The Risen Jesus Gives Us Everything We Need

 

April 9, 2023 – The Sunday of the Resurrection: Easter Day, Year A

Acts 10:34-43; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-18

© 2023 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon is available here. Video of the entire service is available here with the sermon beginning around 22:50.

I want to tell you something that I have kept quiet for a long time—something that will probably embarrass my children: I am a fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Now, I will admit that these days, when I watch reruns of the show, they don’t always hold up. Sometimes they’re too cheesy even for me. But I grew up loving nothing more than spending Monday nights on the couch with my father watching the crew of the Enterprise explore the galaxy in every new episode. 

On Monday night, March 26, 1990, the episode “Allegiance” debuted. In the first scene, Captain Piccard is kidnapped from his quarters, and an imposter takes his place. The real Piccard wakes up in a holding cell alongside a handful of other prisoners. As the episode progresses, the audience watches as the group of prisoners—each representing a different alien species—encounters one problem after another. One of them, a naturally aggressive species, is unable to eat the food that is provided by their captors. Another, belonging to a race of avowed pacifists, begins to think that he might be killed for food. Some in the group want to try to escape, while others refuse to cooperate. In one scenario after another, Piccard and his fellow captives get tantalizingly close to opening their cell door only to discover another barrier they have to get past.

Eventually, Piccard realizes that it’s all a game—that there’s no way to escape. Their captors have brought them there to test them—to observe how different species will handle one agonizing setback after another. Once he recognizes that they’re just rats in a maze, he refuses to participate, and the alien species conducting the research returns him to his vessel. 

I first saw that episode when I was nine years old. A rerun came on a few months ago, and I found myself appreciating it in a whole new way. Now, as a parent, priest, and spouse, I often feel like I’m in the midst of a sociological experiment, being tested to see how I will approach an unsolvable situation. Do you ever feel like that? Do you ever feel like life is just one big game in which you don’t quite have what you need in order to succeed? If you just had a little bit more time or a little bit more money, you could really get ahead. If you were just a little bit faster, a little bit smarter, a little bit luckier, then things would really start to go your way.

Sometimes life feels like one unsolvable problem after another. And religion, with its unrelenting invitation to be better, to try harder, to become holier has the power to make things even worse. On Easter Day, however, we gather together to hear the good news that, because Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead, there is no situation in front of us that God has not already solved, and, whenever we encounter one, we know that we have already been given everything we need.

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and found that the stone had been rolled away. She didn’t bother to look inside or check around the tomb. Instead, she turned and ran, certain that Jesus’ body had been stolen from its resting place. Peter and the other disciple raced to the tomb to see it for themselves. When they got there, they looked inside and explored every inch and found only the linen grave cloths lying on the ground. They knew that the tomb was empty, but still they did not understand that Jesus had been raised from the dead. So they returned home. 

Mary stayed there weeping, overcome with sorrow that not only had Jesus been killed but now his body had been stolen away, leaving her with grief piled upon grief. Even when Jesus came and spoke to her, she thought he was the gardener until he said her name. For us, it’s hard to appreciate just how impossible it was to understand what had happened. Before we came to church this morning, with the benefit of two thousand years of received testimony, we knew that Jesus had been raised, just as he had promised. But there was nothing that Mary and the disciples could do to put the pieces together on their own. Not even the empty tomb and the linen wrappings left behind were enough for Jesus’ closest friends to see and believe that he was alive—that he had triumphed over death exactly as he had told them he would.

The gap between us and what we need to solve all our problems might only be as thin as a strand of human hair, but, when it comes to fixing what is broken in our lives, it might as well be an infinite chasm that none of us can cross. Yet standing on the other side of that chasm is the risen Jesus, who sees us and calls out our name: “Mary!” As soon as she heard Jesus speak her name, Mary’s doubt and confusion, her grief and disbelief, evaporated. She had seen the Lord! And the risen Christ then sent her on to carry the good news of the resurrection to his disciples in order that their work of sharing that same good news might begin. All that was missing—everything that they needed, everything that hadn’t made sense—suddenly came clear. They couldn’t find it on their own, even when it was right in front of them, but when the risen Lord came and found them, he gave them everything they needed.

Our job isn’t to figure it all out on our own. Our job is simply to meet the risen Lord. In the decades that followed that Easter Day, the apostles didn’t travel around the Mediterranean teaching people that they should love their neighbors as themselves, giving them more impossible work to do. The world didn’t need Jesus to teach them that. That is a truth as ancient as civilization itself. Instead, the apostles took with them the good news that Jesus Christ had been raised from the dead. It is Christ’s victory over death that makes loving our neighbors the way God calls us to love them possible. It is the risen Christ who gives the world everything it needs to make God’s loving reign a reality.

