Perhaps This Is the Last Temptation

Hosanna to the Son of David!
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!
Blessed is the coming of the kingdom of our ancestor David!
Hosanna in the highest heaven!

To the joyful shouts of the crowd, Jesus riding on a colt entered Jerusalem, the royal city of David. People spread their garments and tree branches before him as a sign of royal welcome. He is the messiah and the king whose coming the ancient prophets prophesied and for whom they have been waiting for many years of oppression under the Roman rule. This is the moment for which the disciples have been following him all along.

There is, however, something odd about the whole scene. Jesus is riding on a colt or on a donkey in other gospels, an animal not fit for a king. Ordinarily for a regal entrance a king would be riding on a majestic and beautifully clothed stallion, a symbol of military power and victory. This is to fulfill the prophecy of Zechariah who prophesied: “Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion! Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey” (9:9). Donkey is a symbol of humility and peace.

This is a rather bizarre scene to imagine—Jesus riding on a colt and people shouting hosannas and laying down their garments and tree branches. But, therein is the irony and the paradox of this whole scene.

Lo and behold, his triumphal entry into Jerusalem is soon turned into a horrific journey of suffering to Calvary. The crowd’s joyful shouts of hosanna are changed to the violent cacophony of “Crucify him, crucify him.” The tree branches strewn on the road to welcome the Son of David is replaced by a humiliating crown of thorns over his head and a naked wood of the cross over his shoulder. Jesus is not the kind of the earthly messiah and king they have been expecting. How quickly things change!

Perhaps this IS the last temptation for Jesus. For anyone else, such a royal welcome would have been a huge ego booster. You can imagine what it might be like. Just as you are entering a ballroom a huge crowd of people cheering you on and giving you a red carpet welcome, like at the Oscars, what an ego-booster it would be!

All Jesus had to do was to give a go to his disciples and the revolt would have been quickly organized. Perhaps the disciples were already planning a rebellion against the Roman authority. Remember later on when they came to arrest Jesus, one of the disciples drew a sword and cut off the ear of one of the soldiers. This says that some of Jesus’ disciples were armed and ready for a fight when they gathered at Gethsemane. Perhaps they thought it was a secret meeting by night to plan the long-awaited revolt against the Romans.

But to their disappointment Jesus would have none of such violence. He stopped the violent intentions of his disciples and allowed himself to be arrested. No wonder they all immediately fled and deserted him. And no wonder the crowd’s cheers of hosannas turned into the cries for his crucifixion. They were not merely disappointed but were perhaps even angry with Jesus, for he failed their expectation. He was no messiah they had been waiting for.

So, what did they do? They put him on trial. What is so incredulous in this story is that human beings put God on trial. But then, we too often try God for things that inconvenience us and for things that are beyond our understanding and power. How often have you blamed God for things gone wrong in your life? Yet, what human beings muck up so terribly is transformed into the greatest gift of all by the sheer grace and love of God. That is the point of the Passion story—the power of God’s grace to redeem even the worst possible situation. Haven’t you had experiences where you made a mistake or did something wrong but then realized in hindsight that was precisely the moment and the occasion when God’s grace broke in and redeemed the situation? Things could not get worse for Jesus in this story. But also this is more importantly the story of God’s grace and love.

Yesterday my wife Clara and I joined the March for Our Lives at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Park. In witness to the students who were killed by gun violence in Parkland FL and in witness to the thousands of children who have been killed by guns since Sandy Hook, March for Our Lives took place in many cities around the nation and around the world. This is a movement begun and organized by the youth of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School and the youth of our nation. They are crying out for their lives. They are crying out enough is enough. They are crying out for sensible gun control policy that honors the dignity and sacredness of life. We must listen to their cries unless we have lost our soul. Has America lost its soul? Where is our passion for love, justice and mercy? A passion for simply to do the right thing? The tragic deaths of thousands of children due to our failure to pass common sense gun control policy has ignited a passion in our youth to stand up for moral and spiritual justice. What I saw yesterday in the streets of Philadelphia is nothing short of the Passion for life. The death of seventeen students in Parkland FL could not get worse. But, this has become the occasion for the movement of redemption for life.

The Passion of our Lord Jesus is also all about passion for life, the holiness of  life God has given to each and everyone of us. This is a story about the Son of God who is loving, liberating and life-giving. It is the greatest and the ultimate story of love. “God so loved the world he gave his only Son even to death on the cross so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.” I know of no other religion that teaches that God laid down his own life so that we may have life.

