Strip his sleeve and show his scars

“I bear on my body the marks of Jesus.”  Galatians 6:17

Like a number of you, Allison and I have been watching the recent Ken Burns series about the Vietnam War.  Like so many of his other documentaries, it carefully weaves together the story of that troubled era, placing each major leader and event in its proper place.  It also has that human touch that marks Burns’ storytelling, breaking the wide narrative to focus on the experiences of ordinary people who patrolled the jungles, marched in protest and captured it all behind the lens of a camera.  

In his Civil War epic, Burns was restricted to diaries and letters, but for this series, he and his crew interviewed dozens of people, American and Vietnamese, about what they had seen and felt.   It was striking how vividly these men and women could recall the events of a half century ago: the sounds of exploding shells, the feel of boots sloughing through the rice paddies.  Several of them pulled up a pantleg or unbuttoned a shirt to reveal the traces of old wounds.  I can remember that day because I see it every day. I am marked forever.  

My mind goes immediately to King Henry’s words in the English camp before the Battle of Agincourt:
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'

It Would Have Been Enough

“Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”  St. John 13:1

Maybe you saw the article in the Washington Post last week about matzoh man’s visit to Farragut Park[1].  Maybe, at least, you remember the unforgettable picture.  Matzoh Man is a rabbi, Shmuel Herzfeld of Synagouge Ohev Sholom in Northwest.  About this time every year he dresses in his matzoh suit and kippah, which are white with brown spots.  He revs up the matzoh mobile, a Crown Vic wrapped in a vinyl coating that makes it look like the ubiquitous Jewish cracker. 

And he drives downtown to pass out boxes of the unleavened bread, all the while wishing people a happy Passover and reminding Jews to keep the Seder at home this year.  He’s ready to give you the matzoh you need, to invite you to the community seder at his synagogue, to do everything he can to awaken the consciousness of America’s increasingly secular Jews to remember their ancient traditions and to celebrate God’s faithfulness once more this year.

The Post reporter, who was obviously having a great time with the article, asked rabbi Herzfeld why he does it.  And as I was reading, I thought to myself: “this guy is going to say he was a performance artist in his former life, or that he finished last in the rabbinical council’s fantasy football pool.”  Why else would a well-educated, successful religious leader go downtown dressed like a Saltine to shame his fellow Jews into keeping the Seder. 

Homage for Our True King

From the Sounds of St. Francis, 13 April 2017

I know that several of you, like me, enjoyed watching the recent Netflix miniseries, The Crown.  For me, one of the most moving scenes was Elizabeth’s coronation in Westminster Abbey at the close of the fifth episode, an event whose planning had consumed a good deal of the dramatic tension in the several episodes preceding it.  The Netflix series faithfully rendered the grand music, solemn ritual and stunning costumes of the ceremony. 

It also showed part of the homage, the ancient ceremony that follows the anointing and crowning of the monarch.  The senior nobles of the kingdom, the “lords of the realm,” (Prince Philip notably among them) knelt before the new queen to speak an oath and kiss her hand.  The words of the oath at the homage (not includes in the series script, if I remember correctly), are these: “I do become your liege man of life and limb, and of earthly worship; and faith and truth I will bear unto you, to live and die, against all manner of folks.  So help me God.”

The oath is a promise of deep loyalty.  The act of kneeling expresses respect, even a kind of reverence for the monarchy and its place in the life of the nation.  And the kiss is a token of affection, a sign that the promise is made freely, with the whole heart.

Ponder: "he meant to give copious redemption"

“[Thomas Aquinas] says that the very least one of these sufferings was of itself suffering enough to redeem the human race from all sin (that is woven into the Adoro Te).  But, says St. Thomas, it was fitting that He should have to endure all at once.  One suffering would have sufficed for our Redemption, but it would not suffice for the Love of the Redeemer.  He meant to give copious Redemption.  He willed that the beaker should brim over.  He gave a thousand Redemptions all in one.”

Vincent McNabb, OP, The Craft of Suffering (1936), 79.

Ponder: "the means whereby we enter into its bounty"

“Traherne’s devotion to the cross sprang from seeing it the final proof of the nature of God, a nature which had been indicated in all the Divine actions wherever we may look, in the world around us, into our own best thoughts, into the history of man’s redemption, everywhere is to be seen an ever-broadening stream of love.  The cross is both the demonstration of that love and the means whereby we enter into its bounty.  Traherne’s eyes are not fixed upon the damnation from which the passion of Christ saves mankind, but on the felicity into which it admits us.  We learn to prize our own nature by thus seeing the value that God sets upon it.  So our deepest repentance must be for having failed to love and our prayer that we may love more fully.”

