Sermon

The text for the sermon today is taken from the Collect:

Grant that we being regenerate, and made thy children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by thy Holy Spirit.

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I remember vividly a conversation I had years ago with my good friend Rex. We were sitting in a deserted train station because we had just missed our train. To me that meant more adventure but to my friend, who was a meticulous planner, my failure to guide us correctly brought a lot of aggravation. Instead of talking through our differences, we turned our anger into a debate, arguing, quite randomly, about whether Jesus Christ shed his body after he ascended into heaven. I would like to say that I had a theologically reasoned answer, but really I had found myself on the side of orthodoxy because it was opposite to what Rex had said. As we angrily debated, Rex brought up a point that stumped me. 

We were on our way to Mitikas, the highest point in Greece, otherwise known as Mt. Olympus. Rex argued that the only gods who stayed in their bodies were the ones like the Greek gods–Zeus and Mercury, etc.,. Those gods stayed in their bodies and look at their examples! They lived exactly like humans, bickering and having petty fights after their grand feasts of gluttony. To me at this point, Rex was right–why would our God continue to live in this flesh? Why would he really care to eternally live in such restrictions? 

Our train came and took us to the town at the base of the mountain range. We walked into town to the hostel I had planned to stay at. Unfortunately, there was no room for us at the inn because I had forgotten to reserve. We had to camp illegally on the outskirts of town and Rex’s aggravation grew. The next morning, we continued on the journey I had planned, following the directions I had received from some friends which was to hike from the town to a nearby monastery. Loaded down with our packs, we began what was one of the most arduous hikes I had ever done. And of course, a large rainstorm came in, the temperature dropped, and Rex stopped talking to me. 

We were saved by stumbling across a small shrine in a cave, what I now know to be the cave of St. Dionysus of Olympus, a 16th century saint. We went inside and lit all the votive candles we could find. As the chances of hypothermia melted away and we rested, I noticed icons all around the shrine–St. George killing the dragon and the Theotokos, Mary holding her child. The child who was fully human and yet fully God. I started thinking how strange it was that Christ did take on our weak and fragile bodies at all. It seemed too humble, too delicate for a god! There was a remarkable difference here in that icon between the Christ child and the power and might of Zeus. 

The next day, having made it finally to our camp, we started up Mt. Olympus. At this point, I really needed Rex whose eagerness for a difficult task took over and he helped me up an incredible climb. We summited the mountain in complete fog. WE could hardly even see the trail in front of us and all was quiet, still–bare rock wet with dew. And we were alone. There were no gods there–Zeus in all his might was gone, mercury had fled. Rex and I had ascended the greatest heights of human imagination and found that image of divinity lacking—it was cold, lonely, a pitiful expression of unrelenting power wounded still by sin and held in bondage to the world of lusts. I realized that God had saved us from such a life when he did not allow Adam and Eve, who had been wounded by sin, to taste immortality. Wounded human nature is not a pretty sight no matter how much power it has. What we needed was a light to shine through the fog and open to us the heavenly mysteries–the true presence of God.

On our descent, I thought again about that icon I saw in the cave. The Incarnation is not a vision of divinity shackled by flesh and sin but of healed humanity lifted up into perfect divinity. He took on our human nature and human flesh in order to restore what had been lost. He unified his divinity with humanity, fulfilling His creation and allowing Adam and Eve now again to walk with their Creator in perfect harmony. Like the Collect says, we are now regenerate and made children of God through adoption and grace. This is humanity glorified by divinity, and this is why Christ did not shed his body when he ascended, for now his risen body is divine. As the author of Hebrews: “when Jesus had by himself purged our sins, [he] sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high.”

And because we are joined to that ascended humanity through our baptisms, our own lives, yes even the lives we live in our flesh, participate in the divine life. Come now, in the middle of this night, and open your eyes to see the reality present here, the reality made clear by this feast. You will be invited by God to eat his flesh, drink his blood in order that He might be with you and you with Him. That you might join him in perfect life, free from the shackles of sin, the fear of death, and the incessant temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Worship God Almighty with a perfect worship and hand your life over to Him. And don’t forget, that this is possible because God became flesh and has renewed our humanity, because a human being sits on the throne of the universe.

In Advent we reflect on the revelation of Jesus the Christ in His Nativity. We look forward to His coming again in power and glory to judge us and to renew His cursed creation. The Four Last Things are: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. 

I was hoping Fr. Glenn would have set me up a little bit better today by saying something rousing about Hell on Rose Sunday. However, he told me that the older he gets, the less he feels he knows about it. I was frankly taken aback by this, since I had figured that spending 19 years with me as an assistant curate might have given him at least a taste of Hell! In any case, today I will try to say something intelligent about Heaven.

