Friday, May 11, 2018

The Seventh Sunday of Easter -- Sunday After The Ascension

O God, the King of glory, you have exalted your only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph to your kingdom in heaven: Do not leave us comfortless, but send us your Holy Spirit to strengthen us, and exalt us to that place where our Savior Christ has gone before; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

-- BCP, page 226

 Texts

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26; Psalm 1;
1 John 5:9-13; John 17:6-19
"Do not leave us comfortless," we pray in the Collect.  In our church calendar, we are living in that odd time between the Ascension of our Lord and the Descent of the Holy Spirit -- the 10 unusual days when the apostles were, according to the verse immediately before our story in Acts, "constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers." (Acts 1:14)

Do not leave us comfortless. I wonder if their prayer was of the frantic, anxious, and near-panic kind? Forget what you and I know -- that the Holy Spirit came upon them. For all they knew, the Descent of the Spirit could be eons away. It was a time of great uncertainty.

Do not leave us comfortless. Their prayer also takes place in a time of great embarrassment, maybe even shame. They had to come to terms with the fact that Judas, one of Jesus' own hand-picked Twelve, had betrayed their Lord. The community was not at full strength. And the missing one had not honored the cause. I wonder about the urgency in their prayers and their recognition of brokenness and incompleteness.

Do not leave us comfortless. I wonder if we can identify with that? Uncertainty is indeed part of the human experience. We could easily muse philosophically about the vagaries of existence. And there are times in our world -- maybe even now -- when we can identify with the humorist George Carlin's question: "Where are we going? And what's with this hand-basket?"

The reality is that on any given Sunday when we come together to pray, not a few of us are dealing with particular uncertainties or pains or shame or facing hard choices in seemingly intractable circumstances. Or like the disciples, we might be looking at a future without the tangible presence of a loved one. 

The 10 days between the Ascension and Pentecost are reminders that our experiences of uncertainty, loss, grief, pain, and even shame are part of the life of our faith community, not just of human life itself. Their euphoria over Christ's resurrection turned to the aloneness that goes with the physical departure of Jesus. There are seasons in life when even God feels absent. The palpable absence of Jesus during those ten days ... I wonder how the apostles and the disciples, including the Blessed Virgin and the brothers of Jesus felt. Have you ever had a time like that? Has God ever felt absent from your life?

Lean into it. Denial does no good. Name the anxiety or loss or pain or uncertainty or embarrassment or shame. Whatever the feelings in our own circumstances, let us name and accept that this is where we are, maybe for more than 10 days. We know not how long.

We can learn from that first band of people bereft of comfort: Name it in prayer. And pray in community. Paradoxically, when we least feel God is when we most need to pray. When we least feel comforted, that's when we need to be together to comfort one another. We need each other. We need to come together Sunday after Sunday to pray. To lay the matter before God. To wait for God's promised Spirit to descend on us with comfort and strength.

Under the Mercy,

Fr. Daniel+

Friday, May 4, 2018

The Sixth Sunday of Easter

O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding: Pour into our hearts such love towards you, that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

-- BCP, page 225

 Texts

Acts 10:44-48; Psalm 98;
1 John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17
The Collect of the Day asks for God to give us the kind of love towards God that we may love God "in all things and above all things." Loving God in all things and above all things -- that is the objective.

Charles Williams, a lay theologian and novelist who was close friends with C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Dorothy Sayers, looked at all creation as embodying something of God's nature. Our human understanding also, however dimly, partook of the divine light. He was not one to discard any thing or notion out of hand but rather took time to look for truth and beauty within them. This collect reminds me of Williams because he had a wonderful saying that can be a guiding post for us in our search for God and all things godly: This also is Thou; neither is this Thou.

This also is Thou: Creation itself is the first Scripture we meet. "The heavens declare the glory of God..." (Ps. 19:1). Nature is our first teacher -- our first awareness of a gorgeous full moon or the sound of the sea or the majesty of mountains -- in these and more the world gives us glimpses of God's glory. Everything created partakes of the heavenly DNA. We experience it when we behold beauty and are awed into silence. The material world discloses the spiritual reality of which it participates.

This also is Thou: Mother and Father's first embrace and kiss when we are born; being loved and affirmed, being provided for and kept safe. Experiencing goodness and compassion from anyone, perhaps even in unexpected places and from unknown persons; meeting people whose morals and ethics lift us up; hearing or reading poetry or experiencing all the arts-so many ways in which through other people we experience something of the One whose self-revelation is Love.

At the end of his letter to the Church in Philippi, St. Paul says: "Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things." (Phil. 4:8) Because This also is Thou.

Neither is this Thou: We do not worship creation but the Creator who is in all things but is never limited to all things. (If you care for the fancy words, our theism is of the panentheistic kind; we are not pantheists). We seek to love God in all things and above all things. Nothing -- not creation itself; not our noblest ideals; not our truest theology; not even our purest beliefs -- can contain God. Flee any religious community or persons who suffer from unassailable certainty in their convictions about what they claim to know. God cannot be put in a box. Any god who could be so contained is not worthy of our worship, allegiance, and obedience. Giving our ultimate commitment to anything other God as God -- who is beyond all our knowing and understanding -- is to fall into idolatry. Neither is this Thou.

This also is Thou; neither is this Thou. May we rejoice in the sacramental quality imbuing all things and all people. May we never mistake anything or anyone for the Divine reality to which they point and in which they participate.

Under the Mercy,

Fr. Daniel+