I know that love is the answer. I know that selfless, sacrificial love is what it takes for the world to become the place of God’s dreams. I know that love is how poverty and hunger are put to death. Love is how violence and greed are finally defeated. Love is how hatred and bigotry and jealousy are wiped off the face of the earth. Love is how I become a better parent, a better priest, and a better spouse. But I also know that there is nothing I can do to solve those problems on my own. None of us can. Like rats in a maze, just when we think we’re getting ahead, human nature pops up again, and we’re back where we started. If it were up to us, we’d be doomed from the start. But the good news of Easter is that it isn’t up to us at all.

I don’t come to church because I want to be a better person, and I don’t raise my children in the faith because I hope that they will learn how to treat other people with respect. We come to church because this is the place where we proclaim that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. This is the place where death becomes life, where loss becomes gain, where love triumphs over all. And that alone has the power to change our lives. We are here to meet the one whom God raised from the dead. We are here to hear him speak our names. We are here to partake in his body and blood. We are here to see that God has already defeated everything that stands in the way of love taking charge in the world. We are here to let the risen Christ show us that he has already given us everything we need.

All We Can Do Is Pray

 

April 7, 2023 – Good Friday

Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Hebrews 10:16-25; John 18:1-19:42

© 2023 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon will be available soon. Video of the service can be seen here with the sermon beginning around 28:45.

In John’s gospel account, after telling his disciples that one of them would betray him and announcing that he would be taken from them, Jesus prays. In a red-letter edition of the Bible, except for words that introduce his prayer, all of John 17 is red. In that high-priestly prayer, Jesus prays for his disciples—that they would be protected and that they would be one. He prays for those throughout the world who will come to know God’s love because of the work that those disciples will carry out. And he prays that the glory of God will be revealed in what awaits him and that eternal life will be given to all who see and believe.

After that, John tells us, Jesus and his disciples set off across the Kidron valley to a place where there was a garden—a place that they knew well. John doesn’t tell us why the disciples met there frequently, but the synoptic tradition, which is reflected in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, helps us know that the garden was for them a place of prayer. In those accounts, instead of praying in the upper room before setting out, Jesus and the disciples go to the garden to pray. You might remember that, according to that tradition, each time Jesus comes and finds the disciples sleeping, he exhorts them to stay awake and pray so that they will have the strength to meet the days ahead of them. In the end, though, the outcome is the same, and we inevitably come to the arrest, torture, and death of our Lord supported only by prayer.

It turns out that the only thing we can do in the shadow of the cross is pray. Over the centuries, the church has struggled to figure out what sort of liturgical response is appropriate for Good Friday. In part, that struggle has arisen from a clear conviction in the western church that the Eucharist should not be celebrated on this day. Although the Divine Office of the eastern church has always been a part of their Good Friday observances, in the west, we have traditionally looked for other ways to remember Jesus’ death on the day when Jesus died on the cross.

In Jerusalem, as early as the fourth century, the faithful processed from the Garden of Gethsemane, where they had prayed through the night, into the city just as dawn was breaking. They read the story of Jesus’ trial at the governor’s headquarters. They stopped to pray at the column where Jesus had been scourged. After a break to return to their homes and rest for a while, they came to the church that had been built at Golgotha. There the relic of the true cross was laid upon the altar, and the people walked past it, kissing it or touching it with their hands or their foreheads. From noon until three o’clock in the afternoon, they stood in the courtyard outside the church and listened as all of the Old Testament prophecies and New Testament passages that alluded to Christ’s passion were read, stopping to pray in between each reading. Then, at three o’clock, the passion according to John was proclaimed, and shortly thereafter the service ended. 

Christians in communities and churches away from the holy city, unable to walk the Via Dolorosa themselves, developed their own ways of commemorating Jesus’ death. Over the centuries, as fragments of the true cross were distributed throughout the world, similar acts of devotion—kissing and touching and reverencing those fragments—became common. Eventually, even in places where no relic of the cross was kept, the faithful drew near to a substitute cross, offering their silent prayers of adoration to the instrument upon which salvation was wrought. But, long before the creeping to the cross became common practice, the act of hearing the story of Jesus’ death and responding in prayer was central to the church’s Good Friday worship.

In our service today, our focus remains on hearing the passion and responding in prayer. In our Good Friday liturgy, the Solemn Collects are the defining element of our worship. Once we have beheld the death of Jesus, we kneel together to pray for ourselves and for the whole world. Scholars believe that this particular form of prayer may have been composed as early as the second century, and they note that the biddings or calls to prayer, which the deacon will read, likely were written before the collects themselves. That suggests that, even before the church had decided what words to say in prayer, God’s people felt a clear and undeniable urge to pray after they had seen the cross of Christ.

