​26 April 2020
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
III Easter
 
“Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road …” (Luke 24)
 
            Last week, we looked at the story of “doubting Thomas” through the lens of stress, and talked about how in these times we might better understand him as “stressed out Thomas.”
            Today, I’d like to take a similar tack with the story of the Road to Emmaus, reading it as a story of feeling disoriented. Like the story of Thomas, it is a familiar Easter episode. Two disciples are walking on Easter afternoon along the road to Emmaus, a town just outside of Jerusalem, talking about all that has happened in the city – Jesus’ arrest, his trial, and of course his death. I imagine that their reasons for going are that they are trying to escape it all, leaving the chaos of the city for a greater calm in the country. But now new rumors are circulating that some women have been to the tomb and there had a vision that Jesus is alive. These disciples’ heads must be spinning: the text is pretty insistent that they are “talking and discussing,” trying to make sense of it all.
            And then suddenly, Jesus himself catches up with them along the road, but in their disoriented frame of mind they don’t even recognize that it is him. They unburden themselves to this stranger about all that they have seen and heard. And then, starting at the beginning, Jesus tries to explain to them how all of the scriptures have been fulfilled in him. And yet – they still don’t realize that it is he who is with them.
            You know the outcome already: only when the three of them stop at an inn for supper, and he breaks bread with them, do they suddenly realize who it is—but in that moment he vanishes from their sight, and they race back to Jerusalem to share the news of their encounter.
            If Thomas could not believe because he was under such stress, it seems to me we might think that these two unnamed disciples could not recognize him, because they were feeling so disoriented. So much has happened that has turned their world inside out and upside down, that they just aren’t able to see or think very clearly.
            That, too, is a feeling many of us share right now. We wake in the morning, not sure of what day of the week it is. We think we ought to get to work, but are not sure of what that looks like while we are confined at home, or with so much of society closed down. We listen to the news, and hear wildly conflicting reports of what is and isn’t a safe way forward. We long for companionship, but must remain distanced, for how long, we’re not sure. And our heads feel as if they are spinning.
            Or, perhaps we are among those who continue to perform the essential tasks that keep the rest of us going. But there to, the sense of isolation from so much of the community, and the disruption of so much of life undermines our mental equilibrium.
            So being in a similar state of mind, what happens to the two disciples is hardly surprising, Their encounter with Jesus is all part of their disorientation, until they experience something that is familiar and intimate: the breaking of bread. In that moment, their confused hearts and minds are given a new sense of bearing, and suddenly the meaning of all that has happened falls into place with complete clarity.
            But what they discover, is more than the simple fact of Jesus having been with them: they discover that Jesus’ presence, paradoxically takes the form of absence. Recognizing him, they also lose sight of him, except that even then they continue to feel his presence in the space that is between them. So it isn’t an absence of emptiness, but an absence of filling, enveloping them with the sense of purpose through which they are again able to understand their own life.
            Jesus’ presence, you might say, is a bit like the empty space in one of those images of two faces looking at each other, which in silhouette form a cup [hold up the image]. The space would be nothing at all, without both faces framing it. But with them, it is a clear shape that holds the promise of something social and mutually binding between them.
            We are accustomed to thinking of finding Jesus in the Other, and that is true enough. But the story of Emmaus also suggests that we find Jesus in the space between ourselves and the Other: a space which we both contribute to shaping and occupying. Without the presence of an Other (whether that is a spouse, or a child, or a parent, or a lover … or a stranger), it’s hard to know what the space is that we ourselves occupy, hard to know who we are.
            In this time of being distanced from one another, we might think of the space that separates us not as a burden or pain to be born, but as a sacred space, a space which by honoring it, we together shape into a vessel of care, hope and solidarity. Perhaps the space we keep between us, is filled more than ever by Jesus himself.
            Playing off of the image of the two faces that I showed you a moment ago, the poet Rowan Williams penned these lines in his poem, “Emmaus”:
 
Between us is filled up, the silence
is filled up, lines of our hands
and faces pushed into shape
by the solid stranger, and the static
breaks up our waves like dropped stones.
So it is necessary to carry him with us,
cupped between hands and profiles …
 
            In short, our lives are given their orientation by one another – or rather, by the presence that is in the space that is between us, that mysterious presence that fills the gap, as present at this very moment as the air we breath—even now, when so much of life otherwise seems distant, shut off, and disorienting. Amen.

