Sermon by Fr Brian on Sunday, September 16, 2018

Mark 8:27-38 – Link to all the readings for this day

Context is king. Have you ever heard that expression? The context for Jesus’ words today is a location, a place called Caesarea Philippi. A guy named Philip was a local ruler in the first century. He built himself a capital city, and he wanted it, and himself, to look impressive to the rest of the Roman empire. He named it Caesarea Philippi. No ego there.

Caesarea Philippi had all the amenities of a Roman city. Temples to the gods: symbols of power, wealth and sexual pleasure.  A wide main street for soldiers to march on. And a place for the ruler to live, everything around him in its proper place.

It’s with this place in the background, as the disciples crests the hill coming into town, that Jesus asks, “Who do people say that I am?”  It’s standing in front of symbols of someone else’s power that Jesus asks, “Who do you say that I am?”

Imagine these words in front of the Cenotaph at Memorial Park, or in front of the Hospital.  Imagine Jesus asking, “Who do people say that I am?” in front of Town Hall, or beside an intersection full of elections signs.  Or on the site of the old Foundry or one of the mills in the area.  In front of one of our churches?

How does Peter get it right, and then wrong in almost the same breath?

“Jesus, you are the Messiah”: Ding, ding, ding, cue the applause, right answer.

But then, almost right away, Jesus is saying “Get behind me, Satan!” Fail. Epic fail.

Why does Peter see things so clearly, and then so completely miss the point?  Peter’s having trouble understanding how Jesus can be the Messiah and lose the battle. Those things have never gone together before. Peter would never expect a suffering Messiah.  Perhaps Peter is caught up in a vision of himself as victor triumphant, standing up there on the Olympic podium with Jesus the Christ, leader of the tribes of Israel.  That vision of himself, if that’s what is getting in the way, is more dangerous to Jesus’ mission than all the scribes and Pharisees, Romans and Sadducees. It’s no wonder Jesus wants to get this right before they go any further.

How we hear Mark’s Gospel today depends on what we believe Jesus means by denying ourselves, taking up our cross and following him. Many of us will hear this in economic terms. We’re relatively rich by world standards.   But Jesus was talking to the crowd, many of whom were already living hand to mouth.  So, I don’t think he means “buy less stuff, take up your cross, and follow me.”

Healing people is one of the things Jesus does constantly and consistently in this gospel.  Jesus just came from healing a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment.  He clearly wants people to be healthy and whole. So denying the needs of the body is not where he was going with this.  Jesus just released a little girl who was possessed by a demon, so the state of souls – spiritual, psychological, social: these are all of concern to Jesus.

What’s left? What other aspect of ourselves is there left to deny?  Our ‘selves’ means our identities. How we see ourselves. I think that might be closer to what Jesus is suggesting we need to release and invite God to recreate in God’s image.

Think about those times when we are challenged to the core, when it feels as if life is slipping away:

• The devastation of losing a job
• Coping with the loss of a spouse
• Watching your child leave home

These are crossroads in life when we are forced to redefine ourselves.  Our core identities are challenged.  Mark’s gospel is saying that the life of discipleship, following Jesus, is about willingly surrendering that core identity and finding a new life in the death of Jesus.

Some of you may have read books by Thomas Merton, an American monk. Merton is recognized as a writer, theologian and mystic.  He was also a poet, a social activist, and a scholar of comparative religion.  One of his most influential works is his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain.

I found this reflection online, on a blog by a pastor named Christopher Brown:

“As Merton shares his life story, it becomes apparent while he’s studying at Columbia that his false-self is the self that wants to be a famous writer.  He works on two novels which never get published, spends all his time in literature, and writes book reviews and stories for periodicals.  Once he gets to the monastery, he thinks he’s left that false-self behind, until his superior starts assigning him translation and writing projects:

Merton writes:

“By this time I should have been delivered of any problems about my true identity.  I had already made my simple profession.  And my vows should have divested me of the last shreds of any special identity.  But then there was this shadow, this double, this writer who had followed me into the cloister. He is still on my track.  He rides my shoulders, sometimes, like the old man of the sea.  I cannot lose him.  He still wears the name of Thomas Merton.  Is it the name of an enemy?  He is supposed to be dead.”

The Seven Storey Mountainby Thomas Merton, pp. 448-449, Harcourt (1998)

“He’s admittedly confused: Merton thought he gave up his prideful pursuits only to enter a monastery where he became a bestselling author.  What was God doing with him?”

Thomas Merton’ life follows a pattern that seems to be what Jesus is getting at, what Jesus wants for his disciples and the crowd.

Denial of one’s self

Seeking a greater good

Discovery of the true self

What would you and I be asked to deny about ourselves? Being church leader or a priest? Being a parent?  Being someone of influence in this community?

How might God use us if we weren’t so concerned about preserving ourselves? The only way to find out is to do what Jesus suggests: to pick up our cross and follow him.

Not to get too hung up on language, but Jesus invites followers to deny themselves, not necessarily to stop being themselves. Sometimes it’s not about abandoning our identity at the side of the road. It’s about asking our ego to get out of the drivers’ seat for a while and sit in the back so that our true selves can take the wheel.

Jesus isn’t asking for token denial of the things we like, but for a complete surrender of who we are in service of the realm of God.  This is his way, the way of the cross. Christians at the earliest time were called people of the Way, and this is what they were referring to.  This Way of the cross leads to the fullness of life, a life God wants for all God’s children.  To follow Jesus in this way is to set aside other visions of ourselves, and to pursue who we really are, and who we might really become.

Sermon by Fr Brian on Sunday, September 9, 2018

James 2:14-17 (Mark 7:24-37) – Link to all the readings for this day

There was a time almost 500 years ago when the church was bitterly divided, right down the middle.  On the one hand, the Catholic Church held firm: there could be no salvation without the forgiveness of sin.  Such forgiveness was entrusted to St Peter by Jesus himself, and passed on to the church, from generation to generation, in an unbroken line of succession to the Pope in Rome himself.  His hands held the keys to the gates of heaven.  Through the sacraments of the church, bishops and clergy opened those gates for the faithful.  The only way to salvation led through the sacraments of the church.

But corruption was rampant, and the church was in the eyes of some no longer a worthy custodian of God’s mercy.  For protestant reformers, Martin Luther chief among them, such works of the church had become bankrupt.  In 1554 Philip Melanchthon, the movement’s foremost theologian, wrote, “sola gratia justificamus et sola fide justificamur“(“only by grace do we justify and only by faith are we justified”).  Sola fide, “by faith alone”, became one of the rallying cries of those who sought the end of an oppressive regime and the misappropriation of God’s divine right to bestow grace freely on all who hold to true faith in Jesus Christ.

To many this sounds like the tune to which so many angels dance on the head of a pin. What matters more: faith that inspires works, or works that give evidence to faith?  Which came first: the chicken or the egg?  Does anyone even care?  What does salvation even mean?

Today we have a different enemy: complacency. Does faith matter in Carleton Place in the year 2018?  Would anyone pick up a pamphlet?  Like a Facebook post or retweet a Tweet?

In this letter of James, the church seems to be going in a direction that could be its ultimate end.  Somehow favoritism and a preference for those who look like the “right” kind of people had crept into the culture and practice of the church.  And James seems to think it will eat up them up from the inside out.

Whether its complacency or favoritism or theological warfare, from time to time, the church needs to remember who we are, why we’re here, and what God’s grace really looks like.  We need to remember what it means to be saved by grace.  What it looks like, what it sounds like, smells like and tastes like.  We need to touch and be touched by the grace of God.  Because without that, we are nothing.  We have nowhere to go and nothing to discuss.

I think most of us long for a faith that matters. Fighting about theology doesn’t make faith matter.  Attracting the right people doesn’t make faith matter.

Growing up, there was a man at our church named Bob. Bob was probably developmentally delayed, but it was hard to tell, because Bob lived on the streets and he lived rough.  Bob was addicted to alcohol and drugs, but his main addiction was his violent lifestyle. Bob would show up at church on Sundays just as the service was ending and wait in the lounge.  Back then, that was the smoking room, and he would light up if he had any, or bum one if he didn’t.  He’d wait for one of the parishioners who was an emergency room doctor. Ray would check him over, patch him up, and sometimes send him to emergency to get something really serious looked at.  Bob was a bit scary, but he was part of the fabric of that church.

One summer a number of years later, I had just finished University and was out having drinks with friends.  We were all going separate ways, and this was a goodbye of sorts.  I was off to Huron College in the fall.  We were walking downtown, and this guy across the street looked at me and waved.  It was Bob.  I went over to see him, surprised he recognized me.

He asked for a smoke.  Since my late teens, that was always one of the things we shared. I had just quit – again – I told him so. He took a few minutes to process and asked a couple of times just to be sure I wasn’t holding out on him.  It had been years since I’d seen him, so I asked where he’d been.  I was hard to make out what he was saying, as he was pretty high, but it sounded like he’s been in Montreal, and in jail a couple of times.  My friends looked on from across the street.  I realized in that moment that this very well could be the last time I’d ever see Bob, and it struck me that in all the goodbyes to friends and the people at church, this one mattered too.  I did my best to explain to him that I was leaving Ottawa for the next three years, and when I came back, I probably wouldn’t see him at church very often.  I’d be going to another church.

Bob looked at me through his self-induced haze and reached out and hugged me.  I hugged him back.  He told me to say hi to my mom and my sister, and as I went back over to my friends, I could smell smoke and body odour clinging to my shirt.  But the odour was incense of a sort.  In that moment, I felt the loss of someone I’d known most of my life, from childhood through my adolescence and into the first years of adulthood.  But I also felt like I’d found something.  I knew that my life had touched another life.  In that moment, I knew grace was present.  The separation that usually keeps us apart was almost gone. The distance between me and people who are not like me, between my self and God’s desire that we all be one, was smaller.  In that moment, and in other moments since, I have known somehow that love, and being loved as a precious child, is possible and real.

My prayer is that we all have at least one experience like that and those experiences drive us when it comes to practicing our faith.  Like the young girl in Tyre who woke up and found herself free from the confusion and darkness.  Or like her mother who for the first time in forever felt heard and believed, something she had to struggle and fight for.  Or the man who was separated from everyone and everything because sounds couldn’t get in or get out properly. And one day, the barriers disappeared, and he was opened.

When we are open, when God’s grace flows, our faith is real.  Our faith has consequence.  Faith without expression in real and tangible ways is just an idea.  It doesn’t go anywhere.  It ends in a puff of logic.  But faith that grows a pair of legs and moves us somewhere reflects the life of Jesus and his message of grace and salvation for all.

So I’ll ask the same question this week I asked last week: What does in mean to be a Christian community in Carleton Place in 2018?  What does a faith that is alive and meaningful look like here and now?  How will we harness our experiences of unity, love and grace and pay it forward?  How will we, by our love, show this town we are Christians, and that we’re not done yet?

Sermon by Fr Brian on Sunday, September 2, 2018.

James 1.19-21 – Link to all the readings for this day