Audio of Sermon from June 2, 2013 by the Rev. Kate Ekrem

Sermon for June 2, 2013

Sermon by the Rev. Kate Ekrem

Let me read again from the Letter of Paul to the Galatians:

Dear Galatians, ARE YOU NUTS? Didn’t you listen to a word I said?

Ok, Paul didn’t say those exact words, but pretty close. He wrote: “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel – not that there is a different gospel, but there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Chris. But even if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed!”

He is really upset. What is he so upset about? What is the big argument about? Paul founded this church in Galatia, and apparently after he left, some other Christian missionaries came and said, what Paul said, was not quite correct, here’s the real deal. And now Paul is writing to say, they are wrong and I am right! And he’s really really upset about it. Because the argument goes right to the heart of what Paul believes the Gospel is all about, right to the heart of who Jesus is and what his death and resurrection mean.

The gospel Paul is preaching is merely this: salvation is through Jesus Christ. Full stop. There is nothing you need to do, nothing you need to say, nothing you need to even believe, no paper to sign, no oath to swear, no law to follow, Jesus has done it all, 100% of whatever needs to be done to save your soul and reconcile you to God, has been done. It’s totally completely done.

These other Christian missionaries who came to Galatia after Paul said, yes, sure, but you know Jesus was Jewish, and we have this ancient tradition which is very meaningful and the 10 Commandments are pretty darn important, and if you really want to follow Jesus, you need to follow those commandments, keep kosher laws, get circumcised, that’s a fuller and richer understanding of this tradition we’ve been given. To give up those traditions, this rich heritage with all its ethical teachings, to say they didn’t matter anymore, would mean throwing overboard customs that had kept the Jewish people together for centuries through many trials and tribulations. This made sense to the people in Galatia, so they started following those laws and customs, and this is what got Paul so upset.

Now, let me be clear. These Jewish Christians did not think that they could earn salvation through works. That was a later idea that was read back into this time, but it’s not correct. And Paul was definitely not saying that Jewish Christians should betray their history, heritage, and customs. Paul was just saying that gentile Christians shouldn’t have to take on those practices. He was making an important but subtle point. As one theologian has put it “Christ is a doorway through which anyone can enter at any time.” (Feasting on the Word)

That may seem pretty self evident, we may be saying, yeah, Paul was right and those other missionaries were wrong, but think of it this way, when people come to our community we tend to say, welcome, hey, let us tell you about our church, here’s the Book of Common Prayer, it’s really great, and have you been baptized, do your kids need to be confirmed? And the Eucharist, that’s really important, but you can’t receive it until you’ve been baptized, these are our traditions, please join us. That’s the kind of thing to which Paul is saying, no, no, no. There’s actually nothing, nothing, you have to do to become a member of our community because, Jesus already did it, he already made us a community. That’s it, that’s all.  Full stop.  No footnotes or asterisk.

Love makes a person a Christian.  And not our love, but God’s love for us, the love is something that God begins, not us. The life and death and resurrection of Jesus are what proves this to be true. Paul is so desperately trying to say that if we don’t’ get this key point, we’ve missed the whole thing.

You know, this is tricky stuff. I mean, really, then, what is it that makes Christianity distinctive as a religion. According to Paul, there really isn’t any belief or creed or tradition or practice except the unconditional love of God through Jesus Christ equally given to every human being. The end. Apparently that’s so hard to accept, so hard for us to wrap our minds around that we have to do all this (church, worship, etc.) to mediate the incomprehensible and unquenchable, the overwhelming and unending love of God. If Christianity is anything, a way, a practice, then it is just responding to that love.

Paul an amazing character because he was completely uncompromising about the Gospel as he received it: that nothing, nothing, stands between us and God’s love. God’s love was not an abstract concept to him, but a concrete experience that he literally devoted every waking hour to sharing with others. And the Gospel he is sharing is not a soft or watered down Gospel. It’s straight up and hard work. When Paul talks about “this evil age” he means the world around us that is so fascinated with and caught up in having wealth or power or prestige or status. The revelation of God’s love through Jesus breaks all this. All people are loved equally unconditionally by God, there is no status at all. No one is better than anyone else in God’s eyes, we’re all sinners and fully justified. What’s so hard and uncompromising about this is that it turns out there is no authority or tradition or social organization that we can make a foundation for our lives with. The only foundation is Christ.

