19 January 2020
Pastor Joe Britton 
St. Michael’s Church
II Epiphany/MLK

“I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, 
every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places plains, 
and the crooked places will be made straight, and before them the Lord will be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.” 
(Martin Luther King, Speech at the Lincoln Memorial, August 28, 1963,
 quoting Isaiah 40)

    “God is either of supreme importance, or God is of no importance.” So said Rabbi Abraham Heschel, arguing that God must be understood as touching every aspect of our lives. Either you regard God as the cosmos you inhabit, the ground for everything that are and think and do—or you regard God as a kind of add-on to life, rather like a dentist or a chiropractor (good for addressing certain problems, but of no real importance otherwise).
    The issue of God’s importance comes up for us today, because Martin Luther King was someone who saw clearly that God is of importance to everything. In his “I have a dream” oration given on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in August of 1963, he did not just deliver a speech on the political question of segregation: he linked the underlying issues of freedom and justice to the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Bible. His dream, that “every valley shall be exalted, and all flesh shall see it together,” is that of the prophet Isaiah. And like the prophet before him, King saw that if political equality was to be achieved, it would have to be driven by a deeply religious conviction that justice is ultimately derived from what God requires and motivates us to do, and is not of our own making.
    Now, the question of whether politics has anything to do with religion, and vice versa, is a perennial one in our society. But on this day when we commemorate the legacy of one of the great prophets of our time, it seems worth revisiting that question—and especially at a time when our nation is again convulsed by competing claims of propriety and probity in the highest places of government.
    Let’s start in a rather unexpected place: Christian mysticism. In his recent book, The Universal Christ,  our local sage Richard Rohr tries to direct our attention away from the individualized religion of a personal relationship with Jesus (with which we are most familiar), to an awareness of the cosmic Christ who is the animating presence of God throughout all creation. “Everything visible,” Rohr observes, “without exception, is the outpouring of God” (13). Rohr’s worry is that “if we focus too much on the idea that Jesus’ main purpose is to provide a means of personal, individual salvation, then it is all too easy to think that he doesn’t have anything to do with human history” (18). No, Jesus is more than that: Jesus is but one manifestation of a reality that pervades all time and all place, what Rohr calls a “Christ-soaked” universe.
    Seeing things that way, we might then see the meaning of the Eucharist that we celebrate here week by week rather differently than we often do. Instead of focusing on how Christ can become present to us through bread and wine, we might see it instead as focusing our attention on a larger mindfulness, which is that Christ is made present to us in every bit of reality—we just overlook that fact most of the time, and so need our awareness rekindled through simple means like the meal we share here today.
    And if the Eucharist points us toward an awareness that Christ is already in all things, then it radically challenges any idea we have that there can be certain things that are outside of Christ’s purview. We must live as if Christ truly is the ground of all reality. The Eucharist then is not just a kind of spiritual fill-up, but a commissioning to live a certain kind of God-driven life.
    And so, what of politics? Our society is shaped by a deep suspicion of coercively manipulating anyone into a particular religious conviction—and rightly so. But the bedrock of that suspicion—the prohibition against any institutionally established religion which we know as the “separation of church and state—often gets over-extended, it seems to me, to mean the separation of church and everything.   
     If I, as a Christian, hold the conviction that the Christ who animates all things is also the cosmic Word of freedom and justice, then I simply cannot withdraw that conviction from the arena in which society enacts or denies that justice—namely politics itself. Like Martin Luther King, who could not and would not square the racial inequality of America with the prophetic vision of Isaiah, we have to be able to name and resist those places where the authorities of this world substitute their own competing vision of power and corruption for the vision of a human community given to us in the Christ. As Rohr says, “There is no such thing as a nonpolitical Christianity,” because “to refuse to critique the system or the status quo is to fully support it—which is a political act well disguised” (94).
    On the night before he died, Martin Luther King appealed perhaps more directly than ever before to the Biblical context in which he understood the Civil Rights Movement and his place in it—it was, after all, at its core a religious movement. At the head of its marches were not politicians but preachers, priests and rabbis—The Rev. Martin Luther King chief among them. The songs that sustained and inspired them were not political fight-songs, but hymns of the church (some of which we are singing here today): We Shall Overcome, Lift Every Voice and Sing, When Israel was in Egypt’s Land.
    Saying that night in Memphis that he had been to the mountain top and seen the promised land (aligning himself with none other than Moses, the greatest of all prophets), King preached a word of hope and justice that for him came directly from God. He was there that night because of a very political cause—the strike of sanitation workers over unfair practices and wages. But he didn’t leave the issue at that level. He lifted it to being about nothing less than the archetypal struggle for freedom represented by the liberation of the people of Israel from their bondage in Egypt. 
    Surveying the whole of human history, King nevertheless said that he was most happy living in his own day, despite all its challenges and heartache. “I'm happy to live in this period,” he said, “[because] we have been forced to a point where we are going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn't force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men for years now have been talking about war and peace. But now no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.”
    Are we, in these days that trouble our own souls, any less in need of the word of God at every level of a society that has lost its way—a word that will call us to a renewed concern for truth, for integrity, and for the common bonds that knit together humankind with one another and all creation? 
    Remember how King finished this, his last sermon: “Well, I don't know what will happen now; we've got some difficult days ahead. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And so I'm happy tonight; I'm not worried about anything; I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” Is that a vision we still share, or have we as a nation become so infected by the cynicism of a cynical age that we can no longer speak, much less hear, such a prophetic voice? Amen.