Today, the only thing we know how to do is to pray. In the silence that follows each bidding, we will pray first for the church, then for the nations of the world, then for all who suffer, then for those who do not yet know the love of God, and finally for ourselves. The collects that follow each silence are designed to bring together our unspoken prayers and longings in a unified expression. In each case, because we have seen what is offered and accomplished on the cross, we bring to God in prayer the brokenness of the world and of our lives, asking God to draw into the divine life all that is in need of redemption and restoration. In the cross, we have seen God’s love poured out for the sake of the world. In faith we recognize that all our hopes must find their fulfillment there. 

On this day, there is nothing for us to produce or accomplish. All we can do is watch and pray. To see Christ die upon the cross—to hear him say, “It is finished,” and to watch him breathe his last—is to encounter more than a miscarriage of justice. Good Friday is not an inspirational moment, born of a tragedy, that demands from us a bold and decisive response. It is, in and of itself, the perfect and complete satisfaction of all that is amiss in the world. It is the means by which God reconciles and restores us to union with God and each other. The only possible response to what God has done is for us to enter into it through prayer.

Today, I urge you to bring the deepest needs of your life and of the world into the cross through prayer. Let your prayers be the channel through which everything around you that is broken comes into contact with God’s perfect love. Bring your doubts. Bring your sorrows. Bring your hardships into the cross in prayer. Bring your family. Bring this community. Bring this broken world into the cross in prayer. Bring everything that is affected by greed and violence and hatred and sin into the cross in prayer. See again what God has done, and use your prayers to enfold into Christ’s outstretched arms all that is in need of repair. Start with yourself. Feel that embrace. Allow your prayers to carry with you the burdens of your heart. Believe again that God’s love has no limits, and let that love draw you into the cross of Christ through prayer.

We Wash Because We Know

 

April 6, 2023 – Maundy Thursday

Exodus 12:1-14a; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26; John 13:1-17; 31b-35 

© 2023 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video of the service can be seen here with the sermon beginning around 22:00.

I don’t mind washing someone else’s feet. I wouldn’t want to do it all day long, and there are some feet I’d rather not touch, but, in a highly symbolic setting like this one, in which the washing of feet is more of a liturgical gesture than an ablutionary act, it doesn’t bother me to pour water over someone’s feet, rub them tenderly with my hands, and then dry them carefully with a towel. It’s letting one of you wash my feet that’s the problem.

I’m guessing that the discomfort to which Peter gives voice is one that many of us feel: “You will never wash my feet.” There’s something about just sitting there passively, not doing anything to help out, and letting someone we know—a friend, a mentor, a parishioner, a priest—wash that part of our body which we likely do the least to take care of that makes us highly uncomfortable. 

 In the ancient world, there were servants for that. Or, in a modest home, the host would provide the necessary equipment for you to do it yourself. But the one who welcomed you to their table would never greet you at the door and then take off your sandals and start washing your feet. It’s the reversal of roles that makes us feel the way that Peter did. We can go to the nail salon and give our feet to someone who does it for a living, but, when the person we’re prepared to dine with is also the one who washes our feet, we don’t know what to do. It’s easier when you can throw a tip at it and keep it professional.

But, for Jesus, this was more than a symbolic gesture or a provocative act. It was a deep reflection of his identity and the identity into which he calls each one of us. Washing someone else’s feet and letting them wash ours, too, is about knowing who we are and the one to whom we belong.

Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father…During supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself…You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand…Do you know what I have done to you?…If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them…By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

This whole passage is about knowing and serving. Jesus knew that he belonged to God, that he had come from God, and that he was going to God, so he got up from the table and tied a towel around his waist and began to wash each of the disciples’ feet. John the evangelist wants us to recognize that it is because Jesus knew who he was that he stooped down to wash the disciples’ feet. But wouldn’t we expect someone who knows that they belong to God the way that Jesus does—someone who knows that he is even God among us—to sit back and wait on others to come and wash his feet? 

Instead, Jesus shows us that the more fully one belongs to God the more completely one must empty oneself out in the service of others. Traditionally, we might use the phrase, “Know your place,” to remind someone that we think they belong beneath us—that they shouldn’t stray above their appointed station—but Jesus shows us that true knowledge of our place in the economy of God, as beloved participants in the divine life, compels us to get down on the floor and wash one another’s feet. That isn’t because we are worthless to God but because what it means to be precious in God’s sight is to love others in humble service. 

Our God is the one who becomes a servant for the sake of the world. Our God is the one who loves the world by pouring Godself out in a complete and total self-offering. If that is true about our God, then it must become true about us as well. We do not wash each other’s feet because we are the least in the household of God. We do so because Jesus Christ has made us one with God and one with each other. And, as uncomfortable as it makes us, it also means that those who would serve us in Jesus’ name do so not in a socially threatening reversal of roles but as an expression of their own self-understanding as those who belong to God. So we must let them wash our feet, too.

