Tag: All Saints

The Next Evolutionary Step

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

Sermon for All Saints Sunday, Year C

Click here for the biblical readings.

Biological instincts are a funny thing. Our cravings for safety, sustenance, and status evolved as tools for survival, but often they are the very things that hold us back from living our best life.

Let’s take Grog the caveman, for example. Grog was born with an inherent craving for sugars, fats, and salts because he was born into an environment where those things were rare. So it behooved him to eat as much of those things as possible, because he never knew if or when he would come across them again.

Fast forward to 2025, where you and I have inherited Grog’s cravings for sugars, fats, and salts, but live in a very different kind of environment where those things are not rare. So we look at a TV commercial and go, “French fries!” and proceed to eat as much of them as possible, even if we know it’s going to eventually kill us. It’s a mismatched instinct.

So we’re out here living with Flintstone brains in a world of Jetson technology, and we wonder why we struggle. This is true of other instincts too.

Let’s go back to our friend Grog the caveman. He is walking along through the jungle and goes, “Hear sound in bush! Might be saber-toothed tiger! Must fight!” because he developed his fight-or-flight instinct as a means of protection against predators.

But here we are in 2025 with the same brain that Grog had, and we’re like, “Notification on phone! Man on Facebook has bad politics! Must fight!” And we proceed to react as if we ourselves were being attacked by a saber-toothed tiger. It’s not the same thing, and our mismatched instincts are leading us farther away from life rather than toward the preservation of it.

We’re living with Flintstone brains in a Jetson’s world. What we need is a way to take that next evolutionary step so that we can get back to the work of preserving life instead of working against it. Thankfully, that’s exactly what Jesus gives us in today’s gospel.

When we practical-minded people read Jesus’s teachings on the Beatitudes and the principle of nonviolence, it sounds at first like a bunch of impractical, high-minded nonsense. Our natural, God-given instincts for safety, sustenance, and status lead us to want to be rich, full, joyful, and well spoken of. But Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor, the hungry, the weeping, and the hated.”

So it sounds like nonsense, as does all this talk about loving our enemies, turning the other cheek, and giving to everyone who begs from us. Our inner caveman hears these things and goes, “No! Bad!”

And yet Jesus teaches them, which raises the question: Does Jesus just want us to fail? It certainly seems that way on the surface, and that’s a disturbing thought.

It might seem a bit obvious and self-serving for me, as a Christian priest, to say this, but I don’t think that Jesus is saying these things because he just wants us to fail at life. I think that what Jesus is doing is pointing us toward the next step in human evolution. Unlike our previous evolutionary steps, which were driven by biology and survival instincts, this next step that Jesus represents is driven by morality and conscious decision-making.

In other words, the next step of human evolution is not biological but spiritual.

Jesus’s earthly ministry was characterized by compassion. The movement he initiated was characterized not by who it excluded but by who it included. Jesus shared his family table with the most despised and outcast members of society.

He used nature imagery to direct his followers’ attention to the divine abundance that exists all around them. He directed their attention to the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, who neither farm nor sow but are still fed and clothed by the God who loves them.

He invited his listeners to consider the sun and the rain, which shine and fall without discrimination, bringing life to the earth—both sinners and saints alike.

Jesus was convinced that this is the way the world truly works, in spite of the walls of human self-preservation that we have constructed around it and through it. Jesus said that, in spite of our egotistical selves, compassion reigns supreme because God wills it.

The question that he puts to us is: What would our lives look like if we lived as if we believed this is true—as indeed it is?

If you are a person of a certain generation, the name Robert McNamara will probably mean something to you. For those who do not know this name, he served as the Secretary of Defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. His legacy is controversial, and it’s not my job to either endorse or denounce that legacy. But I heard him say something very interesting about his involvement in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

For those who are too young to remember, the Cuban Missile Crisis was a 13-day confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union about the Soviet Union’s placement of nuclear missiles in Cuba—well within striking distance of American soil. The tension escalated to the point where President Kennedy was considering an invasion of Cuba in order to stop the deployment of these missiles, a move which almost certainly would have resulted in a launch of said missiles, triggering a counterstrike of nuclear missiles on the American side, resulting in the mutually assured destruction of both countries and possibly ending human civilization as we know it.

At the height of the tension, the world was mere minutes away from nuclear annihilation. But Secretary McNamara reported that it was saved at the last possible moment by a cabinet member who used his empathy and imagination to understand what it was that the Soviets really wanted. As a result, they were able to negotiate a diplomatic solution that avoided a nuclear holocaust and allowed humanity to continue to exist as it does to this day.

