RCL - Palm Sunday C - 28 Mar 2010

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Mr. Matthew T. Leaycraft
RCL - Palm Sunday C - Sunday 27 March 2010

Isa 50:4-9a
Phil 2:5-11
Luke 19:28-40

The Divine Harmonic

I love the grand harmony implicit in every aspect of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. Everything is alined, almost like magic. Jesus foretells that in the village the disciples will find tied up a colt that has never been ridden. They go, and immediately the colt appears, just as Jesus predicted. The curious owners arrive asking, as Jesus foretells (and well they might), why the disciples are untying the colt. They answer as Jesus instructed, “The Lord needs it.” This seems to satisfy the owners entirely. Off they go with the colt. Jesus seems omnipotent. Everything moves at his command. People, objects, even time itself, seem effortlessly within his grasp. He is free and everything comes to him.

The action speeds up and more join in. The disciples throw their cloaks on the colt. Almost supernaturally it seems, they lift Jesus onto the makeshift saddle. Everyone catches the spirit. The crowd surges toward Jesus laying down their cloaks before him. Disciples all, they were witnesses to Jesus curing the blind, healing the sick, and even bringing the dead Lazarus to life. Caught up in the ineffable wonder of God, the incarnate Christ among them, heaven and earth at this moment in rapturous unity, they sing out blessing God in Christ their King and praising the peace and glory of heaven now realized before their very eyes.

And yet, all this unfolds as Jesus knows himself to be in mortal danger. He walks boldly to what may come. In his greatest moment of glory he is at his most vulnerable. And yet, he is beyond fear: wide open, utterly free. His self offering is absolute. Obedience for him is his complete oneness with God. This is what leads him to give himself up to the situation as it unfolds. The offering of self in love is the only directive, the only authority. Nothing stands in his way either within him or without because in full obedience he is in divine harmony with all things: perfect love of God, perfect love of neighbor. And so, he is at his most powerful. Fully conscious even while riding on the little colt, he tells them, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out!”

Paul asks us to emulate this. “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” But it doesn’t seem to be so easy. He asks us to be obedient.

Obedience. A loaded word for most of us. In our minds it implies some kind of objective set of rules or value system to which we must willingly or unwillingly comply. Rules. For some of us the word conjures images of self abnegation, the giving up of things, or desires, or individuality. Sometimes we relish the discipline of denial. Adherence to fixed rules is what we live for. There lies safety. It is our marker of identity. Often it takes the form of our maintaining our distinction from YOU, whoever you are, who don’t follow my or our rules. For others rules imply domination, repression, and punishment. The only thing to do is escape. We rebel. Make our own rule, a better rule. In the name of freedom which isn’t freedom at all. In our own compulsive reaction we act out in various ways. Fettered by rigidity or driven in license, our identity is of our own making. In both ways we are unfree.

As many of you know, my Seminarian Internship here at Holy Cross and status as a commuting graduate student between New York and New Haven means I log in hundreds of miles a week on the road. Have you noticed that high speed driving in recent years has taken on the psychic and adrenaline pumping intensity of intergalactic combat? I don’t quite know when this happened, but it is at times truly terrifying, weird, and exhilarating all at once. We travel down the highway among strangers. All these isolated and seemingly disembodied souls hurtling along shielded and concealed in the hard shells that encase them. The characters, stripped of their personalized and complicated masks, act out revealing themselves on an essential level. It’s primal and it’s dangerous.

There is the petite young woman in the gigantic black SUV doing close to 90 who breathes down your tail. With terrifying speed she races up behind you, her whole psyche bent on getting you out of her way in the passing lane. You can feel the energy, can’t you? Finally, frustrated and enraged, she swings to the right, passing you. Before you know it, she has aimed her vehicle directly in front of you. Though there is not much more than a car length between you and the car ahead, she’s pulling right in front of you. You want to scream, but you can’t. Time stands still - is this going to be it? Chaos, danger, and possibly death come in her wake. Fueled by blind anger, her rebellion is heedless of any reality but its own compulsive drive. As you feel the blood drain from your body, a death grip on the steering wheel, you slow down and make room for her. And off she goes, her trip an extended conflict with everything and everyone around her. Careless of the consequences, her reality collapsed into itself, love can not enter.

On the other side of the coin, I know a man in his late ’70’s who, making the trip from the Midwest to visit us, proudly announced when he arrived that for the entire length of the two day drive he never exceeded the 65 mile an hour speed limit. In fact, he proudly boasted, he did 60 most of the time, just to be sure he was operating within the prescribed boundaries. His companion, a woman of his own age, emerged from the car ashen and shaken. His immovable slowness, so contrary to the prevailing conditions, had driven the other drivers to frantic extremes, to avoid, get around, and pass him. Yet, he took pride in the mayhem, because he was right. No love here either.

To be honest, I am both of these drivers at different times. Reactive, rebellious, self righteous by turns. If you get caught up in this it is exhausting and debilitating. Adhering to the authority of an identity of our own making, sometimes conscious, much of the time acting blindly, we are lost. But, there are times we intuit another reality. Sometimes your drive down the highway and the path seems clear. Fully attentive in all directions at once, you synthesize your situation and act accordingly. You are free, unfettered by self and others, letting those pass who need to and wishing them well on their way. You accelerate, slow down, change lanes with spontaneous ease relating to situations and others in harmony, creating harmony as you go. The journey, exhilarating and nimble, is over before you know it. You arrive perhaps tired but happy. It was an experience of freedom, a liberation from self.

We get a glimpse of the deeper truth. Something drops away in us and we see our reality from a different perspective uncluttered by ourselves. In grace God enters freeing us from the falsehood of obedience to our inner demands, our inner demons - self created, self inflicted, conscious and unconscious. It can be as simple as disengaging from the highway madness, or it may be letting go of some primal state trapping you anger, hatred, judgment, fear or chaos, what have you, with all the violence of the demons that assailed St. Anthony of the Desert. With the insight into the truth comes freedom. We experience a relief so profound. And, as if that were not gift enough, love enters. Once you have a taste of the Divine Presence you want more, it leads you onward. It’s all you want. With every opening through the infinite grace of God, love fills the vacuum.

It is the movement of grace that brings us to a place like this. It’s a hospital really, for the trapped and blind. We come seeking freedom. Here we find a respite from our particular worlds in which we are defined. Stepping back we become more open to see ourselves as we are. In hospitality, community, silence, prayer, and the Eucharist, we turn our attention to God. Opening ourselves to God, God is able to enter us in new ways. We see more clearly ourselves as we are, free from our allegiance to our false authorities. In humility is our hope. The goal is true obedience, an opening of love so deep there is nothing else. The freer we are in that love the freer we are to love others. It is the divine rule, the one follows the other. Love of God love of neighbor, this is our calling, this the authority which more and more it is our delight to obey. In letting go we invite participation in the divine harmony.

Now as we enter Holy Week let us concentrate our attention and open our hearts to God. Let us look to those areas that confound us. The places where no light shines. The places that seem closed rather than open, those actions, thoughts, and feeling that seem to come from nowhere. Those are the places to look. Here is where we need to spend time. It’s a bit scary, we have everything to loose. We hold on. But, God is our constant companion. We see the truth, humility enters. We have nothing but ourselves, nothing but God.

With every opening, we enter the imperative of love, the radical freedom of obedience to God. We enter the gift of that true self within, born of God poured out from us to God and to neighbor . Bit by bit, from grace to grace we unfold. The old self drops away. Union with God and right relationship, fall into place. Each step lifting us closer to the freedom and glory of the Divine Harmony that greets us, enfolds us and leads us on until we can join with Paul saying:
in heaven and on earth and under the earth, .... every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Amen.

RCL - commemoration of John & Charles Wesley - 03 Mar 2010

Berkeley Divinity School --- Marquand Chapel
Matthew T. Leaycraft*, Senior Sermon**
RCL - Service of Christian Unity in Commemoration of John and Charles Wesley - Wednesday 03 March 2010

* Matthew is a third year seminarian at Berkeley Divinity School. As part of his third year of study he is doing an internship at Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, participating in many Guesthouse-related ministries.
** A Senior Sermon is delivered at the end of a seminarian's studies as a sign of accomplishment in homiletics.

Matthew in front of the Archbishop's residence in Canterbury
February 2010

Psalm 98
Isaiah 49:5-6
Luke 9:2-6:


And he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal. He said to them, ‘Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money—not even an extra tunic.'
And He Sent Them Out to Proclaim the Kingdom of God and to Heal.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Parting from my fellow Berkeley classmates and Canterbury Cathedral pilgrims a couple of weeks ago, I met my partner, Steve, in London for a short vacation. My now good friend, Diing, stayed with us for two nights. Our quarters were in Chelsea, a residential part of London characterized by a confidant and offhand elegance. The harmonious street-scape there speaks of an ordered and prosperous way of living which seems to assume that things have been, and always will be, just like this.

On Sunday we decided to go to Morning Prayer at the very beautiful Chelsea Old Church. An embodiment of English tradition, it had been the parish church of Sir Thomas Moore and the site of Henry VIII’s marriage to Jane Seymour.

The church was crowded with elegantly dressed, mostly elderly parishioners. There seemed no where to sit except a remote corner at the far back. But then I spotted an empty pew at the very front. Having lost patience with the false modesty that won’t take the forward seats even when there is no where else and you’re in the way, I led our threesome boldly up the aisle and sat down.

I was vaguely aware that our arrival and placement had caused a quiet stir. Three men arriving together fit no established relational category. The fact that two were white, highly suspect of being gay, and the third, a tall African, simply did not compute. I am sufficiently American to have found my self consciousness roused by the relentlessly upper class Englishness assembled around us.

I began to doubt my choice of seating. Perhaps it was presuming. My unease increased as Steve leaned over to say that the woman he had been chatting with was the wife of the Vicar. She was seated BEHIND us. Could it really be advisable, not to say polite, to have plunked ourselves down in the pew ahead of her?

Mid-way through the service my remaining confidence crumbled. I noticed that each of the beautifully embroidered kneelers before us bore some motto or heraldic device applicable to the Queen, and only the Queen. A lone example might simply reflect a royalist enthusiasm, but six in a row really left me in no doubt that we were irretrievably in the spotlit land of public faux pas. Inside a voice shouted a single word that can not be repeated here.

References to the Queen during the service seemed virtually continuous. I tried to enjoy the really beautiful experience while looking forward to a fast exit. I later learned that, indeed, that pew is reserved for the Queen or another member of her family should they decide to pop in on a Sunday at 10:30.

Finally, it was over. Thinking, OK, let’s get OUT of here, we found the way blocked by the smiling face of the Vicar’s wife who introduced herself as Suzy. As she continued her get acquainted chat, her husband came along, introducing himself with a self deprecating humor. The next thing we knew Suzy invited us to the vicarage and we found ourselves sipping tea before her family fire.

An hour later we felt we had all made a new friend. Subsequent emails confirmed the genuineness of this spontaneous and wide open gesture of meaningful contact. Here was hospitality of a very real kind. Now, it may not quite take the form you or I might extend and the circumstances are perhaps unlike our own, but we will never forget the welcome that church extended and would be at home there whenever we might return.

Radical hospitality. It’s almost cliche. But, what can it mean? The Gospel of Luke tells us, “He sent them out to proclaim the kingdom and to heal.” This is the true work of evangelism, to proclaim the kingdom and to heal. Tonight we celebrate the lives and ministry of John and Charles Wesley, who, among their multiple talents and capacities, were first and foremost evangelists for Christ bringing the kingdom and its profound healing to thousands.

Together they changed the face of the english speaking church and ushered in much of what we now take for granted as the context of contemporary Protestant worship. Through them the Anglican Church reached whole populations who otherwise were alienated from the good news. And, in America and worldwide, the Methodist Church has made the kingdom manifest for millions. The trajectory of their energy still reverberates as our being here tonight testifies.

For the Wesleys, proclaiming the kingdom was profoundly invitational, an invitation into the divine reality fully accessible in the here and now. The message was that God’s grace is present and available, no matter your state of life, or education, or past sins. For the Wesleys there were no barriers. There was nothing that made anyone categorically “other.”

While it is by no means my intention to unpack the Wesleys’ theology, John Wesley’s preaching and Charles Wesley's hymns powerfully evoke the unequivocal availability of God’s grace. John wrote:

How freely does God love the world! While we were sinners, ‘Christ died for the ungodly’ ... God spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all. And how freely with him does he give us all things! Verily, free grace is all in all! The grace or love of God, whence comes our salvation, is free in all, and free for all...It does not depend on any power or merit in man; no, not in any degree...It does not depend on his good tempers, or good desires, or good purposes and intentions; for all these flow from the free grace of God. (1)

And Charles wrote in the hymn "Maker, In Whom We Live":

Incarnate Deity, let all the ransomed race render in thanks their lives to thee for thy redeeming grace. The grace to sinner showed ye heavenly choirs proclaim, and cry, “Salvation to our God, salvation to the Lamb!" (2)

And they made their audience everyone who would listen.

To whom are we not to preach it?, John (Wesley) asked. The poor? Nay, they have a peculiar right to have the gospel preached to them. The unlearned? No. God hath revealed these things unto unlearned and ignorant men from the beginning. The young? By no means... The sinners? Least of all. He came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. (3)

The two brothers are such extraordinary historical figures we don’t entirely see them in their human dimension. We perhaps now take for granted the degree of personal commitment, certain faith, and genuine love that alone could motivate and sustain such a potent and fearless ministry.

Luke quotes Jesus, “Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money - not even an extra tunic.” Such utterly fearless invitation to the kingdom can rely on nothing external. No material possession. No assumption. No expectation. Nothing. You step out on your own relying solely on Christ, boldly in humble faith. You have nothing to offer but what God gives you. Your life in Christ is all in all. This is the offering of true invitation.

Not kindness, or mere welcome, though it is those things. But, something so much more. Your God given self is all you have and in humble reliance your extend yourself, pouring yourself out for others. Through the spirit alone you become the kingdom, yours is the hospitality of the kingdom. The Wesley’s did this on a gigantic scale. But so did every itinerant Methodist preacher riding from parish to parish in early 19th century rural America.

In my case I know that without such a gift I would never have found my way to Christ. It was a Methodist minister, YDS alumnus and Trustee, Steve Bauman, who helped me find my way. Study and worship and community all helped. But, it was Steve’s deep founded faith and personal courage that enabled him to extend himself to me in such a complete loving openness and acceptance -- even when I had trouble fully accepting myself -- that led me dimly to perceive the reality and presence of the kingdom of God.

Nothing can teach you that in a way that lives within except it be through an offering of love. The invitation so complete, there are no barriers. The Christ in you meets the Christ in the other. In that awakening the world breaks open and at long last you see. And, once you have a taste of the divine that meets you, longing for longing, you step forward ever to meet it. The real ground of being, a joy in love so sweet, it takes your breath away. It’s all you want. It’s all you need. Invitation is the opening of the door that makes real transformation possible.

The Sunday following my encounter at Chelsea Old Church I found myself sitting alone in a pew of St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church, a small parish located in the very heart of the South Bronx. This inner city church community faces extreme challenges. Having some first hand experience with this part of the Bronx, I know these issues can quite literally be those of life and death.

I was there as part of a Berkeley class project. While I waited for my classmates I couldn’t help wondering what the reaction would be to us, the white Yalie visitors. Feeling out of place, questioning our purpose, and half wishing I hadn’t come, a young African American woman appeared at my side. Smiling, her hand extended, she said, “Hi, my name is Tina. What’s yours? Welcome to St. Margaret’s!”

She seemed to have no knowledge of why I was there. I was just any stranger. She expressed not the least bit of wonder that a middle aged white guy in a blazer had appeared out of nowhere. We chatted and laughed together for some time. Her object was a joyous and genuine welcome and greeting. She made me feel part of the place and in union with her and everyone there. I entered fully into a worship experience in many aspects quite different from that to which I am accustomed.

Suzy and Tina in their different ways and contexts offered more than a simple welcome. It went deeper. Theirs was an outer expression of an inner truth that the kingdom is wide open. Barriers of custom, expectation, identity, what have you, were not overlooked, but understood, and as such rendered irrelevant. They left everything behind taking nothing for the journey. They acted in freedom extending themselves as themselves fully, unreservedly in the fearless zone of love. On that basis and that alone the kingdom of God was proclaimed through them.

As we contemplate ministry, be it through ordination or in some other context, it is good to reflect on the work of a church leader like Steve Bauman whose wide open, unqualified love made the way possible for a tentative seeker. And unforgettable is the prodigious outpouring of word and song of John and Charles Wesley whose embrace excluded no one and so ushered in a new era in the proclamation of the kingdom of God.

Let us bless all those who make their lives a living invitation to knowledge and love of God and grant us all the courage and perfect freedom to be like them, an outpouring of God’s love made manifest in the world through his grace.

Amen.

1. Albert C. Outler & Richard P. Heitzenrater, ed., John Wesley's Sermons, An Anthology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1991), 50.
2. The United Methodist Hymnal, (Nashville: The United Methodist Publishing House, 1989), Hymn 88.
3. Albert C. Outler & Richard P. Heitzenrater, ed., John Wesley's Sermons, An Anthology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1991), 46.