​19 April 2020
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
II Easter
 
 
“Unless I touch the wound in his side, I will not believe.” (Jn 20)
 
 
            The context in which we read scripture always uncannily affects the way we hear it. Today, for instance, when we encounter so-called “Doubting Thomas” (as we always do on the Sunday after Easter), it suddenly occurs to me that perhaps what was going on for Thomas was not a struggle with doubt, so much as coping with stress. What if we thought of a stressed-out Thomas, rather than a doubting Thomas?
 
            We’re all under a lot of stress just now. It shows up in all sorts of ways. An unexpectedly sharp word to a spouse, or a child, or a pet. Strange, menacing dreams that we cannot begin to decipher. Low-grade feelings of depression. Tight, sore muscles. I hear it in my own voice. I feel it in my own body.
 
            Which makes me more attuned than before, to seeing the multiple and vivid signs of stress in the stories of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Peter’s lapse into denying himself, by denying Jesus. The disciples’ flight, and then their hiding out of fear behind closed doors in a kind of self-quarantine. The self-preoccupation of the disciples on the road to Emmaus that blinds them to recognizing Jesus when we walks alongside them. And, of course, Thomas’ own irritable dismissal of what the others tell him: “Damn it!” you can imagine him snapping, “here we all are, afraid for our lives, and now you’re telling me you’ve seen Jesus. Give me a break!”
 
            Stress has a funny way of bringing out the worst in us. You might think, that when things get difficult, we would resort to our best selves as a coping mechanism. But often it’s the other way around. Our thinking gets muddied, rather than clarified. Our temper grows short, rather than patient. Our imagination gets dulled, rather than inspired. Our confidence goes limp, rather than girding itself up.
 
            And that, I think, is where Thomas was at on Easter Day. Confused, ill tempered, narrow minded, wilted. And it’s where many of us are at as well right now.
 
            In this week’s New Yorker, David Remnick writes about the phenomenon that has taken hold in the quarantined city of New York of nightly cheering at 7 pm. In one sense, the cheering is itself a sign of stress, and of the need for some cathartic release from it.
           
            But the cheering is also a communal experience of coming together out of self-imposed isolation, to recognize those who are helping to make this pandemic bearable, by continuing to labor (sometimes at great personal cost) for the rest of us: ER doctors and nurses, grocery clerks, deliverymen, sanitation workers and pharmacists—even artists, musicians, and actors who though unemployed, create and post their work online as encouragement.
 
            And perhaps with the release that comes from that nightly cheering, also comes a reminder that we are not merely enduring individual loss and isolation: this is also something we are in together, and we are giving collective birth to the future that will come after this trauma is over. Our individual isolation, also becomes a new social solidarity. So even those who are most shut in at this particular moment, are in some way contributing to a great, shared delivery of a future that has not yet come, or perhaps even at yet been imagined.
 
            I hope that is a perspective we will all take to heart: that our isolation is not pointless or merely necessary, but pregnant with possibility. Imagine the potential of an entire nation—globe, really—forced into a period of Sabbath reflection and recalibration, even while there are many others who face intense struggles of life and death every day that have a way of forcing life’s priorities to the forefront.
 
            Perhaps this is what happened to Thomas, on the second occasion when Jesus appeared to the disciples, when he was able to hear Jesus’ greeting: “Peace be with you.” In those words, there was hope for a future that without Jesus, had seemed infinitely remote and unattainable—distressingly so. But in Jesus’ un-extinguished life, here again was hope for a future yet to be built, the New Creation of Jesus’ promise. Thomas’ stress over what had happened, turned in that moment to a hope for what might happen.
 