It is not too much of a stretch to say that empathy, or love of one’s enemies as Jesus commanded, saved the world that day. That’s just one example of a time when Jesus’s teachings proved to be more practical than high-minded.

If President Kennedy had listened only to his basic survival instincts, the game of survival would have been over. But by listening to the voice of empathy, he was able to transcend those basic impulses in a way that preserved life—not only for Americans but also for his Soviet enemies, and for the rest of the world as well. It was the moral principles of Jesus, and not the instincts of Grog the caveman, that saved the world that day.

That’s why I say that Jesus’s teaching is not just spiritual wisdom or high-minded idealism, but the next step in human evolution. We won’t get there by playing games like survival of the fittest, but we will get there by loving our enemies and doing unto others as we would have them do unto us.

Of course, it’s likely true that most of us will never find ourselves in a position where our personal decisions could affect the nuclear annihilation of millions. But it’s a near certainty that we will find ourselves in a position where we will have to choose between the way of self-preservation and the empathic way of Jesus. The repercussions of that decision may not affect millions, but they will affect individual lives—not least of which is our own.

Which impulse will we choose to follow on that day? The broad and well-trodden path of self-preservation or the narrow way of Jesus? Will we stay locked into familiar patterns of the status quo, or take the next step in human evolution? The choice is up to us.

Today, we celebrate the Feast of All Saints—a holy day when we give thanks for those who have come before us in the faith. Those whose lives have been remembered not because they were successful in amassing copious amounts of money, sex, and power, but because they were faithful in choosing the more difficult way of Jesus when it would have been easier to default to familiar patterns of self-preservation.

They are the vanguard who show us the way to embody the teachings of Jesus and take that next step in human evolution in our own day, just as they did in theirs. The Church honors the saints because they remind us that the work of Jesus is not yet done, and the loving power of Jesus is still at work in our lives today.

I have already seen this power at work in you, the people of this congregation. Your creativity, courage, and compassion are obvious to all who walk through our doors, and even to those who have never attended a service but have borne witness to your good works in our wider community.

At no time has this been more obvious to me than it was last Sunday afternoon, when this church was packed to standing room only with people who gathered to give thanks for a recent member of the communion of saints, our own dearly departed sister, Mary Dally.

She touched so many lives in her decades of teaching in this town, and so many of them showed up to pay their respects that I could scarcely walk from my office to the sacristy. As far as I know, Mary never commanded a nuclear arsenal, but I do know for a fact that her empathy and her commitment touched the lives of hundreds—and I know this because I saw them here in this room.

Someone once told me that I should live my life in such a way that there would be standing room only at my funeral. As far as Mary Dally is concerned, I would say: mission accomplished.

The rest of us are still engaged in that mission, and I watched each of you show up and put in the extra work to honor the dead, care for the bereaved, and support the whole community. This is the next step in human evolution, and you are taking it.

Even as we said farewell to one of our members last week and celebrated one saint’s entry into the Church Triumphant, so in a few moments will we be adding two new members to that fellowship on earth, as we baptize Barak and Cyrus into the Body of Christ.

As Mary’s journey on earth is ending, so theirs is just beginning. Our continuing task is to nurture their growth in the faith, support them with our prayers, and be to them an example of what the next step in human evolution looks like—just as we learned it from Jesus.

Continue to be strong in this faith, and keep up the good work. Amen.

Love in the Past Tense: Grief Without Shame

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon, Uncategorized1 Comment

Sermon for the Feast of All Saints.

The text is John 11:32-44. Click here to read it.

Here is the video of the entire service. The sermon starts at 32:23.

“Jesus began to weep.”

John 11:35

This brief verse, John 11:35, rendered even more concisely in other translations as, “Jesus wept,” is well-known as the shortest verse in our Bible. For that reason, it was a favorite among students at the Christian high school I attended, where our teachers required us to memorize a Bible verse each week.

As a teenager, I liked this verse because it was short, but today, in my middle age, I have found other reasons to love it. I continue to love John 11:35 (“Jesus wept”) because it puts the grief of our fully divine and fully human Lord and Savior on full display and, thereby, it gives us mere mortals permission to grieve, when we feel the need to do so.

Grief is a tricky subject. We pragmatic Americans tend to think of grief as a problem and grieving as an emotional symptom of said problem. When we operate under this misconception, we try to solve the “problem” of grief by making the “bad feelings” go away. This is why so many well-intentioned friends tend to offer so many problematic platitudes like:

  • They’re in a better place;
  • Everything happens for a reason;
  • Heaven needed another angel;
  • God has a plan;
  • It’s not up to us to question the will of the Almighty;
  • Maybe God is trying to teach you a lesson.

