October 6, 2024 - The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.
Well, good morning, Epiphany. As you might be noticing, this is not your usual Sunday morning service... we have a few more of our beloved animals in the room, and my in-laws are also here... that’s totally unrelated I promise. Yesterday was Abbey’s birthday and Lily’s regional cross-country meet, so thank you to our family for coming up and supporting us by being here. And thank you to you all for bringing your pets, as noisy or disruptive as they may be. No worries about that at all, we even have paper towels on standby. We will have a blessing for them - the pets, not the in-laws - a bit later.
But first, a sermon. As you might have noticed in the lectionary readings, where we Episcopalians read through most of the entirety of the Bible in a three-year cycle, this morning, we had some interesting texts. Our first reading is always from the Old Testament; this week we’re introduced to the story of Job, a well-known character for most Christians, but we only get the introduction to his story here really. I’m going to come back to this introduction.
Our last reading is always from one of the four Gospels in the New Testament, we read it there in the middle of the nave. This week, we have Mark telling the story of Jesus, who is addressing divorce and hard-heartedness, and then we have the more beloved story of Jesus talking about having a childlike faith. Most preachers will probably lean toward the second of those two gospel stories in their sermon today, the one about letting the little children come to him... the first story usually needs room for the grace made possible in small group discussion. I might try to preach on it when the Gospel story comes back around next time, but not today.
In the middle of those two lectionary readings, we usually get something from the Epistles, the letters sent to the early churches. Today, we read a few verses from the first two chapters of the letter to the Hebrews. Throughout Christian tradition, the assumption has been that St. Paul wrote this letter, but in the last three hundred years or so, that has been questioned, and now we’re not sure who wrote it. Regardless, much of Hebrews is not often preached on; it’s a letter primarily written to Jews, urging them to understand how important Jesus was, not to return to their old Jewish practice, but to embrace a new covenant that comes out of their old one. It can be difficult to preach on that in 2024, but I am going to land there this morning, in part because when I was just 11 years old, thanks to my old man wearing the red shirt back there, I memorized much of the letter to the Hebrews. That’s another teaser; more on that in a bit.
I’m leaving the introduction behind now though because I want to talk to you specifically this morning about angels and demons and the supernatural. Welcome to church, everybody.
For several centuries now, probably since the Age of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries, and certainly in the more modern era of the 19th and 20th centuries, the very idea of the supernatural has been up for debate. All of us in this room this morning have been raised with the view that we should be able to explain nearly everything through scientific study and experimentation, that natural laws and theories of physics explain everything, from gravity to rainfall, from human reproduction to disease and illness. Now, I am not looking to defeat or undermine the four centuries of Enlightenment in which we all swim in my 15-minute sermon this morning, don’t worry, but I do wonder if anyone here has experienced anything that they cannot explain.
I’ll start, because I have. In another story from my many travels (which you’re probably getting tired of), a friend and I were hiking in the jungles of Belize in the June of 2009. He was serving a nonprofit focused on rural Central American poverty, especially among children, and I just needed to get out of the states after a bad breakup, so I went down and spent a week with him to clear my head. We were hiking with two of his Mestizo friends who had grown up outside Dangriga, and the friends were both packing heavy duty pellet guns... just in case we were threatened by some wild jaguars in the trees.
These friends knew of a waterfall we should go see and swim in, so we hiked about two hours into the jungle to a picturesque cliffside, complete with a gorgeous waterfall. We swam for a bit, ate lunch, and then in one of my most daring and probably stupid moments, we jumped off part of the cliff into the water below. When I jumped, however, my leg twisted funny, and when I landed and tried to spring off the rocky ground under the water, something snapped. I screamed in pain when I surfaced, sure that I had torn an ACL or a tendon or something. I couldn’t put any weight on my leg, and two hours into a jaguar-filled jungle, I started to get a little scared. Our friends began debating if they could carry me back, or if one of them should run back and try to get a medic of some sort, but we were worried at that point about it getting too dark. You don’t want to be in this jungle after dark. Still not really knowing where to turn or what to do, my friend suggested... that we pray.
Now this isn’t one of those sermons, exactly, so stick with me, but yes, as our group prayed over my leg and over our hopeless situation, my leg was, somehow, healed. After prayer, I felt relief, stood up, lightly put pressure on my leg, and then found the strength to hike two hours back to our rural home base. Admittedly, I probably wouldn’t believe this story if it had happened to someone else. When I shared this story at seminary, some scoffed, some attributed my quick recovery to adrenaline; I did spend the next few days in a chair back at camp with a significant leg injury. But I honestly don’t know what to believe, I don’t know what to believe happened to me that day. Was this a miracle? Did something supernatural happen in the jungle because of our prayer? Did an angel help me support my weight? Or was I in shock? Was it adrenaline? ... What happened? Fifteen years later, I still don’t know.
Now, I don’t know if any of you have stories that you can’t explain, but I want to turn us now toward Job before I land this sermon in Hebrews. The Old Testament story of Job, as I mentioned, is a well-known one for most Christians; Job was a wealthy and righteous man, God let the devil sort of play around with him for a bit to test his faith, and then Job suffers unbearable tragedy but still trusts in God. The book is our Old Testament lectionary reading throughout October, so I will not spoil the thousands-of-years-old ending for anyone, no spoilers here, but in our reading today, we are met with what is almost a comical opening scene: “One day, the heavenly beings came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came along too.” The Lord, here, says to Satan, “Where have you come from?”