            So in these stressful days—and let’s not pretend that they are not, whether we are at home alone, with our children, or on the front lines of the fight—let your thoughts turn to what lies ahead, at least from time to time. What is it that makes resisting this plague worth the effort, and what future do you imagine is being birthed by the pangs of the current day? What kind of world is it that you believe is worth fighting for, even now? Is this a great turning point in history, at which we will fail to turn? Or will it be a rekindling of our common identity as human beings, and of our sense of oneness with creation?
 
            The words we read today from First Peter might inspire our response: “By God’s great mercy God has given to us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable … and unfading.”
 
            We are all prophets of a future not yet our own. Amen.
 

​12 April 2020
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
Easter Sunday
 
“The women left the tomb with fear and great joy.” (Mt. 28)
 
             When stress is applied to a system, the cracks are quickly revealed. A dam, for instance, breaks under pressure from a flood; or a bridge collapses from the burden of too heavy a load. That such failure is revelatory of underlying weaknesses is a truism that has been often repeated as of late. We recognize all to well that the stresses placed on our social system by the coronavirus have revealed some deep cracks within: the consequences of inadequate health care, for instance, or the gap between rich and poor, or the neglect of facts in pursuit of ideological purity.
            But that is not the point I want to make here this morning. Rather, I want us to use that image of structural failure resulting from internal flaws, to consider the effect of the stress that was placed on the human condition by the execution of Jesus, the one who spoke only of love. To put Jesus to death, placed a great and unbearable stress on what we all know as the fallen system by which human society functions. Evil and corruption simply could not sustain themselves, brought face to face with  his mercy and love — and the effect of that stress, it turns out, was that the system cracked and fell apart.
            Out of its ruins, came the new life we call the resurrection — not as a miraculous interruption of the ordinary laws of nature, but as an emergence from the ruins of a corrupted creation of the pulsating, vibrating life that was already within it, and had only been obscured. In the risen Jesus, we don’t encounter some fantastical marvel: what we do encounter (perhaps for the first time) is life as it really is, as it was created in the beginning. Resurrection, in other words, is what is in fact ordinary and commonplace—the darkness of evil may obscure it, but it is the darkness itself that is peculiar.
 
            Traditionally, the homily that is delivered at the Great Vigil of Easter is one that was first given by St. John Chrysostom, bishop of Constantinople, around the year 400. His Easter homily bubbles over with joy and enthusiasm, as if he just can’t control his eagerness to have everyone included in the Paschal feast: Have you been fasting these 40 days of Lent, he asks? Well then, come, join the celebration! Or have you perhaps been … neglectful? Well no matter, you come in too, for the feast of life is prepared for all!
            Alluding to Jesus’ parable of the laborers in the field (who were all paid the same, whether the worked a whole day or only the last hour), Chrysostom exclaims, “Let us all enter into the joy of the Lord! First and last alike receive your reward;
rich and poor, rejoice together!” And how is such an unqualified welcome possible, you may ask? Because above all things, “the Lord is gracious and receives the last even as the first.” That includes you, just as you are.
            And it is this level of unqualified acceptance that is, for us, the sign that the old ways of being human have simply collapsed under the weight of their encounter with Jesus. The stress of encountering pure love and compassion, has broken apart the hold that selfishness and deceit have held on humankind.
 
            And so, says Chrysostom, “Let no one go away hungry. Partake, all, of the cup of faith.
Enjoy all the riches of God’s goodness!
Let no one grieve at her poverty,
for the universal kingdom has been revealed.

