By The Rev Mark Michael, Interim Rector

“Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” St. Luke 10:36-37

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

The book was called “The Casuist: Cases in Moral and Pastoral Theology,” and because it was published in 1906, I was able to download it onto my Kindle for free. In the little town where I last served as rector, they gave free gym memberships to the local clergy, so I took my exercise on the elliptical machine, and for about six months, “The Casuist” kept my mind occupied as my arms and legs ran through the machine’s monotonous courses.

I don’t know if any of you read in the gym or not, but I’ve found that books with short chapters and relatively punchy content works best. And “The Casuist” filled the bill in spades. Over several volumes, it collected hundreds of “hard cases,” moral quandaries that had been sent to the author, a certain Stanislaus Woywod, OFM, by puzzled priests who ran across them while hearing confessions and giving spiritual advice.

Fr. Woywod’s cases tend toward the curious and the colorful. There’s Mary, who lays dying and would like to make her confession to the priest over the telephone because her antireligious husband forbids him from entering the house.[1] John, who becomes engaged to a (presumably different) Mary, and then breaks it off without any good reason and marries Martha in a civil ceremony needs to sort out what he owes to his jilted.[2]  And there’s a certain Father X, who because of his scandalous conduct, has been forbidden by his bishop to enter a saloon for a full year except to administer the last rites. If he is vacationing in another diocese, the good father wonders, does the prohibition still apply?[3]

Many of the book’s cases involve two laws or moral principles that seem to contradict each other, like the principle that one should avoid occasions of sin and the fact that a bishop’s jurisdiction necessarily has certain limits. Some involve moral problems created by new technology and social situations, where new principles need to be generated by looking back to similar situations in earlier times.

The book is fascinating for anyone interested in social history because it shows all the challenges present for Catholics leaving the monoreligious farming villages of the old world for a new land. America is full of new moral quandaries: insurance companies who one’s employer orders one to defraud;[4] morphine, which might be taken in some situations but not in others;[5] and legendary religious diversity. One can be sure that back in Sicilian villages, priests didn’t encounter many people like Titus, who “without the least scruple of conscience, has changed his religion a number of times, for the sake of worldly gain.”[6]

I did enjoy a chuckle or two as I read the book, but in many ways it was very helpful for me in my current work as a priest. Because people do ask priests hard questions. They find themselves in situations at work or in their relationships where two obligations seem to be in tension with each other. People wonder when they should insist on a higher standard and when it’s right to go along with the crowd. They worry about balancing different commitments they have made, and how they should think about the new moral and social situations that spring up around us every day. As an Episcopal priest in 2016 I don’t always agree with Fr. Woywod in 1906, but the manner in which he reasons his way to a conclusion can often be very valuable.

Casuistry is an ancient practice, and it arises from the best of intentions. People who love God and want to do His will inevitably find themselves in situations that are morally perplexing. The Law God gave to Israel clearly envisions unusual cases that may arise. Saint Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians is pretty much one long exercise in casuistry, as the apostle works through a set of questions raised by the congregation there. Rabbis in Jesus’ time were principally casuists, responsible for helping people reason their way through how to apply the principles of the God’s law to particular situations. And Jesus shows himself a master of the art, and in some ways a critic of it, in today’s Gospel, the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

Jesus tells his famous story, which is really a moral case study, in an exchange with a teacher of the law. The exchange begins with consensus—Jesus and the teacher both agree that the best summary of God’s law comes from the combination of two Old Testament passages. To enter into eternal life, one must love God with one’s heart, mind and strength and one’s neighbor as one’s self. But then the lawyer asks a question: “and who is my neighbor?”

It’s possible that the man was trying to trap Jesus with the question, but it was also a perfectly reasonable thing to ask a rabbi. We know from Jewish texts of the time that different scholars gave different answers to the question. Because society was changing, and there were many more neighbors around than there used to be. Back when God gave the law to Moses, Jewish people were a monoreligious, family-linked, insular society. In Jesus’ time, they were spread around the known world, living alongside people who practiced diverse religions, spoke different languages, and kept unusual social practices. What if my neighbor is one of the despised Samaritan heretics? What if he’s a Roman legionary or a swindling Greek trader? I know God would want me to love as myself the person who sits beside me in synagogue, but surely there must be limits. The lawyer wants to know the boundaries Jesus puts around this term “your neighbor.”

And so to answer the question, Jesus sets out a case. It’s a case about “some guy”—the term is deliberately anonymous.[7] Even at the end of the story we don’t know anything about this opening figure. Is he a Jew or Gentile, rich or poor, pious or scoundrel? All we know him is that he is beset by bandits, robbed, stripped naked and left unconscious along the side of the road. He can’t speak. He’s not wearing the distinctive dress of any social group. He could be anybody. That’s exactly the point.

The first man to happen upon him is a priest, who is certainly socially prominent, probably wealthy, and hopefully pious.   Because he’s a priest, he’s also bound by a series of laws about ritual purity. If he touches a dead man, or steps in blood, maybe even if he touches an unbeliever, he will have violated his vows and until he has offered a sacrifice of atonement, he won’t be able to minister in the temple. Of course, he’s also obliged to help a man in trouble. But maybe he wanted to take the safest path, or maybe he was in a hurry, or maybe he couldn’t be bothered. But he rides on by, leaving the man half-dead in the ditch.

