Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Andrew Colquhoun, OHC
RCL - All Saints C - Sunday 31 October 2010
Daniel 7:1-3,15-18
Ephesians 1:11-23
Luke 6:20-31
Each year in Grahamstown, South Africa, there is a festival of the arts. It’s modeled on the Edinburgh Festival with music, drama, street theater, the Fringe and some wonderful nonsense and great food. I always loved it.
One year, a group of South African artists presented the Chester Cycle of the mystery plays. These date from the 15th century.
The group’s staging was wonderful… the chorus were saints. They were dressed in cloth of gold and their headdresses were fashioned to look like icons. Square and standing around their heads. Every time they moved, they glowed in the lights of the theater. Heavenly, beautiful and chilling at the same time. Not of us, not at all.
Then the music started… and the musicians played garbage cans and coke bottles. While I had been enthralled by the glowing beauty of the figures, the music brought me right back to earth, to incarnation, to roughness and pain… to life. It was brilliant! Holiness and the ordinary in a wonderful mix.
This feast of All Saints is like that. It captures the heart. This celebration of all the holy women and men from all time past and all time to come surely must touch each of us. It brings awe and wonder; it brings us to our knees in humility. It makes us look at our lives and wonder if we will ever make the roll of the holy ones.
And there’s quite a bunch of them. We really only celebrate the biggies here. Scholars, bishops, monks, nuns, popes, missionaries, kings and queens, apostles, martyrs, hermits and pastors. All with credentials that bid us admire and venerate them. And I do love them – all those holy people – some of them quite surprised, I’m sure, to have a feast day.
Most of them would be more comfortable with the dustbin band and the coke bottles than the great heavenly strings… because truth to tell, most of them didn’t try to be saints. They tried to be human – fully human as the Lord they followed was fully human. Fully in love with God’s people, filled with hunger… hunger of the mind, hunger of the heart. The fled to the desert and found themselves one with each other. Living in the cloister, they became fully aware of the poor at the door. They wrote, they preached, they debated; they traveled to distant places far from their homes. They suffered, they struggled - and God claimed them. And God made them saints!
Just as God has made us saints! On this feast we don’t merely remember the superstars but also the ordinary saints who, all unbeknownst even to themselves, transform the world. You know them – the foster mothers who always have room for one more; the nurses who take on double shifts rather than leave the suffering; the teacher who labors to bring light to a student’s eyes; the teenager who befriends the odd one out in class – all of them are saints. And they are everywhere. This church is packed with them – all the company, all the time. I believe that at the loneliest place in my heart, there they are – loving and holding me. I believe that when I walk and stumble, they are there to cheer me on. I believe that when I fall into the comfort trap, they convict me. I believe that when I have no strength to act, they act for me. And when we can believe that, there is no room left for despair or paralysis of fear. It’s the incarnation – Christ present in us. In all history, in every dark place where one of us shines, where one person gives food to the hungry, where one teenager scared of his sexuality is loved and unashamed, where the exhausted single mother is treasured as beautiful, there are the saints at work; there God is praised, there Christ is born again.
So this is a feast of hope and joy. It’s also a feast of calling, of pulling us forward into the dark places where we would rather not go. Jesus makes no bones about it. He doesn’t spiritualize the blessings – it isn’t the poor in spirit he talks about. It’s the poor, the dirt poor. Their hunger is not for righteousness, it’s for food. Luke the physician reports it as he knows it. And the woes are just as down and dirty. If you have everything now, don’t expect more. Life in the incarnate Lord is not cloth of gold and living icons for most of the world. It’s garbage cans and empty bottles and grubbing for existence.
So we join the saints at the dumpsters, in the churches, in the quiet places and in the streets. This is a feast of wonder and delight and promise because the saints are here – canonized or unrecognized; prelate or your Aunt Helen; wise old men or children. All here, all hungry and thirsty, and all gathered with us at the altar for the only Word that can satisfy. All the heart of God is here.
Showing posts with label 2010. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2010. Show all posts
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Saturday, April 10, 2010
RCL - Easter 2 C - 11 Apr 2010
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Bernard Jean Delcourt, OHC
RCL – Easter 2 C – Sunday 11 April 2010
Acts 5:27-32
Revelation 1:4-8
John 20:19-31
Hallelujah, the Lord is risen! The Lord is risen indeed, Hallelujah!
