Knowing Justice

In both our Old Testament and Gospel readings lurks the questions of theodicy, from the Greek meaning literally “justifying God.” That is, justifying an almighty and an all good God, when we are faced with injustice and evil, and we see bad things happening to good people and good things happening to bad people. So, when God says to Moses, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt,” he is responding to questions that Moses has at least been asking himself.

So here’s Moses’s backstory. Moses was an Israelite, saved by Pharoah’s daughter from Pharaoh’s order that all Israelite newborn boys be killed in order to keep the Israelites from multiplying so much that they might overwhelm the Egyptians. Raised Egyptian, at some point, Moses learned of his Israelite heritage, because we are told earlier in Exodus, “he went out to his kinsmen and saw their enslavement.” And when he saw an Egyptian overseer abusing an Israelite slave, Moses killed him out of a sense of outraged justice. But then Moses learned that his fellow Israelites didn’t see necessarily the justice in it, when the next day, he intervened between two Israelites fighting each other, and one said to him, “are you going to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” So, Moses ran away to Midian, north of Egypt, settled down with his wife and his father-in-law, Jethro, and seemed content to be a shepherd.

The Only Promise that Endures

God’s promise and human betrayal lurk in both the Old and New Covenant readings today. And while one might pass all the betrayal off onto Jesus’s fellow Jews — in whom he was clearly disappointed — we Gentiles should, if anything, consider how we have betrayed Jesus’s promise of motherly protection for the two millennia since this Gospel.

To recap the Abraham story: Before he became Abraham, Abram heard this lone unseen God calling him to leave his ancestral home in what is now southern Iraq, and the local gods of that land, for another land that this lone unseen God would show him, which turned out to be Canaan, later to be called Israel. And the promise was that Abram and Sarai (later Sarah) would become a great nation, and that “all nations on Earth will be blessed on you.” But to be a great nation, Abram and Sarai need children, which it is clear from today’s reading, they don’t have. And though Abram trusts the promise of the LORD about descendants as numerous as the stars, to paraphrase the Russian proverb made famous by President Reagan, Abram may trust but he still wants verification.

So we have this ritualized killing and dividing of animals — presumably belonging to Abram, thus a significant loss of value — and then Abram waiting. There are records of this kind of extremely solemn covenant in ancient history, in which the two parties would walk between the halves of those animals, thus agreeing to be treated the same if they betrayed the covenant. So, when the fire pot and torch seem to levitate between the pieces, it would seem that this lone unseen God is carrying them between the divided pieces of animals as verification of an extravagant promise of descendants as numerous as the stars, and of a nation stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates.

Maybe this was already clear, or not. But these are Jesus’s temptations, not ours. We have no power to change chemicals with a word. No one has died and made us king of the world. And we are all reasonably convinced that gravity is still a thing. Maybe other times we need to identify with Jesus as in the acronym WWJD. But none of us could do what Jesus could have done in those three temptations. But, we do need to distinguish between what Jesus was tempted to do and the all-too human temptations that the accusing angel, called Satan or the devil, was throwing at Jesus’s face, daring him to chose the easy path to compel our obedience.

When it comes to personifying evil, even when using explicit satanic images and characters, Hollywood has clearly not read the Bible. God is not the protagonist, nor is Satan the antagonist, and between them the dramatic suspense of not knowing who’s going to win. But throughout the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, it has been revealed to us that all God’s creatures are at risk of not trusting their Creator, and thus rebelling against them, even those more spiritual creatures that we call angels. At least one appears to have questioned the wisdom of creating beings who would know that they were material while their Creator was not, and that this made it more likely that they would fall into mistrust and rebellion. That angel is called Satan or the Devil. But in both cases, their name means — Accuser. And we are the ones they accuse, and demand that God hand over custody to. If you want to know where to find the “demonic” in this world, look for the signs of accusation, in others perhaps or perhaps within ourselves.

We are not alone in the Breach

This day is both personally, and communally painful. As individuals we are still called this Lent to find that “secret” place where only you, or I, and our God can see. In fact, at least initially, it is only the Father who “sees in secret.” We don’t just hide things from others, or pretend we can hide them from God; we also hide them from ourselves. Do we really want to know why we keep doing what we consciously know we shouldn’t do, or do we want to keep classifying them to ourselves? Lent isn’t about making a checklist of our “don’ts” and resolving on our own not to do them anymore (When has that worked?). Lent is about finding that secret place in our hearts where we can declassify the motives for why we do the things we do, and discovering that the Father has known them all along, and is still with us in this secret place, loving us still.