A Levite rides by next, and he gets a little closer to the man in the ditch. The purity laws are a little laxer in his case, but maybe he’s seen the priest ride by, and he thinks it would be disrespectful to question the holy man’s judgment. So the Levite rides on as well, and the man remains half-dead in the ditch.

But then a Samaritan comes, a trader in a foreign land. He, above all, was a man who could be excused for keeping his distance. The man in the ditch is almost certainly not one of his kind. He’s a stranger in a hostile land, where people recoil from his touch and avert their eyes in his presence.

But the Samaritan goes to “some guy,” the man in the ditch. He binds up his wounds, like God who binds up his broken people. He pours in oil and wine—antiseptic and balm, yes, but also the holy foods of the temple. He carries the man back to an inn, where he could well be suspected for the crime. One commentator I read compared it to an Indian riding into Dodge City with a scalped cowboy in the saddle.[8] The Samaritan probably doesn’t just put the man on his own horse, he also leads it like a servant. When he leaves the inn, he pays for two weeks’ lodging, and promises to make good on the rest when he comes back again.

Which of the three, Jesus asks, was neighbor to the man who fell among the thieves? He’s shifted the question, you see. He’s not asking about who discharged his carefully delimited duty properly. When “some guy” was nearly dead, Jesus means, who became God’s true child by extending the mercy that saved his life. The teacher of the law gives the proper answer. “The one who showed mercy,” he says. The true neighbor was the one who drew so near out of love, and risked his own life to save a man he never knew.

But Jesus has also problematized the teacher’s original question. As the great New Testament scholar T. W. Manson summarized, Jesus is suggesting that “love does not begin by defining its objects; it discovers them.”[9]

On the one hand, Jesus does give us a straightforward moral case with a number of clear conclusions. It’s more important to show mercy than to keep the laws for ritual purity. Helping a neighbor is more important than maintaining one’s social position. My neighbor is any person I discover who needs what I can give. Go and do likewise, Jesus says, and in these days of such great social division and violence, we need not look far to see many neighbors crying out for our attention and help.

But as so often in these parables, Jesus also gestures towards something even more beautiful and profound. This is casuistry, but it is also prophecy. In this unlikely figure, the Samaritan, Jesus points toward a God who loves all whom He has made, who is merciful and life-giving. He helps us imagine that all social barriers might one day fall, that when we looked at one another, we might see only “some guy”—or better, this person who God has made in His own image, this person who too is my brother or my sister. And Jesus suggests that this healing and reconciling work might come from a most unsuitable hero. The true Good Samaritan, He would be One who came as a servant and was despised and rejected. He would be One who drew near to a broken and dying human race. He would be One who risked His own life in a single gesture of costly love.

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

[1] Woywod, Stanislaus. The Casuist: A Collection of Cases in Moral and Pastoral Theology. New York: Joseph F. Wagner, 1906, I.100ff.

[2] Ibid., I.128ff.

[3] Ibid., I.44ff.

[4] Ibid., I.261ff.

[5] Ibid., I.255ff.

[6] Ibid., I.79ff.

[7] Hoezee, Scott. Luke 10:25-37. Center for Excellence in Preaching. http://cep.calvinseminary.edu/sermon-starters/proper-10c/?type=the_lectionary_gospel 8 Jul. 2016.

[8] Bailey, Kenneth. Through Peasant Eyes. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980, 52.

[9] Qtd in Ibid., 41.

By The Rev Mark Michael, Interim Rector

“Whatever house you enter, first say, `Peace to this house!’ And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person.” St. Luke 10:5-6

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

Sally[1] was our most effective evangelist at a parish where I once served. She would warn me ahead of time when she was bringing another one with her.   I’d walk into the chancel Sunday morning and look back at her pew, on the aisle halfway down the right side, and see a new face. The newcomer might be slightly puzzled, a little uncertain; but also glad to be right next to someone who obviously knew what she was doing. Most every time the bishop came, Sally would present a candidate or two for confirmation, someone she’d walked alongside in the journey to faith, another person who had found peace with God and the gift of new life.

Sally had no advanced degrees in theology. I couldn’t even get her to come to Bible study. She was a humble woman, without great wealth or social power. She had what I secretly regarded as one of the most unpromising opening lines in the history of evangelism. I heard her use it at least twice, and winced a bit both times. She would look people right in the eye, sigh a bit, and simply say, “you need to get your butt in church.” You should know that this phrase is not from the New Testament, and I’m sure it’s not recommended by the Episcopal Church’s canon for evangelism. But over and over again, through the unseen work of the Holy Spirit, Sally said it and it worked.

Sally had more than her share of opportunities to use that line in her job. For much of my time as her rector, she was a waitress at Frank’s,[2] a diner much loved by locals, because it was about the only restaurant in our tourist town that stayed open all year round. When you suffer through an upstate New York winter, it’s not hard to become very loyal to the one place that serves bacon cheeseburgers the second week of February.

Waitresses see people in all sorts of situations. They overhear, and learn to observe.   When waitresses are warm and generous, as Sally was, they are often deeply trusted. People talked with Sally about their problems. They asked her for advice as she came to refill their coffee cups. Because they knew she was religious, they asked her for her prayers. And mostly Sally just listened and nodded. But sometimes, she would trot out that unpromising opening line, “you need to get your butt in church.”

