preaching on Matthew 5: 1-12:
Tuesday, January 31, 2017
Sunday, January 22, 2017
Third Sunday after the Epiphany
Matthew 4: 12-23
Almighty God, who didst give such grace to thine apostle Andrew that he readily obeyed the call of thy Son Jesus Christ, and brought his brother with him: Give unto us, who are called by thy Word, grace to follow him without delay, and to bring those near to us into his gracious presence; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Good morning. The reading from
St. Matthew today is certainly familiar to us.
It is the reading appointed in the lectionary every year for the
observance of the Feast of St. Andrew the Apostle. I hear those words, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men, and I almost
instinctively look over to the transept and expect to see our good friends of
the Syria Highlanders. If we listen
carefully, perhaps we can hear the echo of bagpipes in the far distance! The calling of the Andrew and Peter and James
and John out there by the Sea of Galilee is always a wonderful launching place
into the themes of our annual parish patronal festival, as we are invited to
follow Andrew as a mentor and inspiration in willing, heartfelt response to the
invitation to new and full and eternal life in relationship to Christ Jesus, as
his disciples. That the symbolic action
of this moment would be a kind of point of reference for each of us. I always find the hymn so powerful, “They cast
their nets in Galilee.” Based on a poem by the early twentieth century Roman
Catholic poet from Mississippi, William Alexander Percy, who was the uncle of
the famous mid-century novelist Walker Percy.
One of my favorite writers.
In any event, this morning: to hear his voice, the voice of Jesus--to
put down our nets, however that image
might expand into our lives, to follow him, to dedicate ourselves to this new
and different kind of fishing enterprise,
making space in our lives for him to work in and through us to build up his
church and accomplish his purposes.
Whatever it may cost us along the way.
The four gospels give us different perspectives on and share some
distinctive memories, each of them, of
the first days of what we sometimes call the active or “earthly” ministry of
Jesus: that stretch of the story that
begins more or less around the time that John the Baptist was arrested and then
executed and then continues of course through the memories of Palm Sunday and
Holy Week and Good Friday. This period
of time in the story that begins with Jesus connecting in some way with this small
group of men, his inner circle, who were like him mostly men from the Galilee,
from the hinterlands, and who were formerly followers of John the Baptist. They seem to have scattered perhaps in fear
and certainly in great disappointment when John was eliminated from the scene
in that horrible story about King Herod Antipas and his wife Herodias and her
daughter Salome. But soon after that Jesus seeks them out and connects with
them in a new way. Here in Matthew 4
Andrew and Peter and James and John have returned to their old lives, lying low
in the countryside, hoping to stay under whatever radar Herod’s authorities
might be turning in their direction. But
once Jesus meets them and invites them to join him, there is immediately a
sense of a fresh start and new beginning.
A sudden boldness, an enthusiasm.
They thought the story was over, but in reality it was just getting
started. Matthew’s quotation from Isaiah
9 in this context seems to capture the moment.
“The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those
who sat in the region and shadow of death, light has dawned.”
Last week we had the reading from John that remembered these tumultuous
early days slightly differently. As the
authors of the gospels collected the stories from those who had actually been
there, there might have been some varying memories. When was it that we really become Jesus
followers? Was it when we first met him,
back at the time of his baptism, before John was arrested, or was it after John
was arrested, when he came out to Capernaum by the Sea of Galilee and recruited
us for his new mission? In all that,
though, there was certainly consistent agreement about this sense of a revival
of spirit, of a new start, a new direction.
Last week as we read in John’s gospel they remembered Jesus inviting
them to “Come and see.” Come and see.
And this week in Matthew, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”
One thing the memory recorded by Matthew and then lifted up in our
sermon hymn captures for us is I think not just the energy moving forward,
which we get also in John’s story, but also again that somewhat tender reminder
of what we might call, to echo Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous book title, “the
cost of discipleship.” Something about
the pile of nets left behind in the boat by Peter and Andrew. The old way of life. The old securities. For us that would be like, I don’t know: our
wallets and checkbooks, our car keys. Our laptops.