We cannot become our truest selves until we learn that, at our core, we are servants of one another. And we stand in the way of other people becoming their truest, fullest selves when we refuse to allow them to love us back in that same way. These days, even in the fanciest houses, there is no one waiting at the door to wash your feet when you arrive. But this strange act of service, which we offer tonight, is a way to offer ourselves back into the service of God by recommitting ourselves to serving one another in God’s name. 

When we wash another’s feet and allow someone else to wash ours, we get a glimpse into the divine nature and see again that together we belong to a loving, serving, self-giving God. This is who we are because this is who God is, and tonight—together—we come to know that more fully.

Death Is Not Natural

 

March 26, 2023 – The Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year A

Ezekiel 37:1-14; Romans 8:6-11; John 11:1-45

© 2023 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video of the entire service can be seen here with the sermon beginning around 24:50.

Barbara and Earl Pettey didn’t stand a chance. But, before I tell you why, let me ask you to play a little game with me. Take a look at the people on your pew and the pews around yours. Look around, and, in your mind, get a group of about a dozen people together. Got that group together in your mind? Now imagine that you are on a plane with those people and that that plane makes an emergency landing in the middle of the ocean. You scramble into a life raft before the plane sinks out of sight, and that group of people sitting around you is the group of people with you in the life raft. With me so far?

Before long, it becomes clear to you and everyone else in your raft that the raft isn’t big enough for all of you. You’ve begun taking on water, and the raft is sinking fast. Someone has to go. In fact, a quick assessment of the situation produces the incontrovertible fact that two people need to be thrown overboard or else the raft will sink and everyone will perish. For the purposes of this exercise—not unlike the movie Titanic—it is pointless to ask whether you could take turns in the raft or whether there is some way to shift people around or bail water quickly enough to avoid the necessity of sending two people to their deaths. Just accept the limits of the exercise and ask yourself who are your throwing overboard? Which two people in the pews around you would you vote off your bright yellow floating island? And why?

I asked a similar question to a group of people at a Theology on Tap gathering back in Decatur, Alabama. We met every week in a local restaurant for some theological conversation, and that question proved to be one of the more effective conversation starters. In the end, Earl and Barbara were voted off the raft unanimously. Both were in their eighties and by far the oldest people in the group. She was a violist, and he played the trombone, but both had retired a long time ago. Their children were all independent and healthy, and both the Petteys and the people around them felt that, if anyone needed to go into the drink, it should be they. 

Did you come to a similar conclusion? Do you share that instinctive belief that older people’s lives are less important to preserve—less valuable—than those of younger people? Don’t we feel a greater sense of tragedy when a teenager dies than when an octogenarian passes on? What if I told you that the only reason we feel that way is because we have been fooled into thinking that death is a natural consequence of life? What if I told you that our faith actually teaches the opposite and that, in today’s gospel lesson, Jesus challenges the assumption that death is an unavoidable reality?

To get there, we have to hear this story as more than a miraculous resuscitation. We need to recognize the role it plays in the gospel writer’s deepening portrayal of Jesus as the Son of God. Since the second chapter of his gospel account, in one miraculous sign after another, John has been building the case for Jesus’ divinity. Last Sunday, we heard the story of Jesus healing a man who had been born blind. At one point, the once-blind man described the unparalleled nature of what Jesus had done, saying, “Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If [Jesus] were not from God, he could do nothing.”

By the time we get to today’s story, just two chapters later, it seems that Jesus’ reputation as a one-of-a-kind miracle worker has become well known. Did you notice how both of Lazarus’ sisters—first Martha and then Mary—said to Jesus, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died?” Both understood that, had he arrived in time, Jesus would have been able to keep their brother alive. Later on, while Jesus wept outside Lazarus’ tomb, some of those in the crowd looked on and asked, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” The point John seems to be making is that someone who had the power to give sight to a man born blind surely would have been able to heal his sick friend if only he had gotten there a little earlier. But Jesus didn’t want to.

When Jesus heard that his friend Lazarus was deathly ill, instead of dropping everything and rushing to his bedside, he said, “This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” Accordingly, John tells us, even though Jesus loved Lazarus and his sisters, he decided to stay where he was for two more days—long enough for Lazarus to die. Why did he linger and only head to Bethany after it was too late? Because with Jesus it is never too late. Because John wants us to know that Jesus is more than a miraculous healer. John wants us to believe that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world, and that he is even the Lord over life and death.

No one has the power to bring someone back from the four-days dead besides God. There is no spell, no incantation, no prayer that would work. Not even a once-in-a-millennium miracle worker could do such a thing. Only the one who has ultimate power over the universe and everything in it could call Lazarus out of the tomb, and that’s exactly what Jesus did. And that changes everything.

