Saint Mark's Church

There was a time in my life when I regretted that I have been baptized as an infant. Perhaps “regret” is the wrong word. I was angry that I had been baptized as a child. This was a time in my life when I was full of anger at the intrusiveness of God in my life. I was about to pull a Jonah and run, if not to Tarshish, than at least to Arizona to escape priesthood. And I found the fact that I had been baptized, that my parents had made promises for me, and had caused this monumental sacramental act to happen to me to feel as if I were trapped, as if there was not any place to which I could run to be free of God and of those promises made at baptism.

The Church has long taught that baptism, as of the other sacraments, is indelible, there is a quality to baptism which can never be repeated or undone. The metaphor that John uses in the Gospel this morning is that of “fire.” John baptizes with water, but Jesus who is coming will baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire. And if Christian baptism is with “fire,” as the Gospel says this morning, than baptism leaves one scarred, burned forever, and even if I were to run to Arizona or Tarshish, even if I were to never darken the door of a church again, the burn scars of that day, ever so long ago, would stay with me forever. T. S. Eliot has a phrase which I always think of, when I think of baptism: “The intolerable shirt of flame / Which human power cannot remove.” There are times when the life of faith, or occasional faith, or the wish to have faith feels like a shirt of flame, a kind of flammable hair shirt that burns, and hurts, and which “human power cannot remove.”

That, at least, was how I felt. Which is perhaps not a very happy way to think about baptism, but it is not entirely uncorrect either.

Often baptism is taken rather lightly, as a normal cultural and social event. Baby is born, baby takes first steps, baby says first word, and baby is baptized. It is all of a piece.

But if baptism is what the Church teaches, than baptism is very dangerous, and we are almost unbelievably arrogant when we baptize, especially children. We are playing with fire which is not of our making, and risking a great deal, every time we step to the font with another soon-to-be Christian.

Baptism is permanent and it does scar us and takes us into place and times that are unpleasant. Vows are made at baptism that bind us to a life of service and selflessness, to seeking justice, to a life of repentance, and resistance to evil. Baptism makes us citizens of another kingdom, which in turn means that we are aliens and wanderers here, and have a sense of never quite being home. Baptism makes us hungry for the bread of heaven, with a hunger that the stuff of earth can never satisfy. And baptism calls us to make some pretty serious sacrifices: our lives, our money, and our comfort.

But this day we are remembering not all baptism, but specifically Jesus' baptism in the Jordan River by his cousin John the Baptist. And I always find Jesus' baptism to be slightly unusual, slightly strange. I know why I need the shirt of flame of baptism, that slow purgative process that one day, God willing, will make me ready for the Feast of the Lamb, but why would God's messiah, why would the eternal Word need baptism? I may struggle, complain and resist that burn of baptism, but why would Jesus even need it?

In the parallel passage from Matthew's Gospel, John himself protests that Jesus has come for baptism. “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” And Jesus responds that it is somehow proper that John baptize him.

Beyond being indelible, the Church teaches another great truth about baptism: that baptism is the root of our Christian identity, the canvas on which all the other aspects of our Christian life are painted. Some Christians will be ordained, or married, or confirmed, but those sacraments all presuppose baptism. They are all variations on a theme of baptism.. Baptism is the context in which our entire conversation and struggle with God takes place. Baptism, that fire that is set in us, is the way that we learn to love God and our neighbors. Slowly, haltingly over time, the fire of baptism can burn away the brokenness of our hearts, the ways in which we are selfish, self-deceptive and prone to sin. We experience baptism as a shirt of flame because we are yet far off from the perfection which God has planned for us.

I wonder if that doesn't explain the properness of Jesus' baptism by John. Jesus doesn't need baptism like we do. He doesn't need to be rooted in God, bound in covenant with God, and made an adoptive heir to the Kingdom. Jesus is God, very God of very God; Jesus is already rooted and one with God. Jesus wouldn't experience baptism as a shirt of flame because he is perfectly attuned to God, loving as he should.

