“The Old Order Changeth:” A Sermon on Luke 2: 22-40

[Delivered at St. Bartholomew’s Church, February 2, 2020]

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Today’s gospel reading—as well as the reading from Malachi—have a wintry feel to them. They seem designed for a dark night, a cold night. You might expect the presentation of our Lord at the Temple—the ritual purification of the child Jesus and his acceptance as a member of the people of Israel—to be a joyous event. And, in a way, it is. But there are undercurrents throughout the story that hint at a tragic dimension to the occasion.

In Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s, finale to his epic poem cycle “The Idylls of the King,” the last poem is titled, simply, “The Passing of Arthur.” In that poem, Sir Bedivere brings the dying king to the river, and places him in a barge in which four Queens sit, ready to take Arthur to Avilon for healing. And, seeing his king resting in the boat, Bedivere comes to a realization: It’s over. The story in which Bedivere was a character has ended. He exclaims “For now I see the true old times are dead/… Such times have been not since the light that led
The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh.” And now, Sir Bedivere, the last survivor, must “go forth companionless,
And the days darken round me, and the years,
Among new men, strange faces, other minds."

Arthur’s answer brings Bedivere no comfort. He simply replies, “The old order changeth, yielding place to new.”

And that is what is happening in the Temple. Jesus’s presentation is the culmination of Simeon’s life—and the end of it. The righteous and devout old man had learned from the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah. But now that the day has come, the old servant of the Lord knows that his time has ended—he has been dismissed in peace, and his part in the story of God and the people of God is almost at an end.

But first he has some news to deliver. That Jesus is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed.” So far, so good, but then he adds to Mary that “a sword will pierce your own soul too.” The uncomprehending parents are amazed. Even more when the prophet Anna approaches and begins to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.

The news is profoundly mixed, that it is hard to imagine how Joseph and Mary could respond to it. Joseph can’t help but be aware that his own presence in the crowning moments of the story is not alluded to—this good, gentle man who was willing to spare Mary shame and disgrace even before the Angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream—well, indications are that he won’t see the redemption of Israel through the child who is, by his mercy—and yes, his obedience to God’s call, his son at least in the eyes of the Lord.

Joseph knows only that the story will go on, and that, like Simeon himself, that he has played his part thus far.

But Mary—Mary is promised nothing but that a “sword will pierce her soul too.”

We know, because we know how the story turns out, that the sword will not be literal; it will be the mother’s agony of seeing her beloved son rise to great heights, only to be disgraced and executed by the tortuous methods of the Roman Empire, a death reserved only for rebels and traitors.

What are the parents to make of this prophecy, glorious and dire, terrifying and yet hopeful, culminating in the redemption of Israel?

So we look to the reading from Malachi for comfort, or at least illumination.

We do not get comfort. But possibly some light.

The unknown prophet named by tradition as Malachi starts off on a joyful note--the Lord whom we seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom we delight—he is coming. But then the prophet asks us, darkly, “But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?”

He tells us that the Lord will refine us like silver—which involves a lot of fire—and the experience will be like cleansing garments with fuller’s soap. Now, fuller's soap is not Ivory Snow, or some nice gentle cleanser that softens your hands while you do the dishes. It’s made of alkali, urine and chalk. It’s like taking a bath in bleach, only it smells worse. A lot worse.

What on earth is going on with these readings? How can the day of the Lord be joyous, if we must ask if we can stand in it? How can the redemption of Israel be welcomed if it comes with so much loss?

What does it mean to welcome the new if we are of the old order?
Susan Howatch in her final Starbridge novel, Absolute Truths depicts an aging bishop, Charles Ashworth, recently widowed, who sees himself, as, in his own words, “living out those terrifying lines from Tennyson, “the old order changeth, yielding place to new.”

His own son, also a priest in the Church of England, dances with the lovely young daughter of a colleague, while the father grieves his losses, the passing away of the comfortable, secure world in which he flourished.

And he nearly loses himself his disdain for the cheap, vulgar, flashy era in which he is condemned to live, a traditionalist bishop in a radical time, a staunch believer in an age in which the absolute truths by which he has always set such store are rejected by the culture around him, and the church itself seems increasingly less relevant and less able to communicate to a people that horde, and sleep and feed, and know not me, as Tennyson writes in “Ulysses.”