Most of us can muster enough faith to believe that, after we die, something good will be waiting for us. Although we don’t really know what it means, we maintain that generic, amorphous hope that we will go to heaven when we die. But how many of us have enough faith to recognize that Jesus’ victory over death is not just a bit of good news that waits for us on the other side of the grave but an earth-shattering, nature-redefining truth that reorients everything we know about this life and what awaits us? 

Jesus’ power over death reminds us that God did not create us out of the dust of the earth and breathe into our nostrils the breath of life only to allow that breath to leave us when we are too old for this world. God did not establish an endless cycle of birth and life and death as the foundation upon which the universe is built. Death is not the natural consequence of the life God breathed into creation but a tragic consequence of the brokenness of creation that Jesus came to restore. He is more than the means by which we cheat death or escape its effect. He is the one through whom death itself has been put to death.

If you’re having a hard time figuring out how Jesus’ victory over death is real and complete even though the people we love still die, you’re not alone. I want you to know that I don’t understand how it works. I don’t know how it is that this universe and all of the matter and energy within it, although governed by the laws of thermodynamics, will somehow give way to a way of being that isn’t ruled by death and decay. But I take comfort in knowing that Martha didn’t understand it either. With tears streaming down her face, she said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” Instinctively, she knew that Jesus was more than a miracle worker, but she still couldn’t quite understand the significance of the one who stood before her. 

Jesus didn’t hesitate. “I am the resurrection and the life,” he said to her. “Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” he asked, coaxing from her a faith she did not know she had. “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world,” she replied. We can believe that, too, even though we cannot see clearly what is being given to us. Martha’s faith becomes our faith as we, like her, grapple with a reality we cannot fully understand and yet, nevertheless, fully give our lives to. 

Every time someone we love dies, we experience the grief and pain that come with that loss. And so did Jesus. He wept the same tears we weep when a friend or family member dies. When death takes someone from us in an untimely fashion, we often feel anger and confusion at what should not have been. And so did Jesus. When he saw Mary crying, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved—moved to the point of trembling with indignance—at the thought that death could take his friend away. Even the one who had the power to bring Lazarus back from the dead experienced the sting of death in this life. Our grief, therefore, is not a sign of faithlessness but a mark of love. 

But, because of Jesus, we know that our grief must give way to a new hope—not because we hope that one day death will be no more but because we have already seen in Jesus Christ God’s victory over the inevitability of death. In him, even the laws of nature become subject to the law of God’s unending love.

We Must Be Born Again

 

March 5, 2023 – The Second Sunday in Lent, Year A

Genesis 12:1-4a; Romans 4:1-5, 13-17; John 3:1-17

© 2023 Evan D. Garner

Audio of the sermon is available here. Video of the service can be seen here with the sermon starting around 11:00.

Are you tired of Lent yet? My Lent Madness bracket is busted. My Lenten disciplines are hanging on by a thread. My quads and hamstrings are tight from all this kneeling. But there’s more to Lent than what we make of it. Several of you have reminded me that you don’t have to take on a penitential practice in order to experience a Lenten wilderness. For all too many of us, that desolate place of struggle comes and finds us whether we’re looking for it or not.

Several years ago, a bishop told me that he is suspicious of people who enjoy Lent. He was talking about me, of course. He had seen how much I love these forty days of self-imposed misery, and his words were offered as an important counter-balance—a reminder that my ability to choose a season of voluntary hunger and self-prescribed longing is a sign of considerable privilege. Not everyone has that choice. There is nothing holy about going to bed hungry each night if you don’t even have enough cornmeal to make one griddle cake for you and your child.

For plenty of us, there is a different nagging, crippling hunger that follows us day after day—the hunger to know that we are beloved of God. Too often religious leaders have singled us out as sinners in need of repentance—not because we carry our share of a universal brokenness that needs to be restored but because we have not lived up to their standards of holiness. You know what Jesus says to spiritual leaders who take pleasure in making us feel bad about ourselves? “Woe to you…for you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith.” Nevertheless, for those of us who have come to the Episcopal Church from other traditions that deal primarily in guilt and shame, Lent’s annual call to lament our sins and acknowledge our wretchedness—no matter how grace-filled we intend it to be—strikes at an old wound, reopening painful experiences of spiritual abuse. 

Perhaps we should skip Lent altogether and jump straight to the end. Maybe we need less wilderness and more resurrection. Someone I only know through social media shared a post that rightly criticizes the institutional, imperial church for imposing a period self-denial instead of nurturing a season of human empowerment. The author of the original post, Susan Thistlethwaite of Chicago Theological Seminary, asks, “Why isn’t Lent observed by marching into the centers of power, overturning some tables, healing people, and arguing with authorities?” The answer she identifies is Constantine, which is to say the church’s continuing love affair with power. The problem, though, is that until we examine our own love affair with power, any tables we turn over in the name of Jesus we will only reset in ways that serve our own needs and not those of God people—God’s reign on the earth.