Our toolbox. Jobs, hobbies,
commitments, relationships. The things
that are in some way for us the instruments we use to support and navigate our
lives. Leaving it all behind, to go
with him. The peace of Christ, it is no
peace, but strife sown in the sod.
In our story from Matthew 4 I find myself pausing and just taking in
the expression on the face of old Zebedee, the father of James and John, as he
is left behind to finish the work of cleaning the nets by himself. This doesn’t mean that over the next days and
months and years the disciples would never see family and friends again, of
course. And we know that they did keep
fishing, at least occasionally. Perhaps
when the group’s cash flow situation was running low. We know they even stayed right there in
Capernaum for quite a while, perhaps mostly at Simon Peter’s house. And their missionary efforts were at least
for a good while really centered in the same neighborhood. But there was a real break with the past in
this moment nonetheless, a real sense of separation. It’s not a sabbatical, a summer
internship. It seems to happen pretty
suddenly, but there is clarity from the beginning that this is for the long
haul. You’re all in, or you’re not, but
nothing half-way.
So Third Sunday after the Epiphany, and continuing to sort through the
implication of the story we heard Christmas Eve. The Shepherds came into town to see what the
angels had announced with such fanfare, the newborn baby in the manger. And then they returned to their flocks. The Magi from the East have knelt before the
Holy Child and offered gifts and worship.
And then they returned to their homeland. We never hear of any of them again. They disappear into the mists of
history. Yet I think we know somehow
deep down that if their experience was anything like the experience of Peter
and Andrew and James and John, if their experience was anything like our
experience, everything must have been different for them from then on, until
the end of their lives. Those minutes or
perhaps a few hours in the presence of the Child who was and is the Savior of
the World must have been a regular, a daily, a constant element of thought and
feeling and memory, wonder and prayer, awe and worship. Not something that you ever would
forget. A moment that would put
everything from then on, relationships, work, everything, in a new light. I am absolutely sure that for each one of
them, as years and decades passed, in the countryside of Judea, in the ancient
cities of Persia, for all of them, shepherds and magi, as they lay on their
deathbeds, there must have been even in
their last moments of thought this one image and certainty: that they had seen
him, knelt in his presence, somehow over all the years since continued with him
until the very end.
Time for us, in these weeks between Epiphany and Lent, to think through
all this and to pray through all this again, as he comes to us now in Word and
Sacrament, as we study and pray and worship.
As we kneel in his presence. To
look to our mentors and guides.
Shepherds and magi and Andrew and Peter and James and John. Finding ourselves somehow in the picture
when he says: come, follow me.
Sunday, January 15, 2017
Second Sunday after the Epiphany
John 1: 29-42
So these four or five Sundays every year in the interval between the
great 12 Days of Christmas and the beginning of the pre-Lenten season on
Septuagesima give us a bit of space liturgically and devotionally in the
calendar of the church year and in our own personal lives of reflection and
prayer, to pause, step back, and to continue to digest the meaning of the word
first spoken to the shepherds by the heavenly angels: “Unto you is born this day in the City of David a Savior, who is
Christ, the Lord.”
We remember that there are two steps in the story. First the angels sang that good news to the
shepherds, and then, hearing the news, the shepherds replied, Let us go now even unto Bethlehem, to see
this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known to us. The Angels announce; the Shepherds respond.
They get up and go! A pattern that will
be repeated again and again through the gospel, in the life of the early
church, and in every generation.
There is a saying about the character and nature of Christian
life: Jesus meets us where we are, but
he doesn’t leave us there. Jesus accepts
us as we are, but he never leaves us as he found us. The key word in the first sermons recorded
from both John the Baptism and Jesus, “metanoiete.”