And then, young Rachel breaks away from Ashworth’s son, and holds out her hands to the bishop, inviting him to dance. He accepts Rachel’s invitation, and, as they waltz, he recognizes the generosity, the kindness of the younger set—Charley happily admiring his father’s dancing skill, and Rachel reaching out to the formidable old bishop whose bereavement is common knowledge. As Ashworth, our narrator tells us, “I danced, and I danced, and I danced”—all the while grieving for that precious old order, but also realizing that if the new order can reach out in sympathetic love to the old, than the old order, in yielding place to new, must do so in love—with grace if it can mange it.

Historians have written of decades that throw a shadow into the decades that follow them—the “long 1960s”, which continued into the 1970s.

And now we are living in what they are beginning to call the “Long 1980s.” Not the real 1980s, you understand, but a sclerotic as-remembered version of them, with macho preening, culture wars, and a divide between left and right, city and rural, that seems to go on and on, with ferocious heat, but oh, so very little light.

We keep fighting, over and over, the battles of yesteryear, trying to ignore the fraying of our national fabric, and the threats of the 2020s that are, increasingly looming over us—the catastrophic harms threatened by climate change will not be put off by rallies and slogans, as we waste what time there is left to mitigate the harm.

But nothing lasts forever. Somewhere under the ice, whether for weal or woe, is stirring a new Era to replace the long 1980s.

And, eventually, the ice will crack, and the new era will come.

The old order changeth, yielding to new.

That change won’t be easy. Like Sir Bedivere, we look for safe ground on which to stand, and find none. Change can be painful—it can be like the refining of silver, like being washed in fullers soap.

The comfortable world of consensus that I can remember as a young man was only comfortable because it excluded voices who questioned injustices and inequities that papered over divides. The structures and social codes that many of us assume as a given are being tested and failing. Much that we are used to will be lost, or altered out of recognition. Much needs to be, as we are seeing the trust in the legitimacy of our national political branches erode ever further.

What will never change, what will never alter, is this: Jesus’s message that only by reaching out in love, however hard that is to live up to, is how we break the logjam. Reaching out in love doesn’t mean we don’t feel anger, or that we just surrender to those whose vision of the world appalls us. It means that we remember their humanity. That they are as much the beloved children of God as we are. That, like us, they are 100 % sinner and 100% saint. Because love is not an emotion; it’s a promise.

How do we stand up to the day of the Lord?

Love.

Don’t ever give up on love.

Because, as I’ve told you before, hate is always foolish, but love, love is always wise.

In the Name of God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.

The Problem of Non-Parables: A Sermon on Luke 20: 27-38

[Delivered at St. Bartholomew;s Church, NYC, November 10, 2019]

Sometimes the Gospel readings are so self-evident that it’s almost impossible to miss the point, that the difficulty in writing a sermon on it is not just re-stating the obvious lesson.

Sure, we sometimes want to hide from the implications of those Gospel readings for our own lives, but shutting out the Gospel to maintain our own comfortable existence is a struggle against out desire to not want to know where we are going wrong. Think of Jesus’s telling us that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

That’s hard.

We struggle with it.

And one way of struggling with that is to domesticate it, paper over the chasm between what Jesus teaches us and the lessons of the culture in which we live. Of course, to do that, we have to deceive ourselves as to what Jesus is telling us. Or, as Susan Howatch so memorably paraphrased Jesus, “High and wide is the gate which leads to self-deception and illusion, but for those seeking truth, strait is the gate and narrow the way—and brave is the woman or man who can journey there.” [Glittering Images, 190].

With parables, of course, we have to look for the meaning—C.H. Dodd in the 1930s and Joachim Jeremias in the 1950s and 60s pioneered the art of stripping away the centuries of allegory and theology that well-meaning preachers like me have added to the parables, and tried to recover them as Jesus’s audience would have experienced them and heard them. And then they had to deal with Gospel warnings that the disciples outside the Twelve were told parables so that they could hear, but not understand, and be lost.

And today’s discussion between Jesus and the Saducees has been the source of reams of speculation on the nature of the afterlife, from the Church Fathers to our own day. Will we really be pure souls, loving only God, and no longer those who have enriched our journeys below?

Are we really hoping and aspiring to enter the kind of afterlife that led Mark Twain to recommend heaven for climate, but hell for company?