To Sally’s mind, there were few existential crises that couldn’t be helped by an hour spent at the 8:00 Service on Sunday morning. Sally was sharing what worked for her, passing on a little of the peace she had received. “Whatever house you enter,” Jesus told the seventy, “first say, `Peace to this house!’ And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person.”

That’s what Sally meant by “you need to get your butt in church.” She had found so much there in that pew halfway back the aisle: a sense of God’s loving presence, guidance from the Scriptures for her own struggles, the renewing power of the Sacrament, the comfort of a caring community. Sally had met the One who, as our Psalm says “holds our souls in life and will not allow our feet to slip.” Who wouldn’t want to share that kind of discovery with a person in trouble?

Jesus entrusts the life-changing message of the Gospel to the hands of ordinary people. Evangelism is for amateurs. That’s one of the main themes of today’s Gospel lesson, the sending of the seventy. Saint Luke records that Jesus sent out two different groups of missionaries in his journey from Galilee to Jerusalem. First, in chapter 9, He sends the apostles—his inner circle, the people who had been trained carefully and commissioned with supernatural power. And then a little further down the road, He sent out seventy more witnesses, the B team, people like you and me and Sally.

Saint Luke records at least part of the instructions that Jesus gave the seventy before they set out. It’s interesting that His instructions focus more closely on what the seventy should avoid than what they should actually do. Ancient Palestine was a world filled with wandering religious teachers, rabbis, and the seventy are specifically directed not to pretend to be rabbis. They are not to wear special clothing. Nor are they to carry a bag for collecting contributions from the pious. They are to depend on the hospitality of their hearers, but not to pass judgment on the foods presented to them. In other words, they’re supposed to look and sound like the amateurs they really are.

Jesus tells them that they are to announce to the people, “The Kingdom of God has come near you.” I don’t think he was telling the seventy to recite a bare formula. Jesus was saying they should talk about what they had discovered in Him, how they had come to believe that He was the long-promised redeemer, how meeting Jesus had changed their lives. They are to pray for the sick, keeping an eye out for the reality of suffering in the lives of those around them. And God, Jesus promised, would take care of the rest.

The key passage, I think, is this one: “If anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person.” Tell them about what you have discovered, He means, and leave the rest of it to God. No gimmicks, no fancy rhetoric, no tricks. In the memorable words of the great Indian mission theologian D. T. Niles: “Christianity is one beggar telling another beggar where he found bread.”[3]

Evangelism is God’s work. We’re just the messengers, the ones who speak the word that God is preparing others to hear and receive with faith. That’s true when the speaker is learned, experienced and polished. But we see it even more clearly in the words of ordinary people, spoken out of their own experience.

God was already at work in the lives of those Palestinian villagers long before the seventy reached them. God was already stirring up questions and longings in people’s hearts. The fields are white for harvest, Jesus says—planted and tended by God’s hand. “Indeed we also work,” wrote Saint Augustine, “but we are only collaborating with God who works, for his mercy has gone before us. It has gone before us so that we may be healed, and follows us so that once healed, we may be given life; it goes before us so that we may be called, and follows us so that we may be glorified: for without him we can do nothing[4]”

And of course, what a harvest God has gone ahead to prepare for them. The seventy return rejoicing. The sick have been healed, the possessed have been delivered. Their message has been greeted with faith. They share in the joy of the harvest. Jesus looks to the distant horizon. “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven,” He says. What God is doing here, in ordinary people who take the risk of sharing what they know, it marks a turn in the great epic struggle. As the Psalmist says, “This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.”[5]

So did everyone believe? Were the seventy received graciously in every village? I doubt it. Jesus gives plenty of warnings about how this call will be resisted. Human beings are made for relationship with God. The Gospel is the answer to humanity’s deepest questions. God opens doors in the heart that we cannot fathom. But He gives room for human freedom. People can say no, and they will say no. As Jane reminded us in her sermon last week, the stakes are too high for faith to come easily to everyone.

But there’s a mystery in the way people respond to the message as well. We don’t always see what will come of the words we say. The truth may sleep unseen in the heart for decades, only to spring to life at the most unexpected moment. One of the great wonders of the life of the world to come will be to see how God has used the little things we’ve said, the little kindnesses we’ve done; how He’s used them to change lives in ways we could never even imagine.

You already know enough to be a faithful witness. That’s not to say you couldn’t learn more, or that you shouldn’t try to consider a person’s situation carefully before you speak with them about Jesus. But I’m sure there’s someone in your life right now who is deeply longing for the kind of peace you know now in your life in Christ. I’m sure you know someone who would be blessed to be part of a loving community of faith like the one that gathers here every Sunday. There are people in your life that God wants to welcome into His kingdom through your faulty words, the story He has given you and you only to tell.

I guess you could just look them in the eye like Sally and say, “you need to get your butt in church.” It does work. I’ve seen the evidence. But I think you can probably do a little better than that. Commend your words to God, speak from the heart and just wait and see the harvest He prepared.

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

[1] Not her real name.

[2] Not its real name.

[3] New York Times, May 11, 1986

[4] De natura et gratia, 31.

[5] Ps. 118:23.