The literal Greek means “have another thought, change your way of
thinking” but the word is used consistently in Greek to translate the Hebrew
shuv, which means change your direction. It’s not simply about some kind of mental
action. It’s the word you use when you
call out when you see them turning the wrong way down a one-way street. Turn around!
In the beautiful candlelight, midnight of Christmas Eve every year the
story flows like a gentle river to cover the rough places of our hearts and to
sooth our troubled minds and to refresh our spirits. But as the calendar pages continue to turn,
that sacred stream seems to begin to run dry.
“Real life” reasserts itself, with all its hard edges. The birth of a savior certainly sounds like
it ought to be good news 24/7/365--really
good news. But the sun comes up on the
26th of December or maybe the 6th of January, and so
often really it’s all just a fading sentimental memory. We find ourselves in our day to day lives just
exactly where we were and doing pretty much the same thing, headed in the same
direction we were headed before Christmas happened.
So the Bethlehem shepherds in Luke chapter two, and this morning, the
disciples of John the Baptist. They come
to us early in this New Year as examples, mentors, guides.
Like the shepherds when the angels spoke to them, the disciples hear
John’s word about Jesus, Behold, the Lamb
of God, and at once they get moving--they set out to see what he’s talking
about. And I love this first interchange,
as it certainly reinforces the point.
The question the disciples ask Jesus: Rabbi, where are you staying? And instead of answering that question, Jesus
extends an invitation. Maybe more of a
challenge. Come, and see. He knew that
what they were asking wasn’t really what they were asking. The point isn’t for Jesus to tell them his
postal address. “We want to know if you
just might be the real deal, the one we’re looking for. Israel’s
hope and consolation, joy of all the world . . . ; dear desire of every nation;
joy of every longing heart. Is that
you, Jesus? Not just the question of
disciples and shepherds, but deep down in all our hearts year by year by year
as we sing the Advent hymn. Are you the
“long-expected Jesus?” The Lamb of God,
who takest away the sins of the world? Are
you the one I’ve been waiting for? The
one who is going to make a difference in my life. And Jesus answers, Come
and see. Come and see. Because that’s the only way we’ll ever know.
And again, this interval between Epiphany and Septuagesima, a time to
consider just what to do with this invitation.
The sleepy shepherds didn’t just roll over and go back to sleep when the
angels departed.
The disciples didn’t hear the word of John the Baptist and say, “Oh,
that’s interesting,” and then continue on with whatever they were doing
before.
A moment for us: to rush to the manger, to come and see where Jesus is
staying, what he is about, what he might be for us, in our lives. We’re all here this morning as a part of that
response. However we got here, whatever
the presenting occasion or stated motive.
Simply to begin to puzzle through that question, is it really possible
that what happened at Christmas can have anything to do with me? Can it make a difference?
There is a saying sometimes attributed to Albert Einstein, of all
people, though with a question mark.
Somebody said, anyway: “A definition of insanity is to do the same thing
but to expect a different result.” January
is a season of New Year’s Resolutions, and if we want to take this opportunity
at turn of another year and in the space of this Epiphany to think about a
resolution to take the question about Christmas seriously this year in our
lives, we maybe can begin by doing some different things. Metanoite, repent, change direction!
And here on the Second Sunday after the Epiphany, just three simple
thoughts. Not a complete list of
possibilities by any stretch of the imagination, and perhaps you’ll be prompted
in a different direction. But just by
way of suggestion.
One would be to hear the words of Jesus, “Come and see,” as an invitation to a New
Year’s resolution to engage in a fresh way and a deeper way with the
Bible. I think I mentioned before the
image I saw once in a German stained glass window of the Bible resting on a bed
of straw in the Bethlehem manger. Maybe
that’s an image to keep in mind if we imagine ourselves as following the
shepherds. “The Word was made flesh, and
dwelt among us.” Whether we’re already regular
and daily Bible readers, or whether the most Bible we get most of the time
comes in the snippets of the lectionary on Sunday mornings. Maybe “come and see” could be an invitation
to a renewed or extended or expanded practice of prayerful reading, daily or at
set times through the week. Alone is
fine, though I always find the opportunity to share the process of reading and
reflection with others. Reading,
studying, praying together, discussing, seeking to hear what God has to say to
us. My small group Bible Study meets at
7:30 in the morning at the Oakland Panera, and it’s not the only one going on
in that Panera at that hour on Tuesdays, which is kind of neat to see.
