Saturday, March 16, 2024

We Want To See Jesus: A Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent

 

Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, 17 March, 2024.

Texts for the Fifth Sunday of Lent (B): Jer 31:31-34; Ps 51:1-13 ; Heb 5:5-10; Jn 12:20-33



Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks.   They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.”  (John 12:20)

We don’t know why these “Greeks” wanted to see Jesus.  Today’s story comes just after St. John describes the raising of Lazarus and the spreading fame of Jesus, so perhaps these Greeks had heard the news and were curious (Jn 11:45-48).   Maybe they had spiritual questions they wanted to ask.   John doesn’t tell us if they got an audience with Jesus, but their statement, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus” has a directness and an urgency that should get our attention.

Karoline Lewis, a John scholar, notes that this verse is often written or carved on pulpits because the preacher’s central task is to help God’s people to see Jesus.  

This sort of thing should be put in front of preachers.  I saw a photo of an English church where, carved on to the pulpit for all to see, were the words “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel”.

Preachers and people alike should want to see Jesus, and yet, we might well envy the Greeks in today’s reading because they could hope for an introduction and to come face to face with him.   How can we see Jesus?   Where is he that we can look at him?

Fortunately for us, in the language of John’s gospel, seeing Jesus is equated with spiritual understanding.  Lots of people in John see Jesus but didn’t know who he was or who don’t believe him, like the Pharisees in John 9 who are contrasted with the man born blind who receives his sight and says “Lord, I believe” (Jn 9:35-41).

There’s a lovely hymn by Robert Cull called “OpenOur Eyes, Lord”.  It’s not in our hymnal, sadly, but it goes like this.

Open our eyes, Lord,
we want to see Jesus,
to reach out and touch him,
and say that we love him.
Open our ears, Lord,
and help us to listen.
Open our eyes, Lord,
we want to see Jesus.


In my Easter letter to the parish, which you may have received by now, I said that we as Christians are people who look to Christ and to Christ’s light.   Jesus says in today’s gospel that “Whoever serves me must follow me”, but if we don’t look to Jesus, if we don’t see him, then we can’t follow him.  It’s like before GPS, when you needed directions and someone else in another car said “just follow me”.   Do you remember how anxious it got at stop lights, when you were afraid you would lose the person in front of you?   We need to keep Jesus in sight if we are going to follow him.

Today I want to take three cues from today’s gospel reading to suggest ways that we might spiritually see Jesus.  Here’s the first.

“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself”.  He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.”

As we move through Lent, we know that one of our final stops will be Good Friday and the cross.    All through this season we’ve heard the warnings and predictions, as we did back on the second Sunday of Lent, when Jesus told his friends “ that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering … and be killed” (Mk 8.31).   Peter didn’t want to hear that, and was sternly rebuked.   Some of us have been watching The Chosen, the dramatic series on Jesus, and we’ve talked about how the character of Jesus is so compelling and attractive that we can’t bear to think of him dying so cruelly.   Thus we come to better understand fierce, protective Peter.

Last Saturday was our final Après Ski service for this year, and our theme was the cross.   We spent some time standing or kneeling beside a large wooden cross laid on the floor, surrounded by candles.   It was a chance to approach the cross not with horror, but with love and adoration for the one that poured out his life and blood for us there.  Good Friday can be about love as well as sorrow, and the cross can be the sign of love that leads us closer to Jesus.

There is another way to see the cross which I also think leads us closer to Jesus, which is to see how the cross changes and transforms us.     Last Sunday we heard that difficult text from John’s Gospel, another passage where Jesus speaks about being “lifted up”:  And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up” (Jn 3.14).  We heard that gospel as well as the passage Jesus was thinking of, from the Hebrew Scriptures were God told Moses to make a bronze serpent on a staff, the sight of which could cure the Israelites bitten by the poisonous snakes sent by God.

It was a strange set of readings, and the story in Numbers is even a little horrific, but let’s think about the snakes for a moment.   In Genesis, it’s the serpent that tempts humanity out of relationship with God so that they can invent themselves as they see fit.   In the Moses story, the snakes embody the consequences of the Israelites’ frequent rebellions to God.  In comparing himself to the serpent on the pole, Jesus is predicting his becoming our sin, his taking the worst of humanity onto himself on the cross so that we might be healed from our sins.

I saw a wonderful expression of this idea recently.  St Mark’s, an Anglican church in Austin, Texas, had a processional cross designed for them by a skilled blacksmith.  The cross is a simple shape in silver, and coiled around it are the loops of a bronze serpent, a complex shape that suggests the knots of Celtic art.   The Rector of St. Mark’s, the Rev. ZacCoons, writes that he wanted this new cross to be a sign of our hope.  The snake cross, he writes, is a way not only of coming to terms with our sin in the Lenten spirit of penitence and self examination so that we can look “directly at the serpents in our lives, the snakes lurking in our hearts and imaginations”. 

At the same time, Rev Coons writes, the snake cross reminds us that in seeing our sins, we also see our healing:  “through Christ, God can take any sin, any mistake, and through the cross, work it into my salvation … [so that] God can mold our mistakes into something holy, even beautiful”.   

Could we dare see in the cross the love of God in Christ that heals us and makes us beautiful,  so that we might be the true people that God dreamed of when he created us?   Our processional cross has no snakes.  It is very traditional, very ornate, made of heavy engraved brass.    I wonder, though, the next time you watch it go by you in our worship, could you regard that cross and see in its beauty something of the beauty that happened on that cross in Golgotha, when Christ had the courage to become our sins for us so that we might be ransomed and renewed, restored to what God always wanted us to be?  That would be another way to see Jesus.

 

Here's the second cue from today’s gospel that might help us to spiritually see Jesus.

Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. (Jn 12.24)

At this time of year, some of you will notice me wandering around the grounds of the rectory, head bowed and staring intently at the ground.   Gardeners will know what I’m doing.   I’m looking for those green shoots that show the plants coming back to life – at least, the bulbs that the squirrels didn’t get.   Each day offers the chance of a new discover, the promise of spring and of the renewal of the earth.

If we look at nature in springtime, we can see something of the renewal of life that Jesus predicts and promises.   Jesus is not just talking about his own resurrection, but about the renewal of life in general – in the earth, in the church, in his followers, and in the world, which will see a new creation, a new heaven and a new earth.    So we can see something of Jesus and his promise of abundant life in all the signs of springtime, and we can see in those signs the hope and promise of our renewal and remaking as Christ’s followers.    After all, if a humble bulb can come back to life, what more glorious things can we hope for?

 

Here's the third cue from today’s gospel that might help us to spiritually see Jesus.

26Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor. (Jn 21.6)

We know that the words “servant” and “service” in the gospels are key.    In John’s gospel, shortly after this episode, Jesus will set aside his titles as Teacher and Lord to become a servant and wash his friends’ feet “to set [them] an example, that you should do as I have done to you” (Jn 13.14).   Elesewhere Jesus says that he did not come “to be served but to serve” (Mk 10.45; Mt 20.28), and likewise he says that whoever serves and helps another has seen and served Jesus (Mt 25.31-46).

Service to others can also be a way in which we spiritually see Jesus.   We reenact this opportunity to serve others during the footwashing part of our Maundy Thursday liturgy, but our church offers many ways to serve friends, parishioners, and strangers.   I invite you to see your volunteer activities and your interactions with others, both within and outside All Saints, as opportunities to spiritually see Jesus in acts of service.

These are three ways that we might focus on seeing Jesus spiritually.   There are others.  As we get to Easter Sunday and onwards, you might spend time contemplating the magnificent windows about the altar depicting Jesus’ Ascension.  It’s a glorious image and it shows another side of Jesus, who trusted his Father and who shares his glory, and yet would love and serve us.   

There are many ways to see Jesus spiritually, and I think they all begin from cultivating a heart that is open to his love and friendship, which we all need.

 

Open our eyes, Lord,
we want to see Jesus,
to reach out and touch him,
and say that we love him.
Open our ears, Lord,
and help us to listen.
Open our eyes, Lord,
we want to see Jesus.

 

Friday, March 15, 2024

Classroom, Communion and Creed: A Homily on the Place of the Creeds in the Church Today

 

Classroom, Communion and Creed:   A Homily for the Signs of Our Common Faith Lenten series at Trinity Church, Barrie, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, March 15th, 2024.  There is a video recording of this service and homily here.



It would have been about this time of year, 1700 years ago, in the later weeks of Lent, that those seeking to become Christians, called catechumens, would have been preparing for baptism.   As part of this preparation, they would have been expected to learn the statement of our faith that today call the Apostles’ Creed (the Nicene Creed was first written in 325 but did not come into wide use until a few centuries later).  Then, just before Holy Week, the catechumens would come before their bishop and, one by one, be expected to recite the Apostles’ Creed as well as the prayer we call the Our Father, and to answer questions put to them.

St Augustine, a learned and socially prominent figure, would have had to submit himself to this process of instruction and preparation before he was baptised by Bishop Ambrose of Milan in 387.   By that time, the persecutions had ended and Christianity was now the official religion of the Roman Empire, but the church still regarded the ability to say and understand the Creed as a necessary qualification for baptism, and only then could the new Christian participate in the Mass and receive the sacrament.

So the Creed functioned then as it does now, as a sign of Christian identity.  However, the place of the creeds in the life of the church has changed considerably.   For the early church, the Creed (specifically the Apostles’ Creed) was used as a core curriculum, so that the novice Christian could understand the identity and the saving actions of the three persons of the Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  The Creed in the early church was for the classroom, not for communion.   It did not have a place in the liturgy of the church.

Where the creeds came from is a long story that can only get a brief answer in a short homily. The Apostle’s Creed was not, as was charmingly claimed, written by the original apostles.   However,  we know from scripture that the earliest Jesus followers had statements of core belief that proclaimed Jesus as Lord (Christus kyrios) and which contain the building blocks of Christian belief.   

Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, of the seed of David, according to my gospel.  (2 Tim 2,8)

The Apostle’s Creed probably came together over time as a synthesis of these scriptures and teachings around them.   

By the fourth century the Apostles’ Creed had become a way to instruct new Christians and to distinguish them from pagans.    The Nicene Creed, as Gregory Dix noted, was written to answer theological debates among Christians – was Jesus human or divine (answer, both)?  Thus the Nicene Creed, with its more robust Christology, works well in the Eucharist, whereas the Apostle’s Creed is sufficient for services of the word and for the daily offices.  By the sixth century the Nicene Creed had found its place in the mass following the gospel, where it still lives today, though before the Reformation it seems that the people recited the Apostle’s Creed while the priests said the Nicene Creed.

Today, I think it’s fair to say that we know and say the Creeds (Apostles and Nicene) almost exclusively in liturgy.   They don’t really have a secure home elsewhere in the life of our church.  We have communion, but we don’t really have classroom.   Why did this happen?  The practice of infant baptism meant that instruction was shifted to the process of confirmation, which was once a precondition for first communion.  Confirmation in turn lost much of its importance as the Anglican church gradually adopted the practice of the open table, so that we do not ask people to believe before they receive.  One could argue that it’s more grace filled to invite seekers to first encounter Christ in bread and wine and then seek instruction in the faith, but this puts the onus on the church to explain our faith after the fact, rather like giving someone driving lessons after they’ve been on the road.  And, since we see fewer and fewer new believers these days, we have largely lost the skills of catechesis, the instruction of new Christians.

Even so, in liturgy the creeds still function as a sign of belief and of Christian identity.   We say them together, and while the rubrics don’t tell us to, we stand by custom, paying the creeds the same honour that we pay to the gospel and to the processional cross.   By tradition we turn and face the altar, eastward in most churches, east being the direction of sunrise and the direction from which Christ is expected to return.  Some of us make the sign of the cross as we confess our belief in the resurrection.    So the act of participating in, even performing, the creeds is collective, so still a sign of our identity, though perhaps not of unity.   Not all of us, myself included, could recite either creed perfectly, nor could many of us explain the articles of the creeds, even following the old catechism printed in the Book of Common Prayer.

Barbara Brown Taylor once said that we say the creeds together because there are days when we might not believe all we say, and so rely on others to believe for us, and vice versa.    While this statement would likely startle early Christians like Augustine and Ambrose, it does at least have the merit of being honest.   Western Anglicans are, after all, a 21st century church which sometimes seems more comfortable living the questions than it does having all the answers.   Believing and reciting ancient creeds can seem charmingly archaic in our postmodern age.  

However, our task is not to be relevant but to be faithful.   The creeds tell us that a good and gracious God created all things.   The creeds tell us that Jesus is Lord of heaven and earth, that he has conquered sin and death, and that he gives us the hope of the resurrection.  The creeds assure us that the Holy Spirit is amongst us.  The creeds unite us with those who have believed and proclaimed the gospel over the long centuries.   These are the beliefs that I would offer to someone seeking to learn our faith.  

Let me finish with a final thought as to what the creeds are not.   Some churches and Christians call themselves creedal in a way that suggests that others are not true, faithful Christians. I dislike this use of creedal.  And in that spirit, let’s notice some of the things that the creeds do not say.  The creeds say nothing about how to do liturgy, they are silent as to the number and nature of the sacraments, and the creeds do not tell us how to govern or structure our churches.  The creeds tell us that the world was created but not how or when;  they allow us to believe in dinosaurs.  The creeds say nothing about gender, about marriage, or about preference.  And the creeds do not tell us that Christians should rule society.   

So the creeds are not weapons to be used in church culture wars. The creeds simply tell us that Jesus Christ is Lord.   And for us, at this time, as it was for Augustine and Ambrose and all those before them, that is surely all we need,

 

Lent Madness: Julian of Norwich Takes On Zita (or is it Rita?)

 Catching up with Lent Madness at the end of the week, we find that Cornelius the Centurion tamed one of our Shamrock Saints, Andoman, who goes back to the Emerald Isle.   Likewise, the last of the Grappling Gerties, Gertrude the Great, was pulled off stage by the ecclesial crozier of Ambrose of Milan.


Today it's one of the girls from that wacky sitcom, "Rita and Zita", vs that wise and sensible English mystic, Julian of Norwich, and I feel confident in calling this one for Julian.

Vote here.

Mad Padre

Mad Padre
Opinions expressed within are in no way the responsibility of anyone's employers or facilitating agencies and should by rights be taken as nothing more than one person's notional musings, attempted witticisms, and prayerful posturings.

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