By the Rev. Mark A. Michael, Interim Rector

Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked him to depart from them. St. Luke 8:37

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

Our hearts have been broken this week, as we have read and watched coverage of the killing of 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Saint Paul urges us to “weep with those who weep,”[1] and this has been a week for tears and prayers. So many people slain in the prime of life, hatred that is difficult for us to comprehend—the world seems a darker and more dangerous place.

Allison and I had been in Orlando the week before last for a theology conference. We had dinner a mile and a half from the nightclub the evening before the tragedy. “It could have been us,” we thought. If you are gay or Latino, I imagine you may be feeling much more threatened. Another unpredictable act of gun violence, another undetected terrorist, one of us turned against all of us. “How long will it last?” we ask ourselves. Is this just how it will be for us now?

Terrorists, and especially religious terrorists, claim to be acting on God’s behalf, to taking God’s sword of judgment into their own hands. The shooter, Omar Mateen claimed to be an Islamic State loyalist. I don’t expect we will ever know precisely why he did what he did. He may have just been a bitter, self-hating young man. But the official ideology of the Islamic State is very apocalyptic, looking ahead to the day of judgement when God rewards and punishes. Violent acts like this, these fanatics believe, clarify the lines, and hasten the final verdict.

But this is not the judgment of our God, this bloody carnage and arrogant presumption of a man who cannot see into the heart. God loves all whom He has made. All people bear the stamp of his image, no matter their race or sexual orientation. All people possess inherent dignity, and God has clearly forbidden murder.

It’s the Evil One who works through violence and sows division between groups of people. It’s the Evil One who hardens hearts and dulls the conscience, and awakens that which is most savage within us. I have no reason to suspect that Mr. Mateen was not fully responsible for what he did last Saturday night. But events like these also lay bare the deep but mostly unseen struggle between our good and gracious God and Satan, the prince of lies, that shapes the course of this world. We’re frightened by this event, and with good reason, because it’s more than we can handle.

The mass shooting in Orlando quickly brings to the surface several deep rooted and long term social conflicts. They’re all what strategic planners call “wicked problems”—issues that are very complicated and seem to persistently deny consensus or solution. There’s the problem of radical Islam, and our frustrating inability to predict and control terrorist events. There’s the continual escalation of gun violence in our country, especially mass shootings committed by young men. Our continuing hostility towards sexual and racial minorities is another deep problem, a hatred for those who are unlike us, those we can’t understand. And there’s the question of how keep culture wars civil, how to prevent our disagreements about fundamental questions of human identity and common life from becoming violent.

We can’t create machines that will solve these problems. No grand theory will work them out. Some of them are based in issues that have always been at the heart of our culture: tensions between individual rights and social equality, a need for common values and a deeply diverse population. Working through these problems must involve insights from across the ideological spectrum, consensus developed through respectful and gracious relationships.

These are also all spiritual problems to one extent or another. We can only work at them by looking inward and seeking God’s help. Problems like these demand deeper patience and humility, greater compassion for the sufferings of others, love that reaches across divides and establishes true communion. It may be right that we have problems to solve as a nation. But we also have wounds to be healed, evil to be cast out.

Jesus went to the country of the Gerasenes, and he found a tormented and miserable man, naked and raving among the tombs. His neighbors had cast him out, this man who frightened them with his unpredictability and his tendency to show them a side of themselves they would rather forget.

Jesus recognized that the man was in the grip of evil spirits. He had compassion on the man, and drove them out, in a dramatic show of power. Jesus restored the man’s freedom and dignity. His neighbors came to find him clothed and in his right mind, ready to work and make friends, someone they had thought lost forever now fully capable of taking a place in their community.

They saw this wonderful work of healing and they feared the One who had performed it. They begged Jesus to leave their land. They surely had others who were sick. There were people in their community who needed to be reconciled to each other. There was so much that Jesus could have taught them, so much wisdom He had to share.

But they begged Jesus to leave. He’d set one thing right in their community, and maybe they just couldn’t handle more restoration. His healing threatened them. It opened up questions about what else might need fixing in their community. And they were afraid of what His kind of change might demand of each of them. Jesus comes to bring the healing we need, you see, but He also unsettles the ways we cobble together to make this broken world work.

I don’t know how your Facebook feed has looked in the days since the shooting in Orlando, but mine has been fairly agonizing. There were some heartfelt and generous words for the victims of the attack and those who loved them in the first few days. But how much anger since then.

“We could solve this problem,” one person says, “if only we got rid of those crazy people who support the NRA.” Another voice opines: “If we could just get rid of this spineless president and find one who takes Islamic terrorism seriously.” “If we could one eliminate all those morons who continue to oppose gay marriage.” “Muslims are far too dangerous to let into our country.” On and on it goes, hundreds of voices all saying in some way: “this is someone else’s problem.” We can bring peace and unity to America, if only we get rid of him or her or them. Let’s cast out the demoniac, and then at last, we can be free.

And Jesus stands on the shore of our land, as he stood that day by Genessaret. He points to the evil in the life we share together, revealed so graphically in the events last Saturday night. He offers to bind up our wounds, to give us freedom, to help us live together in peace. But to be healed, we must recognize that this isn’t all someone else’s problem. Our anger, our harsh words, our arrogant impatience with those who we refuse to understand, they too have brought our nation to this dark and troubling time. He will heal us, but we must be willing to change. Will it be said of us, in this time: “Then all the people asked him to depart from them?”