My Lord and my God, our Lord and our God, we thank you for the Beloved Disciple. We thank you for his account of your life, death and resurrection. We thank you for his writing audacity.
He shows us the disciples, the founders of our Christian community as faltering in their faith and understanding of you. Even in your resurrected, incarnated presence, they needed help. In the end, just like them, we can only draw our next breath and rely on your Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, the Advocate, to help us live in faith.
Amen.
*****
It is Sunday evening, the disciples, most of them, are cowering in a house they hope is safe. For good measure, they have locked the doors. They are afraid and frazzled. They are wondering about so many things.
Will someone denounce them to the authorities as the followers of Yeshua of Nazareth who was executed 2 days ago? Will someone accuse them of stealing his body from his tomb? That crime alone would call for death under roman law. Why is Mary Magdalene saying she saw the Lord alive? What did she really see? Is Jesus really alive? Didn't he mention that he would come back from the dead?
The disciples are living in fear and guilt. Then Mary Magdalene's witness is suddenly validated when Jesus is amongst them. "Peace to you" he says to them. As if to assuage their enduring doubts, he shows them his wounds. This is the man some of them saw die on the cross. And yet he is alive amongst them. "Peace to you" Jesus breathes on them. And suddenly, a certainty dawns on them. They know this is Jesus without the shadow of a doubt. A new creation is happening in them.
*****
Later, after Jesus is no longer with them, Thomas returns to them. This disciple whose name is a nickname meaning "The Twin" is not a timorous disciple. While his friends live under the siege of their own fears, he is out and about. Is he ministering to others in the Jesus community? This is the disciple who answered "Let us also go that we might die with him" when Jesus turned towards Jerusalem. This is the disciple whom the tradition says will cross the Persian empire and reach India to evangelize people on his way.
He is a man of his time and a man ahead of his time by several centuries. He does not explicitly disbelieve that his fellow disciples have seen a risen Jesus. In that, he is a man of his time. A modern person would self-censor themselves to not possibly believe such a thing that goes against accepted rationality and is possibly the result of emotions and impressions. But Thomas does not reject the witness of his friends. He demands empirical verification. He will believe on his terms. How modern is that?
Now Thomas is not alone in his phase of conditional belief. That morning, Peter visited the empty tomb. He saw the linens that had been deliberately put aside. And Peter went home puzzled but not believing in the risen Jesus yet.
Mary Magdalene visited the empty tomb too. She saw angels there. Yet she still functioned on rationalizations: "someone, somehow must have moved his body, but where?" She only came to belief once her name was called out by the resurrected One standing in front of her. Mary Magdalene, not unlike Thomas, also wanted to touch Jesus, even to cling to him.
After she goes home to tell the tale, the locked-up disciples don't give credence to Mary Magdalene's account of the risen Jesus; they doubt her, they doubt Jesus. Even risen from the dead, Jesus has to work on the disciples. They don't abandon fear and disbelief so easily to move into faith and peace.
If Thomas is more guilty than any other disciple, it is not for his doubt, but for his pride in enouncing his methodology for arriving at faith.
*****
And a week later, Jesus graciously offers Thomas the possibility to put his methodology to use. "Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side." But Jesus also adds: "Do not doubt but believe." Some translators argue that the greek verb should actually be rendered: "Do not doubt but continue believing." A much less contrasted enjoinder and one that reflects more of our own Christian experience, I suspect. In any case, it is an invitation most of us need to hear again and again: "Do not doubt but believe, continue believing."
It seems likely that Thomas desists from testing Jesus' wounds. In all likelihood, Thomas also received the Holy Spirit in Jesus' words and did not need any further help to believe. On the contrary, Thomas now makes a portentous theological statement. He recognizes both natures of Jesus; "My Lord and my God." Thomas recognizes the human master he has followed all these years, even to the risk of his life. And he recognizes the divine master who is one with God.
With God's help, Thomas has transcended his own rationalism to arrive to faith. As the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud will write much later in his prose poem "Bad Blood": "I am no prisoner of my own reason. I have said: God!"
*****
And so, it is important to see how Jesus helps these frazzled, fearful, unbelieving founders of our faith community. He gives them the experience necessary for them to come to terms with his divinity. And through the evangelist, Jesus reaches through the ages to you and I when he says to Thomas: "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe."
Leo the Great said (in his sermon #74 "of the Lord's Ascension):
You and I can no longer use our senses to experience the living Jesus, or can we?
