No Bones About It

May 8, 2011

Third Sunday of Easter, Year A

1 Peter 1.17-23

            Back in the day in Merry Old England you had to be buried in sanctified ground – which meant the churchyard – if you wanted to go to Heaven. Problem was, people tended to stick around, so generations of folks died in the same village, creating a housing crunch in the cemetery. Consequently they developed the practice of digging up old bones to make room for fresh corpses.

            This practice evidently disturbed William Shakespeare, whose grave under the chancel of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford bears a self-composed epitaph that calls down a curse on any sexton bold enough to disturb his final rest. His phobia also puts in an appearance in a scene in the play Hamlet. The melancholy prince watches a laborer excavating a fresh grave, evicting the femurs and skulls of lords and ladies in the process. “Did these bones,” he wonders, “cost no more the breeding, but to play at loggats with ‘em?” Or, translated: Did centuries of judicious inbreeding produce nothing more than a snooty set of pick-up-sticks? Hamlet then offers a meditation on the irrelevance of bloodlines in the face of mortality.

            Peter, by contrast, exhorts believers to remember the cost of their pedigree – not of their bodies, but of their souls; not of the human blood that bred them but of the divine blood that bought them; not the perishable seed of human succession but the imperishable seed of eternal salvation. Our hope of Heaven rests, not on an undisturbed grave but on a disturbed one. We anticipate eternal life not because the seal of Rome kept intruders out, but because it couldn’t keep Jesus in.

            So behave yourselves, Peter scolds. Don’t go native. Your home above earth is a bus stop. Your home below earth is an airport terminal. Your home is in eternity: Make yourself at home.

Gravely,

Doug

Collect

God our Father and Judge, You sacrificed the precious blood of Your only Son to save us. Grant us grace to walk, not as those who fear to feel the flames of Hell, but as those who fear to fall short of the heritage of Heaven, that we may reflect in our love for one another the love of Our Lord who redeemed us by His precious blood. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

 Benediction

God makes you a misfit in this world,

            To fit you for a world as yet unseen.

God frees from you the riches of this world

            To grant you wealth that does not pass away.

God grafts you to a family in this world

            Whose love will last for all eternity.

In the name of the Father,

And of the Son,

And of the Holy Spirit,

Amen. 

A Good Walk Spoiled May 1, 2011 Second Sunday of Easter, Year A 1 Peter 1.3-9

            Kevin Na did not set out to become the patron saint of every weekend duffer who’s ever sliced a smile into a no-cut cover or sent Mr. Spalding to a watery grave. But that’s exactly what he did.

            When Na teed up on the par-four ninth in the Texas Open in San Antonio he was a skilled, if obscure, professional golfer. When he holed out sixteen strokes later, he was an icon of perseverance, honesty, and composure.

He shanked his tee shot into unplayable rough, took a one-stroke tariff, then fired his third shot into the same thicket. Electing to play this one, Na ventured into the bush where he whipped, whacked, hacked and smacked his way back onto the fairway lying thirteen. He pitched his approach shot onto the skirt of the green and two-putted for a double-quadruple bogey.

            After that he fired three birdies on the back nine, parred everything else and finished with an eighty, or four under par if you could eliminate the ninth. Golfers everywhere cheered Na for his determination to complete the hole, his integrity in actually writing a number so large on his scorecard, and his toughness in regaining his composure.

            Peter urges believers to rejoice when life lands them in the deep woods far off the fairway, and that for two reasons: For one thing, the fires of frustration far off the fairway strip away self and smelt us down to the indwelling presence of Christ. Even more importantly, we can remain unruffled in the rough because the successful outcome of our round has already been recorded. All of this happens, Peter reminds us, “through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” Our Lord ventured into the bunkers and hazards and wildernesses of life on our behalf, but also as our example, and emerged in triumph at the end.

            As a result, our inheritance – our final score, our trophy, our prize – is “reserved in heaven.” Peter uses a Greek perfect tense that describes an action already done and impossible to undo. Our Lord is in the clubhouse and has signed our name to his scorecard in the indelible ink of his own saving blood.

