We’ve all seen the road in this Gospel story. We’ve seen it in countless television reports on Israel and the Middle East. It’s an asphalt ribbon through a landscape of rocks and barren earth; a treeless landscape on which a few stunted bushes struggle to survive; a landscape without shade.

The road runs down the steep escarpment from the Judean hill country to the valley of the Jordan. The valley is lost in the haze of the heat rising from the road and the rocks, a shimmering haze the obscures and distorts the vision.

The roadside is marked by a metal barrier, guarding against a fall down the steep hillside.

Now close your eyes a moment and visualize that road, not of asphalt but of dirt and pebbles and shattered stones, a road without signs or markers or protection from danger. That’s the road in the Gospel story. The heat and the haze and the dust are there as always.

Standing on that road, looking down the sloping track, you can see something lying by the roadside; from the distance it’s a pile of clothing, closer you see that it’s a man, severely wounded and unconscious.

In the haze you can just make out two figures farther down the road, separate figures. They must have passed this wounded man a short while ago. Why did they fail to stop and help him?

Now we know that one of them was a Priest of the Temple. If the man were dead the Priest would have required ritual cleansing to return to his work and that would have been time-consuming and it is, after all, his only source of livelihood; he can’t place his job in jeopardy. We know the other was a Levite, a servant in the Temple. He has a very strictly define, narrow set of duties and he looks no further. His motto is “It’s not my job.”

What can I do, I’m not a doctor. What if the robbers are still here? I have a very important meeting and simply risk being delayed. I’ll call for help. Someone else will take care of it.

Ironically, all those things may be true, but here comes a third man who passes you as you stand on that road. You hear the soft hoof beats of his donkey in the road dust and he brushes past you. He’s a Samaritan, a stranger; he makes none of those excuses. He simply sees a person in need and stops and helps.

This life of ours is a sort of road. It may be steep and narrow and it may run through some very uncomfortable and inhospitable and downright dangerous territory. The future is hard to see, lost in a haze. There are wounded on the roadside.

The ones in need may not be physically injured but they need us, they need a word or a hand. There are professional voices to say the word of comfort; there are professional hands to lift up the fallen, but ultimately it’s always one on one, person to person, neighbor to neighbor.

It's just a little synagogue, a small square building of mud and stacked stones. It's a warm afternoon, the dust particles hang in the still air in the long, slanting, golden rays of the afternoon sun.

Men are seated on long benches around the walls, the best seats and the most important men seated by the Eastern wall. In the center of the Eastern wall are the niches, the tabernacle for the great scrolls of Torah wrapped in purple velvet with silver fringe and scrolls of the writings of the prophets. Not all the prophets; the synagogue is tiny and the scrolls are very expensive

The western wall is a low wall topped by a lattice screen of wooden branches. It's the space for women and children, boys not yet having Bar Mitzvah, to stand and hear and see without entering the synagogue.

A young boy is squeezed up against the screen watching and listening with awe and fascination as the words and the sights of the synagogue unfold. He's Mattiyahu bar Alphaeus and he is drawn, so very drawn to God. The world of the synagogue is his world. The Cantor and the Rabbi are his heroes.

So Mattiyahu goes home elated, filled with the sense of his destiny and says to his father, Alphaeus, "Abbe — Daddy — I went to synagogue today and I think I want to be a Rabbi."

Alphaeus drops with bowl and matzoh, looks up to the ceiling and cries, "A Rabbi! A Rabbi! 0 God he says he's a Rabbi. After all I have done for him this is the thanks I get. Never mind that his mother and I have slaved to keep him fed and with clothes and sent his to schul. A Rabbi! Who will care for us as we grow old; a poor Rabbi?" And he tears the edge of his robe and pulls at his beard and cries.

Mattiyahy says, "So maybe not a Rabbi?" Alphaeus, suddenly calm, says " I hoped, your mother and I hoped, we dreamed that you would go into the tax business with Uncle Moyshe, a man of qualities, a man of riches — a man who loves his family, but no, a Rabbi!"

Leaping forward a few years, Matiyahu, now a young man, is seated one day at a table in Moyshe's Office of Taxation Collection, Inc., the dream of being a Rabbi long past, pressed down, He has accepted a life he did not choose — chosen by another — and with it he has accepted a world of power and influence — a world in which he is estranged from all but a tiny core of like people — the tax collectors, harlots and sinners of other persuasions who form a people apart. That is his world.

