Hope that casts out fear

[The following homily was preached at the Easter Vigil celebrated at St Mary's Anglican Church in Vancouver BC on 22 March 2008. The appointed gospel reading is Matthew 28.1-10.]

+ My friends in Christ, I speak to you in the name of God the Weaver, who through the shuttle of the Holy Spirit weaves us into the pattern of the Word made flesh. Amen.

It was with great interest that I opened the Vancouver Sun this morning and discovered that the rector of St Mary’s had participated in a conversation with a Pentecostal pastor, a humane secularist and a Buddhist nun regarding heaven. Then I turned to the Globe and Mail’s review of recently published books to find a lengthy review of a book on Jesus written by a professor of religious studies in Toronto who began his life as a Christian and has since converted to Judaism. These articles appear in the context of the last several years when Christian faith and religion in general have been the subject of numerous books and critiques, some of which have gone so far as to say that religion of any form is the source of most of the conflict experienced in the world today.

Religion is, after all, controversial. By ‘controversial’ I mean that there are different opinions voiced with differing degrees of passion. There are several ways that one can respond to this public and, in my opinion, welcome controversy about the place of religious faith in social, cultural and political life. One response is to engage in respectful dialogue with others, whether religious believers or not, in order to seek common ground and, where necessary, dispel false impressions and caricatures. Another response is to refuse to engage in any dialogue at all and, in that wonderful Canadian phrase, live in two solitudes: believers on the one side of the divide, non-believers on the other.

While I have a clear preference for the first approach, respectful dialogue, the second can, at times, be relatively benign. We conduct our business without concern about the opinions of others. We do not actively condemn them, but we do not feel obliged to enter into conversation with them. This attitude, however, can give rise to a more dangerous response to a controversy about religion. This dangerous response is when we turn a controversy into a conflict. In a conflict our passions have become so aroused that we seek at first to convince those who disagree with us that they are wrong. When those who do not agree with us refuse to change their point of view or to make any concessions to ours, we can quickly become entrapped in the darkness of coercion as we seek stronger means to compel others to acquiesce to our position.

This descent from controversy into conflict and, in some cases, into oppression and persecution arises from one cause: fear. Here the familiar words of 1 John bear witness: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.”[1] When we commit ourselves to protect the dignity of every human being, when we commit ourselves to each other as God has committed God’s very self to us, when we commit ourselves to humility, then fear finds little room in us.

I must not fear.

Fear is the mind-killer.

Fear is the little death

that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear.

I will permit it

to pass over and through me.

And when it has gone past

I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

When fear has gone

there will be nothing.

Only I will remain.[2]

In the space of ten short verses, tonight’s gospel reading from Matthew speaks of fear four times. The guard is so afraid of the angel that they shake and become like dead men. The angel greets the women by saying, “Do not be afraid.” Even then the women run away in a combination of fear and joy. When Jesus appears suddenly appears to the women, his first words are, “Do not be afraid.”

In Matthew’s account of the visit of the women to the tomb, the women are not bringing spices to anoint Jesus’ body. They have come to ‘see’ the tomb. This is a risky action; by doing so they associate themselves with a man condemned by the Jewish authorities for blasphemy and executed by the Roman authorities for sedition. Elsewhere in Matthew’s gospel and in the New Testament, the verb ‘to see’ denotes ‘understanding or insight into God’s purposes’. These women have come to see Jesus; they know that there must be more than his death. What they will see, they do not know. But they are willing to take the risk.[3]

In 1995 I was elected to General Synod for the first time. When I arrived at Carleton University to register, the person behind the desk said, “Thank goodness you’re here! Come with me!” He took me by the arm, assured me my baggage was being taken care of and led me away down a corridor to another office. “Here he is,” my companion said to the woman at the desk, “Dr Leggett from the Diocese of New Westminster!” “Thank goodness you’re here!” she said, “Come with me!” A shorter trip brought me face to face with yet another member of the local committee.

I was finally allowed to sit down and was told the situation. Along with every other member of General Synod, I was scheduled to go to a local congregation for the Sunday liturgy, some four days away. The congregation I was to attend was part of a multi-point charge and the rector of the parish had just come down with a severe case of laryngitis. “Would you preach and preside at the services in the parish?” I was asked. I said “Yes” thinking how honoured I was until I found out later I was simply the first clergy member of General Synod from New Westminster who had shown up at registration.

That Sunday was Pentecost and I found myself preparing to preach on one of the major celebrations of the Christian year without any of my usual resources. Instead I had to sit simply and quietly with the Scriptures for the day and ask, “What do I think the people need to hear?” As I did so, a clear and succinct message came through to me.

I had been wondering what was the real gift of Pentecost. The apostles and other disciples of Jesus knew what he had taught. They had, according to Luke, witnessed the resurrection. But there they were, hiding away from the world, for fifty days, if we are to believe the traditional chronology. What happened on Pentecost that released them to undertake a mission that would change the world?