But as I said at the beginning, we are here as one people, declassifying those secrets of communal responsibility that are perhaps, even harder for us to face than our individual failings. “We confess to you, Lord … our exploitation of other people … Accept our repentance, Lord … for our indifference to injustice and cruelty … our prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us … our waste and pollution of your creation, and our lack of concern for those who come after us.” Each of us may say we’re not responsible for what our ancestors did, but we all still benefit from what they took from others.

Transfigured Calluses

            The Feast of the Transfiguration is traditionally celebrated on August 6th. But starting with the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, we also commemorate the Transfiguration on the Sunday before Lent. In Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus’s transfiguration comes within days of his first prediction of his death and resurrection. So, on the Sunday before we begin to re-present the journey to Jerusalem, the cross and the empty tomb, the Transfiguration reminds us of the ultimate goal of this journey we’re on: what the Orthodox Church calls theosis, defined by St, Irenaeus in this way: He (Christ) became what we are so that we might become what he is.

Hear what Saint Paul says in today’s epistle — And all of us, with our faces unveiled, seeing the glory of the Lord as in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image, from one degree of glory into another, as by the Spirit of the Lord — or transfigured would be as accurate a translation as transformed. Last week I spoke of the transphysical resurrected body of Jesus that all of us shall someday share. That will be us becoming what he is, or theosis.

Unfortunately, to get to that insight in this second Letter to the Corinthians, Paul engaged in some nasty polemics with Jewish Christians who insisted that the Gentiles had to effectively become Jews — get circumcised, observe all the ceremonial laws of the Torah, not just the moral laws — before they could become Christians. Thus, Paul wrongly interprets the veil with which Moses covered his face as a veil of spiritual blindness. Of course, Christians today are above such polemics, right?

Possibilities

Two weeks ago I preached the Good News, or Gospel, from Saint Paul of the “raising of the corpses,” the less delicate version of the “resurrection of the dead.” What Paul preached to those Corinthians who doubted the raising of the corpses was the physicality of the resurrection. Today, he responds directly to their, and perhaps our doubts.

First, he uses the same metaphor that Jesus uses in John’s Gospel of a seed that must die to being a seed so that it can be transformed into fruit. Just because the seed may no longer be visible to the naked eye doesn’t mean that its properties aren’t contained in the fruit. Similarly, Jesus’s resurrected body could just appear in a locked room, or not be recognized by two disciples who walked with him all afternoon on the road to Emmaus. And yet he could tell Thomas to stick his finger into his open wounds, or eat a piece of broiled fish. The body his disciples had seen and touched for three years was clearly different after the resurrection, yet still physical. The great Anglican biblical scholar N.T. Wright describes his resurrected body as transphysical, no less physical but transformed.

Then, Paul describes the resurrected body that we too shall share with Jesus in a way that most English translations of the Greek miss — It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body — Does that sound like Paul is contradicting everything I just said he’s saying? The Greek word that the NRSV mistakenly translates as “physical” is psyche, from which we get “psychology,” the science of the human mind, or in the original meaning of psyche, the soul, which is not the same as the spirit. Spirit belongs to God, the soul is our small share of that Spirit. And inevitably, our physical bodies must let go of that soul, which returns to its divine creator until that day when soul and body are reunited in a resurrection transphysical.

The Holy Space In Between

These are the other Beatitudes, from the Sermon on the Plain, not Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, because in today’s Gospel from Luke we’re told that Jesus “looked up at his disciples,” as opposed to Matthew’s version, where Jesus went up a mountain and his disciples came up to him. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus’s beatitudes are more spiritualized — Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of Heaven is theirs — in contrast to Luke’s — Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God — And if that isn’t enough — Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.

In Matthew, Jesus looks down from his high and holy place to dispense divine wisdom. In Luke, Jesus looks up, not just at his disciples, but at “a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon,” Gentile territory. Here, Jesus is within the people, including the poor and hungry. And he doesn’t just assure them of a heavenly reward, but that their empty stomachs will be filled, as Mary praised God in her song — He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.

That’s another contrast with Matthew — But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. I’m pretty sure that at least some in that “great multitude of people” might have been made to feel uncomfortable. This is a Jesus who seems fully aware that some people need to be filled with justice now, not at the end of this life.

But there do still seem to be some caveats — Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets — That seems pretty directed at his disciples, then and now. Most of us modern western Christians have not suffered anything of real consequence for following Jesus. Most of the claims of persecution I’ve heard are more resentment that we now have to share the public square rather then dominating it. Perhaps this will change as those who worship power seek to co-opt the name of Jesus to favor wealth and power against the Gospel.