Let no one mourn that he has fallen again and again;
for forgiveness has risen from the grave.”
            Surely, these unabashed words of reassurance are a message we long to hear just now: affirmation that out of the rubble of our broken society, a new justice and integrity will arise. Encouragement that out of our dreams that have been eclipsed by economic hardship or physical loss, new opportunities will emerge. Confidence that out of the illness and death that surround us so pervasively on all sides, life will prevail.
            Chrysostom imagined the source of such encouragement this way: in his physical death, Jesus descended to the place of the dead itself, and brought with him into those shadowy regions the inexhaustible life through which all things were created. In the person of Jesus, life invaded death. Love squared off with hate. Mercy faced down violence. And the result? Life, love and mercy emerged triumphant, and the powers of darkness crumpled under the shear stress of the encounter.         
            And so, as that 4th century preacher said in his Easter homily, “Let no one fear death [any longer], for the Death of our Savior has set us free. He has destroyed it by enduring it.
He destroyed Hell when He descended into it.
He put it into chaos even as it tasted of His flesh.

… Hell was in an uproar because it was done away with.
It was in an uproar because it was mocked.
It was in an uproar, for it was destroyed.
It is in an uproar, for it is annihilated.
It is in an uproar, for it is now made captive.
Hell took a body, and discovered God.
It took earth, and encountered Heaven. …
O death, where is thy sting?
O Hell, where is thy victory?
Christ is Risen, and you, O death, are destroyed!
Christ is Risen, and the evil ones are cast down!
Christ is Risen, and the angels rejoice!
Christ is Risen, and life is liberated!
Christ is Risen, and the tomb is emptied of its dead;
for Christ having risen from the dead,
is become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.
To Him be Glory and Power forever and ever!”




           No wonder, then, that when Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to the tomb on Easter morning to mourn Jesus, and instead encountered an angel who told them, “He is not here, for he has been raised,” they went away with both great fear … and great joy. May that peace and joy also be with you this day. Amen.

​22 March 2020
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
IV Lent
 
“As Jesus walked along, he saw a man blind from birth.” (John 9)
 
PART I
 
            We return to scripture over and over again, because depending upon the circumstance, it always has something new and different to say to us.
            So it should come as no surprise, given our current situation of isolation and distance from one another, that in today’s gospel of the healing of the man born blind, the theme of relationship jumps out.
            We’re reading the story, which is quite lengthy, in four episodes, by way of highlighting the layering of relationship and healing that takes place within it. So in this first segment, what has happened so far is this: Jesus has come upon what we might now call a dysfunctional family system. There is a man who has been blind from birth, who is saddled with a sense of guilt that either he or his parents must have sinned, for him to have been born with this condition.
            Meanwhile the parents, as we shall see, have effectively disowned their son, and want nothing to do with him. As a result, he has been reduced to begging in the streets to survive. His status as a beggar also indicates that he is alienated from the community, for it too has washed its hands of responsibility to him.
            So it is into this fragmented human situation that Jesus comes, announcing that despite its apparent hopelessness, out of it will be revealed the works of God. From separation and alienation, something new is going to come that will not just reconcile the all-too human situation of familial estrangement, but redefine those very relationships in light of Jesus’ presence within them.
            And so what happens first? Quite simply, Jesus heals the man of his blindness, which is not only a physical restoration of sight but also a spiritual release from his debilitating sense of guilt. But then, rather than making a big deal of it—Jesus just quietly slips away to let the people to sort out for themselves what happened. And needless to say, confusion reigns—in fact, the degree of the man’s continuing alienation from the community is shown by how the people disagree whether he is even the same person. So let’s go back to the story and hear what happens next … 
           
PART II          
 
            In this second episode, the people have brought the man before the Pharisees, asking for their reading on what has happened. But now, yet a further degree of alienation is brought to light: focusing on the requirements of the Sabbath, the Pharisees are themselves blinded to the power of God that has been at work in their midst: they are alienated from the very God they think they serve.
            So uncertain of what to make of it all, they put the question back to the man himself: What do you say? And he responds, somewhat innocently, that he thinks Jesus is a prophet—that is, someone who is able to bring the ways of God and the needs of the community together in a single thought.
            Now, you might expect that the response to such a provocative assertion would be, “Well, then, what is his meaning?” But instead, the controversy only deepens as the Pharisees lapse into disagreement, and the people decide to draw the man’s parents into the inquiry. Let’s listen in …
 
PART III.
 