But in his coming to live as a human being, he shows us the way home. He is born and baptized, he lives and dies. It is proper that he be baptized because he shows us the model, the example, of how we are to be. He goes before us like a beacon in the dark, flaming with God's love, and because he has bidden us to, we set a fire in those who come to us, children and adults, and we give them the light of Christ as a candle to carry into the darkness of the world.

All of us struggle with the hardness of baptism, I would imagine. Must I give of my time, my money, my energy, my life? Must I struggle and suffer through this Lenten time? Must I be an alien and a wanderer here? Does God have to call me into these difficult places and times?

As I think about my regret that I had been baptized, I realize that what was wrong was not my sense that this powerful, scary sacramental moment had been done to me without my choice, but the feeling that God was somehow out to get me, that God was somehow punishing me, or asking too much of me.

The verse from which the phrase “shirt of flame” is taken are these, and they seem to me simply true:

Who then devised the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar Name

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power cannot remove.

     We only live, only suspire

     Consumed by either fire or fire.

The scar of baptism, the permanence of the covenant that we make with God in baptism, is rooted in an unbending love. Love devised that shirt of flame, Love binds us with it, Love will never remove it, and Love wills us flame with divine fire.

For this is what we were created for: to flame with the fire of God's love, and to burn forever in his presence. And the shirt of flame which is baptism is how we are prepared to flame with his fire. Our Lord, in his baptism, is our guide and example.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

The First Sunday after Epiphany: The Baptism of Our Lord

I do not think that it is too much of an overstatement to say that of the truths that the Church teaches, the Incarnation (God taking on flesh and human nature), is the most radical and the sticking point for most.  Oh, there are other concepts that are difficult: the Trinity, the Resurrection, Heaven, the real presence of Christ in bread and wine, those are all complicated and hard to understand, but the Incarnation is the most radical, the hardest somehow to understand and to accept.

Certainly the Incarnation was the hardest for the peoples of the Ancient Near East to understand: they were used to the plethora of mythic cults, to the Pantheon of the Greco-Roman gods, to the religious foibles of odd groups and cultures, but God becoming flesh?  Gods and goddesses might walk around looking like humans, or dallying with them, or deceiving them, but that the gods should become human seemed to them ridiculous: why would one give up omnipotence or power to live a human life?  Flesh and matter were base, lower than the spiritual and ethereal.

The Church through the ages has struggled with the same conception of the material as base, and because of that has not been quite comfortable with God’s flesh.  Often, in theology and in art, the sense is of an effort to contain and limit the radicalness of Christ’s flesh.  Jesus, while grudgingly human, is still other than human: he is too beautiful, or too formal, or too much like a human light bulb.  He is not really like us, how could he be?  He is human we say with our lips, but our doubt or discomfort is revealed in the images that we make of him or the way that we talk about him.

The long and the short of this discomfort with matter is that we, in our own culture, don’t have a much better relationship with bodies and flesh.  Certainly there is little that I can think of in our culture that is more complex, more heavily charged than bodies and flesh.  We worship the image of the beautiful body, made present to us in the celluloid of movie starts and super athletes.  We live in a culture that idealizes, or at least objectifies the perfect and naked body, and yet few of us are close to the standards we are bombarded with every day.  We are a culture enmeshed in some of the strangest interactions with flesh imaginable.  Just think about our relationship with food, or with sexuality, or with exercise or with health care.  And for all of this obsession with flesh, we are a culture and a people vastly uncomfortable within our own skins.

Is there indeed anything closer to us, and yet more alien than our flesh?  Our flesh can seem so natural that we can forget that we live in it, and we can also feel entirely not at home in our own skin, and horribly trapped.  And why would God choose that?  Why would God choose to suffer flesh, and suffer all that comes with flesh: weakness, sickness, aging and death.  Why would God suffer himself to suffer puberty or middle school gym class, for heaven’s sake?