So, somewhere between — Blessed are you who are poor — and — for surely your reward is great in heaven — that’s where we disciples are. And somewhere in that between, there will be weeping and there will be defamation, and somewhere in that between there will be leaping and there will be rejoicing. But where exactly is that somewhere in between?

One place might be pages 585–808 in the Book of Common Prayer, the Psalter, the entire Book of Psalms, the largest single section of our Prayer Book by far. Before the 1979 American Prayer Book, there were lectionaries that prescribed psalms to be read in Holy Communion or the Daily Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer, but you needed a separate book to find those psalms. What was included in previous prayer books, English and American, were the readings (Epistle and Gospel) from a one year cycle only. Well now we have a three year cycle of Bible readings, far too much to publish in one Book of Common Prayer. So instead we have the entire book of Psalms, or Songs to God as close to us as our prayer book.

It’s not every Sunday that the Old Testament writer is so obviously cribbing the psalm that we sing in response to the Old Testament reading that’s cribbing the psalm that we sing in response to … The prophet Jeremiah had to have known this particular psalm of David, in which both prophet and psalmist speak of those who trust God as well rooted plants who will be given the rain and soil they need to flourish, while those who scorn their Creator will find themselves no more than chaff blowing in the wind.

It was some inspired editors who later made this psalm number one in the Book of Songs to God, reminding us to start our spiritual life with learning God’s revelation of how to live with each other in justice, peace, and love. And those same inspired editors closed out the Book of Songs to God with number 150 — Hallelujah! Praise God in his holy Temple; praise him in the firmament of his power … Let everything that has breath praise the LORD, Hallelujah — Cerebral study and unrestrained praise are the bookends of our life with God. And in between are all the emotional ups and downs in that relationship with God and each other.

It’s all in a book that we call the Word of God. So, we have divine permission to give voice to all of those up and down emotions: sadness, even despair, righteous anger, conviction and resolve, joy, peace, contentment, trust. And we are reminded also to “listen to what the LORD God is saying, for he is speaking peace to his faithful people and to those who turn their hearts to him,” as we recited last Thursday in our Evening Prayer service from Psalm 85. As you return to that place between pages 585 and 808, the more you will find certain verses just coming to you when you most need to remember them.

In this time and place in between weeping and defamation, leaping and joy, find your place in the psalms, where you will find the holy space to weep, to plead, to protest, to rejoice, to celebrate, and sometimes to wait and trust.

The reason that priests bow at the Sanctus is what you’ve heard from Isaiah this morning. When we sing, we sing the song of the angels: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts...” So as Isaiah confessed his unworthiness before the divine presence, so we priests bow as sign of our unworthiness. Then, like Isaiah, we are quick to say, “Here am I; send me!” Perhaps too quick. Wait, what should I say — Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand? “Then I said, ‘How long, O Lord?’ And he said: ‘Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land is utterly desolate...The holy seed is its stump.’”

Simeon was "looking forward to the consolation of Israel,” and so he had, for a long, long time. Anna, along with the other pilgrims to Jerusalem, was “looking for the redemption of Jerusalem,” and so she had, for a long, long time. Israel was God's chosen people, but they had known little besides conquest and exile and strife and occupation. God's people needed consolation. Simeon needed consolation. And so he had come to the Temple of God's presence, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, to pray for that consolation. Anna had done the same for so many years, praying for the redemption of Jerusalem, the rescue of Jerusalem from her oppressors. How often had Simeon and Anna run into each other in this most holy place, spoke of their hopes, and waited together for God to answer their prayers?

Jesus has indeed fulfilled the purpose of God first spoken by the prophet Isaiah. So all these things are perfectly possible: the inclusion of those who are poor or otherwise outcast; vision for those who can only see what is in front of them; relief from whatever weighs down the body and the soul; forgiveness or release from the claims we hold against each other; and this is the year acceptable to God for that fulfillment of God’s purpose for all of us. And so it has been every day that the Word who was with God, and was God, and who became flesh, has spoken through this Gospel; because every day is an opportunity for those hearing this text to fulfill it.

We always thank God for making us “living members” of the Body of Christ, as in the old meaning of “member,” an arm, leg, hand, finger, organ. If we each become limbs and organs of Christ’s Body in this world, we are also limbs and organs of each other in this “Holy Communion,” as much communion with each other in Christ as communion with Christ: Which makes every Holy Eucharist a kind of marriage renewal with Jesus and each other, bread and wine, limbs and organs. And that communion of food and drink, limbs and organs, continues in our Fellowship Hall named for Frances Perkins with “fellowship” being a frequent translation of the Greek koinonia the root of “communion.” Our fellowship in Perkins Hall is a celebration of the communion and wedding renewal we celebrate in this church.