The community of the apostles and disciples were deeply afraid. The controversy aroused by their risen and ascended Lord had moved well beyond dialogue into active oppression and persecution. In John’s gospel there is the poignant statement that the doors to the place where the community was gathered were locked because of their fear of the authorities. Despite all that they had heard and seen, they were ‘tongue-tied’ by fear. Despite the message of the angels, despite visions of the risen Lord, they were hunkered down and dispirited.

After some thought I knew what had happened. The primary gift of the Holy Spirit was not tongues; it was hope. Hope is the deeply-seated conviction that there is a future, a purpose, worth living for, working towards and, if necessary, dying for. Hope is the realization that God has a purpose, a telos to use the New Testament term, towards which God is working. Through the Holy Spirit God invites us to participate in proclamation of this future.

When one lives in hope, the world looks very different. When one lives in hope, fear may indeed arise in us, but its shadows quickly disappear in the light of the hope that is within us. Our problems and challenges do not disappear, but they no longer define our lives. Instead, our hope helps us define how we will respond to those problems and challenges.

As I reflect on my time with the Anglican Church in Myanmar, I realize that I have spent three weeks among a people who have every reason to live in fear.

• Christians are actively persecuted in the military and civil service in that they know that they will not be permitted to rise beyond a particular rank or position.
• Clergy are not permitted to vote.
• Church property may be seized or expropriated without warning and without recourse to law.
• There is no secure or legal means of bringing foreign funds into the country for purposes of relief and development.
• Clergy who study abroad risk being refused permission to return to their studies if they return home to visit their families.
• Any gatherings of more than five persons, other than regularly-scheduled worship services, are forbidden unless authorized by the military.
• Bishops are frequently prevented from visiting portions of their dioceses because of the on-going conflict between the military and tribal militias.
• Postal workers routinely take religious books and resources sent to the church in Myanmar from abroad and sell them to used book dealers who, in their turn, notify the church that the books and resources are now for sale, usually at prices that stretch an already tight budget.
• In a country where the majority of the population is under twenty-five unemployment is rampant.
• During the recent installation of the Primate of Myanmar, security forces were present throughout the service, recorded any public remarks and took numerous photographs of the participants.

Yet I did not find fear.

What I found was a church that was living in hope --- even in the face of oppression and persecution.

• Throughout the country pre-school children are being educated and cared for, regardless of their religious tradition, by Anglican pre-schools.
• Throughout the country micro-credit is being extended to help people establish themselves in sustainable enterprises.
• Throughout the country the Mothers’ Union provides health education, training and, in some more remote locations, supports medical clinics to provide basic medical care.
• Throughout the country young people live out a commitment to the gospel which, on more than one occasion, led me to ponder our failure to imbue a passion for the good news of God in Jesus Christ in people of my ‘baby boomer’ generation and in those who have come after.
• Throughout the country Anglicans, who make up one tenth of one percent of the entire population, gather Sunday after Sunday, saints day after saints day, and give thanks to God for all God’s gift to them and to all creation.

This vitality of Christian witness, this quiet but pervasive joy, comes, I think, from a deep well of hope. Anglicans in Myanmar believe that there is a future, a purpose, worth living for, working towards and, if necessary, suffering for. Anglicans in Myanmar believe that God has a purpose, a goal towards which God is working in us, through us and with us. Anglicans in Myanmar believe that we are called to proclaim this purpose to all and, when it is necessary, to use words as well as the witness of their daily lives.

My friends, this is the night. This is the night when darkness vanishes for ever. This is the night that dispels all evil, washes guilt away, restores lost innocence and brings mourners joy. This is the night when Christians are called to remember that we are not now nor have we ever been meant to live in fear. We have been called to live in love and, to live in love, we proclaim our hope.

There is no doubt that controversy swirls around and among us. That controversy is not limited to questions of sexuality but extends into

• questions regarding how the Holy Scriptures are to be read and interpreted,
• uncertainty regarding the future of our congregations, our dioceses and the national structures of our church and
• differing opinions about how we understand the relationship between the Christian gospel and other religious faiths.

If we live in fear, we may find ourselves descending into the darkness of conflict, a descent that can arouse in us the desire to defeat our ‘enemies’ whomever we think them to be. If we live in fear, then we may find ourselves like the apostles and disciples in the Upper Room, so paralyzed that the good news that we have to share is silenced. If we live in fear, then we respond to our critics and those who may differ from us with accusations, threats and denials rather than with humility, promises and affirmations.

On this night when we proclaim the resurrection, we commit ourselves to remain ‘firm in the hope [God] has set before us, so that we and all [God’s] children shall be free, and the whole earth live to praise [God’s] name’.[4] We gather to proclaim that Christ is risen and that his resurrection empowers us with hope. This is no vague hope, no wishful thinking. It is a hope grounded in God’s covenant fidelity, in God’s constant working throughout all of history, to bring about fullness of life for all creatures, human and non-human. It is a hope grounded in the tangible life of Christ expressed in the Christian community, through its engagement not only in direct service of those in any need or trouble, but in its willingness to engage the political, social and economic structures which deny and diminish the dignity of every human being.