But, occasionally, when it's very quiet, a memory of the beauty of that day in the synagogue, of the sound of the Cantor, the peeling of the Holy Words, the rustling of Tallits, the slanting golden rays of sunlight, creeps back into his memory.

So it is on the day that a voice from the sunlit courtyard calls to Mattiyahu, "Follow me."

HOMILY WEDNESDAY, 5 EASTER 2008

Isn’t it comforting to hear that all the politics, rule making, exclusions and distractions that beset the Church today are nothing new?

Perhaps it’s just human nature that when two or three are gathered together they form a club. (Actually, that’s sort of a paraphrase.) So, in the reading from Acts of the Apostles we hear about the Circumcision Club. I know scripture calls it a “party” but it’s really a club and it has a very specific rite of initiation. There’s no mention of Jesus in that reading, absolutely none.

Which contradicts the Gospel reading from John. According to John the center of the life of any Christian is Jesus.

John writes for Greeks; unlike the concrete thinkers Paul has to deal with, such as the Circumcision Club, Greeks can handle metaphors and abstract thinking so John can talk about vines and branches and fruit with some assurance they’ll get it, just like us.

So, as we all know, God is the Vinedresser, the planner and planter of it all. The Vine that God has planted is Jesus. Now in the Old Testament The Vine always represents Israel so, in a way, John is saying that Jesus is the New Israel. Jesus is the center of our existence because we, you and I, are a bunch of little, green branches. Grace and mercy and salvation flow to us by Jesus. By Jesus we are fed and sustained, made strong, so that we can be good branches, do our part, and bear fruit.

What is fruit? Fruit is whatever God says it is; compassion, charity, love, peace, righteousness, all those things and more; things that show that we know that we are (1) the work of the Vinedresser, (2) attached to, and utterly dependent on, the Vine, and (3) just one of many, many branches.

HOMILY, VESPERS, EASTER 5 YEAR C

Judas departs of his own free will, his own choice. He’s not expelled from the company of Disciples, even though his identity and his purpose are known to Jesus. And Jesus doesn’t try to hold him, to obstruct his going. In that complicity Jesus assures that the plans of God goes forward.

Jesus watches Judas go. A flood of memories go with him. Judas is a disciple and a companion and a friend. They’ve walked the roads of Galilee and Samaria and Judea together for at least three years. Judas has been with Him to hear Him preach and teach and see Him heal the sick, even raise the dead.

The door opens briefly to show the darkness into which Judas goes, leaving the light of the room and the presence of Jesus, then closes securely on Jesus and the company of the remaining eleven. Jesus speaks, quickly, to assure the confused and fearful disciples that all things are as God would have them.

Jesus – Son of Man, Son of God – is now glorified. The departure of Judas in treachery initiates the sequence of events that will lead inevitably to the glory of the Resurrection, an unfolding drama of descent into the darkness of the night and the tomb, followed by the dazzling clarity of the realization that this Jesus, this Son of Man is raised from the dead. The light that is the Glory of God will shine though Jesus, breaking the grip of the dark night of the world.

God is glorified in a triumph over death, glorified in the presence of the risen Jesus and Jesus reflects that glory here, in this world.

Jesus also goes of His own free will into that dark night, the willing object of Judas’ betrayal. He goes as the sacrificial Passover lamb, the lamb given by God for the sins of the world; He goes to the cross.

Where He goes the eleven cannot go, no matter their greatest resolve and best intentions. Jesus knows their hearts; He knows that their courage will fail them and that they will all flee into that same dark night.

They may fail Jesus; they must not fail each other. If they break apart and go their separate ways the words and the acts of Jesus, even the sacrifice He makes, will be nothing more than a memory, a transient, ephemeral memory, soon lost.

They must hold together as one, a community, to preserve the memory of Jesus and to proclaim the Gospel message.

What binds such a community, what is it that holds them together. Every instinct must tell them to simply go home and take up their lives as they had been when they had encountered Jesus; return to their metaphoric fishing. The powers of fear or the prospects of gain cannot override that instinct, only love can do so.

The bond that united them, and unites us, is love; love for Jesus Christ, and love for one another.

This is the time when the days and weeks and seasons of the church slip by so quickly.

In just a few weeks we’ve come from the stories of Advent, preparing us for the great Feast of the Incarnation, stories of prophecy about a new king to restore Israel to its days of glory.

We’ve celebrated Christmas with its stories of the birth of Jesus, a humble birth to humble parents in humble surroundings, a stable in a tiny village called Bethlehem, a baby in a manger whose birth is proclaimed, in Luke to shepherds by angelic hosts, and to Magi in Matthew by a mysterious star, a portent of the birth of a great new king in Israel.

We’ve learned of the baptism of that very baby, grown to manhood after a childhood of which we have only one story, itself a metaphor of being in “his father’s house,” written long after the moment.

We’ve heard that man identified as “The Lamb of God,” by John and we’ve heard that man Jesus call others, Peter and Andrew and James and John as His disciples.

All these stories speak of a specific time, set in the reigns of emperors and governors, and a specific place, a very small plot of earth we call Israel, or Galilee or Judea.

And now we hear John, perhaps the last Gospel to be written, a different story. In a stoke John expands and elevates our thinking, elevates and expands his Gospel story. In John a temporal event becomes an eternal reality.

“In the beginning was the Word:” to the Jew John speaks in the words of the Book of Genesis, the beginning of the history of the universe, the first Creation. To the Greek, knowing nothing of Jewish scripture, John speaks of the foundations of all philosophy, all thought.

“The Word;” in Greek, Logos, is the word of God by which all things were made. It may, to the Jew, be the proclamations of the prophets; it may, to the Greek, be that rational principle that gives unity and meaning to the world.

To the Christian, after John, “The Word” is the self-expression of God, everything comes to be through God’s self-expression. The verb, in Greek, means “causes to be.”

Why do we hear John this week? It’s to serve as a corrective to the very tempting, and therefore dangerous, tendency to see Jesus only in terms of the baby or the man in Galilee or, for that matter, the man on the cross, missing the real meaning and significance of the Incarnation.

“The Word” became flesh and welt among us. The Word does not merely indwell, doesn’t take its place in a human being, Jesus of Nazareth. The identity is complete and absolute; the Word is Jesus and Jesus is the Word.

But he is flesh as we are flesh, taking upon himself all our aches and pains, fears and shortcomings. God does not adopt Jesus at some moment, at the Jordan or the wilderness or the Mount of Transfiguration. That’s a heresy. And Jesus is not simply God in the guise of a human, that’s another heresy. And Jesus isn’t just a very, very nice man, that’s a third heresy. Jesus is the Incarnate Word, God expressing himself in terms and images that we, thick as we may be, really should not miss.

JUNE 7, 2006 “THE FIRST BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER”

This evening we observe a feast day for “The First Book of Common Prayer. Actually we can observe this day on any weekday following Pentecost. We don’t observe it every year because other Feast Days fall on Wednesday so it might be really familiar to you.

I discovered that some years ago in a parish far, far away. I mentioned that we would be honoring “The First Book of Common Prayer” and had more turn out than was usual on a Wednesday. As the service went on I noted some puzzled face out there. It dawned on me that some people thought – and expected – that the first Book of Common Prayer was the 1928 book and it didn’t sound right. No doubt that also thought the last Book of Common Prayer was the 1928 book. But that’s long ago of course.

Actually, the first book came into use on Pentecost, June 9, 1549, in the second year of the reign of Edward the Sixth. It was the foundation for all the subsequent prayer books in the churches of the Anglican Communion. The language my differ but the basic principle and pattern is the same.

The book was primarily the work of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1533 to 1556. His genius was to gather the material from many traditions into one universal book for worship for the English people. He used books of Medieval Latin worship with enrichments from Greek liturgies; ancient Gallican rites as found in the French churches; the vernacular German forms prepared by Luther; a revised Latin liturgy then used in Cologne, Germany. Cranmer took the Psalms from “The Great Bible” authorized by Henry the Eighth in1539, and the Great Litany issued in English in 1544.

Cranmer simplified it all. He made it possible for our common worship and our personal devotions to be found in one book and that is the red book you hold in your hands this evening.

Wednesday, APRIL 26, 2006

SAINT MARK, TRANSFERRED

Yesterday, April 25, is observed as the Feast of St. Mark. Who is St. Mark? What do we know about him? Remarkably little.

We can speculate. Is Mark to young man in a linen garment who avoids arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane by slipping away, fleeing naked? Some think so. Is Mark of the Gospel the same Mark who accompanies Paul on his first missionary journey, the parts from him? Some think so. Did Mark actually write this Gospel?

The question of course is does it really matter who Mark was? Does it not matter, rather, what the author of this Gospel has given us. He has given us a short, concise statement about Jesus, about His Disciples and, actually, about the earliest days of the Christian community, the church.

Many, if not most, scholars agree that this Gospel of Mark should be accepted as being the first written, the earliest. It does seem to be written is haste, approaching a staccato journalism. The Greek is terse; short sentences, fast paced as though the writer was in a hurry.

He was. A generation that had known Jesus was dying out. The actual witness was in danger of being lost or at least terribly distorted and misinterpreted. Those memories had to be captured for the future of the church.

And so the pace; the recurrent Greek is “kai euthes.” It means and immediately. The Gospel begins abruptly with Jesus’ baptism by John in the Jordan; proceeds rapidly through His earthly ministry to His Passion and death, and ends just as abruptly at the empty tomb and the proclamation “He is Risen.”

But is that all? Is that enough? What was the earliest church to make of that story/ What does it mean to them and to us. And so, at some time, someone saw fit to add a postscript and the postscript is a commission to them and to us, “Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation.’ They were empowered as we are empowered by the Resurrection; supported, sustained, protected, uplifted. His work becomes their work and ours.

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

3 Lent

Moutaintops – physical or spiritual – are not easily reached; it demands commitment to climb up out of the valley – physical or spiritual – to a new height. The path is steep.

No wonder Peter and James and John are exhausted and slow witted after that climb, following Jesus. No wonder they are so slow to grasp the scene before them; Their friend and companion and teacher, Jesus, in the company of Moses and Elijah – equal to Moses and Elijah. We are told that at last Peter grasps the significance of the moment; perhaps, but I doubt it – I think that’s hindsight.

Moses and Elijah – Law and Prophecy. God had entrusted His creation to Law and prophecy – to them – until this moment. The great Creator God – the cloud or the “shekinah” is the presence of God – and when the cloud lifts only Jesus remains.

In that moment Jesus is the fulfillment of all that has gone before. In that moment Jesus is the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets,

He fulfills the Law: The Law, Torah, is no longer a dry set of rules and penalties given by a remote God for the governance of His people. Now the Law lives and breathes. Now the Law is not just stated, it is demonstrated by every word and deed of Jesus. Jesus is a demonstration of the love and will of God. Now the world can really ask “who has a God so close?”

He fulfills prophecy: Through the centuries the prophets had chronicles our stormy relationship to God. The endlessly repeated pattern of obedience and sin, repentance and reconciliation – is broken. God and man are reconciled in Jesus. The cycle is ended – the future is linear – mankind and God are one.

Perhaps it’s the moment when you and I should stand on our mountaintops with those three befuddled disciples and look on in wonder and awe at this Jesus – this Jesus in whom the world is transformed and all humanity is forever transfigured.

Wednesday, March 8, 2006

1 Lent

Poor Jonah! He’s just barely recovered from his shipwreck and the big-fish episode and here his is in Nineveh – a huge, noisy, dusty city, pro-claiming God’s judgment upon the people – a singularly unpleasant way to meet the population.

“Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown” he shouts over the noise of the streets. It’s not a warning. He isn’t giving them options. There is no clause that says “ unless you straighten up and repent.

They listen. They believe. They repent. Why? There’s no promise of mercy – no promise of forgiveness. They do so in hope – hope- that God will relent and spare them.

Jonah is the sign. Jonah is the sign of impending judgment – the last chance. Jonah is the sign of God’s presence – God’s attention to their words and actions. Jonah triggers a series of events – the warning, the belief, the repentance and the mercy.

That, of course, is what Our Lord is saying to the Jews of His day. He knows why they demand some sort of sign. “What is this man’s authority? What is his message’s validity?”

Jonah is the sign to the people of Nineveh; Our Lord is the sign to the Jews, a sign greater than Jonah. He is greater because to the warning of judgment Our Lord adds the possibility of mercy – the promise of God’s readiness to forgive those who repent. Jesus is a sign for that generation.

He is a sign for this generation – for every generation. He tells us all that we can, like the people of Nineveh, choose to repent, not to somehow buy His mercy but simply to do as we should, and that God can, if He wills, choose to relent.