            Kevin Na became a hero, not by staying out of trouble but by staying in it until he overcame it. Jesus won our salvation not by avoiding the struggles you and I also face but by embracing them. So when you can’t see the fairway for the trees, don’t quit; keep swinging: you’re more likely to meet your Lord in the rough than on the green.

Fore!

Doug

           

Collect

God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, your resurrected Your Son from the dead as an unshakable sign that our inheritance remains untouched even by the grave. Grant us grace to live this life as those who cannot lose the life to come, and to face life’s tests as those who cannot fail, that our very beings might bring You praise at the revelation of Jesus Christ, Your Son, Our Lord in whose name we pray, Amen.

Benediction

The Lord makes you hope in the risen Christ

            So fear not: Your hope can ever fade.

The Lord makes you pass through the refining fires,

            So fear not: You will be purified.

The Lord destines you to eternal praise

            So fear not: You will be found in Him.

In the name of the Father,

And of the Son,

And of the Holy Spirit,

Amen.

           

Backstage at Easter April 24, 2011 Easter Sunday, Year A Colossians 3.1-4

            One of the early scenes of John Bunyan’s classic allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress finds Christian in the house of the Interpreter, who shows his guest a roaring fire in a fireplace and a man attempting, unsuccessfully, to douse it with water. The fire, we learn, is God’s work of saving grace, and the would-be fireman is the Devil. The Interpreter then takes his guest behind the wall to see another man with a limitless supply of oil that he continually pumps into the blaze. “What means this?” Christian inquires.

The Interpreter answered, This is Christ, who continually, with the oil of his grace, maintains the work already begun in the heart; by the means of which, notwithstanding what the devil can do, the souls of his people prove gracious still. And in that thou sawest that the man stood behind the wall to maintain the fire; this is to teach thee, that it is hard for the tempted to see how this work of grace is maintained in the soul.

“For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

The world killed Christ, stuffed the lifeless body in an empty tomb and for good measure sealed up the only escape route. But God’s glory working unseen fed unquenchable life from within as all unknown Jesus rose again. The final embers of an extinguished fire leapt to life and blew the doors off of death for good.

Paul personalizes the miracle of Easter when he hooks the church the same pipeline of the Spirit’s anointing oil. “You life is hidden with Christ in God” – the perfect tense Greek verb describes an action permanently performed. When the forward-look of life fronts foes too great to face, when the tsunami of sorrow threatens to swamp the flickering flame of salvation, when guilt at our own failure douses us with doubt, the unkillable, unconquerable, unfathomable life of our resurrected Lord burns bright despite it all.

And yet, “it is hard for the tempted to see how this work of grace is maintained in the soul.” We live facing forward toward a world where Christ’s resurrection has happened but Christ’s return is still on the way. In such a place it is good to remember that our victory rests backstage at Easter where the Spirit fuels the fire that will blaze for all eternity.

Secretly,

Doug

Benediction

God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, you place our lives with that of Our Lord where He sits at Your right hand. Grant that as we live looking toward Heaven our lives here on earth might be transformed, that the glory to be revealed one day may also be seen in us daily and may call others to Your Son Jesus, in whose name we pray, Amen.

Collect

May God make you to know that you are raised up with Christ,

            That you might seek the things above.

May God make you to know that you have died with Christ,

            That you might shun the things below.

May God make you to know that you will be glorified with Christ,

            That you might seek His coming glory.

In the name of the Father,

And of the Son,

And of the Holy Spirit,

Amen.

Greatness is Free, But Not Cheap April 17, 2011 Palm Sunday, Year A Philippians 2.5-11

           “Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve.” Martin Luther King, Jr. had it exactly right.

            When Jesus roared into Jerusalem at the head of an impromptu parade everyone thought they finally had a messiah who made sense. The Galilean rednecks bellowed the Marseillaise and shouted “Viva Zapata!” The Sadduccean bureaucrats huddled in caucus to strategize about spin-control. The Roman garrison nervously fingered their swords.

            Hardly anybody got the point: Jesus was not finally throwing off servitude to show himself God-like; he was embracing ultimate service because he was God.

