The Christian Journey - Pentecost 21 (October 25, 2009)

Jeremiah 31:7-9
Psalm 126
Hebrews 7:23-28
Mark 10:46-52

The following sermon was preached by Fr. Jack Holman on his last Sunday as Associate Rector of Good Shepherd Church. He and his wife, June, are moving to a retirement community in Minnesota. They will be greatly missed.

A major metaphor of Christian life is that of a JOURNEY. This image captures the sense of our being on-the-way and of being accompanied and guided by SOMEONE. As a people, our journey begins with Abraham, leaving home, as with Moses, During the Exodus, we travel through the desert in which we learned where we were going and with whom... then came the Diaspora, the scattering. Many of the separated members of the People of God found themselves in different locations, areas, and towns.

Our Christian history, like that of the Jews, is marked by a deep ambivalence in this pilgrim journey. A desire to settle down, sink roots, establish a stable life is up against the need to move on…… following a Revelation, with endless surprises and turns. Our term “PILGRIMAGE” contrasts with St. Augustine’s image of the City of God, as a stable, boundaried municipality. The journey of the People of God exists alongside the conviction that “a mighty fortress is our God.” While we Christians are settlers and builders - our fidelity is pledged, since Abraham and Moses, to a mobile God whose revelation requires uprooting and repeated departures, leaving comfort and relative security and heading out into the unknown. But the metaphor journey has in it another image, that of PASSAGE. Christian scholars have been exploring the passages, which pattern modern religious maturing. Apart from the classic passages of birth, adult initiation, marriage and death, other perilous transitions affect our lives. Each of these passages, is a critical period of opportunity and danger, which shapes the direction of our life journey. We need to remember that the central paradox of a passage is always loss and gain, a time of peril and possibility. During a passage we become vulnerable to both personal loss and unexpected grace. Some vivid examples of losing and gaining are One, the loss of a parent or Two, when we fall in love. In the death of a parent we lose our beginning and our security. While love poses the question: If I admit this person I will have to change. Thus, a passage begins in disorientation and the threat of loss. It matures into a second stage as we allow ourselves to fully experience and name this loss. In the reluctant, gradual letting go of a parent or the slow, gingerly admittance of a love, we are both losing and finding ourselves.

Passages are oftentimes described as “something we undergo” or as going on a voyage on uncharted waters. Both passages include leaving the familiar, traveling for a time while uncertain about the destination and, for the Christian, expecting to meet God on the way.

Psychologically, we grow by letting go of parts of ourselves no longer necessary or adequate for our journey, we are purified of parts of ourselves that do not fit the future. The reordering of our lives that a passage promotes is also a disordering.

I once recalled to you the images on the History Channel showing a wagon train on the way West and leaving behind, along the wheel tracks, beloved and heritage items that hindered their progress to the promising land. As did the traveling Israelites who jettisoned their family and tribal gods picked up in Egypt as they came to realize these gods had nothing to do with the One True Living God. It’s true that we all whether as a family, a church, or a nation, acquire things, thoughts, ideas, cultural attitudes, etc., or a library, in our journeying through life that eventually we are compelled to leave along the roadside.

The British anthropologist Mary Douglas writes about the “potency of disorder”. And this potency is not only psychological, but also religious. This time of vulnerability and loss is also a time of potential grace.

In the threat and even chaos of a life passage, we experience the opportunity for extraordinary growth. We find unsuspected strengths; we are startled by our ability to risk and to trust. It’s generally only with hindsight do we recognize the gracefulness of a time of passage. From that threat and loss, we emerge not just different and wounded but stronger. In the darkness of that passage or in the uncharted waters of our voyage we found a new direction and confidence in our lives.

This experience of the grace of a passage illumines the third stage: emergence and re-incorporation into the community changed and matured. The journey of Christian maturing is patterned with many different passages. We ARE a people in movement, pledged to and in pursuit of a not always discernible God. Movement and change, then, are of the essence of religious growth. The call of the Spirit is constant, to which we need and will respond.

