the lips of the boy-prophet Jeremiah and sent him to speak words meant to shock this people to their senses and then chose them again even when those words did little good – this God does not change. This God remains true, righteous, and merciful, yesterday and today and forever. This God, our God, will not walk away, refuses to give us up.  

The world wants us to forget this. The world wants us to think that things have changed, that God is dead, that our problems now are too modern and too grand for our ancient faith, that religion is so co-opted by politics or weakened by scandal that it has little hope to offer anymore. The world wants us to listen to the words of doom spoken by prophets and madmen alike and to take them to heart, to worry that the days that are surely coming will be filled only with destruction. Even in the Church, perhaps particularly in the Church, the world wants to trap us in a web of woe, discourage us from our mission with words of death and darkness. But these are not the words to take to our hearts. God has already written words of hope and forgiveness there, words of renewed covenant and never-failing love, of trust and mercy and constancy. These words are already etched deep within ourselves; all we need do is look to our hearts to find them.

The question is, when the world comes shrieking its curses and threats, can we act like we believe what we find there? Can we not only treasure the promise of God in our hearts but sing it out with our voices and dance it with our feet? When we hear the hardest words of judgment, the direst predictions of doom, can we shout our hope to the rooftops, can we shine that light which we know to be in us into the path of all those who walk in darkness? Can we paint a vision of what we know the days that are surely coming really look like, can we help to finish that sentence when others flinch in fear at what the future holds – tell them with faith that the days are surely coming when the Church will grow and thrive and do its work, when all of Creation will be made new, when all people will be reconciled one to another, when peace and justice will reign? Can we live like we believe the words written in our hearts?

Of course we can.  Not because of our own strength or because of any rosy-eyed optimism, but God’s great gift has made it possible. In these latter days of Lent, the days are surely coming when we will hear the story of this great gift again, the gift of this new covenant, written in the spirit of his only and eternal Son, sketched into our world with bread and wine, with water and blood, with iron and the hard wood of the cross. We will hear hard and beautiful words of how our Lord Jesus Christ was crucified and died in order to bear much fruit, how God transformed the barren wood of the cross into a glorious spring of eternal life. We will take to heart the story of how God looked down upon His people, broken and sinful and lost, and chose us, called us to work for His kingdom, where there will always be good news for the poor, release for the captives and recovery of sight for the blind. These words have already been fulfilled in your hearing; these words have already been written on the walls of your heart. This kingdom has come and is coming. These blessed, glorious days will surely, surely come.

 

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

25 March 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Posted on March 25, 2012 by Guest User.

A Good Spring Scourging

You may listen to Mother Erika's sermon here.

I have always loved to read. Indeed, I have been a bookworm from my mother’s womb, a trait I inherited honestly from both my parents, who were never, ever without something to read. I was reading on my own by the age of three and devouring chapter books by the time I started Kindergarten. So when I entered middle school, of course, I decided that it was time to write my own novel. Longhand. With a Papermate erasable pen. I can’t remember the subject matter, although I have a vague recollection that it had something to do with a long-abandoned cottage in the woods that was tangled in the vines of an overgrown garden…and in my own florid, overwrought prose. But in my ten-year-old mind, the more adjectives, the better. What tripped me up was the dialogue. I felt pressure, for some reason, to place an adverb after every single line. How else would the readers (of which I imagined there would be many) know what the speakers were thinking and feeling? So line after line of the text ended with phrases like, “…she said, sadly,” “he said, bravely,” “she said, happily, simperingly, fabulously, tearfully, frustratedly…” and on and on and on. I remember my mother – my loving, patient, wonderful mother – reading my first draft and suggesting that, perhaps, there wasn’t a need for quite so many descriptors. But without my adverbs, I was lost. What to do? So my first great novel languished in its notebook and was eventually lost to time. And oh, how I wish I had that notebook now!

There is a decided lack of adverbs in scripture. Remember that the earliest texts of Holy Scripture were stamped letter by letter into clay or scribed onto paper that was both rare and expensive. So every letter, every word mattered. And apparently the writers of scripture did not feel the need, as I did, to provide an emotional context for every single statement, or, for that matter, for many at all. The Bible doesn’t offer us many phrases like, “…Moses said, petulantly,” or “Jesus told his disciples, exhaustedly.” There is little verbiage about the emotional state of speakers in scripture, even in the Gospels. Very occasionally, the Gospel writers will provide us with a clue as to Jesus’ emotional state – he weeps, he loves, he is amazed, he is moved with compassion, or pity. Mark’s Gospel offers more descriptors than any of the other three – Jesus looks at the Pharisees “with anger,” he sighs “deep in his spirit” when asked for a sign, he is “indignant” when the disciples try to prevent the little children from coming to him. But for the most part, we are left to imagine what Jesus was feeling in any given moment. When he spoke words to the disciples, or the Pharisees, or the centurion, or the woman with the hemorrhage, was he smiling? Frowning? Laughing? Outraged? Most often, we just don’t know.