As if he were anticipating this intrinsic problem, Jesus warns us in today’s gospel lesson, saying, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the reign of God without being born from above—without being born again.” Those might be Jesus’ words, but is there anything more thoroughly un-Episcopalian than being born again? I’d bet that we’d happily accept the Great Litany every week during Lent if it meant we could avoid talking about being born again. Even the NRSV—the translation we use here in worship—renders Jesus’ criterion for seeing and entering God’s reign not as “born again” but as “born from above.” That’s how much we’d rather avoid it. 

But it turns out that there’s a funny little word play in the Greek text that makes it seem like Jesus might be telling a joke at Nicodemus’ expense. The word in question—ἄνωθεν—means both “again” and “from above.” If you think about it, that dual meaning makes sense because starting over again is, in a way, like starting from the top. So, when Jesus tells Nicodemus that he must be born ἄνωθεν, and Nicodemus responds, “Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born [again]?” it’s possible that Jesus chuckled a little bit because this religious leader, who had come to him by night, isn’t quite picking up what Jesus is laying down. Nicodemus seems to be confusing a heavenly rebirth with a second earthly nativity.

But I’m afraid that most of us aren’t getting what Jesus means either. Despite our namesake, aren’t we here at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church somewhat skeptical of any story of radial conversion as belonging to a brand of Christianity with which we’d rather not identify? We often use the label “born-again Christian” with a derisive tone in part because those who would emphasize the need for a born-again experience usually look down on those of us who never had one as insufficiently Christian. But Jesus wasn’t speaking to evangelicals or fundamentalists when he told Nicodemus that no one can see the reign of God without being “birthed” again.[1]  He was talking to a died-in-the-wool religious elitist just like us.

We need to be birthed again, which is to say birthed from above, as much as Nicodemus. How often do we walk where he walked and ask the questions that he asked? We, too, have heard about this Jesus and the signs that he is able to do. We recognize that there must be something good and godly at work in this man. But, when it comes to showing up and taking our stand beside him, we’d rather lurk in the shadows, walking quickly in the dim light, lest someone confuse us for one of those religious zealots we like to point our fingers at. 

Nicodemus came to Jesus at night, when no one else would notice, but isn’t our equivalent Sunday-morning worship, when there is nothing out of place or unseemly about showing up in church? This is the safe time to be faithful. No one thinks twice about you walking through those doors on a Sunday morning. But what if they saw you looking for Jesus at the quorum court meeting or the booking room at the county jail or standing in the line at the polling place? What if they heard you at a rally in Little Rock or at a march in Washington? What would they think if you went all in for Jesus? What would they say if you were truly born again?

We cannot follow Jesus into the majesty of God and do so halfheartedly. And if we are going to leave behind our attachment to this world and our love affair with the power structures that are inextricably intertwined with our way of life, we must climb back into the womb of God and be born anew—born not of the flesh of our earthly parents but of the water and the Spirit of our Mother God. Jesus challenges the assumption that our primary identity comes from this world. He asks us to believe that there is nothing more fundamental to our being than our place and participation in the family of God. And he knows that we will never achieve that focus—that singularity of identity—he knows that we can never give ourselves completely to God— until we are born all over again—reborn in the waters of baptism and in the tears of repentance and restoration.

We who belong to the institutional church have a rather unpleasant habit of rushing in and turning over all the tables so that we can put new tables in their place. But too often we do so without remembering the privilege that we carry or repenting of our lust for power. Think Christian antisemitism. Think Islamophobic crusades. Think transatlantic slave trade. Think settler colonialism. Think Manifest Destiny. Think marginalization of queer people. Think domination of women’s bodies. In every case, Christians, working in the name of Jesus, pushed aside an example of embodied power that they found threatening in order to establish their own self-serving power structure in its place. And to them it sounded like gospel work, but it was really just the kingdoms of this world operating in a Christian disguise. 

There are plenty of tables of injustice and oppression in this world that need turning over, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ has shown us that in time God will flip them all. But, if we are going to be about the work of recognizing God’s reign and offering ourselves as vessels through which God’s majesty comes, we cannot skip ahead to the end. This Lenten journey of self-examination and repentance is essential because it is how we leave behind our attachment to this world and embrace the coming majesty of God. If we are going to be a part of God’s reign, we must be born again.

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1. I am indebted to the Rev. Dr. Wilda Gafney for the use of the word “birthed,” which she read aloud as her own translation of the text. 

Fake It Until Christ Makes It

 

February 22, 2021 – Ash Wednesday

Isaiah 58:1-12; 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

© 2023 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video of the entire service can be seen here with the sermon beginning at 17:50.