            So instead of sticking up for their son, the parents wash their hands of the whole situation, and leave their son to fend for himself—as they have always done. The man tries to reason with the now restive crowd, explaining yet again how it was that he was healed.
            But they now put themselves into the same boat as the Pharisees. The god they know, is the god of Moses—and to them that is a closed system that admits no change. And so, they demonstrate their own alienation from the dynamic power of God, by denying its legitimacy. The man tries to point out, that if Jesus were not of God, then he could not do what he does. But the people merely try to reassert the same old spiritual alienation from which the man has been healed, accusing him yet again of having been born in sin, and they drive him away …
 
PART IV.
 
            Jesus, having let the consequences of the people’s alienation play themselves out, returns to find the man whom he has healed. It’s a very touching moment, not unlike other crowd scenes where, when all the others have gone, Jesus is left with one individual: the fearful woman caught in adultery, or the one leper out of ten who returned to give thanks for being cured.
            The healing that Jesus has worked in the man was to reveal that where he thought he was spiritually isolated by guilt, he has been made free; and where he could not see because of physical impairment, he has been made whole. Jesus has in other words turned his world upside down, and it turns out that inside of it, Jesus has revealed to him another world in which isolation is replaced by relationship, loneliness is overcome by community, and self-reliance is transformed into interdependence. The man is now poised, having been healed himself (having been given this new vision) to work those larger miracles of healing within his family and community.
            So the meaning of this healing story, as I read it today, is to recall for us the multiple layers of relationship by which we in fact all live, and to remind us of the power we have be agents of reconciliation. At a time when we are all too forcefully reminded of the private, individual dimension of our lives, it is good to be prompted to remember that in Christ, we do not live in isolated huts, but instead inhabit a vast terrain that is the life Christ shares with us, because it is also the life he shares with God, where he gathers us all into one human community.
            Let me leave you with an image to ponder: while most of us are closed in at home for the next days and perhaps weeks, it would be a healing thing for us to do, to call to mind the immense desert landscape in which we live, thinking of it as a metaphor for the spaciousness and grace of the life into which God invites us to live together in Jesus.      
            We have, for years now, been told that we must protect our culture from the outsider; that it is right to put ourselves first; that we have no need of the other; that division and anger are to be cultivated rather than remedied and overcome. As a Christian community, however, we live by a fundamentally alternative vision: a conviction that in Christ, God has cleared a place where we come fully to know who we are individually, only by knowing fully who we are as a human family.
            If this is a time of rediscovering that fundamental truth—that we are all one—then perhaps these days will have been worth the price, for they will be in their own right, a great awakening of the Spirit.
              
At the announcements:
 
Lockdown
Br. Richard Hendrick, OFM Cap
 
Yes there is fear.
Yes there is isolation.
Yes there is panic buying.
Yes there is sickness.
Yes there is even death.
 
But,
They say that in Wuhan after so many years of noise
You can hear the birds again.
They say that after just a few weeks of quiet
The sky is no longer thick with fumes
But blue and grey and clear.
 
They say that in the streets of Assisi
People are singing to each other
across the empty squares,
keeping their windows open
so that those who are alone
may hear the sounds of family around them.
 
They say that a hotel in the West of Ireland
Is offering free meals and delivery to the housebound.
Today a young woman I know
is busy spreading fliers with her number
through the neighbourhood
So that the elders may have someone to call on.
 
All over the world people are slowing down and reflecting
All over the world people are looking at their neighbours in a new way
All over the world people are waking up to a new reality
To how big we really are.
To how little control we really have.
To what really matters.
To Love.
 
So we pray and we remember that
Yes there is fear.
But there does not have to be hate.
 
Yes there is isolation.
But there does not have to be loneliness.
 