To say, “Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia!”, is to say to the whole world that lordship does not belong to those who crave power and instil fear; no, lordship belongs to the One who willingly goes to the Cross and who is raised to banish the power of fear and death. To say, “Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia!”, is to say that lordship does not belong to those who would demean the dignity of others, those who rejoice in division and use our differences to distort and destroy; no, lordship belongs to the One who humbled himself to share our humanity so that we might share his divine life.

My friends, this is the night when we renew our baptismal covenant to choose justice rather than self-interest, to live in covenant fidelity with God and one another, to walk humbly in the presence of God and neighbour. This is the night when we affirm that we are a community of hope rather than fear, community committed to human solidarity rather than prejudice and suspicion.

Let us pray.

Sanctifier of time and space, maker of dancing quarks and ancient quasars, of energy and element, blessed are you, God of gods. Your saving love endures forever; your holy light pierces the cold darkness of death and chaos; you cut a covenant of life with your creatures, which no evil can overcome. May the glorious radiance of resurrection dispel the shadows in our lives and conform us more closely to your risen Christ, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be all honour, praise and glory. Amen.[5]

---

[1] 1 John 4.18.

[2] Frank Herbert, Dune.

[3] The New Interpreter’s Study Bible, 1799.

[4] The Book of Alternative Services, 215.

[5] Revised Common Lectionary Prayers, 105.

Let us overcome the darkness that is within us

[The following homily was preached at St Mary's Anglican Church in Vancouver BC on Good Friday, 21 March 2008.]

+ My friends in Christ, I speak to you in the name of God the Weaver, who through the shuttle of the Holy Spirit weaves us into the pattern of the Word made flesh. Amen.

On this Good Friday we gather to remember the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth and ponder the implications of his voluntary suffering and death for us and for the whole of creation. Let me begin with three stories.

The first story: The Gentiles tried to kill us but they failed.

Last night, while we were commemorating the last meal that Jesus had with his friends and stripping the sanctuary in anticipation of his passion, our Jewish brothers and sisters were celebrating the feast of Purim, a story told in the book of Esther. It is rare that Purim and Holy Week coincide.

The story of Purim takes place during the reign of the great Persian king Xerxes who counts a young Jewish woman, Esther, among his wives. One of Xerxes’ advisors, Haman, takes a keen dislike for Mordecai, a Jewish elder, and he hatches a plot to exterminate the Jews in the Persian empire.

Mordecai learns of the plot and advises Esther, his niece, to take action. She is at first reluctant, but when Mordecai reminds her that she shall not escape the fate planned by Haman, she agrees to act. Since Xerxes has not summoned her, she must risk his wrath and possible death by appearing unbidden in the audience chamber and then asking to speak with him. She succeeds and eventually foils Haman’s plot. Haman is executed and the Jews are permitted to defend themselves against Haman’s henchmen who have already launched their attacks. The Jews win and Xerxes extends imperial protection to the Jewish community.

Here we were last night, beginning our sombre journey to the Cross, while our Jewish friends were celebrating a great victory. Imagine how some of our Christian ancestors might have reacted: Christians in mourning, Jews in celebration.

The second story: The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God.

The ancient city of Alexandria was a cosmopolitan metropolis of several million people: Egyptians, Greeks, peoples from all around the Mediterranean, peoples from Asia and Africa and one of the largest Jewish communities outside of Palestine. There had always been particular tensions between the Jewish, Greek and Egyptian communities in the city. After the Roman conquest of the city during the reign of Augustus Caesar, Greeks and Jews were given certain rights and tax exemptions not given to the native Egyptian population. The Greeks despised the Jews for various reasons and denied Jews access to the public places where business and politics were conducted.

These tensions reached their height in the year 38. In the past the Jewish community had sent a traditional declaration of loyalty to the emperor on the occasion of his accession. But in the year 38 the Roman governor had failed to send this declaration of loyalty to the new emperor, Gaius Caligula, whether intentionally or not is still not clear. This political lapse was complicated later that year during the visit of Herod Agrippa, the titular Jewish king, who had been sent to Alexandria on a mission from Caligula. Herod had never been popular with the Jewish people and it appears that the Jews of Alexandria insulted him in some fashion. When the governor failed to take action, the Greek and Egyptian population rose up to take direct action against the Jewish community.

Jews were forced to abandon their homes in four of the five districts of the city and were forced into what we now call a ‘ghetto’. Jewish businesses were destroyed and thousands of Jews were killed on the streets, in the amphitheatre and by extra-judicial executions. Statues and pictures of Caligula were forcibly placed in Jewish synagogues causing the Jews to rise up to resist the desecration of their places for prayer and teaching. Eventually the riots came to an end, but the damage done to the Jewish community lasted until the year 117. In that year the emperor Trajan annihilated the Jewish community in Alexandria as part of the Roman effort to quell yet another Jewish rebellion in Palestine.

