Pentecost (Twelfth Sunday in Corona Time)

Readings: Acts 2:1-11; 1 Corinthians 12:3b-7, 12-13; John 20:19-23

“He breathed on them and said to them,
‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’”
The Spirit of life, whose very name means “breath,”
is given by means of breath from the risen Jesus to his disciples.
Given the past few months of pandemic,
when we have masked our faces and kept our distance,
my initial response to this is a sense of dis-ease
at Jesus’ casual and indiscriminate breathing on people.
But, given the past week,
the reference to breath also puts me in mind
of George Floyd with a policeman’s knee on his neck
for over eight minutes,
who moaned and cried “I can’t breathe,”
until he fell silent, the spirit gone out of him.

During the pandemic shutdown I have tried
to focus on the acts of generosity and creativity
that these difficult days have elicited from people.
Despite the increasing fraying of the fabric of solidarity
in the past few weeks,
I had hoped that perhaps the pandemic
could bring out the best in us,
could point us toward a better future.
But the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis,
following swiftly on the killing
of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia
and Breonna Taylor in Kentucky,
makes such hopes seem like idle dreams,
returning us to the old nightmare
of the persistent racism that has stained our history
as Americans, as a Church, and as a human race.

But what does all of this have to do with Pentecost?
And what does the word of God have to say to us this day?
Today we are offered both a positive vision
of the new world that the Spirit is creating
and a mandate from Christ to live in such a way
as to let God’s Spirit work through God’s people.

The descent of the Spirit in the book of Acts
depicts the power of God
overcoming the divisions sin has created,
as people of different lands and cultures
each hear the good news of God
proclaimed to them in their own native tongues.
Paul, writing to the Corinthians,
reaffirms the power of the Spirit
to forge unity where there had been division:
“in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body,
whether Jews or Greeks, slaves or free persons,
and we were all given to drink of one Spirit.”
The good news of salvation is not simply
that our sins have been forgiven
or that death has been overcome,
but it is also that God has once more
breathed his Spirit into human clay
and brought to life a new humanity,
overcoming the divisions of race and sex and class
that have structured the world in which sin has reigned.
To be saved is not to be plucked
from this disaster of a world,
but it is to live now a transformed life
in the new world made by the Spirit.

But to say that the Spirit has called forth
a new humanity into a new world
is clearly not enough.
We who claim the name Christian
live with one foot in God’s new world of grace
and one foot in the old world of sin;
we are not yet fully that new humanity
that God’s Spirit would make us.
I am struck how the risen Jesus,
appearing to his disciples,
both speaks the words, “Peace be with you”
and also shows them the wounds of his torture,
as if to say, “The old world of sin is passing
and I have come with forgiveness and mercy,
but don’t forget the cost of following me,
don’t forget the blood and pain through which
this new world must be born.”
To believe truly in Christ’s message
of peace and forgiveness
we must also see the wounds
of torture and oppression.

We can focus so much
on Jesus’ message of mercy and love
that we forget his call to costly repentance.
He says to his followers not only,
“Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them”
but also, “whose sins you retain are retained.”
To retain someone’s sin is to hold them accountable.
The ministry of forgiveness
is crucial to the life of the Church,
but so is the ministry of accountability,
the ministry of not glossing over sin
when it shows itself,
the ministry of calling to repentance
so that forgiveness might become possible.
The Spirit consoles,
but the Spirit also convicts and converts.

To receive the breath of the Spirit
people have to be free to breathe it in.
And it is hard to breathe it in
with someone’s knee is pressing on your neck.
It is a testimony to our black brothers and sisters
that they have over the years managed to find ways
to breathe the Spirit in despite the knees on their necks.
And it is a testimony against us who are white
that we so persistently turn a blind eye
to the wounds inflicted on the body of Christ
by the violence of racism.
The too-often repeated cry, “I can’t breathe,”
is a prophetic call to see the ways in which
the Spirit who consoles
is also convicting and calling us to conversion.
May the Spirit whom we receive this day
liberate us all,
and lead us to a more just world
in which all God’s children
are free to breathe the Spirit in.
And may God have mercy on us all.

Funeral Homily for Angela Christman

In his Confessions,
a text that Angela loved
and taught a generation of students to love,
St. Augustine tells two different stories about grief.
In the fourth book, he writes of being a young man,
years before his conversion to Christianity,
and losing a childhood friend to death.
He writes movingly of his grief
as he experienced it at the time:
“I boiled with anger, sighed, wept,
and was at my wit’s end.
I found no calmness,
no capacity for deliberation.
I carried my lacerated and bloody soul
when it was unwilling to be carried by me.
I found no place
where I could put it down” (4.6.12).
But as movingly as he evokes this youthful grief,
he also looks back on his earlier self
with a critical eye.
He sees in his grief
a kind of theatrical self-involvement
that the young can be prone to:
his younger self was genuinely suffering,
but was also somewhat impressed
by the depth of his own suffering.
His older self can also see,
looking back at his younger self,
the fatal human error
of investing ourselves too deeply
in our worldly loves:
he writes, “in these things
there is no point of rest:
they lack permanence” (4.10.15).
For, as Augustine tells us repeatedly,
our only rest is to rest in God.

Were this Augustine’s last word on grief
we might think that it is
somehow unchristian to mourn.
We might think it is
unchristian to love anyone so deeply
that their death would leave us
with a torn and bloody soul.

But this is not his last word on grief.
In book nine of his Confessions
he writes of the death of his mother, Monica,
shortly after his conversion to Christianity,
a conversion for which Monica
had persistently prayed with many tears.
And Augustine’s words describing his grief
are strikingly similar to the words he uses
is speaking of the death of his youthful friend:
“my soul was wounded,
and my life as it were torn to pieces,
since my life and hers
had become a single thing” (9.12.30).
But, he goes on to say,
“I was reproaching the softness of my feelings
and was holding back
the torrent of sadness” (9.12.31).
Recently converted,
a sort of adolescent in the Christian faith,
Augustine finds his own grief shameful,
a sign of the power that love for passing things
still holds over him.
So he tries to hide it, even from God.
But he realizes that in denying his grief
he is also denying his love for his mother.
She had wept for him;
could he not in turn weep for her?
He says to God, “Now I let flow the tears
which I had held back….
My heart rested upon them,
and it reclined upon them
because it was your ears that were there” (9.12.33).

We come here to weep at Angela’s grave,
confident that God hears our grief
and knows the love from which it comes,
praying that God will, in time,
heal the grief so that only the love remains.
We come to weep not because we doubt
that Angela has found her rest in God,
but because we remain behind,
still pilgrims on the restless journey
that Angela has finished.
We come to weep because we will miss
the sight of her face and the sound of her voice,
which made the journey just a little bit easier.
We do not grieve as those without hope,
for we believe, as Angela believed,
that Christ has defeated death.
Still, our souls feel lacerated and bloody,
our lives feel torn to pieces.
So we come to weep,
even as we look forward to the day
when we will join Angela—
our daughter, sister, wife, mother, and friend—
in that city of God where every tear
will be wiped away,
for “there we shall rest and see,
see and love, love and praise” (Civ. Dei 22.30).

Ascension (Eleventh Sunday in Corona Time)

Readings: Acts 1:1-11; Ephesians 1:17-23; Matthew 28:16-20

For most of us, the coronavirus pandemic
has been a time of distance and separation,
a time of absence from the people and things we love.
There is, of course, the literal physical distance
that we must take from people:
no closer than six feet; faces veiled by masks.
I hear the French are even thinking of abandoning
greeting one another with a kiss on each cheek.
Then there is the separation we feel from friends and family,
an absence that technology seems unable to really compensate for:
nothing makes you appreciate the irreplaceability
of another person’s bodily presence
like an extended Zoom visit.
There is also a strange distance
that has affected our sense of time:
early March seems years, not weeks, ago.
We are above all distant from what we might think of
as our “normal,” pre-pandemic, selves:
so distant that we are beginning to think
that we may never recover those selves.

It might be tempting to thinks of the Ascension
as a feast of distance and separation and absence:
the going of Jesus to a distant place, far away from us,
his departure marking a vast distance
between us and those days
of his resurrected presence with his disciples,
a distance we try to bridge by sending up prayers,
in something like the religious equivalent of Zoom.
The joy of Easter for Jesus’ friends
was having him bodily back among them,
and the Ascension might seem to undo this.
And, indeed, the depiction of the Ascension in the Book of Acts
is something of a farewell scene:
the risen Jesus taking leave of his friends,
after which that stand, around looking up at the sky,
perhaps in wonder, or perhaps with longing
to have back again the bodily presence of the risen one.
But the scene of Jesus’s Ascension in the book of Acts
is balanced by his final words to his disciples
in the Gospel of Matthew:
“behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.”
The passing into heavenly glory of Jesus’s risen body
does not seem to deprive his friends of his presence.
Indeed, through the gift to them of his Holy Spirit,
Jesus is somehow more present, more with them,
than he was even in his resurrected body.
I think often of Pope Benedict’s description
of the Ascension as “the beginning of a new nearness.”
The entry of the risen Jesus into heavenly glory
does not involve him leaving here and going there,
but somehow brings here into there,
draws earth into heaven,
and in turn makes heaven present on earth
through the power of his Spirit,
who forms his followers into his body
and fills them like a temple built of living stones.
The Ascension does not deprive us
of Christ’s bodily presence;
rather, we become that bodily presence.
As Paul writes to the Ephesians,
God the Father, “put all things beneath his feet
and gave him as head over all things to the church,
which is his body,
the fullness of the one
who fills all things in every way.”
Through his ascension into glory,
Christ’s body now is spread abroad
throughout the world,
for, as the poet Hopkins, put it,
“Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.”

I think one reason why the suspension of public Masses
has been such a trial for so many people
is because it is in gathering together for worship
and receiving sacramentally the gift of Christ’s body
that our identity as the body of Christ
is renewed and strengthened.
The temple built of living stones
is manifested most fully
in God’s people gathered at God’s altar,
and people feel keenly the absence of that gathering.
But without in any way diminishing
the real pain of absence that people are experiencing
we must believe that God
would not let us suffer this trial to no purpose.
This time of absence and distance can become,
through God’s Spirit,
an experience of the “new nearness” of the ascended Christ.
We cannot stand around looking lost,
wondering where the body of Christ has gone.
Our challenge on this day of Ascension
is to let the Spirit fill us
so that we can become his witnesses
through the fire of love
that has been poured into our hearts.
Perhaps this is what God is showing us today:
Christ’s body, the Church,
plays now in ten thousand places,
dispersed and yet somehow one through the Spirit.

The day will come to regather,
to receive again the body of Christ,
and it will be a day of rejoicing.
But for now we wait,
suffering time’s slow passage,
trusting God to provide,
knowing that heaven has been joined to earth,
that we remain joined to one another
through the bond of the Spirit,
that we are the church
even when we cannot go to church.
May God grant us the gifts of patience and love
and may God have mercy on us all.

Easter 6 (Tenth Sunday in Corona Time)

Readings: Act 8:5-8, 14-17; 1 Peter 3:15-18; John 14:15-21

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means
to speak the truth in love.
We hear a lot of people these days who are,
as they say, “speaking their truth,”
but it seems to me that there is
rather less speaking in love.
Perhaps I’ve just been spending
too much time on various social media,
where a firm conviction of one’s own correctness
is generally taken as license to savage the incorrect.
Don’t get me wrong.
When I see or hear someone spouting
what to me is clearly arrant nonsense
I too feel the urge to expose them to ridicule
or accuse them of (take your choice)
forgetting about some vulnerable group,
or not paying sufficient attention to the facts,
or being selfish or sub-Christian,
or a slave to popular opinion
or just a garden variety idiot.
Sometimes I even give in to those urges.
And I tell myself that I have no choice
because the truth matters.

Well, the truth does matter.
But so does love.
Because the truth matters we should,
as the first letter of Peter says,
“always be ready to give an explanation
to anyone who asks you
for a reason for your hope.”
We should live our lives in a way
that is so shaped by faith, hope, and love
that it provokes others to ask us
why we live in the way that we do.
We should live lives that are, frankly, unreasonable
unless God is who the Gospel says God is:
the eternal lover who raised Jesus from the dead
and who through the Spirit draws us into that new life.

But then, when it comes time to give our account,
we cannot let our words give the lie to our life.
If we cannot give a reason for our hope
without crushing the spirits
of those who may disagree with us,
then perhaps we are not the hopeful people
that we think we are.
Perhaps we do not really believe
that the truth matters,
because we do not trust
in the capacity of truth
to defeat falsehood by its own power.
We end up like Pontius Pilate
who contemptuously sneers
“what is truth?”
What is truth
without imperial power to enforce it?
What is truth
without armies of avenging angels?
What is truth
without verbal weapons
that can eviscerate its foes?

But the first letter of Peter speaks differently,
exhorting Christians to profess the truth
“with gentleness and reverence,
keeping your conscience clear.”
Christians should have a firm conviction
of the truth of their beliefs,
since these are convictions
upon which we stake our lives.
But conviction is not permission to forget
that those to whom we speak the truth
are just as beloved by God as we are,
and that we are called to love them
as God loves them
even if we are convinced
that they are being selfish
or sub-Christian,
or slaves to popular opinion
or just garden variety idiots.
Indeed, if we seek to love them
as God loves them
we might very well discover
that their reality and motivations
are a bit more complex than they first appear.
This does not mean
that we should never say things
that people find difficult to hear,
that might even make them angry,
but this is something quite different
from words that are demeaning and derogatory.

First Peter gives us no less an example
of the power of gentleness
than Jesus himself,
who “suffered for sins once,
the righteous for the sake of the unrighteous,
that he might lead you to God.”
It isn’t simply the fact
of Jesus’s suffering that saves us,
but how and why he suffered:
as a witness to the power of disarmed truth.
Perhaps we should ask ourselves
whether our unwillingness to surrender
the weapons of invective
is not in fact a fear that we might suffer
the same fate as Jesus,
is not in fact an unwillingness
to follow the way of the cross.

In John’s Gospel,
Jesus promises to send his followers
“another Advocate to be with you always,
the Spirit of truth.”
And Paul tells us in his letter to the Galatians
that the fruits of that Spirit of truth
are love, joy, peace,
patience, kindness, generosity,
faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
These fruits should be key to our discernment
of whether it is through the Spirit of truth
that we speak and act
in witness to the hope that is in us,
or whether it is some other spirit
that moves us to speak.

The coronavirus pandemic,
while in some ways shutting down our lives,
has also opened up new horizons for us.
It has called forth
amazing acts of love and creativity
as well as some of our worst human instincts.
It has presented us with a choice.
Love or hatred?
Joy or anger?
Peace or strife?
Patience or impatience?
Kindness or cruelty?
Generosity or selfishness?
Faithfulness or despair?
Gentleness or brutality?
Self-control or giving free range
to whatever impulse moves us?
In the midst of this extraordinary time,
in this moment of choice,
God continues to pour out on us
the Spirit of Truth
and calls us to bear witness in the Spirit
to the hope that is in us.
May we witness truthfully in love
and may God have mercy on us all.

Easter 5 (Ninth Sunday in Corona Time)

Readings: Acts 6:1-7; 1 Peter 2:4-9; John 14:1-12

“Do not let your hearts be troubled.”
I don’t know, Jesus.
That’s kind of a big ask.
I mean… easier said than done.
There is a lot for our hearts
to be troubled about at the moment.
Some are troubled at the thought
that many, many more people will die
before we have a vaccine
or effective treatment for Covid-19.
Some are troubled at the thought
that each passing day of shutdown
does more damage to people’s livelihoods
and will lead to years of poverty and lost opportunity.
Some in the first group are troubled
that people in the second group
are troubled over what they are troubled about
and some in the second group are troubled
that people in the first group
are troubled over what they are troubled about,
but most of us manage to be troubled about both things,
we humans being experts in multitasking anxiety.

Trouble is laid upon trouble
in a noxious layer cake of fear,
and though our current anxieties may be
unique to this historical moment,
humans have been feeding on fear for millennia.
So when Jesus says, “do not let your hearts be troubled”
he is speaking to the human condition
that we share with those who first heard his words.
We shouldn’t forget that Jesus is speaking to his disciples
on the night of his arrest,
and while they do not know exactly what will happen,
they know something is happening,
and it is likely going to be bad.
Troubled hearts come
from not knowing the path forward.
So before they can heed Jesus’ exhortation
to free their hearts from trouble,
they want to know where all of this is headed.
For, they think, until they know that,
they cannot leave that place of troubled hearts
where they are mired.
When Jesus promises that they will be with him
in the Father’s eternal dwellings,
Thomas—ever the skeptic—
says, “we do not know where you are going;
how can we know the way?”

But the whole point of faith
is that you can know the way
without knowing the destination.
Faith, as the Letter to the Hebrews says,
is “evidence of things not seen.”
Thomas Aquinas says that not seeing faith’s object
is what distinguishes faith from knowledge.
There remains a difference
between one who is journeying
and one who has arrived,
between what Thomas Aquinas called a viator
and a comprehensor,
between one living by grace
and one living in glory.

We know in our bones that we have not yet arrived.
We feel it is the exhaustion and anxiety and irritation
of these past two months.
We hear it in cranky children and adults,
in hurled insults and accusations.
We see it in mounting deaths rates
and unemployment statistics.
This is life on the way,
not life in the heavenly homeland.
And the way is the way of the cross.
Faith, which knows the unseen,
clings to the promise that we will arrive.
But we don’t know,
can’t know,
how long we will have to endure the way.
Our destination will take us by surprise,
like a thief in the night.
We have no map,
only a path before us to follow.

But still our hearts should not be troubled,
even in the midst of troubles,
because to turn to Christ in faith,
to set out upon his way of grace,
is to know the God who will be our glory.
The stunning claim of Christianity
is that in Jesus Christ
our destination has become the way
and the way has become our destination.
The instant we set our feet upon that road
we have in a real sense arrived at our homeland:
“Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”
We know this too in our bones.
We feel it in those moments of peace and consolation
that fall upon us when we have no reason
to feel peaceful or consoled.
We hear it in words of kindness and encouragement
that can come from unexpected quarters.
We see it in the faces of friends who love us
and of strangers who evoke our compassion.

Faith is an odd dwelling together
of knowing and not-knowing.
Faith directs us to our unseen destination,
but it also sees the destination in the way,
sees the Father revealed in the Son through the Spirit,
sees just enough to take another step
sees by grace the hints of glory.

“Do not let your hearts be troubled.”
It’s a big ask, these days in particular.
But the call of faith is nothing if not audacious.
We are on the way of faith,
and it is the way of grace that leads to glory.
May God continue to lead us on this path
and may God have mercy on us all.

Easter 4 (Eighth Sunday in Corona Time)

Readings: Acts 2; 14a, 36-41; 1 Peter 2:20b-25; John 10:1-10

If you frequent the deeper, darker valleys of the internet
you may have come across someone exclaiming,
“Wake up, sheeple!”
The portmanteau “sheeple”
entered the dictionary in 2017,
defined as: “people who are docile,
compliant,
or easily influenced:
people likened to sheep.”
While it seems to have originated
as a derisive term for technological trend-followers
who lined up to buy the latest product,
it seems most often encountered these days
in a political context
as a way of suggesting that
people are listening uncritically
to so-called experts
on a range of topics
from the reality of global warming
to the authenticity of the moon landing,
to the spherical nature of the earth,
based on the belief that such experts
are systematically misleading us,
are perhaps part of a “deep state” conspiracy,
and that we need to open our eyes
and not blindly follow their counsel.
Lately you see it used for those
who think it’s probably a good idea to follow the advice
of the majority of epidemiologists and public health officials
regarding social distancing and staying at home.

My general inclination
is to dismiss anyone who uses the term “sheeple”
as a member of the tinfoil-hat-brigade,
those inclined to conspiracy theories
who confuse adopting a blindly contrarian position
with actually being intelligent and informed.
But before I indulge in an orgy of self-congratulation,
it is good to remember that we all
like to consider ourselves to be independent thinkers
and not blind followers.
Even when we trust experts
we like to think it is because
we have made some sort of independent judgment
as to their trustworthiness and expertise.
We might roll our eyes dismissively
at those who use terms like “sheeple,”
but, at the same time, we want to assert:
not me; I’m not a sheep
blindly following along;
I listen to Public Radio
and I critically evaluate what I hear.

But then we have the Gospel.
We have Jesus presenting himself
as the shepherd of the flock
that hears his voice and follows him.
He doesn’t suggest that the sheep
critically evaluate the voice of the shepherd,
or check his credentials,
or review his sources.
Is he not suggesting, instead
that a life of following is the ideal,
the model for being his disciple,
the way by which we will have life
and have it abundantly.
Is he not calling us to trust the shepherd
so that he may lead us beside restful waters?
Is he not, in some sense,
calling us to be sheeple?

Well, yes and no.
No, he is not suggesting
that we listen to and blindly follow
every voice we hear that claims authority.
He tells us that, along with shepherds,
there are also thieves who come
“only to steal and slaughter and destroy.”
We sheep, it seems, must not abandon discernment.
While a generalized stance of suspicion
is not necessarily a sign of discernment,
neither is a generalized stance of credulity
as sign of genuine faith.

But, yes, he is calling us to trust him.
He is calling us to return,
as the first letter of Peter put it,
to the shepherd and guardian of our souls.
He is calling us to listen and respond to his voice
as sheep respond to the voice of their shepherd,
to rely ultimately on his wisdom and not our own,
trusting that he knows better than we do
the path that leads to those restful waters.

The question, then,
is how we strike the balance
between an unwarranted credulity
that leaves us subject to those
who would steal and slaughter and destroy,
and a self-defeating skepticism
that refuses any wisdom
that we cannot demonstrate for ourselves?
For ultimately faith is always a matter
of accepting a wisdom we cannot ourselves prove;
it is always a matter of accepting
the limits of what can be demonstrated
and embracing in trust a mysterious truth
that calls to us from beyond that limit.

But how do we know where to place our faith?
Jesus says later in John’s Gospel
that we can identify the good shepherd
because “a good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”
This seems also the criterion suggested by the first letter of Peter:
“When he was insulted, he returned no insult;
when he suffered, he did not threaten…
He himself bore our sins in his body upon the cross,
so that, free from sin, we might live for righteousness.
By his wounds you have been healed.”
The true shepherd, the one to whom we should listen,
is the one who wills to share the lot of the sheep,
who lets himself be stolen and slaughtered
and destroyed for our sake,
so that we might have life.

We cannot rely on our own wisdom
because the path that this shepherd would lead us on
is one that runs counter to ordinary human wisdom.
It is the path of cross and resurrection.
If Corona Time has taught us nothing else,
it has taught us the fragility and unknowability of human life.
It has taught us that even the best-informed
and best-intentioned experts
only know so much.
But it can also teach us to seek another wisdom,
a wisdom beyond the limits of what can be demonstrated,
a wisdom that might at first seem to be foolishness.
The best of human wisdom is that which reminds us
of our own fragility and mortality:
that all life ultimately ends in death.
But the wisdom of God tells us a different story:
that death ends in new life in Christ.
The true shepherd’s voice,
the expert we can and should believe,
is the one that proclaims this wisdom.
May God have mercy on us all.