Heaven is a Kingdom. The Kingdom of God. You cannot have Heaven without being in the Kingdom, without, in fact, being in and participating in, the Life of God. God is the good and fitting End of all things. He is the Telos (τέλος), around which all Reality is oriented. Everything that IS, owes its being to God. There is nothing created that lacks a parallel in God. God has depths that are not reflected in Creation, but there is nothing in creation that does not rest upon Him. [Inadequacies of God as Sun metaphor.]

As I have said aforetime, part of the Divine Project is turning nothing into dirt, dirt into humans, and humans into Sons of God who partake of the Divine Nature. This is pure profligacy on the part of the Father. He doesn’t need us to be complete in Himself. But His extravagant Love spills over to make the Universe and everything in it. Heaven is the culmination and the vindication of Time. It is present now in Eternity, but for us to reach it, we’ve got to experience our lives. Eventually, though, we will all come to the time of Resurrection. Then our Redeemer, Jesus the Appointed One, Emmanuel (God-with-us!) will re-create the human lineage in the pattern by which His Father raised Him. Our bodies will have perfect senses, and will suffer no debilities. We will be able to walk upon water, disregard doors when entering rooms, and be tremendously nourished from but a little sustenance. Our minds will also function perfectly, and we’ll be able to perform prodigious feats of logic and association with total recall of events. 

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’d like to step back into sacred history and show the evolution of conceptions of Heaven.

What have we been given to understand of Heaven from scripture? In the Old Testament, the only glimpses of Heaven are given in some of the prophets (like Isaiah). These prophetic visions, though, were conditioned by the pattern of worship that the children of Israel had in their Temple and Tabernacle. And, of course, this pattern of worship was given by the Lord Himself to a people wandering in a wilderness. Israel had been redeemed from slavery in a far country, but they had not yet reached the land of milk and honey that they had been promised. It was while they were sojourning in the desert that the Lord spoke to Moses, commanding, “…let them make me a sanctuary; that I may dwell among them, according to all that I will shew thee” (Exodus 25: 8-9). 

The furnishings of the Tabernacle (later Temple) and their arrangement formed the basis for the visions of the prophets that followed: 

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the Temple. Above it stood the seraphims; each one had six wings…and one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory. (Isaiah 6:1-3)

The Tabernacle was the place where the Name of God—His presence—dwelt with His people. God had promised that He would hear His people (and not just them but also Gentiles) when they would pray “toward” the Temple. It was a physical place. You can go there. It’s on a map. There were more than half a dozen prophecies speaking of how the Gentiles would come to worship God in Jerusalem as well. When King Solomon dedicated the First Temple the Shekinah glory of God appeared and descended upon it, taking a shape that would have been familiar to the Israelites who had heard about the pillars of fire and darkness in the desert. The Temple showed that God lived among His people. 

And then it was destroyed! The half-step toward Heaven that the people of Israel had taken was revoked when the Babylonians rolled over (in Divine Judgement according to Jeremiah) Jerusalem.

Fast forward some 500 years to the world where Zechariah and Elisabeth lived, childless. The Jews were restless. The Babylonian exile had ended as the prophets had promised, but things seemed…off. What the scriptures promised and what daily confronted the Jewish masses seemed at odds. There had been no acknowledged prophecy (or prophets) in hundreds of years. And God was NOT with His people. Their Temple (the second one, built by Zerubabbel but being fantastically improved by Herod the Great) had not had a visible manifestation of their God.

No Shekinah.

But God had promised, by many prophets, that He would come if it were built. But…so far, no glory. The understanding of the Jews that they had gained from reading between the lines of the prophecies and from things in what we call the Deuterocanonical works was that they—the Jews—would be on top of the New World Order that would be come about when God revealed Himself. There was also stuff about the Messiah who would resemble Moses and be announced by somebody who resembled Elijah. 

Anyway, this contrast between Jewish expectation and reality is what accounted for the many and varied troubles the Romans had in governing Palestine. Because they were the ones who were in charge.

Then, one day, in the reign of Augustus Caesar, God did fulfill the words of the prophets, showing up to grace Herod’s magnificent Temple with His presence. But only two people, Simeon and Anna, recognized him. Instead of a huge glowing cloud, he showed up as an eight-day old infant, arriving to be circumcised in the arms of his mama. The babe Jesus shed his first blood in the Temple. A foreshadowing (and a down-payment) on what was to come.

God reveals Himself to us progressively. He provides as much as we can take at the time, then waits for it to be assimilated before giving more. Each new revelation builds upon the previous.

In the OT the Lord provided a glimpse of Heaven in the arrangement of the Tabernacle that was the basis for subsequent prophetic visions. In the NT, the Lord comes personally to teach us of Himself, the living experience of which is the Kingdom of Heaven. He shows and tells us that where he is (for example) there is no disease, no deformity, no hunger, no want. In last week’s Gospel Jesus tells John’s disciples: 

Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see: the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them. 