But, hold on—aren’t we missing something here?

We aren’t dealing with a parable today. No, this is part of a test of Jesus’s acumen.

Specifically, of his legal acumen.

Which means we are, at long last, playing on my home turf.

The legal test comes in two prongs. The first question, posed by the scribes and Pharisees, involves them showing Jesus a coin, and asking if it is lawful to pay the Emperor tax. This question is an effort to put him into a Hobson’s Choice, a question where there is no safe or good answer. It’s as much a test of Jesus’s political savvy as of his legal ability—will he slight the Emperor or the Torah?

Jesus brushes this one away easily. He asks whose name and image is on the coin, and, being told that the name and image are Caesar’s, he simply answers, give to Caesar what is Caesar’s—and to God the things that are God’s.

Now that is a good answer. Succinct and to the point, but, best of all, avoiding the political pitfall of advocating denying the legal authorities their due, without slighting the legal responsibilities under Jewish law. Clever, unanswerable, unassailable. Advantage, Jesus.

The next question, though, is like something out of torts class. A tort is a civil wrong—an accident, or act of negligence that harms someone in their person and their property. And torts professors are famous for their a long, detailed hypothetical stories, in which an improbable series of events are posited to make you question the legal fundamentals.

The classic torts class hypothetical used when I was in law school was based on a real case: Palsgraf v. Long Island Rail Road. So a woman named Helen Palsgraf decided to take her two girls to the beach in 1924. This was her big mistake. While she was waiting to board the Long Island Rail Road train, an earlier train pulls in, and, as she’s waiting, two men start getting on the train. One of them is lugging a package along with the help of sme LIRR employees. They drop the package, it explodes, a piece of shrapnel hit a large coin-operated scale on the platform, which teeters over and hits Mrs. Palsgraf. After this incident she develops a stutter, and sues the LIRR.

So how about it?

Is the LIRR liable?

Or to use an actual Talmudic legal question summarized by Herman Wouk in his Inside, Outside a cow is tethered in a market. It kicks a stone, which flies into a market stall shattering a vase. Is the cow’s owner liable?

By the way, that one is so well known in the Talmud, that it’s just summarized as “Stone in market—so what?”

Here, instead of the ricocheting shrapnel, or the bovine launched rock, we have the legal hypothetical of the perennial widow. Seven bridegrooms for one wife, they all fall down.

So, say these Sadducees, who don’t believe in the Resurrection of the Dead, in the next life, whose wife is she, anyway?

They’re trying, of course, to make the Resurrection look silly, and to make Jesus look silly for defending it. Their regular opponents, the priests and the scribes, can’t be happy—they don’t like Jesus any better than the Sadducees do, but this is not just Jesus under attack, but their own special belief is being made to look ridiculous, along with Jesus.

In other words, unlike a torts hypothetical, it’s not a question posed in good faith to test the limits of doctrine.

So Jesus does what’s called in fencing a “disengage.” That’s when a fencer tries to block her opponent’s sword, and then lunge, but the other fencer—well, the other fencer moves her sword under the first fencer’s sword, and now controls the bout.

Jesus disengages with the question by denying its premise; rather than talk about whose wife she is, he tells us, “those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage.”

So, she’s nobody’s wife. Indeed, she “cannot die anymore, because she, [and all they who are resurrected], are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection.”

Then Jesus knocks out the Sadducee with a simple appeal to the Torah; the story of the burning bush, where Moses “speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,” and adds that “he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”

Game, set and match.

It’s a wonderful example of how the itinerant preacher from Nazareth keeps besting the sharpest minds of his own tradition when they try to trip him up.

But is there more to it?

Well, let me suggest two implications of Jesus’s words. First, Jesus tells us straightforwardly that the long-dead patriarchs were alive to God in Moses’s day, and in Jesus’s own day. Jesus teaches us that he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive."

Second, terrible use has been made in Christian teaching of hell, as a place of eternal punishment and suffering. Yet when Jesus speaks to the Sadducee about the resurrection of the dead, he makes very clear that only those who are worthy of resurrection will see it.

How do these two statements match up—how is that all are alive to God, and yet only the worthy will see the resurrection of the dead?