No wonder many of Paul’s contemporaries in the early church thought he was the one that was nuts. He spend this whole letter to the Galatians just trying to convince them of that one thing. There’s only one thing, God’s love, the end. And now I’ve spend this whole sermon doing the same. I hope you’ll continue to remind me of this truth as I continue to remind you, because reminding each other that God loves every human creature unstoppably and unendingly, is one thing this place, this community, is good at and good for. Perhaps we have that much in common with that small church long ago in Galatia.

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Works consulted included Essay on Galatians by Wendy Farley in “Feasting on the Word” and “Introduction to the New Testament” by Raymond Brown

Sermon for third Sunday of Easter

Sermon by the Rev. Kate Ekrem for April 14 2013

Acts 9:1-19a

Many years ago, I met a woman, a new member of the Episcopal Church, who said that what she loved about our church was that people were not continually asking her the date and time of her conversion to Christ. She came from a tradition – I can’t even remember what it was – where that was the norm, and in many churches it still is. My friend found the fact that we weren't so interested in her conversion hard to get used to, but refreshing, but I wonder if conversion isn't something we should think more about.

            This morning we read the famous story of Saul, who was later of course called Paul, the author of most of the letters in the back of the New Testament. We read the famous story of how he turned from unbelief to belief in an instant that was like a flash of light.

Text version of Sermon for April 7 by Father Richard Viladesau

Sermon by Father Richard Viladesau

Second Sunday of Easter 2013 at the Church of Our Redeemer

In a recent conversation with a graduate student, I parenthetically mentioned the statement of the late English novelist Iris Murdoch: some Xian teachings “have become so celebrated and beautified in great pictures that it almost seems as if the painters were the final authorities on the matter,” rather than the scriptures or the theologians. The student was struck by this, and asked for examples. It is easy to think of instances where the common Christian conception comes from the way things are portrayed in art: we assume there were three Magi, although Matthew gives no number; that they were Kings, while for the gospel they were “astrologers.” People imagine the two disciples journeying to Emmaus as two men; but from text more it is more likely they were man and wife. The whole scene of the pietà is an invention of art. And today’s gospel is another prime example. Paintings of the Thomas scene almost invariably show Thomas putting his fingers into Jesus’ side, as he is invited to do. [Examples: Caravaggio, “Incredulity of St. Thomas” shows Thomas actually putting his finger into Christ’s side, his hand guided by Christ; Romanesque cloister of Santo Domingo de Silos; Duccio, “Maestà”; Hendrick ter Brugghen; Verocchio; Guercino; Signorelli]. If you ask people what happened, this is what they think. But it is not what the gospel says. Thomas does not touch the resurrected Jesus: he believes when he sees. “When Jesus appears and somewhat sarcastically offers Thomas the crass demonstration of the miraculous that he demanded, Thomas comes to belief without probing Jesus’ wounds.”[i] If he had accepted the invitation, would have been like those who are condemned for demanding signs and wonders before believing (Jn. IV:28).

Thomas believes when he sees; but what he sees is an appearance of Christ. He still has to believe that this vision is of a reality. The Apostles who saw Christ still had to have faith; we are told by Matthew that even after these visions, some doubted (Mt. 28:17). Seeing is not believing. External signs are still signs. What faith is about cannot  be proven or shown physically, because it is about something more than a physical reality: it is about a relationship of trust in God’s goodness and triumph over evil and death.

"Blest are they who have not seen and have believed." If we exclude from consideration the "epilogue" or second ending added by an early redactor (Jn. 21), these words are not only the last to be spoken by Jesus in John's gospel, but are the concluding words of the entire work; the final thought that the original gospel writer wished to leave us with.