Yes there is panic buying.
But there does not have to be meanness.
 
Yes there is sickness.
But there does not have to be disease of the soul
 
Yes there is even death.
But there can always be a rebirth of love.
 
Wake to the choices you make as to how to live now.
Today, breathe.
Listen, behind the factory noises of your panic
The birds are singing again
The sky is clearing,
Spring is coming,
And we are always encompassed by Love.
 
Open the windows of your soul
And though you may not be able
to touch across the empty square,
Sing.    

​8 March 2020
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
2 Lent
 
Jesus said, “No one can see the kingdom of God
without being born from above.” (John 3)
 
            We continue today with our Lenten theme of healing and reconciliation. Last Sunday, JP set out the parameters of those ideas in reference to Jesus’ own temptation in the desert.
            And so today, I want to focus in on one specific wound from which many of want to be healed: numbness, or that state of feeling overwhelmed mentally and spiritually by the current state of the world, and a feeling that there is nothing any of us can do about it.
            I’ve heard many people, over the last several months, speak of just such a numbness. It comes from the accumulated sense of ennui that has built up over the last several years — the sense of inescapable corruption and self-dealing on the part of our nation’s leaders, the distortion of truth, and most especially, the real human cost that these impulses exact on the most vulnerable among us. And I hasten to say, that the words I have used here could equally be applicable to persons on either end of the political spectrum. The sense of numbness affects us all.
            So, enter Nicodemus, the Pharisee who by virtue of his status as a religious leader must officially oppose Jesus, but who surreptitiously comes to Jesus by night, confessing that there must be something to what he is doing, since no one could do such signs apart from the presence of God.
            Jesus responds with one of the most often quoted verses in the Bible: “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above” (or “born again,” as some would have it). Now, in the Greek, the word here can equally mean either born “from above” or born “again,” so I just want to just set aside that latter reading, and focus instead on what it might mean to say that we need to be born “from above.”
            Nicodemus, of course, hears Jesus’ words in a literal sense: “How can anyone be born,” he asks, “after having grown old?” So then Jesus tries to push his imagination beyond the literal, saying that the birth of which he speaks is of “water and the Spirit.”
            And the introduction of the word “Spirit” here is the key to the whole dialogue. We are all born, in some sense, as a lump of flesh—biologically needy, and emotionally unformed. So the critical issue, as we grow and mature, is to what degree we allow the Spirit to inhabit that flesh, so that, as Rowan Williams has put it, our “flesh is made to be something more than a dead lump of untenanted material which lies around for other people to fall over.”[*]
            What Jesus is trying to help Nicodemus to see, I think, is that he is in need of healing—a healing that would open him up to being inhabited more fully by the Spirit so that he would be in real relationship with God and his fellow human beings, beyond being being held hostage by the pharisaical exclusivity in which he is trapped.
