Christ the King - Proper 29 C

What kind of a king offers his life? The thief on the cross knew. Now it is up to us to remember him.

Christ the King

Proper 29 C

Transcribed from a sermon given in 2013

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

Luke 23:33-43

Today we celebrate Christ the King. As I said at the beginning of the service, it is the last day of our year. It is the completion of the whole story of Christ from his anticipation of Advent, his incarnation in Christmas, his work on earth during Epiphany, his journey to Jerusalem during Lent, his death and resurrection with Easter, his sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, to his follower’s ministry in the world which is celebrated during this long green season we have just completed when Pentecost is past people of Christ are on earth. On this last Sunday we celebrate Christ the King, the promise of the coming Kingdom of God. Today is the conclusion the finale.

But what kind of a king, what kind of a king are we celebrating. Throughout history a king has been the person with the most power, the strongest with the most followers. As kids you may have played king of the hill. You know, when one strong kid gets up on top of the hill and the other kids try to get up there and push him down. The king is the one who is the strongest. And throughout history the king of any country was the one who had the most armies and was strong enough and rich enough to be able to manipulate people well enough to have power. If somebody else came along and had more power, he would push him out and become king.

But what kind of a king is Jesus? On Christ the King Sunday the image that we read about of Jesus is him hanging on a cross and dying. It is when people are saying that if you are a king, if you are so great, if you are the messiah, get yourself down yet he chooses not to. What kind of a king gives up his power? What kind of a king does not use his power at the time when it is most needed? What kind of a king lets himself be crucified? That is the question for all of us. The answer is that he is different kind of king, a servant king, a king who didn’t come for himself, a who didn’t come to rule, but came for all the people. It is a very different sense of what a king is.

We read today about this poignant experience of Christ on the cross being mocked and humiliated and no one recognizing who he really is. Pilate put up the sign King of the Jews to mock him. The religious leaders don’t recognize who he is, and thy make fun of him. But there is one person there, the person who we are least likely to think would have a deep theological understand, one of the others who are being crucified with him, who recognizes who he is and what it means. Realizing that Christ’s kingdom is not of this world, but is something more he is able to say to him, “Jesus remember me when you come into your kingdom.” A powerful, powerful line. “Jesus remember me when you come into your kingdom.” He didn’t ask for anything in particular, just don’t forget me. And what is really amazing is that if you look carefully through scripture there is only one person in the New Testament, in all the Gospels, who is promised to be in heaven with Christ. It is that criminal dying on the cross. And it wasn’t because he said some particular statement of faith. It wasn’t because he had been baptized. It wasn’t because he had gone to church. It wasn’t because he was a particularly good person. He just recognized Jesus and asked him to remember him. And Jesus promises that he will be in paradise with him that day. What a promise. Jesus remember me.

So what does this have to do with us who have been told of who Jesus is, who have been promised of what Christ’s kingdom is, who know the creeds and all of that stuff? What does this have to do with us? We don’t need to ask Jesus to remember us, he can’t forget us. Those of us who have been baptized are told that we are marked as Christ’s own forever. Baptism establishes a relationship with Christ that does not end. Christ is not capable of forgetting us. On the other hand, we are quite capable of forgetting Christ. So for us it is not to ask Jesus remember me, it might well be Jesus asking us, “Friend, will you remember me when you go about your daily business?” Will we remember him? Do we remember Christ when we wake up in the morning and take a breath and realize that we are alive for another day, when we see the sun rise and the earth alive? Do we remember Christ when we have that cup of coffee or tea that has that unique drug called caffeine in it that was a gift from God that comes from plants? Do we remember Christ when we eat or breakfast or brunch or lunch? Do we remember Christ when we drive to work or wherever it is that we go during the day? And when we are cut off by somebody on the road do we remember Christ or do we just say “Oh, God!” Do we really remember Christ when we are hurt by someone we love, by a child or a parent or a sibling or a spouse? Do we remember Christ forgiving the soldiers at the cross when we are feeling hurt and angry and resentful? Do we remember Christ when we sit down and we are paying our bills? Do we remember Christ when we think about our finances? Do we remember him when we thinking about how we are going to spend our day? Do we remember him? That is the question for us today.