            While most of the sayings of Jesus in the gospels have to be carefully considered in their lived situation and in the context of their original addressees before we can discern any relevance to our contemporary situation, these words are obviously meant by the author for us: we are the original addressees; we are those who believe without having seen, and who are called "blest" for that reason.

            It is clear that the intent of this saying is to indicate the superiority of faith over vision. But why should this be so? Is it somehow more meritorious to believe "blindly" on the testimony of others? Is faith ultimately an irrational act of submission or of wishful thinking?

If not, then what can be the basis of such belief?

Obviously, our Christian belief is based on the testimony of others, beginning with the first disciples. But we don’t believe simply on others’ testimony. How could we take the word of people or writings 2,000 years old? Here we meet Lessing’s problem of the “foul wide ditch” of the impossibility of certain historical knowledge. We believe in that testimony not simply as testimony from past, but as lived out in community of faith. Combined with.

And that testimony from the past cannot stand alone. It must be joined to the “testimony” of God. In today’s first reading, Peter says, “we are witnesses, and the Holy Spirit is witness.” The exterior testimony is believable insofar as it corresponds to our interior experience of God: something interior and of its very nature invisible: the “testimony” of God that is experienced and lived in our hearts. This is a testimony of experience: the “outward” testimony of others is believable insofar as it corresponds to the rest of our experience, and gives us a meaningful way of interpreting it.

This “experience of God” is not a separate mystical kind of experience: it is found in our experience of ourselves and the world. It is found in experiences of goodness, beauty, generosity, value; in love that sacrifices self, in hope in face of death. It is the “pointing beyond” or transcendence that is implicit in all positive experience. It is also found indirectly in experiences of evil that call out for a reversal: a reversal that is impossible within our human history, however hard we strive. Even where we do reverse evil and improve our world, we cannot reverse the evils and injustices of the past, and we cannot avoid the inevitability of randomness and death.

In these combined witnesses we can find reasons for belief in resurrection, in the triumph of God’s life over sin and death. But there is a condition: belief is not forced on us; it is not merely intellectual. It is a commitment and a way of life. It is believable if - (and this is why the blessing appears) we are ready to receive and live it.

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[i] Brown, Gospel according to John XIII-XXI, 1046.

Sermon for April 7 from Fr. Richard Viladesau

Sermon for Easter Sunday

Easter 2013

For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

--(1Cor 15:25-26)

One of the interesting things I get to do is to go behind-the-scenes, so to speak, in our local funeral home. I really enjoy all the guys who work over there, and  I notice how much they kind of try to shield the loved ones of someone who’s died from the nitty gritty details. For example, sometimes I’ll do a service for a family without a church home over at the funeral home, and typically it’s an open casket, and the person has been made to look so nice and there might be sentimental objects placed in their hands or what have you. After the service they’ll shoo all the family out of the room and very matter-of-factly close the casket, a process that has a few steps. The first thing they do is crank down the pillow that’s keeping the dead person’s head elevated, the put a little crank into the casket, and wind down the thing so the person’s lying flat. Then they take the little blanket that’s tucked around the person and pull it over their face, and then they close the lid. I don’t mind telling you the first time I saw them do that I was pretty freaked out.  It really

Sermon for Good Friday

Good Friday 2013

by Rev. Kate Ekrem

This happens every day. On some level this is a very ordinary story. Someone who’s been preaching about human rights and dignity gets arrested and tortured and killed by an oppressive regime. Really it’s not so different from so many other arrests, so many other people who've been made to disappear by those in power. We can name Oscar Romero, Janani Luwum, DietrichBonheoffer, but also so many whose names we don’t know, those in Argentina in the 1970’s, Germany of the 1930’s, or in our own country in the lynch mobs of the 1960’s, and those in  Syria or Tibet even today, this very day, right now.  This story is not so different from all those stories. But this is the one we know by heart.

This is the one whose facets and contours are so familiar to us, the high priest’s slave’s ear, the rooster crowing, the seamless garment, the sour wine. We know every detail of the story of Jesus’ suffering and death; it’s compelling as well as horrifying.