No one likes a hypocrite. And the bigger the fake the more hated they are. Maybe that’s why we can’t help but smile when a politician who runs for office on a family-values platform is exposed as an adulterer. The only hypocrites we would rather see fall from grace are the religious leaders who make a living pointing their fingers at sinners and dishing out heavy doses of judgement. Is there anything more satisfying than seeing the holier-than-thou preacher’s mugshot on the front page of the paper?

I learned only a few months ago that the term “hypocrite” didn’t have a negative connotation until it was taken over by Christian culture. A word that literally means “interpreter from underneath,” its origins are from the ancient Greek stage, on which actors would interpret their characters’ roles from underneath the masks they wore. The word hypocrite didn’t make an appearance in English until the 13th century, when it was used to describe someone who was pretending to be pious in order to deceive others, and it didn’t come to mean a person who was acting contrary to their stated beliefs until the 18th century. 

In the Hebrew of the Old Testament, the word that is sometimes translated for us as “hypocrite” actually means “godless” or “profane.” In other words, it referred not to someone who was faking religiosity but was used as a criticism for God’s people when they forgot what it meant to belong to God. Although the concept of a play-actor isn’t found in the Old Testament, we understand that, when prophets exposed the predatory lending practices or exploitation of widows and orphans by so-called religious leaders, they were highlighting the incongruity of a projected religious identity and a faithless way of life. 

But, when it comes to religious practice and acts of piety, aren’t we all hypocrites to some degree? Aren’t we all here because we know that there’s at least a slight disconnect between our public lives and our private thoughts? We pretend to be nice. We hide our real feelings. We bite our tongues, and instead we say, “Bless your heart.” But don’t we want the inside to match what’s on the outside? Don’t we want loving-kindness to be our way of life not because it's how we’re supposed to act but because it’s what we really feel deep within us?

In some ways, I think that’s why we come to church—because we want to reconcile that difference and because we know that this is the place and that this is the community that can help us find that unity of identity we seek. We are here because we believe that the love and forgiveness and reconciliation that Jesus offers us can shape us from the inside out. Only then—only when what is within us has been renewed by God’s love—can what shows up on the outside reflect the truth that is within us. But that process of renewal doesn’t start by avoiding hypocrisy. It starts by embracing it. Here's what I mean. 

Jesus doesn’t care if you’re a hypocrite. In fact, in a sense he encourages it. That’s why he tells the rich young man to sell all of his possessions and give the money away to the poor—not because the man has already figured out how to love God with all his heart, mind, soul, and strength and his neighbor as himself but because Jesus knows that a radical outward action like that has the power to shape a person deep within. In the parable of the tax collector and the Pharisee, Jesus praises the tax collector who lowers his head and beats his breast not because he has reformed his life but simply because his prayer is earnest and humble. Sometimes we say we’re sorry not because we mean it but because we want to mean it. Sometimes we say our prayers not because we want to but because we want to want to. The journey of faith must start somewhere. It starts even with a small step.

Of course, hypocrisy does have a dark side. The warning Jesus gives us every year on Ash Wednesday is an important one for us to hear: “Beware of practicing your piety in front of others in order to be seen by them; for then you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.” Using the example of the hypocrites, who like to make a big show about giving alms, saying their prayers, and fasting, Jesus tells us to hide our generosity, to pray only behind closed doors, and to wipe the ashen crosses off our foreheads before walking out the church door. Why? It’s not because Jesus is worried that our Lenten practices will mask our heart’s true intentions but because our piety will have no power to shape our hearts if it is only for show.

The spiritual problem with hypocrisy isn’t that we pretend to be something we’re not. It’s thinking that pretending is all that matters. Jesus calls us to go deeper than that. When a spiritual discipline is outwardly focused and the only thing we care about is what other people see, the only benefit we get is the esteem of our peers. But, when the practice starts on the surface and then turns within, causing us to examine our own hearts, then we have the opportunity to be shaped by the one whose example we seek to imitate. Then our piety draws our hearts closer to God, and our whole lives begin to follow suit.

When Jesus tells us that only those who practice their piety in secret will be rewarded by their Father in heaven, it’s because the only reward worth seeking is the one that is found in here—deep within our hearts, where no one but God can see. This Lent, may that be the spiritual journey we take. Even if we are only going through the motions of faithfulness, may they be for us an invitation to encounter God within our hearts. May our Lenten devotions be a personal journey back to God—the one whose love transforms us from the inside out.

How Will We Ever Be Worthy?

 

February 19, 2023 – The Last Sunday after the Epiphany, Year A

Exodus 24:12-18; 2 Peter 1:16-21; Matthew 17:1-9

© 2023 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon is available here. Video of the entire service can be seen here with the sermon beginning around 18:45.