This past week has been the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of JFK. I’m sure if you turned the TV on once during the week you have realized that because there have been so many specials remembering him. When I think about JFK and the wonderful quotes from him, the one that I can’t forget is when he said “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” It is a profound statement of what is important. In many ways since JFK we’ve gotten even more of a consumer society. We have gotten even more into a society that asks what is in it for me. Whether it be the tax code or a new law or health care or a new store we might go to. Is that store going to be the best for me? Does it have the best parking, the best prices? What is in it for me?

One of the conversations that church leaders have been having for the last ten or fifteen year, is: How are we as churches to be in a consumer society? Less and less people chose a particular church because that is how were raised so that is their denomination. More and more they pick a church that satisfies their needs. Is it a church that has good parking? Is it a church that is near my home? Do I like the people there? Does it have the kind of classes I want to take? Is the service short enough, or long enough? Is the preaching what I like to hear? Is the music my kind of music? Does it satisfy me? And that is the consumer mentality. The danger is that we start saying that about Christ or the Church.

You do sometimes get that sense that people are going to church and being in relationship with Christ because of what Christ can do for them. Obviously being in relationship with Christ is the best thing that we can possible do for ourselves. It brings us peace and joy and meaning and purpose and it helps us at the tough times. We go to him for healing. That is all absolutely right, but that is not all of it. There are times when we desperately need Christ’s help. But there are times when Christ needs us. It is a relationship. It is a friendship. And any friendship where you just go to the other person and ask for help is not a friendship anymore. We also need to ask what can we do for Christ. Not just what Christ can do for us. And what can we do for Christ’s church, not just what the church can do for us.

 On those days when we are feeling lost and alone, and we come to church, and we so need to feel God’s love, we feel God’s love not just through the service but by the other people around us, by the welcome at peace, by the sense of a community gathered together. If the only people who came to church on a Sunday morning were the ones who were hurting there would be nobody there to help them. So we need to ask not just what Christ and the Church can do for us, but what we can do for the church and for Christ? We need to ask what we can do to help to bring in Christ’s kingdom.

The other thing that I remember from JFK is his challenge to the country to have a person on the moon within a decade. Looking back, it might not seem as dramatic as it was, but at the time it wasn’t even known if it would be possible. It was a big audacious goal. It was a challenge It was a challenge that took money, time, effort, and everybody coming together and working on it. Out of it not only did we get a person standing on the moon but more importantly we got the miniaturization of computers and we have satellites that we can use for our GPS. If we hadn’t had the work to get to the moon do you think we would have a cell phone whose computer is larger, has more computing ability, than the great big room sized computers did fifty years ago? Teflon and a whole bunch of other things that inform our lives were secondary effects of this great audacious goal.

It has been a long time since a leader in our country has had a goal like that, that has challenged the country to come together for that. But those kind of goals can be important to a community. St Barnabas is right at the edge of a change. I’m only going to be your rector for two more months and then there will be a person, an interim, a priest who will be here to help as the community comes together to figure out where do you go from here. Who do you want to hire as your rector? What direction do you want to go? St. Barnabas is in a really good place to have a big audacious goal. This is a community that is healthy. It is not broken apart. It is working together. We have wonderful, generous, loving, caring people. We have brilliant people giving talks on philosophy. We have people with hearts that give to the homeless. We have singers that share their gifts. St. Barnabas, with God’s help can do just about anything. I would like to encourage and challenge this community to as you think about the future think big. Think about what this community can do to help bring in the reign of God. Think of how you can share Christ’s love with the thousands of people who live in this are. Think of what kind of a difference this church can make. Have a goal like having a person on the moon that is worthy of the people who are here. And through it all each and every day remember Christ. Remember Christ’s kingdom, and remember that now that you know of Christ’s love your responsibility is to share it with others.