The Father pours out his love on to the Son and  the Son, in turn, empties himself to the Father on the cross. This is the act of perfect selfless love. This is the story of perfect mutual love of Jesus the Son of God and God the Father. It is by this love that we are saved. It is by this love that the world will know that we are the followers of Jesus. There is no love story quite like it, friends. This is the greatest love story of all.

Love conquers all; love forgives all; Love suffers for all; Love triumphs over all evil. This is the Good News we believe in and proclaim to the world. Friends, we are in possession of the greatest love story of all.  Yet, we are timid and shy to tell this story. We are afraid to live and proclaim this great story. The world is hungry and thirsty to hear and know this powerful story. Today we begin retelling and living this story.

For Christians there is nothing holier than the Paschal mystery revealed in the Passion of Christ. The suffering of this innocent victim does not end in utter despair. It had the greater purpose of revealing the power of love.

Jesus gave it all for you and for me so that we may have new and eternal life. How much do you love Jesus in return? How far are you willing to go for Jesus? How much are you willing to give for his love? He gave it all for you and for me.

Preached by Bishop Allen Shin

25 March 2018

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Event Horizon

The death last week of Stephen Hawking has put me in mind of theoretical physics, and in particular of black holes - those phenomena of space and time on which so much of Hawking’s work focused.  For my purposes, I’ll just describe a black hole as a region of space and time with a gravitational pull so powerful that nothing can escape it.  Being more a man of letters than of numbers, I have a tendency to consider this as-yet-directly-unobserved phenomenon for its metaphorical possibility, rather than its scientific specificity, which is probably a disservice to the great physicist (or any physicist), for which I apologize in advance.  But chalk it up to the sheer force of Hawking’s influence in the contemporary, mainstream imagination, that the urge to enlist this avowed atheist in the enterprise of preaching the Gospel feels like, well, a gravitational pull so strong I can’t escape it.

I have no business talking about theoretical physics, in which I can’t even be called a dabbler.  But the more I have read about and by Stephen Hawking these past days, the more it has seemed to me that, although he was not himself a believer, his avenue of inquiry and his discoveries are in no way at odds with the avenues of inquiry and discoveries of faith.  And if scientific observations translate well into theological metaphor, mightn’t they shed light all the same?  Can’t science articulate more than one true thing at a time?

I hear Jesus say, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”  And can’t I be forgiven for hearing so clear an echo of that description of a black hole: a region of space and time with a gravitational pull so powerful that nothing can escape it?  And doesn’t it sound almost as if Jesus has something like this in mind, too?

How can I ignore it when I read that “when very massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle... [and] a black hole has formed, it can continue to grow by absorbing mass from its surroundings”? (Wikipedia entry on “black holes”)  This doesn’t sound to me like a process unrelated to the mind of God.  Especially when it would nearly suffice as a description of the church, and when it seems entirely congruent with the unusual claim that Jesus made as he anticipated his death on the Cross: “I, when I am lifted up from the earth will draw all people to myself.”

It requires a shift, of course, for us to think of this inevitable gravitational pull as a positive force, and not simply a journey down the drain.  But Hawking, himself, is responsible for supplying us with this shift in thinking, since it was his research that showed that black holes were not merely sucking everything into them with irresistible force, they were also “leaking radiation and particles” and could eventually explode “transform[ing] them from destroyers to creators....” (NY Times, “Stephen Hawking Dies at 76, March 14, 2018, by Dennis Overbye)

“Hawking radiation,” if I have this right, is the stuff that comes out of a black hole - that is, it’s the stuff that escapes from the space and time from which nothing could escape.  That sounds a bit like resurrection to me.

To the popular mind, a black hole, of course signifies the inevitability of death, in some real sense.  The Times obituary of Hawking calls black holes “those mythological avatars of cosmic doom.”  I suppose that in many ways the site of a Roman crucifixion was meant to serve as an avatar of cosmic doom - or at least we may see it that way with hindsight.  Put three crosses on a hill and you could have a symbol for something like that.  Who would approach such a thing, knowing that the Cross - that symbol of the empire’s ability to to put you to a painful and tragic death - leads only and inevitably to doom?  But the story we begin to unfold every year at this time, includes this strange prescription of Jesus that “I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”  St. John makes it clear that it is the Cross that Jesus is referring to, telling us that “he said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.”