            And this notion of being inhabited by the Spirit gets to the very heart of the matter: in Nicodemus, Jesus is attempting to bridge the gulf between self and community that is the fruit of Nicodemus’ own alienation from the spirit of inclusion which is God’s way of being in the world. Only if Nicodemus allows himself to be gifted with the reconciling Spirit of relationship which is “from above,” will he find that which he truly seeks: eternal life—which contrary to popular imagination is not some sort of prize for right believing, but an integration of the self into the animating creative Spirit of all creation. That is what it means to be “born from above”: to become one with God’s loving purposes for creation, by letting God’s spirit inhabit our soul.
             And this is where the story of Nicodemus connects with our current sense of spiritual and mental numbness. That feeling of helplessness is something from which we, too, need healing, not unlike Nicodemus’ own captivity. It is easy, in these times, to fall into a certain despondency that is itself a form of “fleshiness,” where we struggle to find the strength within to resist the pressures without. Yet perhaps these pressures can themselves become the catalyst for us to open up to the indwelling grace of the creative, energizing, reconciling Spirit of God, rather than trying to rely on our own interior weakness.  
            Then these days of spiritual numbness will lead us into a deeper awareness of how our own flesh can give voice to the Spirit, which is first and foremost about building networks of relationship that speak of the underlying unity that is given to us in creation, rather than of the bitterness and suspicion that divide us.
            In fact, it might be said, that in all the stories of healing by Jesus, that is exactly what he is up to: the restoration or extension of relationship in community. We will see this played out time and again in the lessons for the coming Sundays of Lent: next week, in the woman at the well; then in the man born blind; followed by the raising of Lazarus. In short, this is a time not to back away from community and relationship, but to embrace it as the only place in which we human beings will ultimately find God’s Spirit at work among us.
             I was struck, reading this week’s obituary in The Economist, by the shear value of staying in the game, of letting the spirit inhabit our daily life. The obit was for Katherine Goble Johnson, a mathematician for NASA in the 1950s and ’60s, who as an African American—and a woman—and so encountered considerable opposition to her work. In 1953, as a fresh recruit, she faced the difficult task of challenging the accuracy of a senior engineer’s calculations, which she discovered were wrong because he had made an error with a square root. Very carefully, she asked her question. Was it possible, that he could have made a mistake? He did not admit it, but (as the obituary writer described it), “by turning the colour of a cough drop, he ceded the point.”[†]
            We are all in a time when raising the question, “Have we as a nation made a mistake?”, is hard to do. The numbness we feel from the volume of the negative response is overpowering. Yet we are still met with Jesus’ challenge that we must be born from above, that is, animated with the Spirit that raises us from the mendacity and divisiveness of our day, to a place where we know ourselves to be motivated by a God who draws us toward nothing less than wholeness, healing, health, truth, and reconciliation.
            John’s gospel does not tell us what happened to Nicodemus after his encounter with Jesus. He simply vanishes from the narrative—but later we do get a hint of what became of him when he defends Jesus before the Sanhedrin, and then again at the end of the gospel, when he assists Joseph of Arimathea with the burial of Jesus’ body. So evidently he was someone who took to heart Jesus’ teaching that he be born “from above,” and himself became a follower of Jesus through welcoming the habitation of his Spirit. For as Jesus says, that is what it means, to see the kingdom of God. Amen.


[*] Rowan Williams, “Health and Healing,” in Holy Living: The Christian Tradition for Today (2017).

[†] “The Girl Who Asked Questions,” The Economist (February 29th – March 6th, 2020), 74.

​23 February 2020
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
Last Epiphany: Transfiguration
 
 
“Peter said, ‘I will make three dwellings here:
one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.’” (Matthew 17)
 
            When I was a young priest, the rector I was working for at the time caught me up short one day when he said, “Joe, it seems to me that you are more interested in the things of the church, than you are the ways of Jesus.” Ouch.
            The thing was, he was right. As a recent seminary graduate, I knew all there was to know about religion. I knew the correct number of times to swing the thurible to cense the altar at high mass. I knew the proper vestment to wear for every possible kind of church service, from Solemn Choral Matins to a private home communion. I knew the difference between a reverend, and a very reverend, and a right reverend, and even a most reverend. I knew the name for every vessel in the sacristy, and the right sequence of collects to pray at Morning and Evening Prayer. I had it all down.
            But the thing was, underneath all that religion, there wasn’t a lot of spirituality. I had lapsed into what Rabbi Heschel called “religious behavioralism,” by which he meant a faith that substitutes the symbols of religion for authentic relationship with God. Heschel devoted much of his life to combatting the ways in which he saw “rituals, customs and ceremonies” overtaking the experience of real praise and devotion in American synagogues — and the same could be said for much of mainline Christianity at the time as well.
            And so, from the time that that rector made his remark to me about my religiosity, I think I’ve been on a gradual journey away from religion, and toward the spiritual — if by the spiritual is meant a deep and personal awareness of the underlying mystery of everything that is, as given by God in the act of creation. By comparison, what you might call the bric a brac of organized religion just isn’t that interesting or life giving, at least not to me. Not anymore. In fact, if what many people say nowadays is that they are “spiritual but not religious,” well then, count me in!
            And isn’t that what Jesus himself was constantly trying to get the religious authorities of his day to understand — those Pharisees who were masters at observing the letter of the law, but overlooked its spirit entirely. And of course, as we heard today, when Jesus took his closest disciples with him up on the mountain top, and they caught a glimpse of just how intense the affinity was between him and God—the first thing they want to do is institutionalize it by building dwellings to contain it. Jesus simply ignores their all too human instincts toward religiosity, and tries instead to draw them into the moment: “Trust me,” he says, “you don’t have to hold onto this. Let it be. Don’t be afraid.”
            And in the space that such a true spirituality opens up, not weighed down by the impassivity of observance, something new and more alive can begin to grow: we begin to become followers of Jesus, rather than mere participants in ceremonies. In his little book, Being Disciples, Rowan Williams says that to be a follower—a disciple—of Jesus means, at the very least, two rather simple things. First, it means being open to asking whether what we do, and what we speak and know, are open to the influence of Christ and his Spirit. And second, it means committing ourselves to being part of a learning community that together seeks to be drawn ever more deeply into his life.
            Discipleship, in other words, is a state of being — a way of life. Or, another way of putting it, would be to say that it has to do with a certain stability, a patient staying, or abiding (as John’s gospel puts it). It has to do with remaining in the presence of Jesus long enough, that the things we routinely do become shaped by his own example into practices that infuse every part of our daily life.
            The word “discipleship” comes from a Greek word meaning “to be a student,” and in the ancient world, disciples lived in the household of their master and learned through their constant exposure to his teachings. Discipleship therefore implies an commitment to be constantly changing and growing, refining the skills of living that constitute the way of life one is attempting to take in and internalize.
            But of course, not every day results in large steps forward. It has been said that discipleship is a lot like bird watching: you have to sit very still, expectantly anticipating that something dramatic might happen, which means that some days nothing much does and they feel disappointing and unproductive. Yet on the occasions when some rare and beautiful bird does break into view — well then the time sitting quite still is all worth it.  
            Here at St. Michael’s, we are embarked on a yearlong examination of the practices of Christian faith that are the yardstick of what it means to make following Jesus a way of life — practices that you might say that tend toward the spiritual, rather than the religious. At its core, such a practice is something done by a group of people—us—that addresses some basic human need, but in response to and in light of a common awareness of Christ’s animating presence within. Some of these practices can seem quite ordinary, things like hospitality and gratitude—and some of them more difficult, like testimony and prayer—but when they are practiced in imitation of Jesus, they take on the role of reorienting our lives to seeing and relating to the world as he does. They move us along from being members of the church, to being followers of his way.
            Let me give you one example. This week is Ash Wednesday, the traditional beginning of Lent as the season of preparation for Easter. If you were to just walk into church here on that day, knowing nothing about what was going on, you would probably get the strong impression that it was all about some ritualized expression of guilt that a group of people feels about something they have done. But if you were to reframe that day in terms of the practice of healing (as we intend to do), a rather different message would come through.
            Perhaps the real issue is not so much that we are all guilty, as that we are wounded, in one way or another, by the consequences of what we have done. And our deepest need is to be healed (or set free, or liberated, or restored, or made whole, or whatever word you want to use for it). The practice of healing, then (of seeking forgiveness and reconciliation), would be the natural outgrowth of being a community where we also engage such practices as truth-telling and respect for human dignity, so that what has wounded us and what we have done to wound others can be named, recognized, and set right.
            Following Jesus, means approaching life through a set of practices that form us with just such a disposition of awareness, expectancy, mystery, and anticipation—always open to the growth of our interior spirit, rather than held captive by the externalities of religion. And for me now, that’s the only Christian life worth living. Amen.
            (Oh, and by the way — the correct number of swings of the thurible to cense the altar? It’s 24.)