Not only does the Incarnation not make sense, it is as the people in the ancient Near East saw, radically offensive, radically iconoclastic.  It is, in many ways the most lunatic, the most offensive of all the claims that the Church makes about Jesus – that God himself lived among us – that the frailty of our bodies and our inability to escape the flesh – was shared by God.

For we are indeed fleshly beings.  For all the efforts of our minds to feel removed from flesh, for all the illusions of eternity and survival, all the defenses that we erect to defend us from our frailty, our mortality, our aging, and our raw and latent physicality, all of that is mere illusion.  We live now at the whim of a phenomenally complicated system of muscles, blood vessels, bones, and fluids that often surprises not by its occasional failure, but by the fact that more doesn’t go wrong more often.

If you are like me, and feel the strangeness of this flesh that I live in, you might feel the wrongness of God experiencing what we do.  It is too base, too vulgar, too intimate that God should feel this bounded and this limitation that we feel.

There is, in the claim of the Incarnation, a radical discomfort, a breathless immediacy, a suffocating closeness.  And I, at least, am not sure that I like that closeness!  God should be in his heaven, and all well on earth; I would prefer the Divine to remain at a distance, the Holy of Holies to remain veiled: I want God to remain both holy and wholly other.  I do not want to think about God knowing the experience of flesh, or eating, or sleeping or being sick.

But if the Word became flesh, no longer is there any distance between the heavens and the earth.  If God has become flesh there will be little relief from the immediacy of the experience of God with us in the flesh.

Which means that the Incarnation is radical indeed: the Incarnation is like an avalanche, cascading down the mountain and changing everything in its path.  If God has taken flesh, that says something about all flesh.  If God has lived a human life, that says a great deal about the seemingly inane parts of human life.  If God has walked among us as matter, that says a great deal about the material world around us.

In the Incarnation God glorifies the world.  First, God glories in our flesh, because he has taken on our flesh.  Then he glories in the things of the world that sustain our flesh: this fish, this bread, this wine, have fed the God of heaven, and thus are blessed.  And then he glories in all matter: blessed be the fields that grew the grain he’s eaten, blessed be the waters that held the fish that he has caught, blessed be the air that he has breathed and the dust that he has tramped in, blessed be the stars and planets and the atoms and quarks in their dancing, blessed be all.

The Incarnation makes of our flesh, our lives and of this world a sacrament, for God glories in the material.  Matter is not base, for God has grown up here, walked here, slept here, eaten here, laughed here and died here.  Whatever our culture might say, whatever some people of faith might say our flesh in not lesser, not incidental, not base.  For the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and made of our flesh and of our world and immeasurable glory.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

Christmas Day 2009

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia

One of the certainties of human life is that we need to be reminded, again and again of the truths we know.  They are not inscribed forever, once we first learn them, but we need to be reminded and recalled to their truths again and again as we travel through our lives.

What is true for people is true also for communities.  Speaking truths once is not enough, but we need to repeat them again and again, until over the years they become part of the knowledge of our individual and communal hearts.  That is the purpose of liturgy – to slowly inscribe the grammar of the Scriptures and the story of God’s redemption into our minds and lives, like water dripping onto our stony hearts and slowly wearing away the sharpnesses.

The Scriptures are full of the stories that need to be heard again and again: God’s longing and call to us, our human nature which flees God’s presence and constantly erects idols to stand between us and that loving and intrusive gaze.

Day in, day out, week in, week out, we read the Scriptures to remind ourselves again and again of those stories.  God’s covenant with Abraham and Sarah, God’s salvation through famine, exile, law-giving, wandering in the wilderness, through judges, kings and Diaspora.

There are times, in the year, when we read again some of the most distinctive voices of the Scriptures, the prophets, and Advent is one of those times.