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

[1] Rom. 12:15.

By The Rev Mark Michael, Interim Rector

He cried out to the Lord, “O Lord my God, have you brought calamity, even upon the widow with whom I am staying, by killing her son?” I Kings 17:20

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

For me, the biggest surprise of my trip to Zambia in April was having dinner with the Archbishop of Canterbury. It wasn’t at all planned. I’d been given a banquet ticket at the last minute, and when the waiter went looking for a seat for me, it was the first one he spotted, right at the front, beside the spiritual head of the world’s 85 million Anglicans.

I was delighted, of course. I am a great admirer of Archbishop Welby’s. I pray for him every morning, and I believe that God has given him to us as the leader we need at this challenging time. Given a few days’ notice, I could have formulated any number of appropriate anecdotes for a casual evening or profound questions for an interview. But I was not prepared, on a few seconds’ notice to make small talk to him for an hour or so.

I wasn’t really afraid I would use the wrong fork or the wrong title. It was dark enough to conceal the flatware and the menu was traditional Zambian. I’m not sure that the archbishop knew how to spear pan-fried caterpillars any better than I did.

It was more the tone of conversation that had me worried. Should I just let him do the talking and nod politely? Was it appropriate to tell more about myself? Was it pious matters only or would a few jokes be in order?

I wanted to help the poor fellow relax a bit after what had been a rather grueling day of presentations and debates. But I wanted to be respectful as well, to show that I appreciated the honor of sharing the meal with him.

Well, as people usually say about these sorts of things, it turned out just fine in the end. I can’t say too much about our conversation, because I was in Zambia as a reporter, and the Archbishop’s press man came over to me soon after I was seated to make me swear it would all be “off the record.” The archbishop was as I would have hoped him to be: thoughtful and engaging, with lots of questions about my family and about interim ministry, which they are beginning, on a trial basis, in the Church of England. He laughed at my jokes. I left dinner just as impressed with him as I was at the beginning. There was no mistaking, throughout our time together, that I was a very ordinary parish priest and he was the Archbishop of Canterbury. But we were able to connect, to share. There was real communication across the gap.

In years of talking with people about their prayers, I know that many struggle with how to communicate across an even broader gap. We find it hard to know just what to say to God, what words we should use in our prayers, what tone we should take, what topics might be off limits. I’ve often been asked something like— “This sickness, this bereavement, this struggle to find a purpose in my life is really hard. Can I really talk to God about it?” “Is it disrespectful to complain?” “Does God really care about my trouble?” “Sometimes I feel really angry with God. Is it okay for me to feel this way, or even to say this when I pray?”

These are not foolish questions.   God is the Creator and Ruler of all things. He is the One to whom we must finally render an account. He is holy and we are not. We do well to know our place before God, to speak with God in a way that acknowledges His authority and wisdom. We call speech that is mindful of that existential gap between God and ourselves reverent.

The author of Ecclesiastes urged reverence in this way: “Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore, let your words be few. For when dreams increase and words grow many, there is vanity; but God is the one you must fear.”[1]

What Ecclesiastes is saying is that we shouldn’t babble on aimlessly when we speak with God. We shouldn’t boss God about like our own personal lackey. God knows far more than we do about the meaning of the events in our lives and what is truly best for us.   To speak with God, and to know that He hears us is perhaps the highest privilege of a believer. We must choose our words carefully, recognizing that privilege and showing respect and gratitude.

But reverent speech should also be direct and honest, even about the things that are most difficult for us. I don’t think that God is like Emily Post or your tenth grade English teacher, waiting to catch you out for some error in what you say or how you say it. Jesus assured us that God delights to give good gifts to His children when they ask Him. God wants us to draw near to Him, and a profound relationship with God as with a human being requires that we be truthful about our struggles and our pain.

Today’s Old Testament lesson describes one of the most dramatic incidents in the story of Elijah. Elijah is the first and greatest of the Old Testament prophets, the one who was called simply “the man of God.” Like all Biblical prophets, Elijah revealed God’s Word. He also worked miracles, and through them God revealed that his message was true. Most of Elijah’s miracles, like this raising of the son of the widow of Zarephath, came through direct and honest prayer. The Book of James in the New Testament actually holds up Elijah as a model for the prayer of Christians, saying that his witness proves that “the prayer of a righteous man is mighty in its effects.”[2]

Elijah is called to prayer by the honest doubt of a faithful woman. Months before otherwise nameless widow of Zarephath had welcomed Elijah, a foreigner who was in her land fleeing the long arm of the law. In the midst of a severe famine, the widow made a cake for the man of God from her last bit of flour and oil. For her faithfulness, God had sent just a little more of each thing every day, so that the barrel was never emptied and the cruet never dry. She took the prophet into her home, made him a little room on the roof, and she grew to trust in His message.

But then, unexpectedly, her only son had died, leaving her without a provider, alone in the world. The widow comes to Elijah, in deep distress, angry at him and angry at God, desperately searching for an answer, as we all do at such times. “What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance, and to cause the death of my son!”