Unlike Matthew and Mark, Luke reports what they didn’t think important enough. Jesus’ Baptism wasn’t private between him and John — Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized — Luke doesn’t even bother to narrate the actual baptism, just that it had happened in the past tense. John was a lot like a revival preacher setting up a tent in the country and calling people to come hear the Word of God that had come to him, and then repent of their sins by being baptized in the nearest body of water. Matthew and Mark would have known this too, but only Luke thought it a detail worth mentioning. I believe that Luke wants us to understand Jesus’ Baptism as an act of solidarity with his fellow Jews and Israelites. Baptism as an act of solidarity is essential to the Baptism rite in our current prayer book.

“For me, Christmas starts in earnest on Boxing Day,” Jessica Furseth wrote for The Guardian newspaper in a 2023 article headlined, “Boxing week, that blissful period when nothing happens, is the real gift of Christmas.” For those who aren’t aware, in Britian, Canada, and others in the British Commonwealth, Boxing Day is on December 26th, and is traditionally for gift-giving beyond one’s family, for instance your local proprieter or employees. Boxing Day itself is a holiday in those countries, but Furseth expands it to a week, “the only time of year when we can legitimately forget what day it is…The real joy of Boxing week is a feeling that no one is doing anything ‘important’, creating a break from a relentless push for productivity that dominates pretty much every other time of year.”

Fr. David writes, “On the one hand, this is a very human story that all of us can identify with. What parents or other caregivers of children cannot identify with the shock, anguish, and confusion of Mary and Joseph. Who hasn’t felt the adolescent tension between respect owed to parents, and the assertion of newly discovered independence?….”

It was about 2,500 years ago that the Word of God inspired the prophet to speak the words of vindication that we hear in today's reading from Isaiah. It had been in 586 BC that the Babylonians had burned down Jerusalem, burned down that Temple that King David’s son Solomon had built some 500 years earlier. But in 538, the Persian King Cyrus conquered Babylon, and allowed all the peoples conquered by the Babylonians, including the Jews, to return to their homelands. It was actually during that exile that they took the many scriptures they had collected of their history and edited them into what we Christians call today the Old Testament. When the Jewish people returned to Jerusalem, there was no longer a king, for there was only one King in the Persian Empire. Their authority was not a king, but the Torah, the five books of the Law of Moses.

Fr. David writes, “Once, the true Light became concentrated into a point of energy.

Then it exploded into smaller points, all with a trace of the true Light.

In time, creatures evolved to the point of recognizing that trace of light, but still fail to trust the warmth of that light.

So, the Light began to shine like a lighthouse beam, shooting through the darkness to one man and one woman, then to a tribe of outcasts, liberated by the heat of that Light, and initiated into a covenant with the Source of that Light, and called to share that light with all the tribes of Earth…”

Fr. David writes, “But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for see — I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” (Luke 2:10-11)

Ask yourselves this night which of these active characters in this familiar story you are. Are you shepherds first filled with fear, then with joy, leaving here and going back to your regular lives praising God but doubting if any of it means something for the rest of your life? Are you Mary, searing all these words and images in your mind, and trying to make sense of it all and fit them into your little life? Are you Jospeh, perhaps a bit concerned about what happens if the shepherds go telling everybody about a Messiah being born? Or, are you the apostles on a mission who first read this Good News according to Luke, who got the message and understood their marching orders?….”

Fr. David writes, “So, if I read Micah literally, God will abandon Israel until she has finished giving birth. I don’t know how the ladies in the audience feel about labor pangs becoming a metaphor for national greatness. In the Talmud, this passage was interpreted as a metaphor for Rome being allowed to “enfold Israel for nine months,” or however long it would take before the Messiah appeared; who would be a descendant of King David, which explains Micah’s reference to “Bethlehem of Ephrathah, the least of the clans of Judah,” but also David’s birthplace.”

So last Sunday I talked about my friend from seminary and her John the Baptist nutcracker. Well he sure seems to earn that rap today — Brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? And yet, he is surprisingly pastoral, meeting people halfway. And he has the passion of a man who deliberately chose not to follow in his daddy’s footsteps. In this slightly penitential season of Advent, a season of preparation for Jesus’s first and second coming, the Good News we hear from John the Baptist is that God will meet us halfway.

On this second Sunday of Advent in Luke’s year, we get as much of the soft cop side of John the Baptist as there is to get, and we get the hard cop side as well. “Look, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and suddenly the Lord whom you seek come to his temple…But who can endure the day of his coming…For he is like a refiner's fire, like fullers’ alkali…he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver.” That sounds painful. But in our Gospel, John is like the prophet Isaiah preparing the exiles of Judah to actually “see the salvation of God.”