It is not surprising that a person might yearn for the good old days. But we need to anticipate and perhaps move from one camp, one structure to another. We may either in exasperation or in calm confidence ask: How many times must we be ready to begin again? How does seventy times seven sound? That is, in fact, the real miracle of Christianity. It is set in the Testament of the New, ordered to the fresh possibilities rather than the old mistakes of life. It proclaims the availability of the Spirit who would breathe on the earth and make it a New Creation.

Christianity is a faith of HOPE that reassures mankind, the Church, even a parish, that we can become renewed in Christ Jesus. Our redemption as well as our maturity is achieved precisely in the shifting human condition where beginning again or carrying out one’s responsibilities, adhering to principles, is a daily challenge. Ever since Christ’s first followers had to begin again to preach the good news at Pentecost, the Spirit has been our strength for the new beginnings of life. The Christian life is not a die-straight road into the future. It is more like a maze laden with wrong turns and dead ends, with surprises and difficulties. We make our way through it by always finding ourselves again, redeemed by the thousand resurrections of His spirit through which we are healed and can move forward.

The difficulties of our present world, nation, church and personal seem enough to discourage the strongest of us. The temptations to drop out, turn aside in search of a private peace with the ever-changing secular world are very great. But the Christian who lives by the Spirit knows that there is no end to our need to pack up, strike the tent, and begin again. We also know that God’s promises are the guarantee that we CAN ALWAYS BEGIN AGAIN. That is what the resurrected life of the Spirit looks like. In living it, as church, as Christians, we are a source of hope, a real sign of constancy, of salvation for the whole world.

We, you and I, as members of the Body of Christ, will always be faced with choices and decisions that mark a difficult passage. We can refuse a grace¬-full possibility shrinking back preferring to remain dormant in Egypt or to begin, to continue our journey retaining, carrying with us only our life-giving, strength-giving Ark, Holy Scripture, the sustaining, Word of God, our Eucharist, both is our beacon, our pillar of fire, our column of cloud, guiding us into a more mature existence and deeper commitment to live in Christ, to participate with Him in His mission to reach out in love and concern for the world and all those who dwell therein.

Remaining faithful in the keeping of unity of Christ, wherever it leads us until finally at the last, we leave everything on the side of the road to join with Him who runs to greet us joyfully with outstretched arms and the words: “Fidelis servus et prudens. Well done thou good and faithful servant. Come, enter into the kingdom which has been prepared for you.”

On the Eucharist - Pentecost 11 (August 16, 2009)

The following sermon was preached by Fr. Jack Holman, Associate Rector of The Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd, Tomball, TX.

Proverbs 9:1-6
Psalm 34:9-14
Ephesians 5:15-20
John 6:51-58

Eating alone in silence is not the option of choice for most of us. Human loneliness is graphic in large cafeterias in our area. It just isn’t natural not having someone to talk to, someone to share with. We feel profoundly for the poor lonely men and women who must eat their meals by themselves. Somehow they seem cut off from the rest of the human race. The message of the Eucharist is that we need never eat alone. Sure, on occasion or even frequently we may have to take our meals by ourselves, but we are never really alone because Jesus is with us. Jesus, who fed the multitudes, Jesus who enjoyed the table fellowship of his apostles is the very same Jesus who is with us not merely in the Eucharist meal but wherever we are and wherever we go. No matter how alone or cut off we may feel, Jesus shares the table with us. Saying Grace emphasizes this. The Eucharist means that Jesus has come to eliminate loneliness from human life. Even though occasionally we may be alone, as long as we believe in the love which Jesus manifested when feeding the multitudes, we know there is no reason for us to be lonely.