But today’s Gospel has long been seen as a clear example of Jesus’ anger and indignation boiling over. For centuries, people have imagined him striding into the outer court of the Temple, disciples in tow, spoiling for a fight. As he had suspected, he finds not a serene and holy gathering of God’s people making their way into the inner courts to offer their yearly Passover sacrifices, but a wholly tangled mess – animal-sellers hawking their wares, the incessant buzzing of bargaining in the air, queues of anxious pilgrims all knotted up in a jumble by the trade tables where corrupt moneychangers sit at tables, inscrutable and hidden by piles of coins – and always the braying and bleating of cattle and sheep and doves, oh my. Faced with this frenetic scene, Jesus stands alone with clenched fists, furious to see this Saturday-at-the-Philadelphia-Flower-Show, Target-on-Black-Friday, McGillan’s-on-Saint-Patrick’s-Day kind of mob scene in this most sacred place. And so he grabs a whip and goes nuts – flailing the animals and the animal sellers alike, kicking over tables, hurling fistfuls of coins into the air, spinning and shoving until finally he stands alone in the middle of the court, his whip dangling at his side, panting and covered in sweat and dust and pigeon feathers.

And this is a completely fair picture of what this scene may have looked like. I have no doubt that Jesus experienced anger, and this moment known as the “Scourging of the Temple” may be the best example we have of Jesus’ letting loose some of his long pent-up frustration. But without that long stream of repetitive adverbs, is it possible that there is another way to look at this story?

The Scourging of the Temple is one of really only three stories that appear in all four Gospels. But John, as is John’s wont, treats this story very differently than Matthew, Mark, and Luke. First of all, in John’s Gospel, this story takes place right at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. There is no long build-up to this event in John, so there is no sense of stifled frustration with the religious authorities after a Gospel’s-worth of confrontations and arguments. Secondly, it is only in John’s Gospel, in fact, that Jesus uses a whip. But notice what the text says here, “Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle.” This was no handy whip that Jesus seized on an impulse; this was a whip that Jesus made himself, wove together out of reeds or grass, to help him get the animals up and out of the court. And finally, we can see that Jesus’ core complaint is different in John’s Gospel. In the synoptic Gospels, Jesus is full of righteous indignation. He accuses the moneychangers of corruption, of cheating the pilgrims who needed to trade their Roman coins for temple shekels, which were the only coins that could be used to pay the required temple tax. But here in John, there is no fiery accusation of robbery, only the command to stop making the house of his Father into a house of trade.

And so what if we pictured the scene this way – Jesus enters the Temple courts on Passover because he is a faithful Jew. As he ascends the Temple mount he feels at the root of his being the sympathetic vibration between his body, where the fullness of God dwells, and the innermost room in the Temple, the Holy of Holies, where the fullness of God dwells. He knows a deep consonance between the place where he stands and the body he stands in; he knows that he is the place where God’s love will be most powerfully contained. He knows what he has to offer to the world, he knows the sacrifice he will make for the people who press in all around him…and yet no one else knows it. No one else can even see him through the maze of people and sheep and never-ending queues. What to do? Clear out the court, he says. He braids a cord to help him control the animals and sends them on their way. But that doesn’t grab the attention of the people who are afraid of losing their place in line, so he knocks over the tables so that there is no longer anything to be in line for. And only then does he stand in the middle, his impromptu cattle prod hanging at his side, his face intense and earnest – stop what you are doing, he says. Look up from your queue, look at me, for I am the temple of the full, final sacrifice, I am the temple that will be raised up in three days. No queue, no buying and selling, no trading necessary here.

Seen this way, this Gospel story is not only a Scourging but also, importantly, a Cleansing. A cleansing of the Temple – a clearing of the way so that all of the people could see with unobstructed view and undistracted attention the invitation that stood before them. See me. Follow me. Jesus’ coming into Jerusalem was the coming of something new and astounding, something that required space and attention. And His coming into our lives means precisely the same thing. Former Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple put it this way: “His coming means a purge. So it is always, not less with the shrine of our hearts than with the Jewish Temple.” Jesus’ coming clears away those things that distract us, drives out those things that get in the way of our truly seeing Him, unclutters our hearts so that Christ may be enthroned there. What is it that blocks your view? Fear? Busy-ness? Over-scrupulousness or anxiety? Judgment, of others or of yourself? Are you reticent to forgive or be forgiven? Do material things get in the way of remembering that it is the Lord who is your strength and your redeemer? Do the great commandments of God seem like walls that are impossible to scale instead of hand-holds that help you love God and your neighbor? What stands between you and Christ? And are you prepared to have it cleared out? Because our Lord Jesus Christ has come, is coming, and will come again; he stands ready to cleanse you, body and soul. He stands here, at this altar, now, offering your heart a good old-fashioned spring scourging. “Take these things out of here,” he says to you, “Stop making the shrine of your heart anything less than fully my own.” What to do, what to do? Say yes, Christ says. Yes, we say, finally, humbly, thankfully.                                          

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

11 March 2012

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia

Posted on March 11, 2012 by Guest User.