I always like to think of the prophets as the caregivers and therapists in our lives.  They are at the same time comforting and challenging, they are full of judgment and full of compassion.  They point out to us our foibles and blindnesses, and knock over the defenses we have labored to build so that the grammar of God has someplace to sink in.  And when they have broken through the haze of self-deception and egotism, when they have aired our dirty laundry and raised up before us the poor and disposed, and brought home to us the ways that we have ignored God and loved only ourselves, when they have done that, they comfort us.  They speak words of the coming salvation, of the Messiah, the Savior of Israel, who will bring both God’s judgment and God’s salvation to fruition.

God’s judgment and God’s redemption, go hand in hand, the abrasive voices of the prophets teach us:

The main problem, of course, is that we don’t like to talk or think about God’s judgment.  Too often, we have heard from churches, from pastors or priests, from parents or from slightly crazy folk on street corners the story of God’s judgment.  We have heard that God is an angry God, a God who is waiting to tick off our sins on the list which reads “Naughty and Nice” and decide where we are going.  More often than not, we feel as if we are going the wrong direction, and we fear that God’s vengefulness, God’s judgment is waiting to spring, front-loaded against us, and only the super-spiritual, the über-elect, the crème de la crème of the most spiritual will make the cut.  Life is a cosmic game of “Survivor” and every day, every hour someone is getting voted off the island.  God is simple, God is myopic; an angry, vengeful God who is both capricious and horribly predictable.

But the prophets really tell us a far different story.  They tell us that we are foolish, human people.  They remind us that we can just never seem to get ourselves together.  They speak to us of our complacency, of our comfort, of our blandness and our duplicity, in the face of human suffering and the demands of the divine.  They lift a mirror before our faces, and the image that we get back is not as pretty, or as sympathetic as we might like.

The words of the prophets are not fundamentally comfortable words to hear.  They are constantly restless, always probing, words that fester and disturb.  The prophets are like loose teeth that you want to worry with your tongue, or a scab that you want to pick.  They are never settled, always questioning; when you feel home, watch out.

But the prophets are not simply about judgment. Because there are moments when their tone changes, and they can tell that we need not curmudgeon rebuke, but comfort and hope.  We need not simply the possibility of God’s redemption if we straighten ourselves out, and return to God again, but the story beyond the story, the narrative beyond that of God’s anger, the hope of God’s astonishing redemption, whatever our state.

The message of the prophets is both judgment and redemption, and so we are told also about God’s love beyond measure, God’s perpetual forgiveness, the  restoration of God’s chosen people, and the Messiah, long expected who is coming.

And we need both.  We cannot hear about grace without brokenness, sin without redemption; either one or the other, without a myopic vision.  Sin and grace, judgment and redemption, they go hand in hand.  Cheap grace, cheap judgment, both are, in the end, simply cheap.  Either is too little, too late.  Only when we hear both voices is the fully dimensional vision of God apparent.

For God is not myopic.  God is three-dimensional, multi-dimensional, all-dimensional.  God knows both our foolishness and sinfulness, and our hopefulness and our hopelessness, which run full of complexity, in the course of our lives, and the prophets are the stereoscopic vision, the stereo sound of God’s constant unwillingness to let us settle into ennui, and God’s constant unwillingness to let us settle into damnation.  No complacently is too deep to avoid God’s disturbing, and no sin too dark to avoid his redemption.

Yesterday, with the prophets filling my mind, the news flashed around the world that the Diocese of Los Angeles, in electing two suffragon bishops, had elected a woman in a committed same-sex relationship.  Which means that the fighting and rhetoric of 2003 will be brought up again, with the added energy of the debate over women’s ordination. And Anglican Communion will once again teeter on the brink of falling apart, and attempt to decide whether to impale itself on the horn of civility and simply not talking too much, or on the horn of radical justice and inclusion.