Scripture commentators tell us that while the Last Supper was indeed the last meal that Jesus ate with his followers, before his execution, it was not the first of the “table fellowships” which Jesus shared with them. Eating a meal together had deeply religious significance for all small religious groups in the time of Jesus. Therefore, it is very likely that the fellowships which Jesus shared with his apostles before the Last Supper were religious meals in tone and symbolism. The Eucharistic Rite is described as many things: a sacrament, a memorial, a sacrifice. But above all else, it is a meal and it plays the role as a sacrament, a memorial, or a sacrifice, insofar as it is a banquet. Not just an ordinary banquet; it’s a wedding banquet, a meal that celebrates the love among those who deeply love one another, even though it doesn’t look like any kind of meal at all. Jesus has compared the kingdom of his heavenly father to a wedding banquet and the Eucharist is a union between Jesus and his followers in that kingdom

Furthermore Paul compares the love between Jesus and his church to the love between a man and a woman. The Eucharist is a celebration of the union between Jesus and his church. Saying that it is a celebration of a passionate love does not seem to be an exaggeration. We sing and celebrate the Eucharist because we are convinced that God is deeply in love with us.

Those of us, who assemble around the altar to eat the bread of the Eucharist, necessarily and inevitably, commit ourselves to do all we can to eliminate physical suffering in the world. Hunger, poverty, ignorance, sickness, misery—none of these have any place in the world in which the Eucharistic banquet is celebrated. Now we are under no illusion that they can be eliminated immediately; nonetheless, as Christians we must consider ourselves committed to do all in our power to overcome physical suffering. Just as Jesus did, we must take compassion on the multitudes, even if we realize our compassion is not going to be completely effective. The war on poverty began not in Washington but along the shore of the sea at Tiberias twenty-one centuries ago.

This is not to say that there is any specific way of “feeding the hungry” which every Christian must follow; much less to say that specific legislation is endorsed by the gospel. But it is to say that every Christian must be profoundly concerned about hunger—or any other kind of human misery—where ever it occurs, and must do all that he can to work for its elimination. Theologians tells us: Non salus sine pauperes: There is no salvation without the poor!

We don’t minimize the importance of the theological controversies raised over the Eucharist down through the ages, but there is a danger that these controversies may blind us to the basic message of the Eucharistic banquet. We need only to take Jesus at his word that this bread and this wine is his flesh and blood and that we are in communion with Jesus and his work when eating this bread and drinking this wine. We are brought into contact with a new life, a life which is the ‘springtime of the world”. It does make us an integral part of the great historical process which began on Sinai and was renewed in the Upper Room. It does give us a share in the sacrifice and suffering of Jesus and it does promise us ultimate reunion with Jesus in the new life of the Resurrection.

Neither the theological discussions going on thru the centuries, nor the exegetical considerations, should cause us to overlook the message of Marks’s gospel: Where he writes: “He who eats the bread of the Eucharist is really in communion with Jesus and is working together with him in fulfilling his covenant”. Let’s not overlook the familial nature of the Eucharist. Then and now it was a family banquet, a small intimate gathering of a group of close friends. Early Christians, whatever their understanding of the precise relationship between the Lord’s Supper and the Passover, were quite aware that the Lord’s Supper was a gathering of people who loved one another. In other words, the covenant of Jesus was a covenant rooted in a love feast of a group of intimate friends To the extent that Eucharistic banquets do not manifest this profound affection which Jesus and his apostles felt for one another, they are less than adequate symbols of what the Eucharist really means. We may not always know the person next to us and that’s unfortunate, but if we are not prepared to love that person or anyone else in church, then we simply do not understand what the Eucharist means-no matter how sophisticated our theology or our exegesis may be.

We humans hunger after meaning, hunger for purpose and faith. We can understand how the Good News of Jesus can protect us from ever being spiritually hungry again. The purpose and meaning that the Good News puts into our life, makes it impossible for us to drift into chaos and confusion. It is not merely a banquet of wisdom as stated in Proverbs. It’s a kind of unity with God and his Messenger for which there was no preparation in the OT. It is obvious that Jesus is speaking of a form of union with God that is quite new. The Eucharist represents the most intimate union that is possible between Jesus and us, between God and us through Jesus. The love of Jesus for his followers was such that he would remain, somehow or other, present with them through the Eucharist, bringing life now, not only through his teaching, but by his presence! Case closed!