Sometime during these troubles, a member of the Jewish community in Alexandria took pen in hand and wrote what we now call the book of Wisdom or the Wisdom of Solomon. A portion of this book is frequently read at funerals particularly because of its simple yet hopeful beginning: “But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them. In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died, and their departure was thought to be a disaster, and their going from us to be their destruction; but they are at peace.”[1]

• The earlier optimism of the Alexandrian Jewish community for a rapprochement with the Greeks and for social and cultural acceptance by them had been replaced by a mounting sense of disillusionment and disappointment.
• The author addresses his fellow Jews in an effort to encourage them to take pride in their traditional faith. By presenting Judaism in intellectually respectable terms, he seeks to shore up the faith against hostile anti-Jewish attacks from without and gnawing doubts from within.

He is guided by three themes:

• the certainty that justice will be eventually triumph over injustice,
• the conviction that a life lived in accordance with God’s wisdom as revealed in Torah is better than any other life and
• the troubles of the present time are this generation’s exodus, its own experience of costly deliverance from tyranny into freedom.

Even if the present time is fraught with evil and injustice, the author affirms that it is still wiser to act morally and faithfully because moral and faithful actions plant the seeds that will eventually bloom into the harvest of righteousness, peace and justice. Perhaps the writer of Wisdom expected the seeds to sprout in the next generation, but he probably did not live to see this happen.

The third story: It is better that one community die if it serves the state.

Let’s fast forward nineteen hundred years. On the 30^th of January 1933 the President of the Weimar Republic appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor. On the 10^th of March 1933 the Nazi government opened the first concentration camp, Dachau, in an agricultural area just outside of Munich and incarcerated members of the Communist and Social Democratic parties. In 1936 Sachsenhausen, first a concentration camp, later an extermination camp, was opened near Weimar, a city always associated with liberal democracy in German history. In 1937 Buchenwald, also a concentration camp that became an extermination camp, was opened near Berlin. As these camps opened and political realities became more difficult, many Jews attempted to flee Germany. Some attempted to flee to the east into Poland, but the Polish authorities refused to permit the Jews to enter the country.

In a tragic Catch-22, the German authorities would not allow the Jewish refugees back into Germany. They were trapped in the border zone and their situation became increasingly desperate. The world took no action as people languished, unable to leave, unable to return. In Paris the son of a couple trapped in this ‘no-man’s land’ took a gun to the German embassy and shot the third secretary who died a few days later.

Just before midnight on November 9, Gestapo chief Heinrich Műller sent a telegram to all police units informing them that ‘in shortest order, actions against Jews and especially their synagogues will take place in all of Germany. These are not to be interfered with.’ Rather, the police were to arrest the victims. Fire companies stood by synagogues in flames with explicit instructions to let the buildings burn. They were to intervene only if a fire threatened adjacent ‘Aryan’ properties.[2]

• More than 1,000 synagogues were burned or damaged.
• 7,500 Jewish businesses were ransacked and looted.
• 91 Jews were known to have been killed.
• Jewish hospitals, homes, schools and cemeteries were vandalized.
• 30,000 Jewish men, aged 16 to 60, were arrested and sent to Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen.

This night, the 9^th to the 10^th of November, is known as ‘Kristallnacht’, the ‘night of broken glass’. On the 15^th of November Jews were banned from public schools. By December Jews were banned from most public places in Germany.

These events mark the beginning of what our Jewish brothers and sisters call ha Shoah, the Holocaust. By 1945 six million Jews had been systematically exterminated as well as millions of Socialists, Communists, gays, lesbians, Jehovah Witnesses, gypsies and prisoners of war. The scope of the Holocaust of European Jewry and the murder of millions of others is difficult to comprehend, so difficult that there are voices today that deny the Holocaust ever took place or assert that the Holocaust was invented by the Jews in order to maintain their secret control of the world’s economy and to bolster support for Israel.

Why do I tell these stories on a day when we gather to remember the death of Jesus?

I tell these stories because of the power of the narrative we have just read. John’s powerful narrative of the events leading to the death of Jesus has been read throughout the Christian world for at least fifteen hundred years. Many of us have been moved by Johann Sebastian Bach’s The St John Passion. We may have uncritically absorbed the message explicit in John’s gospel that the death of Jesus is the responsibility of ‘the Jews’, an entire people, rather than the Jewish and Roman authorities who saw Jesus as a threat to public order and to the stability of the state. He was, to use modern political language, a subversive, whose message, like the Dalai Lama’s, was seen by the political authorities as providing philosophical fuel to terrorist fires.

Throughout western history and into the present day, purveyors of fear, demagogues and dictators have found it useful to make Jews and other minority groups scapegoats for the problems faced by a given society. But purveyors of fear, demagogues and dictators are not the only ones who find scapegoats useful.

All of us have, from time to time, found it self-serving to identify the cause of our problems and challenges with a particular person or party or group. Let me speak in those voices.

• “I am tired of being told that I bear any responsibility for the present situation of First Nations people. It’s their own fault if they choose to live on their ancestral land rather than get with the programme of the twenty-first century. Let them get over it.”
• “The church used to be a comforting and peaceful place before women, gays and lesbians began agitating for their so-called ‘rights’ or so-called ‘justice’.”
• “It’s time for the conservatives to go away. They are all homo-phobic, critical fundamentalists.”
• “You know, our congregation was wonderful until that crazy rector moved the altar and brought in the BAS.”
• “You know, we could do great things here if the Prayer Book people would just move away.”