Or perhaps the Sunday morning 10 a.m. Bible Study over in the Old
Rectory Parlor would be a helpful support.
In this New Year they’re just beginning to read and discuss the New
Testament Letter of James, so this would be a great time to start. Or maybe you’d be interested in joining my
new Facebook Group for Rector’s Bible Study—an invitation to spend a little
time reading and praying about and discussing the readings for the next
Sunday. We’re just getting that started
this week, and it’s kind of experimental to use that format. If you’re interested, let me know. Anyway, there are lots of resources out
there, lots of opportunities, groups, classes, study guides--but the important
thing I guess would be just to get started.
A second way we might begin to “come and see” would be to resolve for
each of us a deeper commitment to private prayer. We have this wonderfully rich contemplative
prayer group of course that meets on Wednesday evening for Centering Prayer,
and I know they also would be delighted to have more folks join them. But perhaps this kind of a resolution would
simply be about finding a few quiet moments two or three times a day, maybe
just five minutes at a time, to step back, close our eyes if that’s
helpful. Perhaps to say the Lord’s
Prayer slowly and inwardly, and to lift before God’s presence the concerns of
our hearts.
Perhaps simply to say the words
of the Manger hymn: “Be near me, Lord
Jesus, I ask thee to stay close by me forever, and love me, I pray.” If you have a prayer book at home, perhaps to
find the offices of Morning and Evening Prayer and to pray one or two of the
Collects slowly, meditating on a word or phrase that seems to catch your
attention. Perhaps to take home each
week our Sunday morning service leaflet and to turn to the pages with our
parish prayer requests, to take five minutes or so every morning or a few times
a week to say a prayer and then to read through that long list of names. We don’t always know why they’re on the list,
but we know that they or someone who loves them have asked us as a congregation
to lift them up in God’s attention and care.
And a third way we might respond to this invitation to “come and see”
in this New Year would be to renew and refresh our commitment to the worship of
the church. I know I’m speaking to the
choir here! Those who come to church on
a winter, Steeler Playoff Game Sunday! But
even if we are already coming to church every Sunday, or most Sundays, whatever
the weather, whatever the alternatives on offer around us—this renewing and
refreshing may be more about what’s going in
on us when we enter these doors on Hampton Street. Not simply to say, “I’m going to church this
morning” as a matter of routine. But to
expect to meet him, to expect to change, to expect to be sent out in a new
direction. Enter his gates with thanksgiving.
Come into his courts with praise.
To make that a prayer, to have that intention, when we sit down in our
pew Sunday mornings a few minutes before 11.
Christmas is over now, for another year, but the New Year’s Resolution
of the Shepherds is still here for us: Let
us go now even unto Bethlehem, to see this thing which is come to pass, which
the Lord hath made known to us. It
has been two thousand years since the disciples first met Jesus out there by
the Jordan River, but his invitation to them are still here for us: Come
and see.
Sunday, January 8, 2017
First Sunday after the Epiphany
Isaiah 42: 1-9
Baptism of August Isaiah Newman
Good morning. The Sunday after
the January 6th Feast of the Epiphany and the day of the traditional
observance of the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord Jesus Christ, as we’ve heard
in the hymns and the gospel reading. The
event at the Jordan River in all four gospels launches the public ministry of
Jesus along the road that leads eventually to Good Friday and the cross. In the Eastern Orthodox Churches the day is
known as the Theophany, as the divine nature of Jesus is revealed by the Word
of the Father and in the descent of the Holy Spirit.