*****
In community, in worship, in prayer and in mission, Christ is alive. You can taste and see the Lord if you do not doubt but continue believing. And know that you cannot do that on your own but that the Holy Spirit is always with you to enable you to continue believing, if only you will let it help you.
Shortly, you will come forward to partake of the sacrament of the Eucharist. Taste and see. Jesus was, is and always shall be with you. And you will take Him wherever you go.
As Teresa of Avila prayed:
*****
And so, my Brothers and Sisters in Christ. Blessed are you who have not seen and yet have come to believe that Jesus is alive and is the Son of God. Through believing may you have life in his name. Peace to you from the Lord Jesus, the Creator of All and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Br. Bernard Jean Delcourt, OHC
RCL – Easter 2 C – Sunday 11 April 2010
Acts 5:27-32
Revelation 1:4-8
John 20:19-31
Hallelujah, the Lord is risen! The Lord is risen indeed, Hallelujah!
My Lord and my God, our Lord and our God, we thank you for the Beloved Disciple. We thank you for his account of your life, death and resurrection. We thank you for his writing audacity.
He shows us the disciples, the founders of our Christian community as faltering in their faith and understanding of you. Even in your resurrected, incarnated presence, they needed help. In the end, just like them, we can only draw our next breath and rely on your Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, the Advocate, to help us live in faith.
Amen.
*****
It is Sunday evening, the disciples, most of them, are cowering in a house they hope is safe. For good measure, they have locked the doors. They are afraid and frazzled. They are wondering about so many things.
Will someone denounce them to the authorities as the followers of Yeshua of Nazareth who was executed 2 days ago? Will someone accuse them of stealing his body from his tomb? That crime alone would call for death under roman law. Why is Mary Magdalene saying she saw the Lord alive? What did she really see? Is Jesus really alive? Didn't he mention that he would come back from the dead?
The disciples are living in fear and guilt. Then Mary Magdalene's witness is suddenly validated when Jesus is amongst them. "Peace to you" he says to them. As if to assuage their enduring doubts, he shows them his wounds. This is the man some of them saw die on the cross. And yet he is alive amongst them. "Peace to you" Jesus breathes on them. And suddenly, a certainty dawns on them. They know this is Jesus without the shadow of a doubt. A new creation is happening in them.
*****
Later, after Jesus is no longer with them, Thomas returns to them. This disciple whose name is a nickname meaning "The Twin" is not a timorous disciple. While his friends live under the siege of their own fears, he is out and about. Is he ministering to others in the Jesus community? This is the disciple who answered "Let us also go that we might die with him" when Jesus turned towards Jerusalem. This is the disciple whom the tradition says will cross the Persian empire and reach India to evangelize people on his way.
He is a man of his time and a man ahead of his time by several centuries. He does not explicitly disbelieve that his fellow disciples have seen a risen Jesus. In that, he is a man of his time. A modern person would self-censor themselves to not possibly believe such a thing that goes against accepted rationality and is possibly the result of emotions and impressions. But Thomas does not reject the witness of his friends. He demands empirical verification. He will believe on his terms. How modern is that?
Now Thomas is not alone in his phase of conditional belief. That morning, Peter visited the empty tomb. He saw the linens that had been deliberately put aside. And Peter went home puzzled but not believing in the risen Jesus yet.
Mary Magdalene visited the empty tomb too. She saw angels there. Yet she still functioned on rationalizations: "someone, somehow must have moved his body, but where?" She only came to belief once her name was called out by the resurrected One standing in front of her. Mary Magdalene, not unlike Thomas, also wanted to touch Jesus, even to cling to him.
After she goes home to tell the tale, the locked-up disciples don't give credence to Mary Magdalene's account of the risen Jesus; they doubt her, they doubt Jesus. Even risen from the dead, Jesus has to work on the disciples. They don't abandon fear and disbelief so easily to move into faith and peace.
If Thomas is more guilty than any other disciple, it is not for his doubt, but for his pride in enouncing his methodology for arriving at faith.
*****
And a week later, Jesus graciously offers Thomas the possibility to put his methodology to use. "Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side." But Jesus also adds: "Do not doubt but believe." Some translators argue that the greek verb should actually be rendered: "Do not doubt but continue believing." A much less contrasted enjoinder and one that reflects more of our own Christian experience, I suspect. In any case, it is an invitation most of us need to hear again and again: "Do not doubt but believe, continue believing."