Now as you hear that, you might be imagining a Zeus-like, white-bearded God sitting around a table or a living room or on a throne with all his angelic, winged buddies, all dressed in white with halos above their heads... and then a red, horned, spike tailed guy with a pitchfork comes walking toward them, and God says, “What are you doing here?” That is certainly an image, one inspired by centuries of Christian art and more recent cartoonish depictions perhaps, but it’s not one that we can really accept seriously anymore. The strangeness of this image and this story are just too much for our enlightened, rational minds to accept. This, then, must be an allegory, or fable, or myth... genre is an essential thing to understand when reading the Bible. Entire traditions, entire religions have divided on this very point, on whether or not certain holy texts can be read literally or figuratively, as fact or allegory, as inspired transcription or inspired imagination.
So... what do you actually believe? Was my injury recovery a miracle or medically explainable? Was God allowing Satan to tempt Job simply an allegory, as most of us today believe, or was it true history (the famous Thomas Aquinas believed it was). What about the virgin birth or the physical, bodily resurrection that we profess in the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds? (You’re on shaky ground now, preacher, watch out.) Well, I’m here to tell you that while I have my own opinions on these things as your rector, as an ordained, two-time seminary grad, and as a fellow Christian, my own firmly held beliefs and opinions on what is important and true? Well, those opinions matter far less than something else. We hear about that something else from the writer of Hebrews.
In the first verses of this letter, the Bible verses I memorized back in 1995, we are told that (in the NIV), “In the past, God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days, he has spoken to us by his Son whom he appointed heir of all things and through whom he made the universe.” Somehow, I know those verses like they’re written on the back of my hand. Hebrews was an odd letter for a middle schooler to read, and I surely did not digest its full meaning then as I was trying to learn the words for youth group Bible competitions (which is another long story, for another time).
But what the author here writes is that there are many ways that God revealed God’s glory in the generations before the author’s first-century Jewish audience lived and walked the earth. Many ways. God’s glory was revealed in creation itself, in burning bushes, in deliverance from Egypt, through prophets, through angels, the list goes on and on as you read the Old Testament texts, witnesses to God’s engagement on earth. But now? As of the first century? Now we have Jesus, “the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being.” The author continues in chapter two: “We do not yet see everything, but we do see Jesus.” We do see Jesus.
Some of his audience might have actually seen Jesus literally walking the earth; that is possible and argued by some commentators on the text, some placing its writing around 64 AD, so there is some overlap. But, and here's the sermon in six brief words: even today, we do see Jesus. The four collected and varied accounts of the Gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – give us four visions of Jesus that can and should inform our lives. And the entire church, the Body of Christ, in its better days at the least, represents Jesus on earth today. We can see Jesus.
We must not see the biblical text as a list of rules and regulations by which to structure our lives and enforce holiness on others. Nor should we see it as a historic document that describes exactly what happened and when in the past, lest we get caught in its contradictions and application to historic cultures. Instead, we have here in this book and in this Church witnesses to the life of Jesus in the world, the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being in the world, and we have witnesses to the way the world has changed and continues to change because of Jesus. We see that “loving God” and “loving neighbor” are the two most important commandments to live by, and we see the world turned upside-down by a kingdom of self-sacrifice and abundant love. We see that because we see Jesus.
Now, I don’t know what I believe happened when I was able to walk out of the jungle on a bum leg. I don’t. I don’t know how or if miracles happen when we pray, or if prayer simply prepares us and orients us toward the will of God. I don’t know. I don’t know which of the traditions that have all split into various denominations has the exact right version of the truth with a capital T, though I do tend to think Episcopalians are close? I’m not 100% sure, and if someone says they are 100% sure, they’re wrong. Generations of Christians have disagreed over nearly all parts of this Christian faith, many have gone to war over those disagreements. We simply do not know.
But what I do know is that being a Christian involves practicing the Way with a capital W, of practicing being like this Jesus we see in the Gospels and in the Church, of becoming like Jesus, and of living as Jesus lived. John Mark Comer, an author who someone in this room recommended to me recently, writes that we are all disciples, we are all following someone, whether we realize it or not.
I hope that we choose to be following Jesus. Following Jesus will change our very lives and the lives of those around us. The act of actually following and becoming like Jesus will change the world.
St. Francis, our saint for the day, for our "Blessing of the Pets," we know that he loved animals and he loved nature, both deeply. That love though? It came first from seeing and following Jesus.
Francis was the son of an affluent cloth merchant, living in wealth and ease, until he encountered the poor, and then sought after Jesus and a different way of being in the church. The story goes that Jesus appeared to him, a mystical vision in a church outside Assisi, and changed his life forever. Whether you have a mystical vision of Jesus yourself or you experience a miracle healing or you come in here to the Church of the Epiphany with doubts or skepticism and you’re just appreciative of the love and the brunch and the welcome you feel here... no matter what, I hope that you can be okay with not knowing or explaining everything, and that you will simply look for Jesus and spend your entire life becoming more like him. Amen.
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