And although I have some pretty clear thoughts about full inclusion of women and gay persons in the life of the church, my first thought was one of fear and exhaustion.  Really? Right now at this tension-filled moment?  Really? We are going to spend all this time and energy fighting about this, while poverty, violence, abuse, and disease, run rampant in our streets and around the world?  Really?  With the church shrinking and struggling and with parishes closing, we are going to fight about this?  Really?  After we, hope against hope, managed to preserve a sort of separate peace in the Anglican Communion?  And filled with thoughts of the prophets I thought “Would that there were prophets in our day who could wake us out of our smugness and comfort us in our brokenness!  Would that there were prophets who could treat on this…”

But we have heard the prophets from beginning to end: angry Jeremiah, fearful Jonah, Job, Amos, Micah, all of them, masterful Isaiah, even down to John the Baptist in the Gospel this morning, channeling Isaiah: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”

We have no need of a modern day prophet to harangue us, because we have heard the words of the prophets, and they are still challenging and comforting, for the conundrum that the Episcopal Church finds herself in, and for each and every day of our lives.  We have heard the prophets, and while their message of judgment and redemption are not about the Diocese of Los Angeles, or the Anglican Communion, still they ring out as true and full of challenge and comfort to us.  For this time in the church, the prophets say: There is no smug certainty or complacency, on either the left or the right of this current debate which God will not break us out of, and there is no sin, no rhetoric of anger or hatred, no schism, beyond God’s loving redemption.

And for the other days of our lives they say “Repent your sinfulness, and return again to the Lord.  For the moment is coming when all shall see the salvation of our God.”  We have no need of a modern day prophet to harangue us, because that Word pointed to, and prefigured in the prophets has come among us.  He has come into our lives and hearts with the same message of repentance and salvation that the prophets teach us.  He speaks and says to us:

There is no smugness or arrogance or certainty or complacency that God will not disturb us out of, through the Scriptures and through the circumstances of our lives, and there is no darkness, no isolation, no sinfulness, no living hell beyond the salvation of our God.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

6 December 2009

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Here we are, at the end of the Christian year, and every year before we begin the year again, on this last Sunday we celebrate that Christ is King of Kings and Lord of Lords.  He is the Omega of all, and here at the end of the year, Christ is King.  Next week we will start again, and begin to prepare ourselves for that little baby “slouching towards Bethlehem” to invert our world and our lives, but today we proclaim what is true, despite all evidence to the contrary – Christ rules as King, now and always.

I say “all evidence to the contrary,” because that is the truth of the matter.  In a world beset by war, violence, all manner of “-isms,” economic disparity and crisis, and genocide, it seems, most often as if Christ is not King.  How could Christ possibly be King, and the world still looks like this?  Indeed, isn't the state of the world the best evidence there is that Christ is not King?

At one of the darkest moments in my life, right after I had returned from the darkness and death of Ground Zero, someone was foolish enough assign me an Ash Wednesday sermon and what I preached that day has haunted me since: that Lent is the abiding reality of life, that although we go through liturgical seasons, and celebrate high feasts, our lives are lived in a kind of perpetual, everlasting Lent, in the dust and ashes of our lives.

Which is not untrue.  We do live in a kind of perpetual slide into the dark, trapped in our own rather messy lives and heads, with our bodies and our loved ones aging and dying, and in a world filled with darkness, fear and suffering.  But it is not the whole truth. 

The message of the Gospel is that we live between the times.  We live in times which look like everlasting lent, but the message of the Gospel, the unseen truth is that there is a glory waiting to be revealed to us: that Christ rules as King, and that however dark the world might be, however lost or hopeless we as people might be, yet still Christ reigns as King and that someday, God willing, we will get out to the place of the visible reign of God.

But Lord knows it is hard to live in that tension with one foot in lent and one foot in the reign of God already begun.  It is hard to live in the messiness of the world, wondering why the reign of God isn’t manifest.

I also find it hard.  I’ve been ruminating, for the past week on the past year.  A year ago I knelt here, just inside the chancel gates and was ordained to the priesthood, and yet ordination didn't perfect me, or bring me up out of that place of lent, not knowing or feeling the reign of God.