She doesn’t pray to God herself. Perhaps she doesn’t think she can, or that God wouldn’t be ready to hear what she’s feeling. But Elijah prays for her. He doesn’t correct anything she’s said, in fact his own words to God echo the widow’s almost exactly: “O Lord my God, have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I am staying, by killing her son?” The great man of God is angry also, you see. He’s saddened by the death of the young man who he had also come to care for during his time in the widow’s home. Has God actually killed the boy? Elijah didn’t know why he had died, but at that moment, after such faith and sacrifice, it certainly felt that way. He didn’t hide this from God. He was honest, and then he was direct: “O Lord my God, let this child’s life come into him again.”

And in response to such honesty, such plain and direct speech, God acted directly. “The Lord listened to the voice of Elijah; the life of the child came into him again, and he revived.” It is the single greatest miracle of the Old Testament, a person brought back from death. It would happen just one more time, in the ministry of Elijah’s successor, Elisha;[3] until centuries later when the Promised One would come and bring back to life another widow’s son. “A great prophet has risen among us,” they would say then of Jesus, “God has looked favorably on his people.” That miracle at Nain would point ahead to the greatest wonder of all, yet to come, when this great prophet would Himself be risen from the dead, conquering sin and opening eternal life to all.

But remember where it all began, in a word spoken out of doubt and fear, an honest word, a direct request, out of just about the worst imaginable situation. I hope that none of you will never need to pray for the life of your own child or to ask for God’s help as you hold a loved one dead in your arms. But whenever you feel deeply frustrated, or fearful of the future’s hazards, know that you do not need to hide your feelings from God. God loves you. He wants you to turn to Him for help. We speak to God across a great divide, to be sure, but He is ever leaping across it to bless, heal and save.

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

[1] Eccl. 5:2,7.

[2] Jas. 5:17.

[3] II Kings 4:18-37.

By the Rev Mark Michael, Interim Rector

“He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. St. John 16:14-15”

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

In the first year of seminary, my classmates and I were sent out a few Sundays to preach in local congregations. I drew the short straw, and was assigned to a Family Service in a rural Cotswolds village on Trinity Sunday. The assignment was to say something orthodox and meaningful in about five minutes, and the core audience was a dozen elementary school children. Well, I mustered my full energies, and most of what I was learning in my class on the church fathers, and put together a plan, which involved a circle dance and some half-digested fifth century Greek theology.

I was feeling rather confident about my impending oration, and on the Saturday before Trinity Sunday, over breakfast after Mass, I announced to the congregation at Pusey House Chapel that I’d happened upon a way to explain the Trinity to kids. Father Philip frowned over his teacup, looked me directly in the eyes and said bluntly: “If you think you have explained the Holy Trinity, young man, then clearly you’ve got it wrong.”

I take his point. This is the day when we confess together the mysterious truth that the One God is Three Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. What God is in Himself is a truth utterly beyond us. How God’s three Persons are related to one another is revealed to us in Holy Scripture, but some aspects of this lie beyond our powers as well. In a sense, there is no explanation of the Holy Trinity, either for eight year olds or the most seasoned and learned theologians. Even Archbishop Rowan Williams, the most gifted Anglican theologian of our time, cribbed a line from Churchill when he said that the doctrine of the Trinity is the “’least worst’ explanation we have found for talking about something very disturbing and inexhaustible.”[1]

The truth of the God who reveals Himself in the creation of the world, the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit surpasses the limits our words can stake out. The most complete response to this truth about this God is adoration, obedience and love.

And yet, from the very beginning, for the sake of its public worship and teaching, its moral vision and systems of governance, the Church has found it necessary to speak of the Trinity. This remains the best way we can answer the questions people naturally ask about the “disturbing and inexhaustible God” who saves and renews us.

This doctrine is classically and most clearly expressed in the language of philosophy. The Creed speaks of one being or substance of God and of three persons, three distinct subjects. Strictly speaking, that is not Scriptural language, and that makes a certain kind of fundamentalist very grouchy. The Bible rarely uses philosophical terms, but it does say many things with philosophical significance.

This language of substance and persons expresses exactly what Jesus means in our Gospel lesson when He speaks of truth that He has been given by the Father and which the Spirit will declare to his disciples in the time after His departure. The truth is one, because it is expresses the single wisdom, purpose and will that the Father, Son and Spirit share. But it is shared by individual subjects, from the Father to the Son, and then to the Spirit. In our Epistle lesson, Saint Paul presumes a similar single unity of purpose and will when He speaks of how Jesus has uniquely reconciled us to God, giving us a share in the glory He shares with the Father. The sign of this reconciliation and glory is the Holy Spirit, who comes from the Father and the Son and lives within us.

When we ask how precisely the distinct Father, Son and Holy Spirit share this single truth, reflect this single glory, or cause this single work of salvation, we are asking a philosophical question. It’s a timeless philosophical question, the question of the one and the many. If you remember your Philosophy 101, you will know that it’s one of the original questions of Western philosophy, something Thales and Heraclitus were wrestling with long before Plato was a twinkle in His mother’s eye. The question of the one and the many asks about how we assign similarity and difference, how things can be grouped together in meaningful categories depending on the characteristics they do and do not share.