Everything was starting to come together. Things were really moving now. Six days earlier, Jesus had asked his disciples if they knew who he really was, and, even though the crowds still didn’t understand it, Peter had put his finger right on the pulse of Jesus’ identity: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Ever since that moment, Jesus had begun to speak more freely with his disciples about his plans and how God would use him to accomplish God’s saving work in the world.

These last six days had been a whirlwind, and now Jesus had invited Peter, James, and John—his very closest followers—to accompany him up to the top of a holy mountain where they could pray together. They had prayed with each other plenty of times, but this invitation was different. Jesus now seemed interested in allowing these three to join him in his most intimate, most holy spiritual practices. And the disciples were not disappointed.

Suddenly, as he was praying, Jesus’ skin began to give off its own radiant light. As if the sun itself had begun to shine from within him, his face was transfigured from its normal countenance into the very source of light itself. Basked in the stunning brightness emanating from Jesus, Peter and James and John looked up and saw Moses and Elijah standing there on the mountain top beside their teacher. “Can you believe it?” they said to themselves. “Is this really happening to us? How is it that we were chosen to see his glory?”

Peter knew better than to let this moment pass by. Having been given this astounding insight into Jesus’ true nature and glowing with the warmth of this privileged moment, Peter inched closer to Jesus and whispered, “Lord, it is good for us to be here. Only say the word, and I will build three booths—one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah—so that you can dwell here forever.” But, before Jesus could answer, the bright cloud of the Divine Presence descended upon the mountaintop, and the voice of the Almighty thundered at them: “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” 

In an instant, the disciples’ excitement evaporated, and an overwhelming fear gripped them. They fell down to the ground and hid their faces in the dirt, praying that this moment would pass without costing them their lives. They had underestimated the significance of this encounter and their own worthiness to receive it. But, after only a moment, Jesus came and knelt down and touched them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.” And, when the disciples dared to look around, everything had vanished. It was just they and Jesus and the empty summit. They had come that close to God and had lived to tell about it—but not until after Jesus had been raised from the dead.

Have you ever been given a gift that you did not deserve—an honor of which you were unworthy—only to discover that the gift itself was so magnificent as to require a response from you which you were utterly unable to give? Imagine being picked out of a crowd and told to hold in your hands something so precious that, if you were to drop it or squeeze it too tightly and crush it, the very light of the world would go out. How long before the privilege and honor of being chosen would give way to the doubt and fear of failure? At what point would the significance of what was being asked of you become so burdensome as to guarantee your inability to fulfill your responsibility?

Jesus Christ is God Incarnate. In him, God became flesh in order that our flesh might contain even the light of the world. Jesus has come to invite you to go up on the mountain with him and to pray beside him until not only his face begins to shine like the sun but until yours begins to shine with that same light as well. When the voice of God Almighty thunders in the cloud and declares, “This is my child, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased,” God is speaking those words to you, declaring that you, too, are God’s beloved child. Because you belong to Christ—to the one who beckons you up that mountain with him—God is handing you the very light of the world so that it might shine from within you and give light to others. But how will you ever stand there and receive it and embrace it and let it shine—all without dropping it and dashing it to pieces?

The truth is that it is easier to fall down into the dirt and hide our face until the light has passed us by. Following Jesus seems like a good idea until it is our turn to bear that light to others for Jesus’ sake. What happens if we’re not good enough or strong enough or holy enough to carry it? And there’s no hiding on that mountain top because Jesus is more than a wise teacher or a holy example worth following. He is the very Son of Man—the divine judge who comes in the glory of God to judge both the living and the dead. We cannot encounter the glory of Jesus Christ without hearing that thunderous voice that goes right through us, shaking us to our core. And yet it is Christ himself who makes us worthy to bear that light with a worthiness we can only behold in his resurrection.

“Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead,” Jesus says to them on their way back down the mountain. Why? Why wait until then? Because none of us is prepared to accept the glory that we have been given or the awesome responsibility that comes with it until we have seen God’s victory in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is our very weakness, our failings, our incapacity, our sin that God has defeated in the empty tomb. Because he is risen, we are worthy to receive that light. Because he is risen, we are able to bear that light to the world. Only because of the resurrection of Jesus are we prepared to journey up the mountain with him and let his light shine from within us.

Contemporary Christians tend to emphasize our role in the story of salvation—what are we supposed to believe and what works are we supposed to do? We hear this story, and we focus on Peter and ask ourselves what we would have done in his place. But the invitation God gives us in Jesus Christ is to allow Christ’s work and Christ’s faith to stand in the place of our own. If our sin is what took him to the cross, then it is God’s victory over that sin that shines forth from the empty tomb. Without the resurrection, we could never be worthy of the gift we have been given, but standing in the light of our own redemption, we know that there is nothing that could ever take it away.