Ordination has not removed my angst about my ability as a priest, or taken away the pain and suffering in others which priesthood brings one into constant and perpetual contact with.  Not only is the world a dark place, and the life of the priest a constant vision and interaction with that darkness, but the lives of people are dark and messy, and I know this now, not just because I've interacted with people in dark and messy places for the past year, but because I know that I am a mess, that ordination doesn't make me anything other then the messy person that I was before, and yet still through it all Christ is King.

There is nothing quite like, day in, day out, going to the altar, dragging with you your own darkness and the darkness or pain of the conversation that you have just had.  The liturgy takes on, at times, a decidedly ironic tone: “Lift up your hearts,” and try to keep the ironic smile off your face, or even more poignant, “The Peace of God which passes understanding…”  Indeed it does, here in the Lenten twilight.

There was an old priest I knew who used to say that every time he went up to the altar an atheist and came down again a Christian, and there are days like that, when Lent takes hold.

But through it all, Christ is King.

Only when the grace of God is able to strike me hard enough to remind me of Christ’s Kingship, only then, when I can remember briefly that Christ is King do I know that somehow the messiness, both in the world and in all of us, and most of all in myself is not the eternal, everlasting Lent that it feels, but the moment of waiting for what is already true to be revealed.

Christ is King of my joys and sorrows, king of my failures and my successes, King of my good days, or more likely my bad ones, King no matter how much I fail to remember or just can't let him be.  So I will go up unto the altar of God, as I have done for a year now.  Despite feeling and knowing that I am a mess, unworthy. 

Michael Ramsey, a great archbishop of Canterbury in a complex and wonderful phrase once described ordination as a “walking sacrament”.  For priests journey through life, allowed into the lives of God’s people and as they go, they bless.  They bless and offer up to God the brokenness, the sadness, the messiness of the world around them.  And I wonder if part of that walking sacrament is the full knowledge that I too am broken, foolish, messy, one step from a train wreck.  Through the broken things of earth, God works, through water, bread, wine and human beings, even this foolish human being standing before you today, because Christ is King.

Because the Ancient of Days, the Alpha and Omega is also the broken Jesus, scourged, whipped, mocked, standing before Pilate, soon to be hung on a tree, and cognizant of the irony of the question about his kingship.  Because the crucified and dead Lord is King, because of that, the brokenness of the world and my own brokenness are as nothing. 

Because Christ is King, I can go up to the altar and stumble through my pastoral work.  Because Christ is King, I can go up to the altar and know that my brokenness and the brokenness of bread and wine, and the brokenness of the world are caught up, covered, restored, and redeemed, because Christ himself has been broken.

And through it all, Christ is King.  Through all the births and deaths, the meetings and pastoral counseling, through the Offices and the masses, when I'm feeling thankful or Lenten, or atheistic, through it all Christ is King.

For some day, we will get out into the vision of his reign.  Some day we will see no longer only in part, that glory which is yet hid from us.  Our Lent will be over and our tears turned to songs of joy.  And we will know that secret hid in the midst of our Lenten struggle: Christ is King and rules over all our times, Lenten or happy. 

Until the day when we can see his kingdom, reign on our altars and in our hearts, O King of Glory.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

22 November 2009

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

I met a young priest once, years ago, who was struggling with his first parish placement.  He couldn’t seem to get anything done on time, he was often late or absent, and no one could really figure out if he was just lazy, or if there was something else going on.  Finally, I overheard him say in an offhanded way “These hands were made for chalices, not for calluses.”  Suddenly, I thought, “Aha,” here’s the heart of the matter, a fundamental misunderstanding about what the work of the Gospel is.

I will admit to you, that there are times in the past year when the phrase has flashed through my own head.  When we were out chipping ice off the sidewalk during rush hour after a sudden snowstorm, or up to my elbows in macaroni salad at City Camp at our mission parish of St. James-the-Less, I would think [sigh] “Wouldn’t it be nice if it were true?  Wouldn’t it be nice if these hands were made for chalices and not calluses.”  But it is inescapable: Christian life, ordained or not, is a life of getting calluses.  “Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant.  For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.”