The privations of the flesh and the mind that shape so much of our life now because of the curse on creation will be no part of our renewed Life lived with Him (and in Him) hereafter. This is the life that Jesus has in Himself and enlivens us by His Spirit to emulate. That life holds love, peace, joy, praise, and thanksgiving—which are fruits of the Spirit.

Jesus knew that we would have this waiting period in which the Church expands, and the Holy Ghost moves as He will. But as the Lord gave to the Israelites the pattern of worship in the Temple, so Jesus has brought us further into the mysteries of God, preparing us for the life to come and helping us now. The Israelites consumed mana in the wilderness to save them from starvation. We consume the Body and Blood of the Son of God which readies us for Heaven. 

I’m going to end with some rank speculation about what Heaven might be like. I believe it is congruent with what has been revealed in Scripture and Holy Tradition. Note well that this is not about the intermediate state, the bodiless time which may resemble sleep occurring after death but before the General Resurrection. There are glimpses in John’s Apocalypse that may apply to that period, but today is about Heaven, not that.

So here goes:

• We’ll have spiritual bodies in Heaven and so it will be a lot like our life here now. These will be really magnificent bodies. We will not miss our old lives, but we will be grateful for them and will sometimes marvel at the difference between our astounding “now” and our blinkered “then”. 
• Mercy, forgiveness, faith, hope, and love will be the only social currency in the Age to come. And there won’t be a need for any other sort of currency.
• We will still need (and have) government. Under the direction of our King, we will still do work, accomplishing things so marvelous that each new act will make the sum total of all prior human achievement look paltry in comparison. We will still have politicians to administer the work. But, wait, you may be saying, I don’t like that term politician. Well, wherever one has a polis—in this case the City of God, descended from on high—one will have politicians. And if Jesus decides to put Daniel as vice-regent over Virginia—where I will still be living—I’m not going to complain.
• We will no longer suffer temptation. Not because we are mind-controlled robots, but because we retain our memories of missing the mark in this world. Here we were born innocent—ignorant of sin—which is a privation. There, we will be living II Corinthians 5:21:

For he hath made him…(our King, Jesus)…to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.

Our cognizance of this will rebuff the sorts of violations we committed in this Vale of Tears. 

• Our life with and in God will be one of constant improvement. But our increasing greatness will not diminish the magnitude of the differential between the Almighty and Us. To the contrary, our magnified perceptions will daily reveal more of the Father’s glory.
• Our limitations (not our sins—which are done away—but our ignorance and relative frailty) are and will continue to be our glory. We will still feel as well as think. We will continue to experience emotions as we confront new situations that call forth a response from us. We will continue to be surprisable (and surprised).

To summarize: God is infinite, we finite. Growing in the Kingdom of God gives us an unlimited capacity for improvement. And according to the nature of things mathematical, our capacity for improvement will always be increasing so that each succeeding day will bring new realizations, unite previously unperceived or disparate strands of divine thought so that our lives are lived in a state of ever-mounting rapture at the majesty, subtlety, and beneficence of the Most Holy Trinity.

And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. (Revelation 21:3-4)

In the Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen.†

“Now when John had heard in prison the works of Christ, he sent two of his disciples, and said unto him, Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?”

This is a disturbing scene, especially if one passes over to John’s point-of-view. He was in prison and he must have known that he would not get out alive. Furthermore he seems to be having second thoughts about his strong claims concerning Jesus as the Bridegroom. Herod was anxious over John’s popularity among the common folk. So were the Pharisees who were careful not to voice public criticism of John the Baptist for fear of falling out of their favor. Not only that, but the Pharisees, with some success, worked to enlist some of John’s disciples in order to bring a united judgment against Jesus for abandoning the Jewish purification rites before and after meals. But the situation here is that John had been taken into custody by Herod’s thugs.

The Herodian Dynasty was homicidal, pitiless and characterized by paranoia. Herod Antipas was around fifteen-years-old when his father ordered what we know as the Slaughter of the Holy Innocents and after that two of his own siblings were murdered because his father feared that they would attempt to usurp his throne. The pagans had a saying: “It is better to be Herod’s pig than his son.” Herod Antipas had survived political and family purges and he managed to end up as a tetrarch after his father died. Now he, unhappily, held John the Baptist in prison. And he was politically savvy enough to know nothing good would come from it. John was a realist. It was certain that his work was about to come to an end. John had not been the sort of prophet who softened the truth for anyone and so on the cusp of his death he sent this message to Jesus:

“Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?”

Why is this disturbing? It is disturbing because it is an embarrassing question and all the more embarrassing, uncomfortable because it is coming from John the Baptist, who had declared to Israel that her Bridegroom had come:

“He that hath the bride is the bridegroom: but the friend of the bridegroom, which standeth and heareth him, rejoiceth greatly because of the bridegroom’s voice: this my joy therefore is fulfilled.” 