I do not know about you, but I do know myself. I have felt and, in one fashion or another, spoken these words in various times and places.

The problem lies, as Shakespeare says, not in our stars but in ourselves. When we gather here, year after year, to tell the story of the last days of Jesus of Nazareth, we are telling our own story. We are telling the story of how fearful we are of encountering the darkness that exists in each one of us. When God sends us the witness of the prophets and sages, when God sends us the witness of the people of the covenant of Moses and, in the fullness of time, when God sends us the witness of the Word made flesh, we resort to that primeval response to flee. But God, ever faithful, pursues us and finally, like even a cornered rabbit, we fight to the death to protect ourselves from learning the truth.

That truth is that deep within each one of us is the desire to be the centre of the universe. When Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are about to be thrown into the fiery furnace, the king challenges them by saying, “Now let us see whether your God can save you.” But Shadrach responds out of a deep awareness that it is God who is the centre of the universe, mysterious yet purposeful, incomprehensible but ultimately compassionate. He says, “Whether God saves us or not, God is still God. If you are trying to prove a point, you will fail.”

The truth is that deep within each one of us is the desire to be the only beloved of God. When Jonah is furious with God for having dragged him from his home to proclaim a message of judgement on Nineveh and then, because the people heed the message and repent, God decides not to destroy the city, God asks Jonah, in so many words, “Do you think you are the only one I love? Do you think you are the creature whose existence is important to me?”

The truth is that deep within each one of us is the desire to be the final adjudicator of all value and worth. When Peter falls into a deep sleep and has a dream where God bids him eat what is forbidden, he challenges God by declaring he has never eaten unclean things. But God speaks to him, much like God speaks to Moses: “I am the one who will declare what is clean and unclean. If I choose to do a new thing, I will do it. Now go and bring the Gentiles into the covenant!”

But in the end, the desire to be the centre of the universe, the desire to be the only beloved of God and the desire to be the final adjudicator of all value and worth are illusions that can lead to even more dangerous delusions. The truth is found in the Cross of Christ, the ultimate symbol of humanity’s attempts to hide from the Holy One of Israel who constantly seeks to free us from the bondage of fear and death.

At the end of today’s liturgy, as we gaze at the Cross and remember the powerful story told today, let us ponder how we have avoided confronting whatever darkness lurks in our own souls that may lead us to find convenient scapegoats, whether near or far, rather than seek the heart of God that beats within each of us. Let us be conscious of how that story has been used to kill rather than promise life. Let us leave this place with the commitment to do all within our power to prevent the story of the Lord’s death from ever being used for other purposes than proclaiming the bottomless love of God for us and for all of creation.

Let us pray.

We veil our faces before your glory, O Holy and Immortal One, and bow before the cross of your wounded Christ. With angels and archangels, we praise you, our Mercy, and we bless you, our Compassion, for in our brokenness you have not abandoned us. Hear us as we pray though Jesus, our high priest: heal all division, reconcile the estranged, console the suffering, and raise up to new life all that is bound by death. Amen.[3]

---

[1] Wisdom 3.1-3.

[2] ‘Kristallnacht.’ Encyclopedia Britannica 2007. Retrieved 10 November 2007 from Encyclopedia Britannica Online: http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9046254

[3] Revised Common Lectionary Prayers, 100.

I have called you friends

[The following remarks were made in the context of the Maundy Thursday celebration at St Mary's Anglican Church, Vancouver BC.]

+ My friends in Christ, I speak to you in the name of God the Weaver, who through the shuttle of the Holy Spirit weaves us into the pattern of the Word made flesh. Amen.

On a visit to UBC Urgent Care three days before I was to leave Vancouver to travel to Myanmar, the physician who examined me asked, “Why would you or any one travel to a military dictatorship like Myanmar?” One of the members of the rugby executive I serve on wrote to the parents of our rugby team, “Please keep Dr Leggett in your thoughts and prayers. As you know he is an Anglican priest and a professor at Vancouver School of Theology. He’s off on a trip to Myanmar, a country where the military persecutes Christians and jails intellectuals. We’d like him to come back to us.” A member of my congregation expressed his concern that I was not adhering to the request of some members of the democratic opposition in Myanmar that foreigners avoid travelling to the country. Our own foreign affairs web-site advised against ‘non-essential’ travel.

So why did I go? I have come to realize that there is only one reason. I went to visit friends. I went to visit friends whom I had never met but friends nevertheless. These friends needed to see and talk to me in the flesh as much as I needed to see and talk to them. It was, with due respect to our foreign affairs travel advisory, ‘essential’ travel.

On this night two millennia ago in a secure location Jesus met with his friends. The different gospel accounts do not agree as to what kind of festive meal they were sharing. Matthew, Mark and Luke describe it as the Passover meal, while John describes a chaburah, a fellowship meal where a rabbi met with his disciples and conducted what I would call a graduate seminar. What is clear, whether the meal was the Passover meal or a chaburah, is that the community of disciples gathered around Jesus had reached a climactic moment.

The controversy that began with Jesus’ teaching ministry of the past three years had led to conflict within the Jewish community throughout Judea. The Jewish authorities, concerned with the integrity of the Jewish tradition and with maintaining some semblance of political autonomy under Roman imperial administration, had begun to take more active steps to solve ‘the Jesus problem’. As Jesus had travelled to Jerusalem, even some of those who had followed him began to abandon him, some simply walking away, while one, Judas, for reasons that have never been clear, decided to betray Jesus to the authorities.

In this environment Jesus girded himself with a towel and performed one of the basic duties of a domestic servant. When he had finished, he spoke words that I believe are among the most significant in the New Testament.

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.[1]

Love cannot be disembodied. Love demands incarnation, whether of the eternal Word of God in time and space or the lives of men, women and children who have been grasped by that Word in their own times and places.

Love is not primarily an emotional state. It is the choice to live out the call of the prophet Micah to do justice, to adore covenant loyalty and to walk humbly in the presence of God. To love is to choose to share in this eucharistic feast knowing that to do so is to re-commit oneself to the baptismal covenant which we shall explicitly renew at the Easter Vigil but which we implicitly renew each time we reach out our hands and take the bread of life into our hands.

Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and the prayers?

The eucharist, as one of the Christian community’s dependable ‘sign-acts’, participates in the mystērion, “the revelation of God’s saving self-giving that finds expression in Jesus’ death and resurrection”.[2] We grow into our baptismal faith and identity for as often as we ‘eat this bread and drink the cup’.[3]

The consequences of baptismal faith lived out in eucharistic fellowship for Christians are several. First, Christians understand their relationship to be public rather than private. Our covenantal relationship with God and with each other, forged in baptism and renewed in eucharist, has communal and societal dimensions. Our claim to be members of the Christian community causes our lives to come under special scrutiny, especially if we claim that our life as members of the Body of Christ represents, in some spiritual way, the life of God as expressed in our trinitarian faith.

We seek companionship, people with whom to break bread. Later in the gospel of John, Jesus will say this:

This is my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father[4]

At the heart of all genuinely Christian relationships is a self-giving and self-revealing friendship where we permit ourselves to become more and more transparent to one another.

Christians understand the need for a community of support that shares both values and hopes. When red-hot charcoal briquettes are separated from one another, they quickly lose their heat and burn out. If they are kept close together, their heat increases and, in a counter-intuitive fashion, lasts longer. In many ways the Christian life functions similarly. When we find ourselves in the midst of a supportive community, our faith is reinforced and deepened, enabling us to live out more faithfully our baptismal commitments to one another.

Will you persevere in resisting evil and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?

A popular movie from the 1970’s contained the line, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” No falser statement has ever been made. Love means forever being willing to acknowledge one’s faults and to seek reconciliation and renewal.

An adequate theology of community must take account of sin. Love in community is not exempt from hurt and injustice. Thus the religious dimension of community involves redemption and reconciliation. Without grace, without the gift of healing and renewal and forgiveness, no community will reach its fulfillment. Indeed, it would be come a stifling idolatry.[5]

We come from a tradition that understands the necessity of forgiveness if old hurts and new wrongs are ever to be laid aside in order for the new creation to be revealed in and through our relationships. Furthermore, our tradition empowers us to a greater commitment to a world in which reconciliation takes place between peoples and nations. How the Christian community conducts itself when in the midst of controversy and conflict can be a witness to the larger human community.

Will you proclaim by word and example the good news of God in Christ?

Every Christian is called to embody the good news of God in Christ in whatever vocation or social setting he or she is found. Our life as Christians is a sharing of our commitment to live in the hope and love of God as made known to us in Jesus of Nazareth. It is a shared endeavour to shape our lives according to the vision of the Gospel.

All the baptized are meant to guide, inspire, and support each in this pursuit. Our decisions about priorities in our life together or about shared activities or about personal activities are meant to be grounded in our proclamation of the good news.

Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons. loving your neighbour as yourself?

In the letter to the Ephesians the writer makes a powerful statement within the context of discussing the relationships between men and women: “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.”[6] Here there is no distinction between male and female. All Christians are called to consider themselves slaves to all in order to be free for Christ.

The call of the gospel to love one’s neighbour as oneself is the corollary to the commandment to love God. When we fail to treat one another as God’s beloved in whom the image and likeness of God is present, then we fail in our baptismal vocation.

Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?

In Galatians 3.27-28 Paul writes the charter of the baptismal vocation of all Christians:

As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

In this statement Paul is not necessarily dispensing with the ethnic, social and gender realities of his society, but he is dispensing with any privilege that any of those realities might claim to the grace and knowledge of God. He is proclaiming a new reality in Christ which has the power to overcome all the arbitrary restrictions and obstacles that human beings have erected to inhibit the freedom of God’s grace.