            A few years down the road when Paul ponders the cross the laser-logic of his prose puckers and forces him to fall back on poetry. He belts out a few bars of a popular praise chorus about death as the ultimate form of service, and service as the ultimate form of power. Modern readers often miss an important phrase that comes along in the refrain: “every knee will bow.” The lyricist lifted that line from an older hymn originally penned by the prophet Isaiah where God Almighty sings the solo:

I have sworn by Myself,

The word has gone forth from My mouth in righteousness

And will not turn back,

That to Me every knee will bow, every tongue will swear allegiance.

            That fiercely monotheistic confession Paul now applies to the crucified Christ not only as proof of Jesus’ deity but as an insistence that the mark of divinity is sacrificial service even unto death. Jesus did not abandon or damp-down his deity on the cross, he displayed it.

            Be like that, Paul advises. Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve.

Get Down!

Doug

Collect

Only wise God, Your Son showed us who You are not by ascent but by descent, not by the exploitation of power but by the humiliation of service. Shape our minds on the model of the cross that in our littleness and our lowliness the world might see Your greatness and your majesty and openly confess Christ as Lord. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Benediction

May God place in you the mind of Christ,

            That you might empty yourself of all but Him.

May God place on you the cross of Christ,

            That you might humble yourself in fellowship with Him.

May God place you at the right hand of Christ

            That you might forever proclaim the unending praise of Him

Who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,

One God now and forever,

Amen.

Retro Unrighteousness

Retro Unrighteousness

April 10, 2011

Fifth  Sunday Of Lent

Year A Romans 8.6-11

            Techies call them “skeumorphs” – useless but comforting visual cues bolted onto a new technology to keep users from losing their psychic footing in a shifting world. The word derives from two Greek terms, “tool” and “form,” so a skeumorph is something that takes on the appearance of a tool we no longer need except as a compass point on our emotional maps.

            You know the kind of thing: an angular slot in your Levis for the pocket watch you’ve never carried; the tiny picture of a garbage can at the bottom of your computer screen so you can throw things away, even though wastepaper basket and document both consist of nothing but ones and zeros; spoked wheels on your car though you’ve never piloted a horse-drawn carriage, and a certain level of horsepower under the hood though the relative strength of horses doesn’t come up much in your daily life.

            Paul challenges believers to cast off the skeumorphs of a sinful past and live conceptually in the new world Christ inaugurates. “Flesh” in this passage refers less to specific behaviors than to a general mindset. The old life offered certain tools we had to use to get by: acquisition, self-assertion, retaliation, things like that. “If you want to stay alive,” explains Holden Caulfield in “Cather in the Rye” as he admits to a gross insincerity, “you have to say stuff like that.”

            Paul contrasts that mentality with life “according to the Spirit,” which again has less to do with televangelists and healed gallstones than with an overall angle of attack on life. The Spirit is big in this passage. Of the twenty-one times Paul uses the word in Romans 8, one third of them are in this paragraph. “Life” marks another major concept: the term appears eight times in Romans 6-8, a quarter of them right here. “You are not in the flesh but in the Spirit,” he writes: that’s Christianity 101. We all receive the Spirit upon salvation. The problem is that our radical conversion to the Kingdom of Heaven can assault our souls with vertigo as we lose our trusted fleshly landmarks. So we smuggle in the skeumorphs of the old life.

            The passage seems to say that we do not need to sidle into salvation with watch pockets that bulge with an emergency supply of sin or virtual containers of trashcan carnality that we hoard because they might come in handy. Instead, we surrender to the indwelling Spirit who blows away those inadequate crutches and replaces them with living limbs.

Time to Take Out the Trash,

Doug

Collect

Holy Spirit, you breathed life into the body of Adam in Eden, into the body of Jesus on Easter, and into the Body of Christ at Pentecost. Blow today through the bodies and souls of Your saints that we might cast off the anchors of sin that keep us temporarily safe but eternally stuck, and instead raise the sails of our souls to the prevailing wind of eternal life. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Blessing

May the Lord free your soul from the flesh,

            That you might lose all your former plans.

May the Lord fill your soul with the Spirit,

            That you might follow wherever He leads.

May the Lord fortify your soul with eternal life,

            That in the present moment you might find forever.

In the name of the Father,

And of the Son,

And of the Holy Spirit,

Amen.