C. J. Stranks, Anglican Devotion, 105-6.

Praying the Passion with St. Bridget: A Holy Dying

Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit!” And having said this he breathed his last.  St. Luke 23:46

Several of the Fifteen Os also make mention of a particular aspect of discipleship that was especially important in St. Bridget’s time, ending life in faith and trust, having what Jeremy Taylor famously described as “a holy dying.”  As she meditates upon the end of Jesus’ life, St. Bridget is also inviting us, as does the final stanza of one of the Victorian passion hymns, to “Learn of Jesus Christ to die[1]”

In her concern with a holy death, in part St. Bridget reflects the reality of her times.  She was surrounded by people, all of them baptized Christians, who died in unexpected ways every day.  An epidemic struck a village, an army laid siege to a town, a fire swept through a city, and thousands would die.  People lived perilous lives, and unlike the reality in the Western world today, there were very few means of effectively blunting the pain, so that most people were conscious and fully aware of death’s approach. 

Praying the Passion with St. Bridget: Call to Mind

We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin.  Romans 6:6

In my last meditation, I spoke about the way in which Bridget’s passion prayers carefully turn us away from the danger of viewing Christ’s passion and death as a purely human story.  They also, quite carefully steer us away from the accompanying danger of seeing the Cross as an event that belongs only to the past, something that happened on a lonely hill in Palestine long ago and remains there, an interesting story in someone else’s life.

Instead Bridget believes that Christ’s passion and death are a reality with deep significance for the present moment, and that Christian discipleship is deeply bound up in responding to Christ’s call, described in one of the prayers as “enduring in the way of the Cross.” 

Praying the Passion with St. Bridget: Devastating and Glorious

God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation.  II Cor. 5:19

If you’ve ever read through one of the Gospels from beginning to end in a single setting, maybe what surprised you most was how long the passion story, the account of Jesus’ suffering and death is.  In what is probably the earliest Gospel, St. Mark, 45% of the text is of the last week of Jesus’ life.  Regular worshippers know to prepare themselves for Palm Sunday, because when we read the passion, it will take quite a long time.

The Gospels are unlike any other kind of literature that predates them in the way they focus in on this final (or properly almost final) part of the life of their subject.  We have some deathbed scenes for other important figures in the Bible, and the classical biographies usually include an account of the death. There is generally in ancient literature a sense that the death reveals the character, but the passions of the Gospel stories are really unprecedented.

Praying the Passion with St. Bridget: Weeping with the Pain of the World

“He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed.”  Isaiah 53:5

You may think it odd to begin a presentation about a famous set of prayers by a Swedish nun by spending time with a German painting.  But this painting was directly inspired by the devotional writings of Bridget of Sweden, especially her Revelations, a book of visions of the crucified Christ.  Bridget never saw this painting, as it was completed 130 years after her death.  But had she been able to paint, I believe she would have created something just like this.

This is the Isenheim Altarpiece, painted by Matthaeus Gruenewald in 1515 for the hospital chapel at Monastery of St. Anthony in a village near Colmar in Alsace, now a part of France.  One of the masters of the Mannerist style, this is Gruenewald’s greatest work.  A similar “Small Crucifixion” is in the National Gallery.

The monks who served at the monastery of St. Anthony were a community dedicated to treating those who suffered from the plague and ergotism.  There was no remedy, and the monks’ mission was to provide physical care and spiritual consolation.  The painting appropriately reveals Jesus who suffered as we suffer and who shows the extent of God’s love through offering Himself to destruction.  Jesus is present in our pains and reveals His mercy as we face the certain prospect of death.

Circumcised for Us

“And at the end of eight days, when he was circumcised, he was called Jesus.”  St. Luke 2:21

I will never forget how I came to know all about circumcision.  I was in the fourth-grade class at Vacation Bible School at Saint John’s Church.  In our little town, the ecumenical Bible School was a big deal, and there were about twenty of us nine-year-olds gathered around tables in a corner of the Fellowship Hall.  Our teacher was Mrs. Truax, a dignified, silver-haired lady who taught Sunday School at Saint John’s for a half-century. 

We had memory verses each day at Bible School, and there was a little prize if you could recite it back the next day.  And that day’s memory verse was from Galatians, “neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature.[1]”  Looking back, it was a rather complicated text for a nine-year-old, though maybe not so hard to memorize.  The thing was, I didn’t know what the text was talking about.  I had some vague understanding that circumcision was a religious term, like intercession or consecration.  This was my chance to get the matter cleared up.

So, I raised my hand and asked, “Mrs. Truax, what is circumcision?”  And her face blanched and she began looking around, as if to make sure that none of the other classes had heard.  She then ordered all the girls to leave the room, and then proceeded, in hushed tones, to give us boys who remained behind a pretty straightforward explanation.  It was by far the most dramatic thing that ever happened in my decade or so of children’s religious education.  And you can bet that every boy—and every girl, for that matter—who was there never has forgotten what circumcision is.

Ponder: "it is this only that can make us free"

"They who imagine that self-denial intrenches upon our liberty, do not know that it is this only that can make us free indeed; giving us the victory over ourselves; setting us free from the bondage of our corruption; enabling us to bear afflictions, (which will come one time or other;) to forsee them without amazement; enlightening the mind, sanctifying the will, and making us to slight those baubles which others so eagerly contend for.,,It is the greatest mercy, that God does not consult our inclinations, in laying upon us the Cross, which is the only way to happiness.  Jesus Christ crucified would have few imitators, if God did not lay it upon us, by the hands of men, and by His providence."

Thomas Wilson, Sacra Privata.

Ponder: a true pneumatologia crucis

"This is the paradox of divine love, a true pneumatologia crucis.  To invoke the Spirit, praying the prayer, 'Come Holy Spirit' is a wonderful, but perhaps also a sombre thing to do.  It is wonderful because it asks God to draw us into the same relationship of love that Jesus had with the Father.  It is sombre because it is asking God to draw us into the same relationship Jesus had with the world, which led him to a cross."

Graham Tomlin, "The Prodigal Spirit and Church Growth," in Towards a Theology of Church Growth (2015), 135.

Victory is Ours: A Sermon for Holy Cross Day

"The LORD has made known his victory; * his righteousness has he openly shown in the sight of the nations."  Psalm 98:3

As you might have noticed, just now I made the sign of the Cross over myself.  I do it quite often.  I sat down and counted this week, and discovered that in the usual course of celebrating the Eucharist on Sunday, I make the sign of the Cross not once or five or ten times, but 27 times, as well as making it over each of you individually with the wafer when you come forward to receive Holy Communion.  Making the sign of the Cross is a ritual that accompanies many different words and movements in the course of the liturgy, including nearly all the most important ones.  I use the Cross when I ask God to be with me in reading and hearing the Gospel, when I speak His word absolving your sins, when I bless the bread and wine, when I speak His blessing over all of you at the end of the service, and at quite a few other times besides these. 

And of course, the Cross isn’t just here among us in the ritual action, we also worship facing a Cross.  The service begins when the choir and the sacred ministers come in, proceeded by a Cross—and we brought the beautiful jeweled one out of the vault to mark this special day.   There are crosses on the windows and the paintings, the arches and the plates.  The silver cruets we use at the Altar have crosses on their tops.  My vestments today are adorned with a half-dozen of them.  There’s one on the steeple, and the whole building, for that matter, is shaped like a Cross. 

Now, if you’re new here, all these crosses are likely to strike you as rather odd, maybe as a kind of symbolic overkill.  Surely, we could mix it up a bit, couldn’t we?  What is it about the Cross that urges us Christians to plant it everywhere, to mark everything with it? What does it mean for us?

Ponder: "the evil spirit of defeatism"

"While painfully aware of our own frailties, we have to march on without giving in, keeping in mind what the Lord said to Saint Paul: "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness' (2 Cor. 12:9).  Christian triumph is always a cross, yet a cross which is at the same time a victorious banner borne with aggressive tenderness against the assaults of evil.  The evil spirit of defeatism is brother to the temptation to separate, before its time, the wheat from the weeds; it is the fruit of an anxious and self-centred lack of trust."

Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, 85.

Comfort and the Cross

“Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”  St. Luke 14:27

Last Sunday after the 8:00 service, Ralph Tildon came up to me and told me that my sermon had reminded him of a movie.  “We’re No Angels,” was based on the passage about welcoming the stranger that I had taken as my text.  I don’t expect you’ve ever heard of the movie either, as it never broke number 8 in the box office listing when it came out in 1989.  But it was a slow Sunday evening, so Allison and I watched it together. 

The movie tells the story of two bumbling convicts who escaped from a prison and were taken into a monastery, after being mistaken for famous Biblical scholars.  The convicts are played by Sean Penn and Robert DeNiro, and for me it was worth the cost of the rental to see Robert DeNiro trotting around in an old fashioned priest’s cassock and biretta.  The plot plays out as you would expect when two semi-illiterate, chain-smoking cons try to pose as holy men in the midst of a massive manhunt. 

The climax of the film comes when Father Brown, aka Jim the convict, is spontaneously invited to give the sermon at the monastery’s annual festival.  Jim is Sean Penn’s character, a relatively kind hearted fellow who looks about fourteen.  By this point in the movie, you know to wince when he opens his mouth, but you’re also on his side. 

Ponder: "inexorably to the cross"

From then on, the direction of Lenten energy leads compellingly and inexorably to the cross, and what God accomplished there for all humankind. It’s not that our own individual selves and our own individual sins no longer matter: they matter immensely. They merely pale in significance alongside that which is their antidote, their remedy. As we move through Lent, the theme becomes “less of me and more of Jesus, less of me and more of us.” “We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you, because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.”  This is in itself a school of holiness, a preparation for our eschatological destiny.

 Dan Martins, "The Morphology of Lent."  Covenant 4 Mar 2016

For Meditation: A Kind Woman in Heaven

"Never, as he afterward told Father Vaillant, had it been permitted him to behold such deep experience of the holy joy of religion as on that pale December night.  He was able to feel, kneeling beside her, the preciousness of the things of the altar to her who was without possessions; the tapers, the image of the Virgin, the figures of the saints, the Cross that took away indignity from suffering and made pain and poverty a means of fellowship with Christ. Kneeling beside the much enduring bond-woman, he experienced those holy mysteries as he had done in his young manhood.  He seemed able to feel all it meant to her to know that there was a Kind Woman in Heaven, though there were such cruel ones on earth.  Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world's hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman's tenderness.  Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.
Not often, indeed, had Jean Marie Latour come so near to the Fountain of all Pity as in Lady Chapel that night; the pity that no man born of woman could utterly cut himself off from; that was for the murderer on the scaffold, as it was for the murderer on the scaffold, as it was for the dying soldier or the martyr on the rack.  The beautiful concept of Mary pierced the priest's heart like a sword."

Willa Cather, Death Comes to the Archbishop,216-217.

O Root of Jesse

O Root of Jesse, Who dost stand for an ensign of the people, before Whom kings shall keep silence, and unto Whom the Gentiles shall make their supplication: come to deliver us, and tarry not.

The House of Jesse was a stump.  That’s where this majestic passage from Isaiah 11 begins.  God had revealed this to Isaiah, when to all outward appearances, it seemed likely to have a fairly secure future.  He’s talking about the royal house, Israel’s line of kings.  Jesse was the father of David, the greatest of kings, and it was David’s descendants who ruled in Jerusalem in Isaiah’s time.  It will become a stump, Isaiah begins, cut off violently after so many warnings went unheeded.  The patience of God would be exhausted, and it would fall like a great tree in the forest.

And great trees, generally, do not rise again. The ruin of what once was, the death of a promising future.  It’s the natural lesson of this time of year, of course, when the greenery of summer is dying off.  The trees have shed their leaves, and the wind whips through the branches, and the sap moves very slowly if it moves at all.  It’s dark and cold, and life seems chased from the earth.

We Have Failed, But He Has Triumphed

“He has appeared once for all at the end of the age to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself.”

Hebrews 9:26

Yesterday, the government of Singapore hosted a historic meeting between Xi Jinping, the president of Mainland China and Ma Ying-jeo, the president of Taiwan.  Technically, China and Taiwan are still engaged in a civil war, and it was the first meeting between the leaders of the countries in sixty years.  Many people are hoping for reconciliation.  China and Taiwan share a common language, history and culture.  Both are important economic powers, and there would be advantages in trade and security cooperation.

But with a bloody war and decades of hostile rhetoric behind them, it’s almost impossible for the leaders to know how to speak with each other.  They agreed not to call one another president, because that would suggest that both lead legitimate governments.  No flags can be displayed.  Neither president has the freedom to promise another meeting or to make substantial proposals for common action.  The words they do use must be chosen with extreme delicacy, because anything either leader says could call up old associations and deeply offend the other, perhaps touching off internal scandals that would only make things worse.  In its impotency, its nervous gesturing, what it most reveals is just how far off the goal of normalized relations really lies. 

Who Do You Say That I Am?

“Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”    St. Mark 8:38

A few years ago, Pastor Allison and I led a mission trip to Washington DC for teenagers from our two churches.  We were aiming to help these rural kids understand what urban poverty is really like, and to support a number of ministries that were working among the poor in the city.  It was an amazing experience for all of us, and together we lived on a food stamp budget, visited and prayed with the homeless, chopped vegetables at the DC Central Kitchen, and helped serve meals at a shelter.  Our Bible studies each day focused on different parts of the Magnificat, the Blessed Virgin Mary’s revolutionary song of praise, which we prayed together each evening. 

We also gave the teens an assignment, to memorize the Magnificat over the course of our time, so that its message could form their spiritual lives.  One beautiful evening of the trip, we were walking up 14^th Street, on our way back to our dorm from a concert on the steps of the Capitol.  Unprompted, a few of our girls joined hands, and started to recite the Magnificat together as they walked down the street.  “He has put down the mighty from their seats, and has lifted up the lowly,” they chanted.  “He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.”[1]  We were just past the Willard Hotel, about a block from the White House, and on the sidewalks, filled with tourists from every part of the world, all eyes turned to the girls.  Now they may have just been trying to learn the lines, but knowing those particular girls well, I think there was something more to it.