Justice-making and peace-making are, for Christians, dependent upon the removal of such arbitrary restrictions and obstacles in order to free all God’s children to experience the fullness of God’s grace made known to us in creation, redemption and sanctification. For Christians, this baptismal commitment is made known by the domestic justice and peace of our relationships with the Christian community itself. Our domestic justice and peace will inevitably lead us into work towards justice and peace in our communities and, to the degree that we are able, our world, breaking down the ethnic barriers that perpetuate sectarian violence and political discrimination, the economic structures that perpetuate the bondage of workers and home and abroad, and the continued disparity of opportunities and power available to women and people of colour throughout the world.

So, my brothers and sisters, let us be friends tonight. Let us embody that love for one another as friends which we have come to know in Jesus of Nazareth. Let us be friends tonight to prepare ourselves for the work that still lies before us. Let us be friends tonight to remember those of our brothers and sisters, our friends, who struggle each day for bread, for water and for human dignity.

Let us pray.

Eternal God, in the sharing of a meal your Son established a new covenant for all people, and in the washing of feet he showed us the dignity of service. Grant that by the power of your Holy Spirit these signs of our life in faith may speak again to our hearts, feed our spirits and refresh our bodies. We ask this in the name of him who called us friends and who, with you and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns now and for ever. Amen.

---

[1] John 13.34-35.

[2] Bernard Cooke, “2. Historical Reflections on the Meaning of Marriage as Christian Sacrament,” in Christian Marriage, ed. Bernard Cooke, Alternative Futures for Worship, no. 5 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1987), 43.

[3] 1 Corinthians 11.26.

[4] John 15.12-15.

[5] This is a re-casting of comments by substituting ‘community’ for ‘marriage’ in comments made by Cynthia S. W. Crysdale, “Christian Marriage and Homosexual Monogamy,” in Our Selves, Our Souls and Bodies: Sexuality and the Household of God (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1996), 96.

[6] Ephesians 5.21.

Maundy Thursday

20 March 2008

Saint Mary’s Anglican Church

Vancouver BC

+ My friends in Christ, I speak to you in the name of God the Weaver, who through the shuttle of the Holy Spirit weaves us into the pattern of the Word made flesh. Amen.

On a visit to UBC Urgent Care three days before I was to leave Vancouver to travel to Myanmar, the physician who examined me asked, “Why would you or any one travel to a military dictatorship like Myanmar?” One of the members of the rugby executive I serve on wrote to the parents of our rugby team, “Please keep Dr Leggett in your thoughts and prayers. As you know he is an Anglican priest and a professor at Vancouver School of Theology. He’s off on a trip to Myanmar, a country where the military persecutes Christians and jails intellectuals. We’d like him to come back to us.” A member of my congregation expressed his concern that I was not adhering to the request of some members of the democratic opposition in Myanmar that foreigners avoid travelling to the country. Our own foreign affairs web-site advised against ‘non-essential’ travel.

So why did I go? I have come to realize that there is only one reason. I went to visit friends. I went to visit friends whom I had never met but friends nevertheless. These friends needed to see and talk to me in the flesh as much as I needed to see and talk to them. It was, with due respect to our foreign affairs travel advisory, ‘essential’ travel.

On this night two millennia ago in a secure location Jesus met with his friends. The different gospel accounts do not agree as to what kind of festive meal they were sharing. Matthew, Mark and Luke describe it as the Passover meal, while John describes a chaburah, a fellowship meal where a rabbi met with his disciples and conducted what I would call a graduate seminar. What is clear, whether the meal was the Passover meal or a chaburah, is that the community of disciples gathered around Jesus had reached a climactic moment.

The controversy that began with Jesus’ teaching ministry of the past three years had led to conflict within the Jewish community throughout Judea. The Jewish authorities, concerned with the integrity of the Jewish tradition and with maintaining some semblance of political autonomy under Roman imperial administration, had begun to take more active steps to solve ‘the Jesus problem’. As Jesus had travelled to Jerusalem, even some of those who had followed him began to abandon him, some simply walking away, while one, Judas, for reasons that have never been clear, decided to betray Jesus to the authorities.

In this environment Jesus girded himself with a towel and performed one of the basic duties of a domestic servant. When he had finished, he spoke words that I believe are among the most significant in the New Testament.

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.[1]

Love cannot be disembodied. Love demands incarnation, whether of the eternal Word of God in time and space or the lives of men, women and children who have been grasped by that Word in their own times and places.

Love is not primarily an emotional state. It is the choice to live out the call of the prophet Micah to do justice, to adore covenant loyalty and to walk humbly in the presence of God. To love is to choose to share in this eucharistic feast knowing that to do so is to re-commit oneself to the baptismal covenant which we shall explicitly renew at the Easter Vigil but which we implicitly renew each time we reach out our hands and take the bread of life into our hands.

Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and the prayers?

The eucharist, as one of the Christian community’s dependable ‘sign-acts’, participates in the mystērion, “the revelation of God’s saving self-giving that finds expression in Jesus’ death and resurrection”.[2] We grow into our baptismal faith and identity for as often as we ‘eat this bread and drink the cup’.[3]

The consequences of baptismal faith lived out in eucharistic fellowship for Christians are several. First, Christians understand their relationship to be public rather than private. Our covenantal relationship with God and with each other, forged in baptism and renewed in eucharist, has communal and societal dimensions. Our claim to be members of the Christian community causes our lives to come under special scrutiny, especially if we claim that our life as members of the Body of Christ represents, in some spiritual way, the life of God as expressed in our trinitarian faith.

We seek companionship, people with whom to break bread. Later in the gospel of John, Jesus will say this:

This is my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father[4]

At the heart of all genuinely Christian relationships is a self-giving and self-revealing friendship where we permit ourselves to become more and more transparent to one another.

Christians understand the need for a community of support that shares both values and hopes. When red-hot charcoal briquettes are separated from one another, they quickly lose their heat and burn out. If they are kept close together, their heat increases and, in a counter-intuitive fashion, lasts longer. In many ways the Christian life functions similarly. When we find ourselves in the midst of a supportive community, our faith is reinforced and deepened, enabling us to live out more faithfully our baptismal commitments to one another.

Will you persevere in resisting evil and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?

A popular movie from the 1970’s contained the line, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” No falser statement has ever been made. Love means forever being willing to acknowledge one’s faults and to seek reconciliation and renewal.

An adequate theology of community must take account of sin. Love in community is not exempt from hurt and injustice. Thus the religious dimension of community involves redemption and reconciliation. Without grace, without the gift of healing and renewal and forgiveness, no community will reach its fulfillment. Indeed, it would be come a stifling idolatry.[5]

We come from a tradition that understands the necessity of forgiveness if old hurts and new wrongs are ever to be laid aside in order for the new creation to be revealed in and through our relationships. Furthermore, our tradition empowers us to a greater commitment to a world in which reconciliation takes place between peoples and nations. How the Christian community conducts itself when in the midst of controversy and conflict can be a witness to the larger human community.

Will you proclaim by word and example the good news of God in Christ?

Every Christian is called to embody the good news of God in Christ in whatever vocation or social setting he or she is found. Our life as Christians is a sharing of our commitment to live in the hope and love of God as made known to us in Jesus of Nazareth. It is a shared endeavour to shape our lives according to the vision of the Gospel.

All the baptized are meant to guide, inspire, and support each in this pursuit. Our decisions about priorities in our life together or about shared activities or about personal activities are meant to be grounded in our proclamation of the good news.

Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons. loving your neighbour as yourself?

In the letter to the Ephesians the writer makes a powerful statement within the context of discussing the relationships between men and women: “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.”[6] Here there is no distinction between male and female. All Christians are called to consider themselves slaves to all in order to be free for Christ.

The call of the gospel to love one’s neighbour as oneself is the corollary to the commandment to love God. When we fail to treat one another as God’s beloved in whom the image and likeness of God is present, then we fail in our baptismal vocation.

Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?

In Galatians 3.27-28 Paul writes the charter of the baptismal vocation of all Christians:

As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

In this statement Paul is not necessarily dispensing with the ethnic, social and gender realities of his society, but he is dispensing with any privilege that any of those realities might claim to the grace and knowledge of God. He is proclaiming a new reality in Christ which has the power to overcome all the arbitrary restrictions and obstacles that human beings have erected to inhibit the freedom of God’s grace.

Justice-making and peace-making are, for Christians, dependent upon the removal of such arbitrary restrictions and obstacles in order to free all God’s children to experience the fullness of God’s grace made known to us in creation, redemption and sanctification. For Christians, this baptismal commitment is made known by the domestic justice and peace of our relationships with the Christian community itself. Our domestic justice and peace will inevitably lead us into work towards justice and peace in our communities and, to the degree that we are able, our world, breaking down the ethnic barriers that perpetuate sectarian violence and political discrimination, the economic structures that perpetuate the bondage of workers and home and abroad, and the continued disparity of opportunities and power available to women and people of colour throughout the world.

So, my brothers and sisters, let us be friends tonight. Let us embody that love for one another as friends which we have come to know in Jesus of Nazareth. Let us be friends tonight to prepare ourselves for the work that still lies before us. Let us be friends tonight to remember those of our brothers and sisters, our friends, who struggle each day for bread, for water and for human dignity.

Let us pray.

Eternal God, in the sharing of a meal your Son established a new covenant for all people, and in the washing of feet he showed us the dignity of service. Grant that by the power of your Holy Spirit these signs of our life in faith may speak again to our hearts, feed our spirits and refresh our bodies. We ask this in the name of him who called us friends and who, with you and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns now and for ever. Amen.

---

[1] John 13.34-35.

[2] Bernard Cooke, “2. Historical Reflections on the Meaning of Marriage as Christian Sacrament,” in Christian Marriage, ed. Bernard Cooke, Alternative Futures for Worship, no. 5 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1987), 43.

[3] 1 Corinthians 11.26.

[4] John 15.12-15.

[5] This is a re-casting of comments by substituting ‘community’ for ‘marriage’ in comments made by Cynthia S. W. Crysdale, “Christian Marriage and Homosexual Monogamy,” in Our Selves, Our Souls and Bodies: Sexuality and the Household of God (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1996), 96.

[6] Ephesians 5.21.