It seems likely that Thomas desists from testing Jesus' wounds. In all likelihood, Thomas also received the Holy Spirit in Jesus' words and did not need any further help to believe. On the contrary, Thomas now makes a portentous theological statement. He recognizes both natures of Jesus; "My Lord and my God." Thomas recognizes the human master he has followed all these years, even to the risk of his life. And he recognizes the divine master who is one with God.
With God's help, Thomas has transcended his own rationalism to arrive to faith. As the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud will write much later in his prose poem "Bad Blood": "I am no prisoner of my own reason. I have said: God!"
*****
And so, it is important to see how Jesus helps these frazzled, fearful, unbelieving founders of our faith community. He gives them the experience necessary for them to come to terms with his divinity. And through the evangelist, Jesus reaches through the ages to you and I when he says to Thomas: "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe."
Leo the Great said (in his sermon #74 "of the Lord's Ascension):
" In a mysterious way (Christ) began to be more present to (the disciples) in his godhead once he had become more distant in his humanity... The faith of the believer was being drawn to touch, not with the hand of the flesh but with the understanding of the Spirit, the only-begotten Son, the equal of his Father. "Within a generation or two of the scene we have just relived, no follower of Jesus would any longer have the experiential knowledge of the physical Jesus. Christians could no longer rely upon such experience to prop up their faith.
You and I can no longer use our senses to experience the living Jesus, or can we?
*****
In community, in worship, in prayer and in mission, Christ is alive. You can taste and see the Lord if you do not doubt but continue believing. And know that you cannot do that on your own but that the Holy Spirit is always with you to enable you to continue believing, if only you will let it help you.
Shortly, you will come forward to partake of the sacrament of the Eucharist. Taste and see. Jesus was, is and always shall be with you. And you will take Him wherever you go.
As Teresa of Avila prayed:
Christ has no body now on earth but yours,
no hands but yours, no feet but yours;
yours are the eyes through which Christ's compassion looks out on the world,
yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good
and yours are the hands with which He is to bless us now.
*****
And so, my Brothers and Sisters in Christ. Blessed are you who have not seen and yet have come to believe that Jesus is alive and is the Son of God. Through believing may you have life in his name. Peace to you from the Lord Jesus, the Creator of All and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Friday, April 2, 2010
RCL - Good Friday - 02 Apr 2010
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Andrew Colquhoun, OHC
RCL - Good Friday - Friday 02 April 2010
Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Hebrews 10:16-25 or
Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9
John 18:1-19:42
It’s not so very long ago that we gathered here with the place decorated, all of us smiling and expectant, singing carols and ready for a feast. Incarnation, Christmas… then into Epiphany with all that mysterious time can bring… kings bowing down, lavishing gifts on a destitute child; Jesus’ baptism and the water transformed into wine. Visions of God everywhere.
Then Lent. There’s really quite a bit of comfort in Lent – some space to think, get in touch with our humanity, our neediness; an opportunity to swallow a bit of humble pie and, in some contrary way, to find a little pride in having been pretty good for these six weeks.
Now the Triduum – three days – the altar is stripped down – a bit barren – but we’ll get through because we know the BIG DAY is coming.
But, my brothers and sisters, if that’s what we’re feeling, we’ve got it wrong. This is the Big Day. All that has gone before, all that will come after, depend on this day. Crucifixion and Incarnation are one.
The Child is born for this day. Somewhere in the human heart, we know this - always have. Even in the Octave of Christmas we celebrate the first martyr and the Holy Innocents. And listen to the mediaeval carols – underneath, always, the sorrow of the mother, the knowledge that this Child, this Infant Holy, Infant Lowly, is born for this day… the journey from the Bethlehem stable leads to the hill of Calvary. The first stumbling steps of the Child learning to walk are completed in Jesus’ falling on the Way of the Cross.
It’s not what we would like, that idea. We don’t like it that the Man the Child becomes is not the man we think he is. We know what we want Jesus to be. Perfect, wonder working, clearing life’s struggles out of the way. We don’t really want more than that. We sing that we want to be like Jesus and what we mean is that we want to be nice like Jesus. We want to do good; we want to heal, we want to feed the hungry; we want to be obedient but we don’t really want to be like Jesus. We want to be respectable. We want to have faith. We want to know and have a guarantee that we are forgiven for our sins whatever they may be. We would like to trust and be certain of our discipleship. We want to feel that at the end, we’ll be among the saved singing the endless praises in heaven.
We want all that but we don’t want to be like Jesus.
Jürgen Moltmann wrote a book called The Crucified God – a most moving and provoking book. In it he says: “God did not become man according to the measure of our conceptions of being a man. He became the kind of man we do not want to be: an outcast, accursed crucified.”
Somewhere, sometime, somehow we have forgotten that the Crucified One is God. Not a being apart from the Trinity but of the Trinity. God did not hand over another person to the Cross – God gave God’s self. The Lamb is God.
We are so desperate to have things made right; we want the sacrifice to clear everything up. Sweep all the dirt away. Wash me. Make me different so that you can love me. We demand the sacrifice.
But the cross is not the result of our indifference to the Incarnation; it is the point of the Incarnation. We didn’t force God’s hand by being who we are. The Cross of the outcast and forsaken Christ is the reality of the world. If God has taken upon himself death on the Cross it is because he has taken on himself all of life – real life.
The Crucified God is one with every desperate, broken longing of the human heart. There is no depth to which humanity can sink that the Cross has not reached. There is no emptiness in our hearts that God does not know.
Jesus is the lover of the addict mugging the pensioner for a fix; Jesus desires the hooker with HIV whom no system will help because she’s “promiscuous.” Jesus shares the terror of the child who waits in the dark for the pain that the perpetrator brings and Jesus bears the shame. Jesus stands in the place of the people in Haiti and Africa and Iraq and Afghanistan who had nothing and now don’t even have hope.
Jesus accuses God of abandoning him and his anguish is the cry of Rachel weeping for her children for they are no more. It’s the cry of the people who can’t see God. The people the Church demeans or ignores…all the gay people, the poor people, the throw-away people.
Jesus – crucified – is the emptiness of existence known by God and sheltered in the Sacred Heart.
So we don’t want to be like Jesus. None of us could bear it. None of us is so loving. Thanks be to God in Christ that we don’t carry such a burden. Our burden is to let that love take us into this poor broken world where God is alive.
Oh God, make us to be like Jesus!
Br. Andrew Colquhoun, OHC
RCL - Good Friday - Friday 02 April 2010
Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Hebrews 10:16-25 or
Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9
John 18:1-19:42
It’s not so very long ago that we gathered here with the place decorated, all of us smiling and expectant, singing carols and ready for a feast. Incarnation, Christmas… then into Epiphany with all that mysterious time can bring… kings bowing down, lavishing gifts on a destitute child; Jesus’ baptism and the water transformed into wine. Visions of God everywhere.
Then Lent. There’s really quite a bit of comfort in Lent – some space to think, get in touch with our humanity, our neediness; an opportunity to swallow a bit of humble pie and, in some contrary way, to find a little pride in having been pretty good for these six weeks.
Now the Triduum – three days – the altar is stripped down – a bit barren – but we’ll get through because we know the BIG DAY is coming.
But, my brothers and sisters, if that’s what we’re feeling, we’ve got it wrong. This is the Big Day. All that has gone before, all that will come after, depend on this day. Crucifixion and Incarnation are one.
The Child is born for this day. Somewhere in the human heart, we know this - always have. Even in the Octave of Christmas we celebrate the first martyr and the Holy Innocents. And listen to the mediaeval carols – underneath, always, the sorrow of the mother, the knowledge that this Child, this Infant Holy, Infant Lowly, is born for this day… the journey from the Bethlehem stable leads to the hill of Calvary. The first stumbling steps of the Child learning to walk are completed in Jesus’ falling on the Way of the Cross.
It’s not what we would like, that idea. We don’t like it that the Man the Child becomes is not the man we think he is. We know what we want Jesus to be. Perfect, wonder working, clearing life’s struggles out of the way. We don’t really want more than that. We sing that we want to be like Jesus and what we mean is that we want to be nice like Jesus. We want to do good; we want to heal, we want to feed the hungry; we want to be obedient but we don’t really want to be like Jesus. We want to be respectable. We want to have faith. We want to know and have a guarantee that we are forgiven for our sins whatever they may be. We would like to trust and be certain of our discipleship. We want to feel that at the end, we’ll be among the saved singing the endless praises in heaven.
We want all that but we don’t want to be like Jesus.
Jürgen Moltmann wrote a book called The Crucified God – a most moving and provoking book. In it he says: “God did not become man according to the measure of our conceptions of being a man. He became the kind of man we do not want to be: an outcast, accursed crucified.”
Somewhere, sometime, somehow we have forgotten that the Crucified One is God. Not a being apart from the Trinity but of the Trinity. God did not hand over another person to the Cross – God gave God’s self. The Lamb is God.
We are so desperate to have things made right; we want the sacrifice to clear everything up. Sweep all the dirt away. Wash me. Make me different so that you can love me. We demand the sacrifice.
But the cross is not the result of our indifference to the Incarnation; it is the point of the Incarnation. We didn’t force God’s hand by being who we are. The Cross of the outcast and forsaken Christ is the reality of the world. If God has taken upon himself death on the Cross it is because he has taken on himself all of life – real life.
The Crucified God is one with every desperate, broken longing of the human heart. There is no depth to which humanity can sink that the Cross has not reached. There is no emptiness in our hearts that God does not know.
Jesus is the lover of the addict mugging the pensioner for a fix; Jesus desires the hooker with HIV whom no system will help because she’s “promiscuous.” Jesus shares the terror of the child who waits in the dark for the pain that the perpetrator brings and Jesus bears the shame. Jesus stands in the place of the people in Haiti and Africa and Iraq and Afghanistan who had nothing and now don’t even have hope.
Jesus accuses God of abandoning him and his anguish is the cry of Rachel weeping for her children for they are no more. It’s the cry of the people who can’t see God. The people the Church demeans or ignores…all the gay people, the poor people, the throw-away people.
Jesus – crucified – is the emptiness of existence known by God and sheltered in the Sacred Heart.
So we don’t want to be like Jesus. None of us could bear it. None of us is so loving. Thanks be to God in Christ that we don’t carry such a burden. Our burden is to let that love take us into this poor broken world where God is alive.
Oh God, make us to be like Jesus!
Sunday, January 10, 2010
RCL - Epiphany 1 C - 10 Jan 2010
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Andrew Colquhoun, OHC
RCL - Epiphany 1 C - Sunday 10 Jan 2010
Baptism of Christ
Isaiah 43:1-7
Acts 8:14-17
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
I had a shock this week. Failing my driving test was very difficult for me; it took me by surprise. Not the failing but my reaction to it. I felt ashamed, scared, small, low. My reason told me to shape up but the voice inside said, “You see, you are not competent; you are getting too old; you were never very good at anything; always fourth, never in the top three; you are a failure; who do you think you are; you’re fooling everyone. You’re still the fat kid who couldn’t hit a ball.” It was a bad day and I felt very alone.
And my hunch is that not very deep within each one of us is one who never feels that he or she has quite arrived; not quite grown up; vulnerable to so many things. And that that part of us is the part we have a hard time blessing.
Now this is the feast of the Baptism of Christ… I don’t know how many sermons I’ve preached on this event. There’s so much about it that is important… how in this baptism, Jesus stands with all humanity, aligning himself with us in our sins – repenting on our behalf before he begins his ministry. It’s been called almost his ordination, his acknowledging his ministry – his confirmation as the Messiah, the Christ. From here on there’s no mistaking that he is on purpose going to the cross.
I know and believe all that. I wonder at it; I’m humbled by it. But all that knowledge and all that subscription to doctrine obviously hasn’t touched the part of me that shrivels when I feel unworthy. The part that says that I didn’t fail a driving test but failed life. And I wonder what it will take to bring peace to that part of the human soul that feels so unloved and unlovable.
Apart from all the theology and the doctrine about this great mystical event, there is a human element that is primal although almost always subsumed by the mystery of that action. Luke doesn’t mention where the baptism was or who took part. But the other accounts put Jesus and John together. These two men, cousins, face the worst that life can do to humans. Utter desolation, uncertainty, pain, suffering, prison and death… and John says, “I shouldn’t be doing this, I’m not worthy.” And Jesus answers and says, “Please, I need this. I need to stand with these people. I need to be part of them and they of me.”
And so they stand, the two of them in the mud of the Jordan, and the water splashes in that first sacrament of life.
And God speaks. “I love you; I am pleased with you; you are my child.” The voice comes and it is the same word spoken in Isaiah – “Do not fear, I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. Precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.”
Oh – my – God! How dare we call ourselves worthless. How dare we shrink from that love. How dare we hold on to the voice that says “Unworthy! Nothing! Failed!”
The story only begins there – then comes the desert, prison for John, his beheading, Jesus’ homelessness, the Cross.
The word, the blessing of love is given to Him to strengthen him for the journey that is ahead.
It’s given to us, too, for the same reason. That declaration of love is for all. In that declaration is the healing that we need, if we will listen.
And just as Jesus carried that voice to the broken, so we are to carry that voice to God’s beloved. The very people Jesus sought out. The people who have never heard “Beloved”; who have only known lostness; the smelly crowd standing in the mud next to us while we think we’re clean.
The crowd came to baptism with longing and expectation. Tired of soldiers and oppression. Poor and hungry. They haven’t gone away. These are the people we promised at our baptism to seek and serve and love; these are those for whom we promised to strive for justice and peace and whose dignity we promised to respect. These are our brothers and sisters who struggle with more than a driving test; whose lives are trial and struggle and want. These are the people who need to hear from us “You are our beloved.”
Br. Andrew Colquhoun, OHC
RCL - Epiphany 1 C - Sunday 10 Jan 2010
Baptism of Christ
Isaiah 43:1-7
Acts 8:14-17
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
I had a shock this week. Failing my driving test was very difficult for me; it took me by surprise. Not the failing but my reaction to it. I felt ashamed, scared, small, low. My reason told me to shape up but the voice inside said, “You see, you are not competent; you are getting too old; you were never very good at anything; always fourth, never in the top three; you are a failure; who do you think you are; you’re fooling everyone. You’re still the fat kid who couldn’t hit a ball.” It was a bad day and I felt very alone.
And my hunch is that not very deep within each one of us is one who never feels that he or she has quite arrived; not quite grown up; vulnerable to so many things. And that that part of us is the part we have a hard time blessing.
Now this is the feast of the Baptism of Christ… I don’t know how many sermons I’ve preached on this event. There’s so much about it that is important… how in this baptism, Jesus stands with all humanity, aligning himself with us in our sins – repenting on our behalf before he begins his ministry. It’s been called almost his ordination, his acknowledging his ministry – his confirmation as the Messiah, the Christ. From here on there’s no mistaking that he is on purpose going to the cross.
I know and believe all that. I wonder at it; I’m humbled by it. But all that knowledge and all that subscription to doctrine obviously hasn’t touched the part of me that shrivels when I feel unworthy. The part that says that I didn’t fail a driving test but failed life. And I wonder what it will take to bring peace to that part of the human soul that feels so unloved and unlovable.
Apart from all the theology and the doctrine about this great mystical event, there is a human element that is primal although almost always subsumed by the mystery of that action. Luke doesn’t mention where the baptism was or who took part. But the other accounts put Jesus and John together. These two men, cousins, face the worst that life can do to humans. Utter desolation, uncertainty, pain, suffering, prison and death… and John says, “I shouldn’t be doing this, I’m not worthy.” And Jesus answers and says, “Please, I need this. I need to stand with these people. I need to be part of them and they of me.”
And so they stand, the two of them in the mud of the Jordan, and the water splashes in that first sacrament of life.
And God speaks. “I love you; I am pleased with you; you are my child.” The voice comes and it is the same word spoken in Isaiah – “Do not fear, I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. Precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.”
Oh – my – God! How dare we call ourselves worthless. How dare we shrink from that love. How dare we hold on to the voice that says “Unworthy! Nothing! Failed!”
The story only begins there – then comes the desert, prison for John, his beheading, Jesus’ homelessness, the Cross.
The word, the blessing of love is given to Him to strengthen him for the journey that is ahead.
It’s given to us, too, for the same reason. That declaration of love is for all. In that declaration is the healing that we need, if we will listen.
And just as Jesus carried that voice to the broken, so we are to carry that voice to God’s beloved. The very people Jesus sought out. The people who have never heard “Beloved”; who have only known lostness; the smelly crowd standing in the mud next to us while we think we’re clean.
The crowd came to baptism with longing and expectation. Tired of soldiers and oppression. Poor and hungry. They haven’t gone away. These are the people we promised at our baptism to seek and serve and love; these are those for whom we promised to strive for justice and peace and whose dignity we promised to respect. These are our brothers and sisters who struggle with more than a driving test; whose lives are trial and struggle and want. These are the people who need to hear from us “You are our beloved.”
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