If you’ve ever found yourself in a state of grief, and heard this kind of pseudo-theological drivel spat at you by well-intentioned believers, then you too know just how unhelpful such slogans can be. These kinds of “bumper sticker theology” serve to comfort the minds of the bystanders more than the hearts of the bereaved.

Through my years of service as a hospice chaplain, I have come to realize that the beliefs that “grief is a problem to be solved” and “grieving is a feeling” are fundamental errors. Grief is not a problem; it is a process, and grieving is not a feeling; it is a skill. And frankly, speaking as a fellow pragmatic American, grieving is a skill at which we tend to be very, VERY bad.

If we were to look for a culture that is more skilled at the art of grief than our own, I think we need look no further than the Jewish culture of our Lord Jesus. Jewish culture tends to understand the process of grief better than our own. Our Jewish neighbors have, over the course of several millennia, developed a practical approach to mourning that guides people through the process of grief in a systematic way.

During the first stage of grief, between the death of a loved one and their funeral, Jews recognize that people are in an initial state of shock. The bereaved are exempted from performing many of the commandments of the Torah while they process the loss of their loved one. For the first week after the funeral, they are said to be “sitting shiva,” where they are not expected to go to work, leave the house, or even prepare meals. During this time, friends will visit the family to bring food, sit with them, tell stories, and say prayers. Gradually, after this week of sitting shiva, family members will begin to reintegrate into society. There are certain limitations placed on their activity for the first month and the first year after their loss. After that first year, life has more-or-less returned to normal, but they still pause once a year to remember their loved one on the yahrtzeit, the anniversary of their death. Jewish culture understands, better than American culture, that grief is a process and grieving is a skill that must be taught and can be learned.

In today’s gospel reading, we get to see an example of Jesus sitting shiva with his close friends, Mary and Martha, after the death of their brother Lazarus. What’s amazing about this passage is how Jesus meets each of the sisters where they are, according to their distinct personalities. Both sisters begin their conversation with Jesus in the exact same words:

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

John 11:32

And then, with Martha, the more practical and intellectual of the two, Jesus engages in a theological discussion about resurrection; with Mary, the more emotional and contemplative sister, Jesus says nothing, but simply weeps.

Though we know, from the rest of the gospel story, that Jesus is about to miraculously raise Lazarus from the dead, that knowledge does not stop Jesus from being fully present with these bereaved sisters in their grief. Jesus knows what he is about to do, but he still takes time to meet people where they are.

The most beautiful thing about the Christian faith is our belief that God, in Christ, has entered fully into the human experience, including our experience of grief and death. Divine omnipotence does not create a stoic barrier between us and our feelings, but allows us to enter into them more fully. Real faith enables us to skillfully navigate the troubled waters of grief, charting a steady course between the way things are and the way they ought to be.

When I, as a hospice chaplain, am invited to the bedside of one who has recently died, I notice how often the bereaved family members feel ashamed of their grief. While I stand silently by, they sometimes say to me, “I’m sorry for crying; I know they’re in a better place and I should have more faith, but I just miss them so much!”

Those are the moments when I, as their chaplain, will break my silence by referring to the very Bible verse that inspired this sermon. I say to them, if they are Christian, “When Jesus visited the grave of his friend Lazarus, the Bible very clearly tells us that ‘Jesus wept.’ If it’s okay for Jesus Christ himself to weep at the death of a loved one, then it’s okay for you to do it too.”

As further evidence for my position on this matter, I would cite St. Paul the Apostle, in his first letter to the Thessalonians, chapter 4, verse 13:

“We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.”

1 Thessalonians 4:13

St. Paul does not say, “so that you may not grieve;” he says, “so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.” Grief is a very good and natural part of human life, even for the life of a Christian. Grief, as I like to say, is simply “love in the past tense.” Others have said that grief is just “love with no place to go.” Grief is not a sin. Grief is not a problem to be solved. Grief is a normal process, which we all must go through. Grief is a natural consequence of love, which our Lord Jesus commands us to do.

Kindred in Christ, I want you to hear today that there is no shame in grief; it is simply “love in the past tense.” If you feel sad because you are working through the process of grief, I want you to know that Christ is with you in your grief and this shortest verse of the Bible, “Jesus wept,” is spoken for you this day.

The grief that you experience might be for a loved one who has died; it might also be because of the loss of a job or the end of a relationship. Your grief might be part of coming out of the closet, because you yourself or someone you love is not the person you thought they were. The grief you experience might even be because of something good, like getting married, having a baby, graduating from school, or retiring from a career after many years of faithful service. All of these events are good things, but each of them also involves the end of a previous identity and way of life.

Whatever the source of your grief is today, I want you to know that it is healthy, normal, and good. Jesus Christ does not stand in judgment over you for your grief, but kneels down in the dirt and weeps with you for your loss.

I pray that you will take this mental image with you into your experience of grief. I pray that it will give you the grace to go easy on yourself while you are going through the process of grief. I pray further that your self-acceptance, and your faith in Christ’s acceptance, will give you the wisdom to have mercy on others who are going through their own process of grief.

Through it all, may the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep our hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God, and of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, our Lord. And may the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, be amongst us and remain with us always.

Amen.

Beholding and Becoming

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon2 Comments

Sermon for the Feast of All Saints

The text is 1 John 3:1-3.

As a dad to a teenager and a pre-teen, I aim to be “firm but fair” when it comes to media consumption. Like many parents, Sarah and I worry about the amount of sex and violence that our kids are watching on TV. An additional concern, which didn’t exist when I was a kid, is the kind of radical misinformation that can come to our kids through social media and the internet. I know we are not alone in this concern.

A number of years ago, I was listening to an interview with a Muslim scholar who had written a book on Islamic extremism. The news reporter asked this scholar if people should be worried that a new mosque was opening in their city. The scholar said, “No. Research has shown that regular attendance at mosque is a moderating factor, when it comes to extremism.” So, the reporter asked, “Where then are these young people getting radicalized by groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda?” And the scholar answered, “On the internet.”

My wife Sarah and I have regular conversations with our kids about internet safety and how to critically evaluate the supposed “information” to which they are being exposed online. Like any good parents, we want our kids to be smart and safe, so they can live healthy and happy lives in this world where mass media is never more than a few clicks away.

This is not just a problem for parents and kids. After the horrifying terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, media companies realized they could boost their ratings (and thereby make money) by keeping people glued to their screens with images that provoke fear and rage. Thus began the era of “doom-scrolling” wherein a person can lose hours of time, clicking on article after article and video after video about how the world will come to an end, if the next election doesn’t go the way they want it to go. Political polarization skyrockets as more citizens become convinced that every vote is a “battle for the soul of this country.”

In the world of dietary health, a common maxim is, “you are what you eat.” By this, nutritionists mean to say that the substances we eat eventually get metabolized into the molecules that make up our bodies, so we had better make sure that the food we eat is healthy and nutritious. I would agree with that statement. And I would add that the substance of our mental diet is just as important as the substance of our physical diet. In the same way that the food we eat becomes part of our bodies, so the information we consume becomes part of our minds.

Have you thought about your mental diet? Companies have realized there is a lot of money to be made by stuffing your brain with the junk food of lust, rage, envy, sloth, vanity, arrogance, and greed. (Did you count them? Those are the Seven Deadly Sins and they are the driving forces of our consumer economy.)

What I’m trying to say in all this is that our mental diet matters, at least as much as our physical diet. The information we feed our brains becomes a part of who we are, so we had better make sure that we are feeding our minds with good information that improves our health, as human beings.

St. John the Evangelist, in our Epistle reading this morning, makes just this point. He writes,

“Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when [Christ] is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”

1 John 3:2 NRSV

Let me unpack that verse. When John writes, “we will see [Christ],” he means more than just the physical act of looking at something. The Greek term he uses is opsometha, which means “to attend to” something. This is more than just a passing glance; this is the act of giving our full attention to the presence of Christ in our midst. In older English translations, this word was rendered as “Behold!” or, in other words: “Hey, pay attention! This is important!” That’s what St. John means when he says, “we will see [Christ] as he is.”

This kind of deep and attentive seeing has a profound effect on a person. In the twenty years that Sarah and I have been in a relationship, we have shaped each other dramatically. I am a different man today than I was twenty years ago because I have been in a relationship with her. I imagine she could say the same thing about me. In some ways, that change has been for the better, and in some ways, it’s been for the worse (but that’s just what we promised to do when we got married). Our intimate relationships change us, as human beings, because we spend so much time paying close attention to one another, really seeing each other, in the way that St. John means it. The point that John is making in this text is that the same thing happens in our personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

When we follow Jesus as our Lord and Savior and really behold him “as he is,” we begin to become “like him” in the ways that really matter. When St. John, the traditional author of today’s passage, first met Jesus, Jesus nicknamed him and his brother James, “sons of thunder,” presumably because of their volatile temperament and boisterous nature. We know they were working-class fishermen who vied for privileged positions in (what they thought was) Jesus’ political revolution. By the end of his three-year journey with Jesus, we find gentle John reclining on Jesus’ bosom at the Last Supper. Later on, when John wrote his gospel, he only names himself as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” In summing up Jesus’ ministry, John is the one who records the words of the new commandment,

“Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

John 13:34 NRSV

Finally, when John wrote the epistle from which we read this morning, gentle John (formerly a “son of thunder”) is able to honestly utter the famous words,

“God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”

1 John 4:16 NRSV

So profound was the transformation of John’s heart, Christian tradition remembers him as “St. John the Beloved.” By the end of his life, this “son of thunder” was not remembered for his violent temper, but for the fact that Jesus loved him.

As our evangelical kindred are fond of saying, Christian spirituality is “more of a relationship than a religion.” The tricky part is the fact that our present relationship with Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior is not a flesh-and-blood relationship with a person who can be seen, heard, and felt with our physical senses. We encounter the risen Christ through Scripture, Sacrament, silence, and service.

When we gather for worship each week, we look for a genuine experience of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. At home, on the other six days of the week, I hope you are spending time each day in prayer and the study of Scripture. I hope that you give your time, talent, and treasure for the building up of the kingdom of God, on earth as it is in heaven. Through these spiritual practices, we deepen our relationship with Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. Through that ongoing relationship, we come to resemble Christ more and more, as his light shines through us.

Beloved, we live in a world that tries to tell us who we are by our ability to produce and consume goods in a global economy. The Gospel of Jesus Christ shows us who we really are by revealing our true identity as God’s beloved children. As St. John writes in today’s epistle,

“Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”

Beloved, I exhort you this morning to “see [Jesus Christ] as he is,” so that you too might “be like him.” Pay attention to your mental diet.

  • In addition to your weekly attendance at church and reception of the Sacrament, spend some time each day in prayer and the study of Scripture.
  • Whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord.
  • Proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ.
  • Seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself.
  • Strive for justice and peace, respecting the dignity of every human being.

By living out these vows, which we all made at our baptism and renew with every new baptismal candidate, we will deepen our relationship with Christ and be transformed, day by day, into his likeness. May God bless you in this holy work and reveal the Divine Self to you in the depths of your heart.

Who we are / What binds us together

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon4 Comments

Sermon for the Feast of All Saints

Delivered at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in St. Joe’s, MI.

Ephesians 1:11-23

Most of us know what it’s like to be in the middle of a conflict.

At first, we might be in a little bit of denial about the whole thing. We say, “Meh, it’s no big deal.” We go for a walk, get a snack, maybe take a nap, and wake up feeling right as rain.

But sometimes, that’s not enough. We wake up and we’re still feeling mad about it. This is a good thing because anger, even though it doesn’t feel pleasant, is our brain’s way of telling us that something is important to us. For example, it’s easy to just let it go when some hothead cuts you off in traffic, but harder when your teenager tells you they want to drop out of high school. Anger is a healthy thing when it reminds us about what’s important, but not so healthy when it festers so long that it turns into resentment and contempt.

In order to stop that from happening, we need to sit down and have those difficult conversations about what really matters. We have to listen to each other’s point of view and try to negotiate a compromise. If that works, great! If not, it can leave feeling pretty hopeless. We throw our hands up and go, “Ugh! I guess that’s it. The yogurt has hit the fan and we’re all headed for Hades in a handbasket. Whaddyagunna do?”

And that, I think, is a very interesting question, if we ask it honestly. What are you going to do? That question, when asked honestly, leads us past the surface level of conflict, opens us up to new possibilities, and reminds us of what is most important: The mystery of who we really are and the reality that binds us together at the deepest level of our existence.

That mystery, that reality, is what the author of the epistle to the Ephesians is talking about in the Scripture reading we just heard.

At the end of the first century, the Church in Ephesus was in a pretty rough place. Only a few decades after its founding, it was already engulfed in a controversy that threatened to tear the community apart from the inside. The controversial issue, in that time and place, was the question of whether a person could really be a Christian without first becoming Jewish. It helps to remember that, at that point in history, Judaism and Christianity were not yet separate religions. Christianity started as a renewal movement within Judaism and only later took on a separate identity of its own.

On one side, conservatives were saying, “Listen! Jesus was Jewish. All of his apostles were Jewish. The Bible clearly states that the Jews are God’s chosen people. Therefore, if a person really wants to be a follower of the way of Jesus, they first have to convert to Judaism and follow the ways of the Torah.”

On the other side, the liberals were saying, “No way! Jesus was an enlightened being. He had no patience for your backward traditions. Therefore, we are going to purge the Church of all that superstitious nonsense and have a truly progressive spirituality.”

(By the way, does any of this sound familiar to anyone who has watched the news lately? It should. Two thousand years later, and we are still having the same fight.)

Enter the author of the Epistle to the Ephesians. This person, writing in the name of their mentor St. Paul, is trying to help the Christians in Ephesus figure out how to be the Church for the long haul. In the first generation after Jesus’ earthly ministry, it seemed to the Church like the end of days was imminent, so they didn’t put much thought into creating an institution that would help people follow Jesus for thousands of years to come. They sincerely believed, at that time, that sustainability was a non-issue. As time wore on, however, it slowly dawned on these Christians that they were going to have to hunker down and figure out a way to live as the people of Jesus in a world that wanted nothing to do with him. So, for the first time, these Christians are asking questions about how to live together as people from different social classes, ethnic groups, languages, ages, and genders. And all of this was happening at the same time as Christians everywhere were being excommunicated from traditional Jewish communities and actively persecuted by the Roman government. Needless to say, it was a very contentious and complicated time to be a Christian. (Much like today.)

In the moment of this letter, the author of Ephesians writes to that Church in the midst of apparent hopelessness, appealing to the deeper truth of who they really are and what really binds them together. The author tells them that they have an “inheritance,” a “destiny,” and “hope” that come from their faith in God. According to the passage we read tonight, the same divine energy that raised Christ from death to new life is now at work in the hearts, minds, and bodies of those who follow the way of Jesus.

In some mysterious way that transcends rational understanding, the very lifeblood of Jesus now flows in our veins and we have become his hands and feet on this Earth. We are, all of us, essentially one person, and that person is not you or me, but Jesus Christ himself. Later in the epistle to the Ephesians, the author writes, concerning the controversy that was tearing their Church apart, “[Christ] is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.” (Eph 2:14 NRSV)

Jesus Christ is who we are. All other identifying factors are secondary to that one truth.

The modern theologian who expressed this truth more beautifully than anyone was a French Jesuit priest named Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Fr. Teilhard, writing in the early twentieth century, lived his faith in a time that was every bit as fraught and contentious as the first century. He was a stretcher-bearer on the front lines of World War I. He was, in addition to his vocation as a priest, a paleontologist in a time when the Roman Catholic Church wasn’t yet sure what to think about the writings of Charles Darwin.

For Teilhard, there was no conflict between faith and science. He saw the whole history of the cosmos, from the Big Bang to the formation of stars and planets, from the evolution of life to the emergence of human beings, all 13.8 billion years of cosmic history, as a single story of God’s creation and salvation.

Teilhard’s hope and vision was that, one day, all things would be part of the Body of Christ. By “all things,” he really did mean ALL. THINGS. When Teilhard imagined the Body of Christ, he wasn’t just thinking about all Christians, all humans, or all of planet Earth. He was thinking about the entire universe as the Body of Christ.

The Vatican of that time wasn’t quite ready for a cosmic vision as big as Teilhard’s. They censured his work and forbade him from teaching theology. Teilhard, as a good Jesuit, obeyed the order but continued to write in private. He entrusted his papers to a friend, who published them after his death.

Writing in his private journal, Teilhard struggled with the Vatican’s resistance to his ideas. He looked to God for assurance and prayed, “O God, if in my life I have not been wrong, allow me to die on Easter Sunday.” Shortly after writing that prayer, Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin passed away on April 10, 1955… Easter Sunday.

I think Fr. Teilhard was right, and I think the author of the epistle to the Ephesians would agree with me. God is in the business of reconciliation, but not assimilation. God seeks unification, but without uniformity. We are one, not because of any shared ethnicity, nationality, party, class, or gender, but because God has made us one in Christ. The very lifeblood of the risen Christ flows in our veins, just as it has in all the saints of history, and still does in the atoms of the most distant galaxy. That is the faith that will give us the wisdom and the strength to navigate the many conflicts of our time as faithfully as the Ephesian Christians did in theirs. That is the truth about who we really are and the glue that will bind us together, both now and forevermore.

Amen.

(Reblog) God Loves Chutzpah

On By J. Barrett LeeIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

“Jesus doesn’t need any more admirers — he needs disciples willing to get into some Gospel trouble on God’s behalf.”

Sermon by the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson at All Saints Church, Pasadena
Celebration of Ministries Sunday, September 22, 2013.
Readings: Amos 8:4-7 and Luke 16:1-13.

For more about the work and witness of All Saints Church visit our website: http://www.allsaints-pas.org | Follow us on twitter @ASCpas

A Feast for All People

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon4 Comments

I grew up on the border between Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  These towns are both major international centers for medical research and educational advancement, but that’s not what they’re known for.  No, the main thing that Durham and Chapel Hill are known for is college basketball.  The college basketball rivalry between the Duke Blue Devils and the UNC Tarheels is one of epic proportions.  Every year, these teams battle each other with bitter ferocity.  No matter the outcome of the game, everyone knew to steer clear of Franklin Street in downtown Chapel Hill.  The next morning, it would be completely trashed.  Everyone in town had their team, whether they were interested in basketball or not.  You were either a Carolina fan or a Duke fan.  There was no two ways about it.  If we knew a family where one child went to Duke and the other went to UNC, we called it a broken home.  People in Durham and Chapel Hill go crazy over their college basketball.  Even at church, you could always tell when the NCAA Final Four was happening because the place would be empty.  I guess people know where their priorities lie.  It’s kind of crazy when you think about it: two towns divided and their streets trashed, all because one team managed to throw a ball through a hoop more often than the other team.  People divide themselves over the strangest little things.

As many of you know, this Tuesday is Election Day and we can expect a lot of divisive language around that subject as well.  Like many of you, I am looking forward to being rid of all the yard signs, the sloganeering, the attack ads, the mudslinging, and the propaganda trying to convince me that one candidate is a savior while the other one is a demon.  Election season makes me miss those good old days when TV commercials weren’t trying to save the country; they were just trying to get you to spend money you don’t have to buy junk you don’t need.

What bothers me about the rhetoric in these ads is the way it makes us seem so hostile and feel so divided against one another.  If one were to accept everything in these ads at face value, one might think that this country was on the brink of another Civil War.  But we know that’s not the case.  In spite of everything, a rare and remarkable thing will happen this Tuesday: people will line up peacefully and politely to cast their votes and shape the future of this country.  There will be no bombs or rifle fire.  The loser of this presidential election will not face execution.  The supporters of the losing party will not be rounded up, exiled from the country, or imprisoned in forced labor camps.  That isn’t going to happen here on Tuesday.  There are places in this world where such things do happen, even today.  Voting, in some countries, is an exercise in taking your life into your hands.  There are some countries where transitions in government happen only once a generation, when the incumbent president is either arrested or assassinated.  Thankfully, that doesn’t happen here.  We live in a place where political change happens frequently and peacefully.  So, I think we should be careful before using violent and slanderous labels like ‘cult leader and ‘socialist’ when we’re describing a candidate whose views we disagree with.  Jim Jones and David Koresh were cult leaders, Mitt Romney is not.  Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse Tung were socialists, Barack Obama is not.  Real cult leaders and socialists have slaughtered millions in the name of religion and ideology.  Neither of these candidates has done such a thing.  Therefore, it is morally offensive to call them these names.  Whatever your views and however you vote, do it with peace and goodwill in your heart.  Inoculate yourself against the toxin of incivility that poisons our public discourse.  However you vote, vote with love in your heart.  That’s what it means to vote as a Christian.

We human beings seem to have an innate tendency toward division and hostility.  It doesn’t just come out during election years and sporting events.  We divide ourselves over race, religion, gender, nationality, and beer preference.  It seems that there’s something inside each and every one of us that longs to belong to some kind of community.  As they say, “birds of a feather flock together,” so we often organize ourselves into small groups with others who look like us, talk like us, dress like us, think like us, vote like us, and worship like us.  We do this because we feel lost in the cosmos.  We perceive ourselves to be, in some sense, alone in this world.  Above all, we fear the ultimate loneliness of death, which threatens to inevitably swallow us up into dark oblivion.  That’s why, in our time here on earth, part of our survival instinct is a herd instinct.  We want to fight the darkness, death, and loneliness.  So we find some kind of object to rally around as groups: our family, race, sports team, religion, political party, or country.  Each group competes with the others to win, to survive in the great contest of existence.  On the one hand, we experience a great sense of purpose and solidarity from these groups, but on the other hand, they also form the basis for our hostility and hate toward one another.  We think we have to beat the best in order to be the best.  Subconsciously, our primal instincts are telling us that our very survival depends on the victory of our little group over its competitors.  If the others win, so we think, the darkness, death, and loneliness will conquer us all.

The fact that our species has evolved to think this way is understandable, but still wrong, in my opinion.  I think our fear of darkness, death, and loneliness has blinded us to a much deeper and much older truth about who we are and how it is that we’re connected to each other, to the universe, and ultimately to God.  I’d like to share with you what I believe about that truth.

Today, we are celebrating the Feast of All Saints.  This holiday has been celebrated by Christians for over 1,400 years as a festival to remember heroes of the faith from generations past.  In some churches, this remembrance has been limited to a special class of people who have been named “saints” by the ecclesiastical hierarchy.  In churches like ours, we use the term “saint” more broadly.  Presbyterians have always believed that every person is a saint in his or her own way.  Of course, there are always those people who we remember with special fondness and admiration, but we don’t have to wait for some church committee to decide on their spiritual status in heaven.  Moreover, we include ourselves in that number.  Saints don’t have to be dead people.  The Communion of Saints contains all God’s people, living or dead, from every time, place, people, and language.  Most importantly of all, we are not admitted to the Communion of Saints because we’ve led some kind of spiritually or morally heroic life.  No, we believe that everyone is a saint by God’s grace and God’s grace alone.  Not a single one of us has earned our place in the Communion of Saints.  Each of us, from the greatest to the least, from the best to the worst, is a member of this worldwide family as a free gift.  This community, this family that transcends time and space, is the reality that we celebrate on the Feast of All Saints.  This, I believe, is the great and mysterious truth that shows us who we are and how it is that we’re connected to each other, to the universe, and to God.

In our first reading this morning, the prophet Isaiah envisions a time when “the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.”  Did you get that?  “A feast for all peoples”: an extravagant dinner party where everyone is invited and everyone belongs.  This is the vision in the prophet’s heart that he tells us comes from God.  This is God’s idea for the human race.  Another prophetic soul, writing almost a thousand years after Isaiah, wrote down another, similar vision.  We heard from this person in our second reading this morning: “I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”  A little later on, the seer of this vision describes this mystical city in greater detail.  He says, “The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations.”  Did you hear that?  “The nations will walk by its light… Its gates will never be shut… People will bring into it the glory and honor of the nations.”  Friends, this is just like Isaiah’s vision of the feast for all people.  I imagine this city as a multi-ethnic, international dance party.  The gifts and treasures of every tribe and culture are on display.  Billions gather for an abundant feast prepared by God.  In the streets you can hear Swedish and Swahili, you can see white folks and black folks, men and women, Republicans and Democrats, and yes, even Tarheel fans and Duke fans.  This is the true nature of our common humanity.  This is God’s goal for human history.  I see it as a prophetic snapshot of the Communion of Saints.

And there’s more.  There is another element found in each of this morning’s readings that factors very highly in this ultimate vision.  In Isaiah’s vision, the prophet says, “And [God] will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken.”  In our reading from the book of Revelation, it says, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.””  In both of these visions, as well as in our gospel reading where Jesus raises his friend Lazarus from the dead, the power of death is being undone by the power of love.  This vision of a city and a feast for all peoples is not some sentimental dream that’s meant to make us feel better, it is the truth that has a power even greater than death itself.  This is the truth in which we find ourselves.  In the Communion of Saints, we are bound to one another by the unbreakable power of God’s free grace.  Not even death can cut those ties.  And, for that matter, neither can any of these stupid and pointless divisions we make among ourselves and defend with such violence and hostility.  The unbreakable bond of grace exposes such foolishness for what it really is, because it’s completely unnecessary.  We team up and fight for “my family/team/party/country/religion” because we falsely believe the notion that fighting for survival will protect us from the darkness and loneliness of death, but we fail to realize that the thing we fear most has already been overcome by bond that can never be broken, a bond that unites us to our enemies and competitors.  By God’s free grace, we are all participants in the great Communion of Saints.  That is the great, liberating truth we celebrate today, on this Feast of All Saints.

If we could just realize and remember this truth more often, our perspective on this life would be transformed.  We could be unfazed and unimpressed by each new hostile attack and defensive reaction.  We could learn the art of letting go of what matters less so that we can hold on to what matters more.  We could be saints rather than survivors.

Sadly, this world, as it is, doesn’t make it easy for us to trust in the reality of this vision.  We need to be reminded of it, which is why we celebrate this holiday once a year, at the beginning of November.  We’re also reminded of this truth every time we celebrate the Eucharist, which we are doing this morning.  This sacramental feast is a foretaste of Isaiah’s great feast for all people.  Gathered around this Eucharistic table with us this morning, present but unseen, are people from every time and place, living and dead, who are bound together in the Communion of Saints by the unbreakable bonds of God’s free grace.  If we only had eyes to see, we would see them sharing this meal with us: Jesus, Isaiah, Peter, Paul, Mary, Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Irving Beal, Ruth Jones, Bob Brucker, Dick Mahaffy, and Matt Conway: all here, present but unseen, bound to us forever by a force more powerful than death itself: the grace and the love of God.