Easter 5

Readings: Acts 6:1-7; 1 Ptr 2:4-9; Jn 14:1-12

VIDEO

“It’s in the syllabus!”
This is something professors repeat constantly;
some have even gotten it printed on tee-shirts.
The syllabus is the carefully designed document
that outlines the goals of the course
and the means by which those goals 
are to be attained:
readings and assignments and policies.
You typically go over it 
on the first day of class,
and tell students to look there first
if they have a question about anything.

Then, over the course of the semester,
usually when a test is coming up,
students ask you questions
that are already clearly answered in the syllabus.
It is as if this document does not exist for them,
or maybe it’s just easier to ask the professor,
and you begin to wonder what the point was 
of the hours spent carefully laying out
the course goals and methods,
and so you reply to these questions,
with barely concealed exasperation,
“It’s in the syllabus!”
And then you go ahead 
and answer the questions anyway.

I sort of imagine this is how 
Jesus might have felt when, 
at the moment that his hour had come,
Thomas and Phillip pop up
with the most basic of questions.
Jesus called the disciples to follow him,
and now Thomas claims 
that he does not know the way.
Jesus revealed divine power
through his signs and miracles,
and now Phillip asks 
to be shown the Father.
When Jesus says, 
“Have I been with you for so long a time
and you still do not know me?”
I hear him saying something like, 
“It’s in the syllabus!”
I have laid all this out so carefully for you:
in telling you that those who follow me
will walk in the light, for I am light;
in telling you that I am the good shepherd
who guides and guards God’s flock;
in turning water to wine;
in feeding multitudes;
in opening the eyes of the blind;
in raising Lazarus from the dead.
And still, you do not know me?
Now you ask me about the way,
now you ask me to show you the Father,
when the final test is upon us?
It’s in the syllabus, guys.

But, like any good teacher, 
Jesus does not let exasperation 
get the best of him.
Like any good teacher he knows that, 
as carefully as you may spell out
the means and ends of the course,
students tend not to take in information
until it becomes relevant to them.
And it typically becomes relevant to them
when the time of testing has arrived.
So too with the disciples:
all that Jesus has said and shown to them
seems to have washed over them to no effect.
But now that the hour has come
and they are gathered in the upper room
on the night in which he will be
betrayed and arrested,
now they ask questions:
How will we know the way?
How can we see the Father?
The answers may be in the syllabus 
of Jesus’ words and signs,
but it is only at 
the final moment of testing
that the disciples begin 
to have the questions to those answers.
And so he answers their questions
in some of his most eloquent and enigmatic 
expressions of his own identity:
“I am the way and the truth and the life”;
“I am in the Father and the Father is in me.”

For those with faith,
for those who sense 
that the hour of testing is near
and that they need 
to know the way forward,
for those who dare to ask,
Jesus can become the cornerstone
around whom their spiritual dwelling 
can take shape;
for those without faith, 
those who are not seeking,
those who think there is always more time,
those who think the path and goal are clear,
Jesus is merely a stone of stumbling.
This suggests that faith may often be more 
about asking questions than possessing answers.
Though Jesus might have felt the impulse
to reply to Thomas and Phillip’s questions
by growling “It’s in the syllabus!”
he also sees that they are finally truly seeking,
that they want to know the goal 
and the way to get there.
Even as they question, he tells them, 
“You have faith in God,”
and he bids them,  
“have faith also in me.”

For us too, 
it is often only when we sense 
that the hour of testing is upon us,
when we want to know what it is 
that is worth living and dying for,
that we get around to asking 
the essential questions.
It is often when confronted 
with illness or death,
or when we struggle fruitlessly 
against the world’s evils,
when we have stumbled one time too many
and realize we do not know the way,
that we finally ask the questions
to which Jesus has been the answer all along.

And even if the answer has always been there,
spelled out in the syllabus 
of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection,
it is better to ask than not to ask.
For like any good teacher,
Jesus does not scorn our questions.
Indeed, he joyfully answers them
by welcoming us to enter 
into his risen life,
the eternal dwelling he 
has gone to prepare for us,
the glory that lies on the other side
of the hour of testing—
the enduringly mysterious answer 
to all our questions
about life and death 
and meaning and purpose.
So let us seek him fearlessly
in our hour of testing, 
let us seek the one who is 
the way, the truth, and the life,
who is calling us out of darkness into light,
praying that God, who is merciful,
will have mercy on us all.

 

Easter 5

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

VIDEO

I’d like to think that the sacred order of deacons,
into which I was ordained sixteen years ago this month,
had its beginning in some sublime and glorious moment,
perhaps in a vision of the heavenly liturgy
and those who serve at it.
I’d like to think that,
but our reading today from the Acts of the Apostles,
traditionally seen as the story of the appointing
of the first seven deacons, 
suggests instead that the diaconate originated 
amid squabbles among early Christians 
about food and language:
a moment not sublime and glorious
but mundane and messy.

The situation is this:
the Apostles continued the Jewish practice
of a daily food distribution (like a soup kitchen)
to those in their community
who were consistently in dire need:
orphans, landless immigrants, and widows.
A dispute arose between those disciples 
who spoke the Hebrew dialect called Aramaic
and those who spoke Greek,
who had likely grown up 
outside of the land of Israel.
The Greek-speakers felt 
that the widows of their group 
were being overlooked 
because those in charge were Aramaic speakers.
Even though everyone involved was a Jew,
and, moreover, Jews who shared the belief
that Jesus was the Messiah,
they still found that differences 
of language and custom
threatened to divide them. 
So the Apostles appointed seven Greek-speakers
to help with the daily distribution.
Tensions eased,
“the word of God continued to spread,
and the number of the disciples in Jerusalem 
increased greatly.”

Anyone who has worked in the Church knows
that this sort of thing is not unusual.
We may all be brothers and sisters in Christ,
but our fallen natures 
still tend to show themselves,
not least in our tendency to see 
those who do not speak our language
or share our customs
or hold our political views
or belong to our social circles
as outsiders whose concerns 
are not our concerns, 
those whom we can overlook.
We who are the Church—
which is all of us—
spend a lot of our time dealing
with the fallout 
of our fallen humanity.
The destiny of the Church 
may be sublime and glorious,
but what it takes 
for the word of God to spread
and the number of disciples to increase
is often mundane and messy.

The First Letter of Peter
seems to focus our attention
more on the sublime and the glorious,
speaking of the Christian community
as “a spiritual house” built of “living stones,”
with Christ Jesus as the cornerstone.
It speaks of how we have been called to be
“a chosen race, a royal priesthood,
a holy nation, a people of his own.”
The image of this spiritual house 
and this royal priesthood
is so sublime and glorious
that it is hard to believe that the path to it
could involve things as mundane and messy
as settling squabbles 
between Greek speakers 
and Aramaic speakers.
We might think 
that because this living temple is “spiritual”
it cannot involve concrete material concerns
like who gets fed and who goes hungry,
whose voice is heard and who is silenced,
who is empowered and who is disempowered. 
But repeatedly in the book of Acts
it is precisely the messy and mundane struggle
to resolve these sorts of issues
that defines what it means 
to follow the way of Jesus. 

When Jesus says that he 
is the way and the truth and the life 
that leads to the house of his Father,
we must remember 
that the way that is Jesus 
is the way of cross and resurrection.
Jesus is not a way around
the ordinary and extraordinary struggles 
of life together,
but he is the way through them.
He is the living stone rejected by the builders,
who endured the suffering of the Cross,
and if we are to be the living stones 
of which his spiritual house is built
we must become like him.
The way to the Father’s house 
is through the Cross,
and for us the Cross is often found 
not in great and dramatic suffering
but in life’s mundane messiness:
the struggle to love and live with 
those whom we can’t understand
due to language or culture 
or personality or life experience,
those whose needs 
are unfathomable to us,
those we find pushy or insensitive,
insecure or irritating, 
irrational or sometimes 
just plain weird.

If life in the Church has taught me nothing else,
it has taught me that I am the Cross 
that my fellow Christians bear.
In my unfathomable neediness,
my irritating insecurity,
my uniquely personal weirdness,
I am being borne by all of you.
And all of you are being borne by me.
And we cannot put each other down,
because while we are the Cross
we are also the living stones
from which God’s house must be built.
That is what it means to be God’s pilgrim people.
That is what it means to be the Body of Christ.
That is what it means to be the Temple of the Spirit.
It is to bear the Cross of each other 
in the mundane messiness of our common life,
as we walk the way that is Jesus Christ,
crucified and risen,
journeying together to our Father’s house.
Let us pray on this journey
that God, who is merciful,
might 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 5

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

In today’s Gospel, Jesus speaks about a place
and a way to that place.
The place is his Father house,
in which “there are many dwelling places”—
a place, we may presume, of joy and peace and rest
that Jesus goes to prepare.
The way to that place is Jesus himself:
“Where I am going you know the way…
[for] I am the way and the truth and the life.”
Moreover, the way is the place:
Jesus says to Phillip,
“Whoever has seen me has seen the Father…
Do you not believe that I am in the Father
and the Father is in me?”
If we journey with Jesus as our way,
we have in a real sense already arrived
at the place toward which we are journeying,
because in him we truly encounter
not only the way to our destination
but the truth and the life
that is the goal of our journey.
The way is the place
because the God whom we seek
has sought us out in Jesus Christ
and made himself our way.

But it is perhaps too easy simply to say
“the way is the place,”
too easy to mouth clichés
about the journey being the destination,
because I think we all have a sense
that our journey is not yet complete,
that there is a difference between being on a journey
and having reached your destination,
that along the way we restlessly yearn
for that place of dwelling, that place of rest.
Our experience of the truth and the life of Jesus our way
is fragmented and incomplete:
we struggle to know the truth and are beset with doubts;
we live our lives in the midst of death and loss.
How can our place of dwelling be found in Jesus our way
when each day our experience tells us
that we have not yet arrived at a place of truth and life?

St. Augustine pondered this question
by asking why it was that Jesus said
that he was going to prepare a place for his followers.
If, Augustine asked,
there are already many dwelling places in his Father’s house,
why should Jesus have to go prepare a place for us?
What could it possibly mean
to make our heavenly dwelling ready?
Is Jesus like some (probably underpaid) hotel worker
who goes to turn down the beds and put mints on the pillows?
No, Augustine said, “He is preparing places of dwelling
by preparing those who will dwell in them” (Tract. in Io. 68.1).
The heavenly dwelling place is made ready
by making us ready to be the dwelling place of God.

Our second reading, from the First Letter of Peter,
exhorts us: “like living stones,
let yourselves be built into a spiritual house
to be a holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices
acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”
The imagery here is that of the Jerusalem Temple
where God dwelt, not as a place in which God was confined,
but as the special—we might even say sacramental—place
in which God could be encountered:
where God’s outreach to humanity
attained a particular intensity,
a notable pungency,
a special efficaciousness.
But now, St. Peter says, we who have faith in Jesus,
we who embrace him as our way, our truth, our life,
have become that holy temple,
that place of encounter;
we who gather to share the body of Christ
become what we receive:
the dwelling place of God.
The way is the place
because we who are on the way
have become by grace the place in which God dwells,
and the ones in whom God dwells
are those who dwell in God.

What does all of this mean for us?
If the way is the place of truth and life,
then we must have faith
that even when we experience doubt and loss along the way
these too are somehow, mysteriously, part of what it means
for God to dwell in us and us to dwell in God.
We hold stubbornly to the faith
that the struggles of the way are part of the process
by which God prepares that dwelling place
in which we offer spiritual sacrifices,
the dwelling place whose foundation
is Jesus Christ, crucified and risen,
the “living stone, rejected by human beings
but chosen and precious in the sight of God.”

This is true of us as individuals:
in ways that we may never be able to fully fathom,
our doubts and our confusions,
our losses and even our dying,
are God preparing us to be the place in which he dwells.
This is also true of us as a community.
We are at a point at which we might be wondering
what the future holds for us as a parish.
What will the restructuring of the diocese
and the institution of pastorates bring?
What will our joining with the parish of Thomas Aquinas
mean for us here at Corpus Christi?
Almost surely it will mean
the loss of old, familiar ways of doing things:
a different Mass time,
perhaps different leadership,
certainly different ways of thinking
about ourselves as a community.

It is only human to love the familiar
and to want to cling to it.
But Jesus today calls us by his grace
to let go of what has been,
to enter into his way of death and resurrection,
and to find there truth and life.
This does not mean that we will not experience
doubt or confusion,
the loss of old ways,
the death of the familiar.
But if we believe that Jesus the way
is our place of dwelling
then we believe that even loss of what has been
is part of God preparing that spiritual house
in which God will dwell in all his fullness.
We do not know what will happen to us on the way,
either as individuals or as a community,
and we very well may not understand the significance
of events as they unfold around us.
But we walk the way by faith,
not by sight,
and our faith is that even now
life springs forth from death,
for Jesus is risen
and his Spirit has been poured
into our hearts.