And the doctrine of the Trinity says that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are able to work so closely because, as the Scripture teaches, God is one. There is a single divine essence, that they all share. And yet they remain many: distinct, with roles that sometimes differ. They don’t change from one form to another to take on particular tasks, but are eternally distinct, so as the Creed says, the Son is “begotten of His Father before all worlds.” There is no time when they were not distinct.

This is most clearly illustrated by a simple diagram that Kevin has printed for me on the back of your bulletins. It shows how the Father, the Son and the Spirit are each God, but that the Father is not the Son, the Son not the Spirit, and the Spirit not the Father. You may have seen this diagram because it got some currency in the Middle Ages as God’s coat of arms, often picked out in white, blue and gold and emblazoned on stained glass windows.

The diagram is perfectly clear, and probably says about all that needs to be said on the subject. But people rarely find it satisfying. So they usually resort to illustrations and analogies that seem to make things clearer, but are unfortunately mostly wrong. While three-leaf clovers, and ice, water and steam are ways of explaining the one and the many, they fail to do justice to this One, the single, inexhaustible essence of God, and this many of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Church history abounds in many examples of these insufficient explanations. We call them heresies. They inevitably start out trying to simplify what seems unnecessarily complicated in the classical teaching. But they end up creating many more problems than they solve, and not just logical problems, or problems of Scriptural interpretation. Heresies create real problems that emerge in living out the faith they aim to reinvent.

Ideas, you see, really do matter, especially theological ones that aim to describe that truth on which everything else depends. The Church has always insisted that heresy needs to be called out, not just for the sake of consistency, but so the faithful would not be led off course by faulty guidance.

So on this day of explanations, better ones as well as worse ones, I think we would do well to look at just one heresy: perhaps the most common Trinitarian heresy of them all, modalism. Technically, we usually call it Sabellianism, after a third century North African priest who was the first to teach it.

Modalism or Sabellianism holds that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are not distinct subjects, but modes or ways in which the one God chooses to do his work. The One God, modalism says, sometimes acts as father, sometimes as Son, and sometimes as Holy Spirit. It’s a bit like how I am sometimes a priest, sometimes a husband, and sometimes a world-famous mountain-climber (at least in my daydreams).

You can see how this explanation came to be. Jesus ascended, and then ten days later, the Holy Spirit comes down. It’s a bit like Superman stepping into a phone booth, changing from one mode to another. And yet it doesn’t do justice to the full story of the Scriptures, which says that even as the Spirit is here, in our hearts, the Son also lives at the right hand of God and here on the Altars of His faithful people. Modalism also cannot make sense of moments like Jesus’ Baptism, when the Father speaks His word of approval just as the Spirit descends to rest upon the only Son.

But as retired Episcopal Bishop FitzSimons Allison says in his excellent book, The Cruelty of Heresy, there’s also a deeper problem of theological integrity within modalism.[2] We need to know that God is eternally consistent. When I stand at a deathbed, and assure a person burdened by guilt that Christ truly has died to set her free, it won’t do to tell her that the mercy revealed in Jesus was what God intended just at one particular time. We need the confidence that the Son is eternal, that He is the Alpha and the Omega, that was present at the beginning and will be forever. The modalist can say only that once upon a time God came to save the world, but God might have changed His mind since then. Perhaps God doesn’t intend to stand by the promises he made when He was in “Son mode” those many centuries ago.

And what would it mean to be people who worshipped a God who was always changing to fit the needs of the moment—a shape-shifter, a chameleon? I expect it would give us a certain amount of wiggle room in our own interactions with other people. We might be honest one day, but if God is always changing, it wouldn’t be so hard to persuade ourselves that a bit of embellishment was just what this new situation demanded. Heaven knows we are inconsistent enough when we’ve been plainly assured that the One who gave us the law will judge us by it in the end. But if God too were endlessly variable, what need would there be for us to have integrity?

Sound faith and upright living depend on a clear knowledge of the truth about God. There is great wisdom, at least one Sunday in the year, in returning to praise this truth of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, revealed in Scripture, taught by the Church. This doctrine is a life-giving truth, a welcome rule that helps us to know this inexhaustible God more clearly. It stands at the center of the life we share together in Christ, and we must defend it with conviction and care. It may be the “least worst” of explanations, but it reveals our God to us in ways that enrich our minds and uplift our spirits.

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

[1] Rowan Williams, Living the Questions (the Converging Worlds of Rowan Williams), The Christian Century, Apr 24, 2002, David S. Cunningham (thanks to Bishop Matt Gunter’s blogpost “Quotes on the Trinity” at An Odd Work of Grace, http://anoddworkofgrace.blogspot.com/ 18 May 2016.

[2] The Cruelty of Heresy: An Affirmation of Christian Orthodoxy. Harrisburg: Morehouse, 1994, 73-79.

By the Rev. Mark A. Michael

“You know him, because he abides with you and will be in you.” St. John 14:17

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

My late father had a personality that could fill a room. We come from a family of storytellers, of gregarious men. But Dad was unusually gifted. He worked for years as a hardware salesman, which helped him learn to feel comfortable relating to many different kinds of people, and finding just the right topic for small talk. It made me smile to watch what would happen when he walked into a family reunion, a wedding reception or coffee hour after church. People would immediately walk in his direction, smiles would break out, the room would grow louder and more animated as people began to speak up.