And, I think back of the Lutheran Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber, who reminds us that:

God's grace is not defined as God being forgiving to us even though we sin. Grace is when God is a source of wholeness, which makes up for my failings. My failings hurt me and others and even the planet, and God's grace to me is that my brokenness is not the final word .... Grace is God saying, "I love the world too much to let your sin define you and be the final word.

Or, as she also says, “We’re all sinners, we’re all saints, 100 % of the time.”

In other words, we are here to come to the table of a God who loves us in all our brokenness, who is always working to redeem us. And who is always trying to coax us into playing our own part in the redemptive process—forgiving others as we have been forgiven, and freeing them to go on, doing the same.

Passing the redemptive love around—like we pass around communion bread, but more intentionally. Understanding, as out bishop told us in his address at Diocesan Convention yesterday, that we need to redeem our time, because our time is evil, and the accelerating disdain among our conflicting tribes is bringing that evil into ever greater potency.

When Bishop Dietsche finished his address, I couldn’t help but think of Leonard Cohen’s song, “The Future,” where Cohen tells us us:

You don't know me from the wind/
You never will, you never did
I'm the little Jew/
Who wrote the Bible


I've seen the nations rise and fall
I've heard their stories, heard them all

But love's the only engine
 of survival.

And, in essence, that’s what our bishop told us yesterday, that only reaching out across our divides in love, dropping our hostility, and meeting people where they are, and as who they are, can create the Beloved Community we all yearn to belong to.

To do our part in that cycle of redemption, we have to accept that we are all broken, all sinners, all saints, and that it’s from our brokenness that—to steal another Cohen line—that’s how the light gets in.

And that light is the light of God.

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Struggle and Survival: A Sermon on Luke 18:1-8; 2 Tim 3:14-4:5 & Genesis 32:22-31

When I was at college in the mid-1980s, I was a member of not one but two theater groups. The well-established theater group, the Fordham Mimes and Mummers, was where I got to act in Rostand’s The Romancers, play a campy Bob Cratchit (by way of Eric Idle) in A Christmas Carol, and play supporting parts in The Tempest and Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians (Yes, I was the murderer. Why do you ask?)

The newer, smaller one was the Fordham Experimental Theater, where I got to play the primary guard in Jean Anouilh’s Antigone—which meant I got to be the main collaborator with Creon, who Anouilh casts as the Nazi regime.

But the play that comes to my mind in respect to today’s reading is one we didn’t do, in either group: Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser. We didn’t do it, but this story of a World War II era acting troupe led by an aging Shakespearean actor and his wife, propped up by the backstage employee who props up the troupe by keeping the leading man functioning, was one that struck home with one of my friends.

What touched my friend most in the play was how, whenever disaster befell—or they were about to go on stage, which is not the same thing, the long-married couple would turn to each other, and one would say “struggle” and the other respond: “survival.”

Struggle and Survival.

Bear them in mind, because the appointed readings for today may seem ill-assorted, but if you look at them through the lens of “struggle and survival” you may see the common thread linking them all.

Jacob, wrestling with an angel, refusing to let go until he receives a blessing.

Paul, writing his protégé Timothy, urging him to “be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable.”
And Jesus telling the peculiar parable of the Widow and the Unjust Judge.

These three stories give us the same advice, in very different ways, and I think in these chaotic times, it’s one we—us, gathered tonight in this chapel, need:

Endure. Don’t give up. Don’t leave before the miracle happens.

We are living in historic, if perverse, times. Impeachment of the President is stealthily brewing in the background, the United States House and Senate ring with denunciations of our abandonment of our Kurdish allies, and, all the while, we drift further apart from our fellow citizens, divided by clouds of distrust, and, all too often, of increasing dislike.

It’s a grey and cold time, this era of ours, whatever the weather. A time in which anxieties about our country’s very nature are muted, but always present. A time when we feverishly look for a solution, an answer, a way to find our way back to normal. We search the blogs, the tweets, hoping for something to resolve this long, tedious and yet fearful waiting process.

Endure.

Or maybe you’ll like Churchill’s version better: Never give up, never give in, never surrender.

Persist, says St. Paul, and despite the dreariness of these times, we are called to persist.

Jesus’s parable of the Widow and the Unjust Judge teaches us that persistence is necessary to gain justice. He describes for us an unjust judge, a man who fears neither God nor man, and has respect for nobody. A judge who rules by his own self-interest and profit, his own whim, who doesn’t care a bit for justice. And he rules in just that way until one day—poor man—he meets a certain widow.

Now, remember that in Jesus’s day, to be a widow was to helpless and vulnerable—not quite an outcast, but relegated to the margins of the community.

At first, the unjust judge ignores the widow with his usual contempt, and dismisses her cries for justice.

But, nevertheless, she persisted, and her loud cries of “give me justice against my opponent” began to grate on him. She got under his skin, and became a burden to her. Finally, simply to be rid of her, he grants her the justice she demands, and to which she is entitled—not because it’s his duty (though it is, of course), but because he can’t bear not to anymore. Even though he fears neither God nor man, and has no respect for anybody, he simply can’t go on.

So he does the right deed, for the wrong reason—which T. S. Eliot tells us is the greatest treason.

But is it?

Just why can’t the unjust judge bear her complaints any more?

It can’t be because she’s offensively loud—he could have her thrown out.

It can’t be because she’s yet another litigant who keeps pestering him, because the story only makes sense if it’s this one widow who keeps coming back.

And what about that? In ancient as in modern law, you normally only get one chance with any one claim. However it comes out in the first case is final, and forbids any further claims—what in Latin lawyers call res judicata—the thing has been decided. So just toss her out. As many times as it takes.

No. he doesn’t even try.

So what is it?

Isn’t it likely that she keeps turning to him as the just man he is supposed to be, and that her perpetual cries refuse to let him be the lawless, selfish man he has become?

Isn’t she calling to the depths of his soul, trying to awaken the younger judge, the man who wanted at some point to do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly with his God?

And doesn’t the shadow, deeply buried within him, of that idealistic younger former self, once awakened, call him back to himself ?

In other words, the widow won’t let the old rascal off the hook. She won’t accept the venal man he has become.

She won’t give up on him.

Jesus uses this parable as a metaphor for prayer, and the need to persist in prayer. He tells us that, unlike the unjust judge, God will grant us what we ask without long delay. God will grant justice to God’s children—those who choose to walk with God, who answer the call to become partners in the ongoing creation of God’s world.

And then Jesus hesitates—after assuring us that God will swiftly grant us justice, Jesus muses, asking quietly “And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the Earth?”

What he’s really asking is can we—you and I—refuse to give up in the face of the silence of God, in the face of disappointment and loss. Can we trust in God so much that even as we wait, we refuse to believe that God can or will ever abandon us.

And if we can put our trust in God so firmly that we do not allow even for the possibility that God will break faith with us—as the Psalmist often accuses God—then our prayers return to us. Not with easy answers and wish fulfillment, but with the conviction that, just as we won’t entertain the concept that God will fail us, so too neither will God entertain the thought that we will fail God. That God will never doubt that we—yes, you and I are capable of persisting with the widow, and never accepting that those who oppose us are not worthy of love. That we are capable of wrestling with the angels, and finding that we are renamed, no longer merely Jacob, but the new creation Israel, maybe only a drop of water in the eternally rolling sea, but a drop that sparkles with the sunlight, and changes all around it.

We can, like Paul and Timothy, pray, act, teach and do what comes to hand, knowing that our work is never in vain.

In Susan Howatch’s novel Absolute Truths, the sculptor Harriet March—an avowed atheist—teaches Bishop Charles Ashworth, our narrator, a lesson about creation. Charles applies Harriet’s lesson to God’s creation, and realizes:

“Harriet had touched that sculpture with a loving hand long ago, and in that touch I sensed the indestructible fidelity, the indescribable devotion and the inexhaustible energy of the creator as he shaped his creation, bringing life out of dead matter, wresting form continually from chaos. Nothing was ever lost, Harriet had said, and nothing was ever wasted because always, when the work was finally completed, every article of the created process, seen or unseen, kept or discarded, broken or mended – EVERYTHING was justified, glorified and redeemed.”

We have to remember that, and be like the widow. It’s not enough to cry out for justice for ourselves. We have to recall oour opponents to their best, truest selves. We have to fight our own demons, our own anger, our own prejudices, and cry out for justice for all—even—no, especially for the other, the one we fear, the one we hate.

Our struggle, our survival, only comes with a blessing if everyone is included, if everyone is justified, gloried, and redeemed.

Nevertheless, she persisted.

May we go forth and do likewise.