And isn’t resurrection what happens when life escapes, so to speak, from death, that space and time from which nothing can escape?  And isn’t Jesus the pioneer of resurrection?  And don’t you hear him saying, only days before he is nailed to his Cross, not to be afraid, though he knows it is is frightening to be so close to death, so close to what the physicists call the “event horizon,” which is this point of no return at the edge of a black hole, from which no escape is possible. (Wikipedia entry on “event horizon”)

You get the sense, listening to Jesus today that he is in sight of the event horizon of his Crucifixion, on the threshold of a cosmic ministry that is new to him, although he came to us from eternity.  You get the sense that he knows that he is nearing the event horizon, and that although this is frightening to everyone involved, still, it must be encountered.  You can almost hear him steeling himself, and us, for the passage that is to come, which no one has ever made before, and which no one will ever have to make again.  And you can hear him reassure us that although the path looks frightening, we can trust him.

Remember that nothing should be able to escape the gravitational pull of a black hole - certainly no light.  And yet, the wonder of the cosmos is that something does emerge from its irresistible pull.  This doesn’t mean that you want to go sailing around the edges of a black hole to enjoy the view.  But it does mean that even the most powerful forces of the universe are more complex than we had imagined, and in a way, knowing this changes everything.  It certainly changes what we might be afraid of.  And nothing and no one is supposed to escape the inevitability of death.  But Jesus is the One who crossed over the event horizon into that inevitability, and then emerged from it again.

In the church’s terms, you might say that next Sunday, Palm Sunday, is, in a sense, the event horizon of the Christian story - the point of no return from which no escape is possible - at least for Jesus.  Only Jesus crosses over into the black hole of death in order to lead the way back out of it by the power of his resurrection.  He is the original Hawking radiation, so to speak, the One who escapes from a black hole.  That is, he is the One who rises from the space and time from which nothing can arise.  The good news for us is that he does it for us all, since all of us face the same event horizon of death, fearing that its inescapable darkness is all that lies before us.

And I think that he may be telling us with these strange prophetic words - “I, when I am lifted up from the earth will draw all people to myself,” - that from the Cross, where he himself meets death, he can assure us that he will be there at the event horizon of our own deaths, to hold us, and to carry us, to cross over, and eventually, to rise!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

18 March 2018

Saint Mark’s Church Philadelphia

Once Bitten, Still Saved

I have a friend, an older priest mentor, who has the most remarkable baptism story I have ever heard. It begins with my friend – let’s say his name is Alex – as an 8-year-old boy, sitting around a dinner table with his large extended family – aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins – talking about baptisms. The tradition in his family was to name sons after a family member, and then for that family member to serve as the boy’s godfather. So at this family gathering, godfathers were telling tales about the baptisms of their godsons – who had cried the loudest and who had been too fat to fit into the family baptismal gown. Alex, the youngest, sat there waiting for his turn, and sure enough, eventually someone turned to Alex’s uncle, also named Alex, and asked, What about little Alex’s baptism?  

At this point, Alex recounts, his mother made a slightly strangled noise, and when he looked up, he saw that her face was entirely drained of color. Alex looked over at Uncle Alex and saw that his mouth was hanging open in shock. Oh, no, Alex’s mother said and looked down at him with eyes full of tears. It turned out that in the chaos of raising a house full of boys, Alex’s mother had simply forgotten to get her youngest son baptized. She’d thought that she had, but when she was forced to reach back for memories of the moment, she realized that the moment had, in fact, never happened.

The story gets a little fuzzy for me here; I remember that Alex’s mother was so upset that she would have whisked him out the door that instant and thrown him in the nearest baptismal font, but the family, I think, was away on vacation at the time. They found the local Episcopal church and were somehow able to schedule a baptism for the next Sunday. When the whole family arrived at the little country church, Alex, who had never been to a baptism before and who knew only that they happened at the font, stepped into the church, saw the font, and immediately walked over to it and stood there, waiting. It wasn’t until the liturgy was well underway that his family realized that the baptisand was missing. Someone spotted him standing alone and confused over by the font and went to retrieve him. And later, much to his mother’s relief, Alex was finally baptized.

Believe it or not, this is where the story really gets interesting. As the family left the church, Alex, buzzing with excitement, ran ahead, following a path that lay next to a small stream. As he was running, he suddenly saw a flash of brown slice through the grass at his feet. He looked down and saw a long copperhead snake rear up and bury its fangs into his calf. Alex screamed in shock and pain; within seconds, Uncle Alex, newly-minted godfather, had beaten the snake away and was sucking the venom out of Alex’s little leg. He was treated successfully and ended up just fine – bitten, but still saved, now in more ways than one. Like I said, a remarkable story.

When the people of God are bitten by poisonous serpents in the story we heard today in the book of Numbers, there is no one to beat the snakes away with a stick, no one to bind their wounds and carry them to safety. The people die, lost in the wilderness, far away from the Land of Promise. But for them, this is really nothing new. The people of God have been dying in the wilderness for a long time. It feels like a thousand years since they walked through the waters of the Red Sea and danced to Miriam’s song on the other side. They’ve been on this journey forever, and along the way they’ve actually been bitten many, many times. They’ve been bitten by the fear of scarcity or of violence. They’ve been bitten by boredom and frustration, and by the sharp sting of doubt. “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?” they whine again, as the fangs of their mistrust sink deeper into their faith. The people of God have been bitten over and over again; the snakes of today’s lesson are in many ways just one more bite to be endured.

The miracle of the wilderness is not that the people never get bitten. The miracle of the wilderness is that every time they do, they feel something stir deep in their memories. Every time some fear or doubt or lack lashes out at their heels, the people find themselves reaching back for the Red Sea – recalling the moment of walking on dry ground as the water stood up like walls beside them, of finding themselves saved on the other side, reborn, blessed and free. And as their minds turn back to the memory of this moment, they find that their hearts, too, have turned back to the God who made this moment possible in the first place. They repent, beg for strength and mercy, pray that the Lord their God will save them once again. And the Lord always does. This time, the Lord tells Moses to mount a serpent of bronze on a pole so that every time the people find the burning snakes snapping at their heels, they can look up at this sign, lifted up on high, and live. God saves them from snakes with a snake, the exact image of that which threatens them, to show them that even the thing they fear the most can be, in his hands, a sign of life.

My friends, there is nothing to prevent us from being bitten. There is no magic potion, no perfect prayer; there is no law, no wall, no weapon, no amount of money that will keep these snakes away. Nothing can prevent us from being bitten by serpents of a thousand different stripes – the serpents of fear, anxiety, and want; the serpents of loss, grief, and loneliness; serpents that slither in because our sin has taken us far off the path of righteousness and serpents that show up for no reason at all; serpents of illness, pain, and death. Not even our baptisms can keep the snakes at bay – again and again they come slicing through the grass, surprising us, rearing up and lunging at us with fangs bared and full of venom.  

The miracle of our faith is not that we never get bitten. The miracle of our faith is that whenever we do, God is there to stir a memory deep in our hearts. God is there to help stretch our minds back to the stories of our baptisms, stories we remember because we were there, or because of others who have told us, or because of the long, long memory of the Church. God is there to help us recall the promise of that holy sacrament – that the waters of the font are his gift to us, that in these waters we are buried with Christ in his death, and that as we come up out of those waters we are reborn by the Holy Spirit, saved, blessed, and free. Each time we turn back to these stories of our baptisms, we find our hearts, too, turning back to the God who made these stories possible in the first place, turning back to him with love and with repentance, praying that he will save us, once again.

And God always does; God always already has. God has already saved us, once for all, by giving us his Son, lifted high upon the cross, so that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. God has already saved us from death by death, even death on a cross, to show us that even the thing we most fear can be in God’s hands a sign of life – that the cross, which reeks of shame and suffering and oblivion, can be in God’s hands a place of glory, a sign and source of our salvation. God’s Son is lifted up on high so that even as we find the snakes of suffering snapping at our heels, we may look up and live. And yes, those serpents can cause real pain; they can test our faith and try our endurance. But the sign of the cross means that their venom is of limited potency; their bite can only burn for so long. More than this, the wounds they inflict can themselves be transformed by God’s grace into places of strength and healing, of repentance and mercy and grace. Yes, we are bitten, but by the power of the cross we are still saved.

So if you find yourself being bitten – when you find yourself being bitten – take heart. You are in good company. Not just the company of fellow travelers along this particular journey, but all the company of heaven – this great extended family that stretches around the world and back through the centuries, this gathering of friends and neighbors, sisters and brothers, all connected by the great story of our baptism. For in this story, we are not forgotten, but claimed, called, chosen as God’s own sons and daughters. In this story, the snakes of the world fall away to dust and all that remains is mercy and light, love and life. In this story, God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whosoever believes his story may not perish but may have eternal life. Look up. Look up at this story, your story, and live.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

The Fourth Sunday of Lent, 11 March 2018

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia