AKMA’s Random Thoughts

The Sesquicentennial Sermon

I didn’t make any wrong dance steps (which at Christ Church is saying a little, because the liturgical choreography here is more fine-tuned than in most kung-fu movies, and the consequences of error as lethal). I remembered some of the expected moves, and for others I responded quickly to cues from the Master of Ceremonies (who was but a wee college student when I served here). I don’t think I’ll be on the local evening news, but someone from Christ Church will be.

It was a joy to see again some long-ago friends, to find out that the catcher whom I coached in Little League is finishing up his medical residency in New York, that a daughter I didn’t even know is ordained and serving a parish in Kansas, and so on. Best of all was seeing that a historic Anglo-Catholic parish, beset by waves of troubles over a long haul, can pull itself together and regroup in solidarity and determination to thrive again. With joy for that accomplishment, and with hope for other such institutions, I preached the following sermon (warning: some readers may recognize bits from previous sermons in other locations!), with special intention for the blessed memory of Sam Frye, who was born on the doorstep of the church, raised in the church, served the church as sexton for decades, and who died and was buried from Christ Church during my time as an priest-associate. (not done editing as of 4:30 EST; at 12:20 AM (!) I think I’ve caught most of the character and punctuation problems — goodnight!)

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Sesquicentennial Processional and Solemn Mass

4 January, 2004

Christ Church, New Haven

Jeremiah 31:7-14/Psalm 84/Ephesians 1:3-6, 15-19a/Matthew 2:1-12

“I pray that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which God has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe.”

+ In the name of God Almighty, the Blessed Trinity
One substance undivided, and ever in persons three. Amen.

One moment we and those other wise men from the East were leading ordinary lives, minding our own Gentile business, consulting our charts, going through the daily motions, punching the clock; and the next minute we were chasing down some elusive sign from heaven, tracking God’s glory from home to who-knows-where, when providentially we fell in with a procession who could help us find our way (one of the useful functions of a procession, after all, being to show us, lead us, where we ought to go). One moment our world was gray and bland, pallid, dull; and then, by obscure hints and incandescent lures, we found ourselves among a people proclaiming a glory whose attraction we could no longer resist. The moment our shared journey began, the plainness of our Gentile life was all over.

The pallor that had benumbed us ebbed and faded as we encountered a love unknown, a love so awful that we can answer it only with love. That dullness disappeared as we scented the savor of an unimaginable glory impressing its divine mark on our lives. That blandness evaporated around us, for now that we have tasted the heavenly gift we have begun a transformation that costs us our precious selves, that flavors us with a salty way of life that only a lifetime’s seasoning will truly infuse in us. Whether from now on we accept God’s gift, and stagger unsteadily toward a rising star, or on the other hand resist and close our hearts to the vital majesty of the glory set before us, our whole lives are at stake, now. Les jeux sont faits; the die is cast; and we beckon our friends, family, all, to come join our procession, for although we have to stop for directions now and then, although Herod and his minions may threaten us, oppress us, may destroy our mortal flesh, yet we’ve recognized that this way leads to heaven’s glory, and we wish nothing less than that God bring us with everyone to sing aloud on the height of Zion.

Now, as a procession of Gentiles, we meander toward heaven’s glory along a precarious path. We who come to God as outsiders, strangers to the Law and the Promises, as disinherited orphans of a secular world, we dare not push aside the children of God’s inviolate covenant. We look to God in hope, squeezing into the royal wedding feast at the last moment; it’s tempting to boast that we are numerous, that the beloved Son has called us his friends, it’s tempting boorishly to gate-crash into a sanctuary that properly belongs to our neighbors — but in the moment that we children of grace boast, we shrug off God’s free gift of adoption. We Gentiles can’t afford to risk that audacity, we can’t squander grace to buy the illusion of privilege.

We may want to be able to lay claim to God’s favor as though we had earned it, as though the glorious star risen in the East were ours to grasp and brandish and manipulate to our purposes, but that’s a shrill imposture. No one can enlist grace to mortal purposes; no one can dictate terms to grace. God may permit people to try to hide from grace, to insulate themselves from grace; it’s not God’s way, after all, to force grace upon anyone. But God’s grace then makes itself effective among us, around us, as a kind of chain reaction in our world: as the plot of a complicated story suddenly begins unwinding, unveiling both confusion and truth, misapprehension and understanding, obscurity and revelation; as one explosion in an armory ignites another, and that four more, and those even others; as Jeremiah prophesied, so it has happened and so it will happen. Joseph and Mary are there from the beginning. They watch as the prophecies about God and God’s salvation come into focus, reveal the ways that the God we have known and loved is so much greater than our wildest dreams allowed, and they watch as in Christ Jesus the Law itself expands, explodes and reveals the Truth that dwells at Law’s heart — and reaches beyond it.

When that Truth is turned loose, all manner of outrageous things are liable to happen. Walls tumble down, compassion brings strangers together, our flesh’s impulses and desires turn away from getting and keeping, toward offering and sharing. As we follow the Star of Truth, a spirit of wisdom and revelation enlightens our eyes and our hearts, and we suddenly can recognize the brilliant, celestial hope to which God has called us. The cynicism, the suspicion and ordinariness of daily life in the twenty-first century falls away like the gray mist of morning, and the blazing clear light of God’s love displays the radiant majesty of hope, attracting those who have eyes to see or ears to hear, leading wise (and not-so-wise) Gentiles to bring their precious gifts of wealth, of praise, of service, to offer as our way of sharing the greatest Gift of all.

Just that clear heavenly radiance, manifest in the birth of a boy child in Bethlehem of Judea, began unraveling the tangled mess that the powers of this age have made out of our world. A chain reaction: a baby boy, born in simple poverty, initiated strictly according to the liturgical rituals of God’s chosen people, and in an instant everything is different; time is blessed with explosive truth, Law is fulfilled with superabundant mercy, Gentiles come to worship not a star but a Son, paying homage with gifts of gold, frankincense, myrrh, as God’s chosen people are enveloped and accompanied by an innumerable multitude, dozens of dozens of thousands of sisters and brothers, now from every tribe and family and people and nation, all singing praise to the Father of glory, whom hitherto Israel alone had known as God’s firstborn children.

We’re caught up now, this very day, in the effects of a tremendous chain reaction set in motion before the foundation of the world, catalyzed more than two thousand years ago with the birth of Jesus Christ, by whose name we are called. That chain reaction shot out from Jerusalem to Antioch, Alexandria, Ephesus, even to Rome, Byzantium, to Canterbury, and in due time on to New Haven. Its slow but inexorable effects reach down through the years to us, through founding and growth, through conflict and restoration, through sorrow and exaltation, transforming our hearts, transforming bread and wine, transforming every element of a reluctant world into an icon of the God who created all things to be a blessing. That chain reaction teases, tinges every dimension of every morning, afternoon, evening, with the immeasurable greatness of God’s power. The transformative effects of that reaction encounter us vividly in our seeing, hearing, taste, smell, touch, the sensual clues to transcendent grace. That grace brought us here this morning, when we might have chosen so many other alluring Sunday-morning activities; that grace fills our hearts with the peace that passes our understanding.
One moment we were indeed leading ordinary Gentile lives, but now we’ve been caught up in a tremendous parade of saints, saints and sinners, traipsing, processing to glory. Teetering between timidity and presumption, we draw near to God confidently, humbly, unable to conceal our joy that we, too, have been adopted as children of God through Jesus Christ, to receive a portion of the riches of God’s glorious inheritance among the saints. We point our steps toward the goal that Jeremiah describes for us: joining with ransomed Jacob we travellers rejoice in God’s bounty, radiant in the goodness of the Lord. Radiant, because the joy of participating in heaven’s sublime harmony overflows from our hearts, because at last we recognize all our sisters and brothers in the company of Hilda and Peter and Paul and Mary Ever-Blessed, dwelling in God’s house ’ because all of us, with unveiled faces, have begun within these walls, among these dear friends, on these streets and in the hands to which we offer soup and spare change, we all have begun to see the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, and in seeing that reflection we ourselves are transformed into the same image from glory to glory. Radiant, because a hundred-fifty years of ceaseless shared prayers and shared praise strengthen our voices, echo our song, join in our genuflections and amplify our Alleluias, raising in our own voices the resonance of generations of our sisters and brothers who have gathered at this altar, testifying together to the glory of the Lord God who is both sun and shield. Such a glory will not be stifled but must radiate, and the light of that glory leads us ever onward into the sunlight of righteousness.
We came here in a procession, extending not only through the nave and around the aisles, extending not only from Broadway out to Fairfield and Cheshire and Washington, from all New England, from north and south and midwest, indeed from the farthest parts of the earth: a procession including not only all of us living and breathing here, but also Sam Frye, Father Morgan, the Edwards sisters, the Oxford Apostles, monarchs, martyrs, widows, evangelists, virgins, and plain honest disciples whose lives have been caught up and transformed into the likeness of the holiness they’ve learned dwelling at this threshold of the house of our God. The eyes of our hearts enlightened by the grace of the Lord, reflecting the radiance of the star that leads beyond us, knowing that this procession of saints leads not just backwards, behind us to Bethlehem, but ahead of us to Zion. We climb from the low-lying gray fog and dullness and obscurity toward the crystalline clarity of God’s presence, to the height of Zion where we will sing and dance, overwhelmed with joy, participating endlessly the fullness of God’s gift, perfected in donation, radiant with the light of heaven’s glory.

+ AMEN +

Posted by AKMA at January 4, 2004 03:19 PM | TrackBack