Proper 28 C November 13 2016

Everything that is of time, every building, every monument, everything created by human hands will eventually turn to dust. Only God is eternal. Times of change, confusion or darkness provide an opportunity for the light of Christ's love to shine.

Proper 28 C

November 13, 2016

Faith Episcopal Church

The Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

Luke 21:5-19

Imagine that a youth leader brought a group of teenagers from rural West Virginia to New York City for a field trip during the summer of the year 2001. As they drive through New Jersey they get their first glimpse of the New York skyline. The teenagers are impressed by all of the buildings, especially the Twin Towers of the the World Trade Center. In the midst of all their enthusiasm for the great buildings the youth leader tells them that one day those two great tall buildings will be nothing but ruble, ashes and dust. A few months latter, on September 11 th, the students along with everyone else are shocked at the destruction of the towers. They ask their leader, “How did you know!” “Are you a prophet?” He responds that he is not a prophet, he didn’t expect them to be destroyed so soon. He was just trying to make the point that everything that is in time, every building, every monument, everything created by human hands will eventually turn to dust. Only God is eternal.

Some scholars say that the Gospel of Luke must have been written after 70 AD because this passage foretells the destruction of the Temple by the Romans. But Jesus doesn’t tell the disciples when this is going to happen, just that it will someday. In fact, when they ask him when he responds as if the disciples were asking when the “end time” will come. He says that they should not let themselves be lead astray when people say the “the time is near!” He says that there will be wars and earthquakes and plagues before the final end of time. And he tells them “Before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name. This will give you an opportunity to testify.” It all sounds really bad, but he then reassures them that “By your endurance you will gain your souls.”

When I was in Jerusalem I went to the Western Wall, which ia all that remains of the great Temple in Jerusalem. It is an amazing sight, a 62 foot high retaining wall built of enormous limestone blocks. Most of the blocks weigh between 2 and 8 tons but the largest is 43 feet long and weighs more than 500 tons. There is no mortar between the blocks that are carefully shaped to fit together. To stand at that wall is an awesome experience. The idea that people without machinery were able to build it is amazing. That wall is just the retaining wall for the 36 acre area on which the temple stood. No one is completely sure what the temple itself looked like or where the Holy of Holies is located, but there is a large model of the temple in Jerusalem that gives one a sense of its size and grandeur compared to the houses around it. Today if you come into Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives you see the space where the temple stood. Now the Dome of the Rock, a magnificent structure covered with mosaics with a gilded dome, stands there. It is awesome, but the temple which stood there in Jesus’ time was much larger and more impressive.

For Jesus to be unimpressed by this magnificent structure and to suggest that soon there would not be one stone upon another was terrifying to the disciples. This temple was the center of worship for the Jewish people of the time. It was the only place where one could offer sacrifices to God. One might say that to them it was the doorway to God, or the place where the divine and the material world intersected.

Not long after Christ’s death and resurrection, in the year we call 70 AD, when the small Jewish sect that considered themselves follower of The Way were firsts being called Christians, there was a Jewish rebellion against Rome. In retaliation the Roman army tore down the entire temple and its surrounding buildings, quite literally being sure that not one stone was left upon another. It was the ultimate horror and desecration for the Jewish people. They no longer had a place to worship God in the manner that they had for centuries. The animal sacrifices could no longer take place. And the people of Jerusalem who survived fled the area and settled all over the Roman Empire.

This could have been the end for the Jewish people, but they found new ways of relating to God. They continued to read their scriptures and teach their children to follow the commandments. They discovered that their faith was so much more than what was contained in a Temple, so much more than the sacrifices. And because they fled Jerusalem they became disbursed throughout the world.

The followers of Jesus who were still in Jerusalem also were forced to leave. They took with them the teachings of Christ. It was a time of struggle and persecution, but the faith spread. Some were martyred and their courage brought more people to the faith. In a time when there was no social safety net these Christians cared for one another. When there were plagues they took care of the sick. When there was famine they fed one another. And they invited everyone into their community. As Paul wrote there were neither Jew nor Greek, male or female, slave or free. Everyone was invited into the community and it grew. It was the most difficult of times, yet it was that time of struggle and persecution that was the foundation of what we now call the church.

During my recent travels I spent some time in New Jersey. On Sunday a friend and I took the bus into New York and went to the service at Trinity Wall Street. It is a historic church in the city. It turns out that that Sunday was the 250^th anniversary of the founding of their sister church, St. Paul’s. The people of Trinity had helped to build a church in the “suburbs” of that time so that people did not have to travel so far to get to church. My friend and I then went to see St. Paul’s. It is a beautiful small stone church that is the oldest building in New York City to still be being used for its original purpose. Remember that 250 years ago was 1766, before the revolutionary war. Right next to the church is the 9/11 memorial. When the twin toward fell many buildings around them were destroyed, but St. Paul’s remained unharmed. Not a single window was broken. It and its graveyard were covered with ash and ruble, but they opened up the church and welcomed in the first responders who were dealing with the horrific destruction. They provided coffee, food, naps on the pews and the presence of clergy to listen and help the brave fire fighters and police officers who had experienced the unthinkable. Little St. Paul’s became a beacon of hope and place of refreshment and healing.

Two hundred and fifty years seems like a long time for us in the United States, but when I was in the Holy Lands I gained a different perspective on time. I remember visiting some ruins in Amman, Jordan that included the ruins of a church that were at least 1000 years old. You could walk over the floor where worshipers gathered and see some of the tile decorations. A few of the columns that had held up the roof were still there, broken and crumbling. The sun beat down through the emptiness. I was able to discern a raised area where the altar would have been. I walked around that church and imagined the people gathered there for prayer. I stood behind the altar and as I looked out at the emptiness I could feel the presence of priests who 1000 years ago had blessed wine and broken bread in remembrance of the love and sacrifice of a man from Galilee. That church stands empty and in ruins, but there are still Christian churches in Amman where people gather to pray and remember. The Gospels are read, the bread is broken, new members are baptized, and the amazing love of God is taught.

Every building will at some point be but ruble and ashes. Everything that is of time will end. But God’s love is eternal, the message of hope is eternal, the gift of Christ is eternal.

This message in the Gospel today, this reminder of the fragility of the things of this earth, is important for us, especially today. The unexpected conclusion to the contentious election on Tuesday has left many people reeling. There are so many feelings. Some are elated, some are grieving, some are afraid, some are hopeful, many are confused. As we sort out our feelings and begin to move forward it is important to remember that as Christians our primary allegiance is not to a party, our primary allegiance is not even to a country, for these are of time and will at some point be ruble. Our allegiance is to the God of love, the one Truth that is eternal. The one who is, and was and is to be.

And our responsibility now is to discern how God is calling each of us to live out the commandment to love.

Or as the prophet Micah put it:

What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.

Proper 28 C

“Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life.” This collect identifies what Holy Scripture is for Episcopalians.

Proper 28 C

Transcribed from a sermon

Given on November 20, 2013

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

Luke 21:5-19

2 Thessalonians 3:6-13

As I was sitting down to prepare this sermon I read in the Gospel where it says, “Make up your minds not to prepare in advance.” (laughter) I seriously thought about that, but then I realized I would never be able to sleep on Saturday night if I really tried to do that.

I wasn’t terribly inspired by the readings so I went back to read them over again and noticed the Collect at the beginning. The Collect is a prayer that collects the thoughts for the day. In the Prayer Book there is a Collect for every Sunday of the year, so each week we have a different Collect. These are based on great prayers that have come down through time and have been chosen for the different weeks. The one for this week talks about Holy Scripture. This prayer identifies what Holy Scripture is for Episcopalians. It says, “Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life.”

The holy Scriptures for us are something that we interact with. We are not passive with the scriptures. We are even here praying that we will be engaged. It says first that we should hear them so at church services we hear the scriptures. And it is important to hear them. Scientists have found now that when we hear something different parts of the brain are activated and we remember it differently then when we read it with our eyes. So the experience of listening is important. At times I’ve said we really shouldn’t give out the readings on Sunday because then people are busy reading it with their eyes instead of listening with their ears, but I have been overruled on that. To listen triggers a different response so we are to hear scripture, and that is what we do when we gather for worship. The truth is that if you came to church every Sunday for three years you would hear the entire body scripture, except for a few passages from the Old Testament. You would hear the entire breath of scripture. The Collect says we are to hear.

But we are to do more than that. We are also to read them, which means looking at scripture on our own, not just in community. We are encouraged to read for ourselves.

Then it says to mark. Now I know that it is hard to mark up the Bible. How do you take a highlighter on scripture? But if you have a Bible that you can’t stand to mark, get a cheap paperback one and a yellow marker and a pencil and when you read it, mark the stuff that moves you, that you are going to want to look at again. Take your pencil and write notes on the side because you want it to be your scripture. You want to fully engage with it. They find with students that if they can have their own books that they can mark up, it becomes theirs, and they have a different relationship with it. It is your scripture. This is for you. It was written for our learning. So we are supposed to mark up the Bible. Did you know that? Isn’t that really an awesome thought?

And then to learn, to study it. We are always learning. The wonderful thing about scripture is that every time you read it, every time you go through it, there is something new there. There is something new to be learned. We need to approach scripture as a student, to see it as something we are going to learn from. Some of you are still in school, and some of you long graduated, and some of you have graduated and gone back to school in your retirement. We are healthiest when we are always learning, and there is always something new to learn in scripture.

Then it says to inwardly digest - an interesting way of describing our relationship with scripture. To inwardly digest. Well if you think about it, reading and marking it are a way of consuming it. We are grasping hold of it. And when we eat something, first we take a bite of it and then we chew it up. So that would be like taking a bite of scripture and chewing it up by thinking about it and seeing what other people have said about it. Then you swallow it and take it in. If you think about our food after we eat and enjoy it it goes into our system and we are no longer conscious of the process that takes place, but our system manages to pull from it the nutrients that we need to be healthy. So to inwardly digest scripture means that after we have studied it, then it goes into us and becomes a part of us. It sits in there and transforms us and strengthens us. So we are to have that kind of relationship with scripture, an active, interactive relationship with scripture. And the reason, the reason we go to scripture is so that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life. That’s the purpose of scripture; to help us have that faith, that assurance, that knowledge, that life is eternal. Think about it. That’s what we say in this prayer that is part of our tradition.

So this then leads me to talk about the scriptural passages that we read today. Sometimes we get pieces of scripture that we are not comfortable with. Or perhaps we are not comfortable with because we know people that have taken some of it out of context in a way that makes us uncomfortable. In this reading from the second letter to the Thessalonians there is a passage that I’ve heard taken out of context. I don’t know whether any of the others of you have run into this but I’ve heard people say that the Bible says anyone unwilling to work should not eat. I don’t know whether anybody else has run into that, but I have. And it angers me to say that is from scripture because it is taken out of context. So to understand this we first of all we might look at the context of what the entire letter is about. Secondly there is a real question about the authenticity of Second Thessalonians.

So let’s take each one of those. First of all, let’s talk about the nature of scripture. The canon of scripture is something that evolved over time. Unlike the claims of some traditions, God did not write down on a piece of paper what the Holy Scriptures were for Christians. Rather, what happened was that after Christ’s resurrection the church began to grow. Different things were written down. Of course there were no printing presses, so the things that people liked they would then copy and send to their friends. If Paul sent a letter to a church and they go, “Wow, this is a great letter, somebody would copy it,” when they went to another church they would take it. And then that church would read it and say, “That’s really good,” and would copy it and send it to someone else. Over time certain of the things that were circulating were read a lot and others were found to not be quite so helpful. But different churches considered different ones to be helpful. So by about 150, the middle of the second century, there were some churches that acknowledged that there were four books or writings about Jesus, which would be our four Gospels and they were reading the letters of Paul and giving them a great deal of respect. There were other churches that said there was only one Gospel that was worth reading, and it wasn’t always the same Gospel in different parts of the community. There wasn’t any consistency. Up until quite late there were real questions about Revelations and Jude and some other of the letters. So over time what was considered scripture changed and grew and was argued about. By about the third century it had pretty much settled down to what we have today but it wasn’t finally formalized until the seventh century.

It was an ongoing consideration of which of these readings are really useful - which are ones that we are going to say are inspired by God? There was general agreement that the letters from Paul were inspired. But as people began looking in more modern times at the letters of Paul they started thinking that some of these letters probably were not written by Paul - the writing is different, the theology is different. How are we to know which ones are written by Paul and which ones are not? There are some that we are pretty sure that Paul wrote, like Romans and Corinthians, but Second Thessalonians, that is argued over. It is about 50 / 50 when you talk to Bible scholars. Some say the Second Letter to the Thessalonians couldn’t possibly be from Paul because it is too much like the first letter to the Thessalonians. It sounds like someone copied it. In addition, the eschatology, that is the story of the end times, is different in that then it is in some of Paul’s other writings. Others say no it is legitimately Paul. So they argue about it. So the first problem we have is that we are not even sure if Paul wrote it.

In addition, we should look at the context of the statement “Anyone who is not working shouldn’t eat” within the letter itself. The writer is talking about a group of people who were waiting for the end time. They were so sure that the end time was coming any day now they figured they didn’t need to work any more. They just were idle busy body gossips who sat around and talked. These was not people who were unable to work. This was not the poor. This was not somebody who had lost their job. The culture wasn’t quite like that at that time. It wasn’t like it is today. And Paul in his other writings is very clear that it is important to care for the poor and it is important to give to the hungry. He even went to the various churches and said, “There is a famine going on in Judea. Let’s give money to help them out.” And he and Barnabas took that collection to Jerusalem to give to the people in Jerusalem. So he is not against helping someone who is in real need, yet this little passage can get taken out of context and used.

We also have an interesting thing in terms of scripture as Jesus prophesized the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. Some scholars say that the fact that he prophesized the destruction of the Temple means that Luke must have been written after seventy AD when the temple was destroyed. That the writer of Luke put in that prediction to fit in with what had happened. But there are others saying that there is evidence that Luke was written earlier than that. So what are we to make of that? Imagine that you were not involved in a church, you weren’t a Christian, but you found a spiritual teacher that inspired you. You were living in the Midwest and that teacher said that now we are going to go and visit New York City. Suppose this was in the year 2000. As you and your group approach New York City you looked across the Hudson and saw all those buildings. You were very impressed by New York City and all those buildings so the teacher said to you, “There will come a day when those buildings will be destroyed and even the tallest one will be but ashes on the ground.” Now a wise teacher who has some perspective on things knows that every building at some point is going to be ashes on the ground. They are all going to fall down at some point because nothing lasts forever in time. No civilization has survived where it cities are intact. His prediction has no time set. Anybody can predict that yes every building in New York City will at some point be rubble. We don’t know when, but at some point. Yet when 9/11 happened a year later those people would think about their leader’s prophesy.

Suppose Jesus had said what we read today to try and teach the disciples to not be attached to a building where God is supposed to reside and that God is not in a structure because a structure is of time and will be destroyed. Seventy years later there was a rebellion in Israel and the Romans responded by destroying everything in Jerusalem, especially the temple. You can imagine when the Romans quite literally took every stone down that the disciples looked back and remembered what Jesus had said.

(At this point the recording ended.)