And here this morning we celebrate the baptism of August Isaiah Newman. The launching of his public life and ministry as a follower of Jesus, a
disciple. “Confess the faith of Christ
crucified, proclaim his resurrection, and share with us in his eternal
priesthood.” Thank you Tom and Meredith
for coming all the way from your home in Buffalo to share this great day with
all of us. A great way to enter a new
year as a congregation and extended congregational family, with this
reaffirmation of our shared baptismal identity and life in Christ.
August Isaiah’s namesake, the Prophet Isaiah, was living and
prophesying in Jerusalem in the 8th and 7th Centuries
before Christ. The job of the prophet is
to call attention to God’s Word in a fresh and compelling way when the people around
him seem to have forgotten it. And Isaiah’s ministry took place in a
complicated time. The Northern Kingdom
of Israel had been conquered by the Assyrian Empire of what today would be
Eastern Iraq. Its ancient cities and
sacred shrines destroyed, its civilian population decimated and displaced in a
disorganized refugee diaspora throughout the Near East. Its cultural identity and history and faith
traditions wiped clean, its orchards and farmlands distributed as the bounty of
war to the soldiers of the victorious foreign army. Yet just a few miles down south across the
border in Jerusalem, the capital of the southern Kingdom of Judah, there is
this sense of deep, deep denial. “What
happened to our cousins up North, that
could never happen to us!” The country
is protected for the moment by a fragile
network of alliances and vassal state relationships. The Kings are big on ceremony and show, pomp and circumstance--while in reality they
are weak pawns in a game between the great powers, Egypt and Persia and Babylon
and Syria. The aristocracy is humming
along like the courtiers of Louis the XVIth.
Eat, drink, and be merry! The
influences of foreign powers, foreign cultures, foreign religions are
percolating through the nation. Whatever
the latest fad. In all this what it was
that made the sons and daughters of Abraham special, unique, a Chosen People, a
sacrament for the world, a People of the Covenant, was slipping away. The word of the Lord was set aside—the
discipline of a holy and consecrated people ignored, forgotten.
Isaiah could see disaster ahead.
You didn’t need a Masters Degree from the Graduate School of Public and
International Affairs. It was pretty
straightforward to anyone who knew God’s word.
The wages of sin. But then also, what
Isaiah could also see, as the truth written deeply into God’s character and
word, was that God’s faithfulness to Israel was greater than any failure of
faithfulness in Israel. That no valley
was so deep, no mountain so high, no grave so final, that God could not and
would not prove himself true to his promise.
Our reading from the 42nd chapter is sometimes called the
First Servant Song of Isaiah, a part of Isaiah’s prophetic vision of what it
would look like beyond the catastrophe, when that perfect faithfulness of God
would be made known. To look at those words again (there on page 7): He will bring forth justice, righteously but not violently, not by
shouting louder than everybody else, not by steamrolling over the weak, not by
snapping and crushing every bruised reed and extinguishing every weak spark and
flame, but faithfully, carefully, with gentleness, with love. A sign of new and renewed creation, the First
Creator bringing forth a new heaven and a new earth, giving breath and life and
spirit to a healed and restored human family.
Bringing light and sight to a dark world, freeing every prisoner,
sweeping away all those false gods that command our worship and loyalty. “Behold, the former things have come to pass,
and new things I now declare.”
Isaiah’s vision is not an easy
one. Because real death must always come
before there can be real resurrection from the dead. But he sees how an Israel rescued out of and through the calamity that would soon
befall it would be refreshed in God’s word, would trust God’s promises, would
obey his commands, and so would become in reality what God had first described
to Abraham so long ago, a sign of blessing and grace and right relationship
with God, to all people, to every tribe and race and nation. Every nation on earth will be blessed through
you. And from the very earliest days of
Christian memory and witness this has been heard as God’s word to us of the
fulfillment in Christ of his everlasting and perfect Covenant. We hear the echo this morning. The Song of Isaiah 42 begins, “Behold my
servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights.” And as we heard this morning as Jesus and
John stood side by side in the River Jordan, the word from above, “This is my
beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”
Epiphany and Theophany. The
delight of the Father, now with us and for us in a new way.
We pause in this season of Sundays after Epiphany to go deeper into the
meaning and purpose of Christmas: what does it all really mean, that God became
Man? This story, Mary and Joseph and
Child in the Manger, Angels, Shepherds, Wise men from the East—what does it
mean that this child was born for us?
Words of the Prophet first spoken eight
hundred years before the night the angels sang to the shepherds begin to open
that up for us. What
difference does Christmas really make, once the trees come down? I hope we would each one of us ask ourselves
that question a few times in the coming weeks. Thinking back to Christmas—and not, I mean, to
the outward expressions and festivities, but to the heart of the story itself. To the fact of Jesus. Word of the Father, now in flesh
appearing. Of the Father’s love
begotten. Israel’s hope and
consolation. To this promise that as we
would follow him and become a part of his life and attend to and become
obedient to his word, we ourselves may be lifted up in him as he brings about a
new creation, a new heaven, a new earth.
The Christmas holiday comes to an end.
Back to work. Back to
school. The newspaper headlines proclaim
wars and rumors of war, terror and disaster, conflict and strife. The trees are put out for the landfill, the
decorations get boxed up and moved back to the attic for another year. But the one who was born for us at Christmas
remains with us, the Father’s delight, inviting us to remain with him, to find our
own true lives in him. From the
Catechism: “Holy baptism is the sacrament by which God adopts us as his
children and makes us members of Christ’s Body, the Church, and inheritors of
the kingdom of God. The inward and
spiritual grace in Baptism is union with Christ in his death and resurrection,
birth into God’s family the Church, forgiveness of sins, and new life in the
Holy Spirit.” And the word of the Lord
spoken by the Prophet Isaiah this morning to August Isaiah, to the people of
Jerusalem and to the people of St. Andrew’s Highland Park—his promise to: “I am the Lord. I have called you in righteousness, I have
taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the
people, a light to the nations . . . .”
Welcome to the family, August Isaiah.
Blessings and joy and Happy New Year!
Walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself for us, an offering
and a sacrifice to God.
Saturday, January 7, 2017
January 7, 2017 Burial Office Otto Harry Gruner III
January 7, 2017
Otto Harry Gruner III (July 27, 1927 – December 9, 2016)
Jesus speaks to his disciples in the 14th
chapter of St. John: “Whither I go, ye
know, and the way ye know.” He says this
in the night of the Last Supper, with the whole story of Good Friday and the Cross
about to play out. The story that begins
in the winter of Christmas, in a silent night in Bethlehem, ends in the victory
of the Cross and the Empty Tomb of a bright Easter morning--Jesus
unconquered. The power of death
overturned. And we do want to hear that
report today. That news: the power of
death overturned. The Ascension into
heaven. The promise of his return. The good news of sins forgiven, of the mercy
and forgiveness and tender Fatherly love of God ready to take up residence in
every home and every heart. Christian
life and Christian hope. In the Old
Testament words of Job, in the midst of his many sufferings, “I know that my
redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. And though this body be destroyed, yet shall
I see God; whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not as
a stranger.”
It is very much an honor and a privilege to share in this
service for Harry Gruner. Son, brother,
husband, father, grandfather. A fullness
of life: 89 years! Naval officer,
sportsman, businessman and entrepreneur, community leader, and friend. To remember his life in all its richness—and
I so much appreciate the tributes that have been shared with us this
morning. I have known Harry only in the
past few years of his life—his last years, colored so much by age and then by
his journey through Parkinson’s disease.
I enjoyed reading in the obituary you all prepared about his exceptionally
active life, full of energy and enthusiasm in so many ways. Fisherman, hunter, golfer, athlete. And I loved the sentence, “most memorably, Harry was funny, blessed
with a gentle, wry sense of humor.” That’s
an aspect of Harry I would say that I was able to experience and enjoy, even in
these later years—and something he continued to communicate through his eyes
and expressions even when other forms of communication began to
deteriorate. A great man. The first time I met him, you’ll remember, Nancy,
was at a dinner party a number of years ago at your home up in Fox Chapel,
along with our mutual good friends and prayer partners Tom and Liz
Phillips. (And I would share that in
e-mail and other communications over these weeks I have heard from Tom several
times, and from Brad Wilson down in South Carolina, and from my friend and
colleague Alex Shuttleworth, who is the current rector of Christ Anglican in
Fox Chapel, three really fine pastors and friends, and all have communicated
their love and continued prayers.) I
think the second time I saw Harry was not long after that dinner, on a
Christmas morning when he was being cared for over at St. Margaret’s, and the
three of us, you’ll remember, Nancy, had the chance to share Christmas
Communion and a prayer. Other times of
hospitality and visits after you guys had moved over to Longwood. And then such an amazing gift, on Tuesday
December 6, just a month ago, just a few days before he died. You had a lunch date with my wife Susy and I
got invited along as a third wheel. Very
kind of you both to include me! And
after lunch I drove you back up the hill to your place and Harry was sitting up
in the living room in a chair looking over a number of family snapshots. Kids and grandkids. We chatted for a bit, and then I was able to
share with him an anointing with holy oil and prayers of blessing and healing
and strength and peace. Didn’t realize
it, of course, but this was a prayer and an outward sign of preparation for the
new journey he would begin just a few days later on Friday. Passing from this life into greater
life.
So blessings this morning. As we offer together the ancient prayers of
the church for Harry, not just as we say the words but as we gather the faith
and life and witness of the whole Christian family and offer the deepest
knowledge and desire of our hearts to almighty God. As we hear the words of scripture, the
psalms, the lessons, the Good News of Jesus Christ. Born at Christmas. The light of world. “Whither I go, ye know, and the way ye know.”
Or, as St. Paul says in our reading
from Romans 8: “Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor
powers, nor things present, nor thing to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any
other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in
Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Jesus and St. Paul are both talking about something more
than what we might call our religious opinions and theories, our theological
positions or understandings of various issues and concerns of the day. Our churchmanship or our denominations. What they are talking about is a deeper kind
of knowing than that. The kind of
knowing that we talk about when we say that a child knows his mother. It’s about relationship. About the word we use in the Church with real
meaning and sincerity: about faith.
Something that can be expressed in words, but really is much deeper than
words can express. About being in relationship
with God securely. “You know where I am
going, and how to get there,” Jesus says, “because you and I are going to the
same place, returning to the same home, to that mansion that the Father who
loves us has prepared for us. And I am
the way to that home, the Truth, the Life.
No man cometh unto the Father but by me.” It would be my hope and prayer, family and
friends, that as we share in these prayers for Harry we would each one of us
hear and feel and know as well an invitation to enter, and to enter more
deeply, into that relationship, with the one who has loved us and has longed for that relationship with us from the beginning of the world. We can pause for a moment: take the
opportunity of that invitation.
The Funeral Sentences from the ancient prayers of the
Church, “In the midst of life we are in death.”
Thinking how very fragile we are in this short life. How precious every day is. Every day is a gift, a real gift—and of
course a gift that comes with no guarantee.
Even when we say, “see you tomorrow,” we don’t really know. We may have the fullness of nine decades, as
Harry did. Or not. But always one day at a time. And so as we come together today to hear, to
remember, to comfort one another, to give thanks for Harry’s life, we might
also be reminded of a certain urgency in our own lives as well.
“I am the
resurrection and the life, saith the Lord.
He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in me
shall never die.”
Blessings all, in this new year. I would ask that we would stand now and to
turn in the Blue Hymnal in the pews to Hymn #562, and we will sing together
stanzas 1, 4, and 5 of the great old hymn, “Onward Christian Soldiers.”
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