But remember John Henry Newman’s statement that, “one thousand questions do not one doubt make.” Not every question is evidence of personal doubts and in fact questions are natural and may well be a faithful  response seeking of intelligibility.  But either way, when such the object of questions are as a matter of one’s one most important life decisions, we feel an urgency to find answers. So a few days later, when John sent two of his disciples to ask Jesus if he is “the one who is to come,” we get hold of a different perspective on the Baptist. And it is an embarrassment to the Church that John had second thoughts Jesus because John, by Jesus own testimony, stands next to the Blessed Virgin Mary in a singular dignity. This is the first point I want you to take away from John’s crisis: this account’s cringeworthy honesty is a mark of the Church’s devotion to the truth and it is evidence that this really happened. There really was a man named Jesus and John the Baptist thought this man was the Messiah, but at the very end of his life, John doubted whether or not that was true. 

But given that this account of John’s very personal crisis is true, what does it mean? The doubt had specifically to do with the identity of Jesus: “Are you he who is to come or shall we look for another?” That is as profound a crisis as any Christian can experience –- is Jesus who we believe him to be or not? But let me just say that Matthew’s audience may not have been as troubled as most readers are today and the reason for that is because his audience was saturated with the narratives of Israel — and in our day we are hardly saturated with the narratives of the Old and New Testament. I imagine that Matthew’s community knew that only God is God and even some of the best, the godliest saints have known profound discouragement and doubt and have acted out in self-will. Take, for example Elijah, the great prophet of God, who later on in this chapter of the Gospel, Jesus identified specifically with John the Baptist even as he awaits certain death in prison:

“For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John. And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” Matthew 11:13-15

Now imagine that you were a little child standing there with Jesus and let’s say that your parents had made sure that you attended Vacation Bible School and Wednesday School where you heard Old Testament stories over and over again. Your parents had a goal for you to know who you are and that meant knowing the Scriptures. Even a little child, who stood there with Jesus and heard this question coming from John, may well have thought of Elijah, just as Jesus did. A little child might have recalled how Elijah had once behaved very much like John the Baptist. 

Elijah was the greatest of the prophets. He single handedly defeated 450 prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. They called on Baal, but Baal never answered them. Remember how Elijah made fun of Baal when they were unable to perform even one miracle: “apparently Baal has developed a hearing problem; or maybe Baal has fallen asleep; or maybe Baal has even gone on vacation without telling you.” Elijah called on his God, the One Jesus called Father, and Jesus’ Father heard him and sent down fire from heaven to devour not only the sacrifice but also the altar Elijah had set up to worship his God.

But the little children would remember that even that great miracle on Mount Carmel did not rid Israel of idolatry and Elijah became very discouraged. And then when Jezebel sent men to hunt him down he became so discouraged and fearful that he ran off into the desert and sat down under a juniper tree and asked God to let him die. But God sent an angel to feed him and after Elijah had eaten he was supernaturally strengthened to go forty days and forty nights without food. You know what Elijah did next? He used that strength to find a cave where he hid from Jezebel and he refused to leave the cave. So God came to him and said, “What are you doing here in this cave Elijah?” Now all the children who had been to their version of SMAC and Wednesday School knew how this story ended, so I am going to stop there. But if by chance one does not know how it ends you can find it if you begin with I Kings 19. 

What is my point? My point is that Matthew recorded John’s struggles with doubt because it was an important reality for the Church to take in— which reality should encourage future disciples whose faith would also be tested by real hardship, real heartbreak, real doubt, real distress and real disappointments. 

St. Paul in one of the most inspiring and beautiful passages from 2^nd Corinthians summarized this biblical perspective this way:

“But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies.”

 John the Baptist was the very embodiment of Old Testament gravitas, sobriety and holiness — the man of God, the prophet of God, the Friend of the Bridegroom. Jesus told John’s disciples to go back to this prison cell and tell them what they saw and heard: 

“the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them. And blessed is he who shall not be offended in me.”

Jesus knew his mission and John’s doubts did not make him in the least unsure of himself. Furthermore Jesus knew that John would recognize the words as the promises of the Scriptures because they shared the common narrative and common history of the People of God.

There are two points I want you to take with you today: First, this embarrassing honesty that centers on John’s question is a mark of the Church’s devotion to the truth and it is evidence that this really happened. And secondly, I want you to be strengthened and know that we are all earthen vessels and so were the greatest saints. And so our faith is not “faith in faith,” nor is our faith in our faith –- our faith is in Jesus’ faith, we trust in Jesus’ life of trust and love and devotion to God the Father on our behalf.

“the blind receive their sign, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them. And blessed is he who shall not be offended in me.”