​5 January 2020
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
Epiphany
 
“Arise, shine, for your light has some.” (Is. 60)
 
            On Christmas Eve, I asked the question “What do you consider to be sacred?” The question is important, because what we consider sacred also motivates what we think matters — and because in Jesus God becomes identified with the whole of human experience, it turns out that every aspect of our life, matters.
            I’d like to push the theme of the sacred a bit further today, the 12th and final day of Christmas, because it too has something important to teach us. If you were here last Sunday [at the later services], you [would] will remember that the service was made up of nine readings and hymns that cumulatively place the Christmas story in the great arc of God’s creation and redemption of the world. It’s a service that steps back to take the long view, and it offers a rather different narrative than what we encounter in just the angels and shepherds and carols we associate with Jesus’ birth.
            For given the chance to hear nine readings from scripture, we let ourselves follow the lead of scripture itself—which draws us rather quickly past the stable and manger, and pushes us to confront that in Jesus, God becomes identified from his birth with the darkest, most violent, most despairing corners of human existence. We heard of Herod’s jealous genocide; Mary and Joseph’s anxious flight into Egypt; and their life in Nazareth as immigrant refugees. And if you really want to understand Christmas, then you have to tell this part of the story too, because if you don’t, the rest of it is nothing much more than a kind of fairy tale, just another a part of the folklore that surrounds the holiday season.
            When you encounter the rest of the story, it’s as if the stone of divine life that is dropped on Christmas Eve into the pool of human experience, quickly sends out rippling rings that begin to take in the whole of who we are. In Jesus, God goes to the depths of human nature. And the carols and hymns that memorialize that movement, though they may be less well known, are also in many ways the most honest of the season’s songs. They lead us to sing for instance, “What Adam’s disobedience cost, let Holy Scripture say, ourselves estranged, an Eden lost, and then a judgment day,” or in response to Herod’s murder of the children, the Coventry Carol offers “Woe is me, poor child for thee, and ever mourn to say, by-by lulley, lullay” (more a lament than a carol, really).
            And in fact, if we pay closer attention to even the more familiar carols, especially their interior verses, we might notice that they too anticipate that Christmas is to be understood not as an unambiguous joy, but rather as the first act of the drama of the passion, when on the cross Jesus will take upon himself the whole of human suffering. The third verse of “It came upon the midnight clear,” for instance, has us sing, “Yet with the woes of sin and strife the world has suffered long; beneath the heavenly hymn have rolled two thousand years of wrong, and warring humankind hears not the tidings [the angels] bring” (words ominously prescient even now of this past week’s troubling events in the Middle East). Johann Sebastian Bach himself, in many of his Advent and Christmas works, put a musical sign of the cross at the very points where Jesus’ birth is mentioned: da-da-da-da: birth leading toward death.
            So today, we observe yet another part of the story, the Epiphany, the showing forth of Jesus to the world, embodied by the three shadowy figures from the East who are drawn to him for reasons they themselves cannot explain. They are certainly among the strangest figures in the whole of scripture, for they come out of nowhere, play a dramatic if brief role in pointing the way to Jesus, and then just as mysteriously as they arrived they vanish, never to be heard from again (although Cologne Cathedral claims to have their mortal remains). But in both their unexpected arrival and their definitive departure, they serve to focus our attention on these spreading rings of the sacred that radiate out from Christmas, through which God gradually reaches into every corner of creation. So the point of this feast day, is that there is nowhere, and nothing, that has not or cannot or will not be touched in the end by God in Christ.
            And so, in this Epiphany extension of the Word made flesh beyond the bounds of what we could ever anticipate, we come to see that there is nothing that is not made sacred by God’s touch. No darkness is too deep, no war is too violent, no depression is too overwhelming, no suffering is too intense, nor sorrow is too unbearable—that it cannot be entered into, reconciled, and included in the peace and hope of God. Instead of our usual assumption that the sacred is something rare and unusual, or that it is just one folder among many in the file drawer of human experience, in Jesus we learn that the whole of life is sacred.  In fact, the sacredness of creation is the vessel of life itself.
            And so Epiphany gives us this message: treat yourself, and the whole of life, as sacred gift. Take nothing for granted, for it has all been touched by God—the worst, as well as the best. Here at church, we are reminded of this sacred character of life each day at Morning Prayer, when we begin our intercessions with the words, “We give thanks for this new day, for friends, lovers, companions, and children.” Let that same kind of gratitude for the giftedness of life, and attentiveness to the moment, be the expectation that infuses your own spirit this Epiphany season. And then, and only then, shall we shall truly be prepared to sing, “Joy to the world, the Lord is come!” Amen.                 

24 December 2019
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
Christmas Eve
 
 
In the name of the holy and undivided Trinity, one God, now and forever. Amen.
 
            What do you consider sacred? What ho you hold in awe, in reverence?
            We sing of tonight as a “Silent night,” a “holy night,” and we began our prayers by invoking the brightness of this “holy night.” So is this night sacred? Why?
            Google tells us that sacred means “something that is dedicated or set apart for the service or worship of a deity.” Strangely then, the sense of reverence that the sacred evokes depends upon a prior sense of our own limitation: we are not God, only God is God, so our capacity for awe of the divine first requires a certain humility in ourselves.
            Yet not everything we call sacred is related directly to the divine. We hold many things to be sacred: desert landscapes, oaths of office, vows we make in marriage, duty to county, the bonds of friendship, the four sacred mountains.
            In fact, the ancient Greeks regarded reverence, and a sense of the sacred, as the foundation of human society. We are bound to one another as a community, only when we look at one another with a sacred regard that draws us out of our own self-preoccupation and into relationship with one another. 
            So reverence might be said to be at the root of all the virtues. Generosity, honesty, politeness, civility—all these are motivated by being able to recognize the sacred in something or someone other than our own self—in having a sense of responsibility, and accountability, to the Other.
            There was a story in the newspaper a couple of weeks ago about two survivors of Auschwitz, who having been lovers in the death camp, were then separated for 72 years until just this month. Despite being a Jew, Helen was lucky enough to have been pressed into office work; and although David initially was given the job of collecting the corpses of prisoners who committed suicide—when his captors discovered he was a talented singer, they had him entertain them with song instead. Somehow, Helen and David noticed one another, fell in love, and courted under the protective eye of other inmates, promising to meet again after the war if they both survived.
            But fate had it otherwise: the lovers were separated in the final days of the war, and didn’t meet again this month. By then they had both married someone else, and it was their children who brought them together once again in New York. For two hours they shared with one another the stories of their lives. “My God,” she said, “I never thought we would see each other again.” And then he finally had to ask a question that had been on his mind since last he saw her 72 years ago: “Did you have something to do with the fact that I managed to survive in Auschwitz all that time?” In response, she quietly held up her hand to display five fingers: “I saved you five times,” she said. She had risked herself, for him. “I knew she would do that,” was all he could say.
            Is that story sacred? Is there something in that tale of a love found and held over so many years of separation that speaks to us of the holy? Are there stories in our own lives of self-sacrifice and commitment that are similarly sacred?
            And so we come back to this night. It too is a love story: a love story of a God who created us to live in a joyful relationship of self-giving and receiving, only to see that reciprocity thwarted by our own wandering away. But that God, our lover, would not give up, and so came looking for us, and finally found us in a stable in Bethlehem.
            This night is sacred because much like the reunion between Helen and David, God is tonight reunited with us as one of us, and in that reunion we discover the true depth of how seriously God takes this world, and our humanity within it. In fact, God takes humanity so seriously, to become part of it, and to endow it as sacred.       
              Athanasius, a fourth century monk who tried to make sense of all this, wrote that in Jesus, “God became human, in order that humanity might become divine.” Tonight is made sacred, then, by the way of life it calls us into. And if we have such a destiny, then the true lesson of Christmas is that life matters—every part of it—because in Jesus life has been made sacred. How we treat one another, matters. What we say to one another, matters. What we post, text and tweet, matters. Honesty, matters. Compassion, matters. Generosity, matters. Faithfulness, matters. Self-sacrifice, matters. Community, matters. The earth, matters. As the spiritual writer Madeleine L’Engle put it, “There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation [the Word made flesh].” 
            The real miracle of this night, in other words, is not that God takes on human form, but that through Jesus we take on the sacredness of the holy. In him, God holds up a mirror to us and says, “Look, this is who you are: a being created in my own image, created to live as love, created to live in peace, created to live not for yourself but for one another.” So to be here tonight, as you are, is to receive God’s loving encouragement that you treat yourself, and everyone else, as truly sacred—nothing less than the image and likeness of God you are created to be.
            Life, and how you live it, matters. Thanks be to God! Amen.