Some people have this kind of social pull because they have to be center of attention. They dominate conversation and cultivate eccentricities that make them stand out. But aside from being able to tell a joke really well, there wasn’t much that stood out in the way dad presented himself to others. He didn’t interrupt or compel, but was genuinely interested in other people. He was able to draw them toward others, to bring out what was best in people. You might say that his presence lifted everyone else, that he infused a kind of power into gatherings that made them altogether different than they would be without him.

We noticed this more clearly after dad died, when his absence loomed much larger than I think any of us had expected. The family reunions were more subdued. People didn’t stick around as long. We decided to let go of a few events that had been part of our family’s social calendar because they just didn’t seem to work as well anymore without dad to pull everyone together. It wasn’t just that he was gone. The life he brought into our social interactions had faded away as well.

Today is the feast of Pentecost, when we celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit, poured out on the apostles fifty days after our Lord’s resurrection. While I’m sure that we are all deeply grateful for the gift of the Spirit, we sometimes find it very difficult to understand who the Spirit is and how He works in the Church and in our own souls. The Holy Spirit is sometimes called the “forgotten person of the Holy Trinity,” because many Christians neglect to pray to the Spirit or to acknowledge his role in our spiritual lives.

I think in part that’s because the Holy Spirit is both a power and a presence, as Jesus clearly indicates in today’s Gospel. In some ways it’s difficult for us to relate these two ideas to each other. We might even see them as contradictory. But I think that we get a helpful glimpse of what this is like in people like my late father, who have dynamic personalities. Their social presence is weighted with power, and changes the lives of people they encounter. But let’s unpack this a bit.

First, the Holy Spirit is a power, changing people’s lives by infusing them with supernatural strength and new insight. When Jesus spoke to His disciples about sending His Spirit into them after His resurrection, this is probably where their understanding began. Indeed, Saint Luke records Jesus as pointing ahead to the day of Pentecost as the moment when “power from high” would come upon them[1]. In the Old Testament, this is almost always how the Holy Spirit is described, as a power coming from God to equip people for a particular task. The Spirit came upon Samson, and gave him strength to pull down the pagan temple onto the Philistines. Solomon’s wisdom came from the Spirit, and the prophets spoke God’s word through insight sent by the Spirit.

In our Gospel lesson, Jesus tells the apostles that they will do even greater works than he has done after He has returned to the Father and the Spirit has been sent on them. The Spirit will equip and sustain them to do far more than they were capable of accomplishing before.

And indeed, the Pentecost story shows the Spirit coming down and sending out power in unmistakably dramatic ways. The apostles are crowned with flames, and they speak in new languages. It becomes clear, in an instant, that the good news of Jesus Christ is not just meant for Palestinian Jews like Jesus and themselves, but all the citizens of the world. The apostles “do greater works,” just as Jesus had promised. Peter probably made more converts with his single sermon that day than Jesus had made in his entire ministry. It is clear that there’s a new power at work through them.

What would have been new for the apostles in Jesus’ message, and probably what we also find more difficult to understand, is that the Holy Spirit sent on them is also a Presence, God with them as a Person, in a relational way. In today’s Gospel, Jesus promises that the Spirit “will be with you forever.” “He will abide with you,” Jesus says, “and will be in you.” When God poured out His Spirit before the coming of Christ, it was almost always for a particular task, a limited time. The Spirit would stay while the work was being done, and then would vanish again.

But the Spirit rests on Jesus in a lasting, permanent way. The Holy Spirit is the bond of love that united Jesus with the Father, the Source of Jesus’ words and works. Jesus didn’t just use God’s power, God was present in Him and acted through Him. He was never apart from God the Father, because the Spirit filled Him completely.

And the same Spirit is sent on the apostles and on each of us in Holy Baptism. The Spirit that proceeds from the Father and the Son, abides in us and is in us, because He abode in Jesus and was in Jesus first. We receive God’s strength to do His work, yes; but not as a fuel that is spent and needs to be topped up again. God Himself has made His home within us. We are filled with His Presence by the Holy Spirit who lives in us. The strength to do His work flows out naturally from that Presence. It’s not a reservoir but a fountain, ever fresh, ever new, inexhaustible.

You just can’t separate the presence from the power. To go back to where we started, my dad’s social power had measurable effects. You could measure the way the volume in the room changed, the way people moved when he walked into a room. But that power was intimately connected to dad’s presence, his inimitable personality. When dad was gone, that power went with him.

The gifts of God, in the same way, cannot be separated from the Presence of God, by His Spirit, within us. We can ask God for specific gifts of course: deeper patience, greater insight, wider compassion. But what we are really asking for is more of the Spirit. We want the Spirit to reveal Himself to us more clearly, pushing past our own sinful desires and persistent bad habits, so that we come to feel and think and act as God does.   Spiritual growth means more of God and less of ourselves in our lives. The opposite is true as well. When we see God’s power working through us, we feel closer to God, we know Him better. That’s because the One who dwells within us is working through us.

Today, we rejoice that the Holy Spirit, who came down that first Pentecost, is among us, that He abides with us and in us. We pray that we would see His power revealed in what we think, say and do. And we ask that He would reveal His Presence to us more clearly each day, so we may know His joy, peace and love more fully.

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

[1] Lk. 24:29.