Once again, the disciples fail to understand what Jesus is teaching.  James and John come to Jesus because they want positions of power and authority.  They want to sit at his right and left in his kingdom.  They want to be the high chamberlains or chiefs of staff who control access and whose advice is prized above all else.

In response to their request, Jesus asks them a question: “Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?”  Jesus here, as his answer to their simple “Yes,” makes clear is not asking them about a cup or about the baptism that he received from John, but about the cup that he is going to Jerusalem to drink, and the baptism of the cross.  And surely his response to them is one of the more subtly terrifying ones that we hear Jesus make: “The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized.”  In short, Jesus is saying, “Indeed, you will follow the way of the cross that I pursue, and you will know that baptism of blood which I am going to.  This life that you have chosen, and that I have chosen you for will be the death of you.”

And then once again, because they don’t understand, because they don’t comprehend what he is teaching, what he is preaching, what he is preparing to inscribe into his own life, Jesus calls them together.  The other disciples are annoyed at James and John.  They are perhaps not annoyed so much by James and John’s failure to understand Jesus’ teaching as they are by the fact that James and John got their request in first.

Look at what Jesus says to those disciples jockeying for position and power. “Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant.  For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.”

The message of the Gospel this morning is the message that is also the message of Jesus’ life and death.  It is the utter reversal and complete inversion that God brings into the world in Jesus.  Greatness comes, not from position, not from authority, not from job title or money.  Greatness comes only from service.  To be great you must serve, to be first you must be a slave.  To get anywhere in the Christian life, you must give up trying to gain position or authority or power.

The way of the world is a way of the glorification and worship of those with power and authority.  It is the cynical subservience of the sycophant before the powerbroker.  It is about what I can get and hold for myself by whatever means necessary.

But that is not the way that Jesus goes.  That is not the way of the cross.  His way is the opposite.  His way is the complete opposite: serving rather than being served.

One of the ways that we can hear how stunning this inversion that Jesus preaches is, is when we lay the passage from the Gospel this morning next to the reading from the Hebrew Scriptures.  The Book of Job is rather like courtroom drama, in which we get to hear from all sorts of different characters.  God allows Job to be tested, and all manner of calamities befall him, and there are long speeches from Job’s friends and from Job about how God could allow this to happen.  Then finally, unthinkably, the character that everyone would like to hear speak, and no one expects to, God, opens his mouth and God’s defense of the suffering and calamities that Job suffered is so overwhelming, so majestic, that there is really little else to be said.  “Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you and you shall declare to me.  Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?  Tell me, if you have understanding.  Who determined its measurements – surely you know!”  And on and on, the hammering home of God’s absolute power and sovereignty, of God’s total mystery and of God’s otherness from the human condition and mind.

“Who are you to question me?” God says.  “Who are you to even attempt to understand me, when I feed the raven and the lions and tilt the water skins of heaven.” 

And that is where I think we can see the absolute wonder and mystery of the inversion that is Jesus.  The assertion of the Christian faith is that the same God who laid the foundations of the earth became human, and came not for power, not for authority, but to serve.  The same God who is majestic, sovereign and mysterious beyond measure, inverts the way that “things should be,” and instead of coming as a king or president, comes to live the life of a carpenter-preacher in rural Palestine.  He came, not to garner as much power and authority as possible, but to heal, to serve and eventually to die.  That is the model that he leaves us.  “Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant.”

I think about that young priest that I knew sometimes.  His life has not been easy since he entered the priesthood.  He has hopped around to different jobs often, trying to find a place where he doesn’t have to engage in getting his hands too dirty.  I feel sad, often when I think about him.  About the fundamental misconception that he is laboring under.  The reality is this: “Because these hands were made for chalices, they were made for calluses.”  And not just priestly hands, of course.  Christian hands were made for calluses.  After all, I’m pretty sure that he who laid the foundations of the world and became a carpenter in Palestine, developed some pretty significant calluses of his own.  If calluses are good enough for our Lord, I hope that they are good enough for me and for you.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

18 October 2009

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia