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I was in my office on
Wednesday picking out this morning’s hymns, when some visitors came to the
door. Marian Nelson was the receptionist
and went to greet them. A couple, maybe
in their sixties, came in, and the woman introduced herself as the
great-granddaughter of a former rector of this parish, and she asked if we
would mind if she showed her husband the church. My
ears pricked up at this and I got up from my desk and went to the doorway and
asked which rector that was, and she said “John Partridge.” Well, this got me excited, because John
Partridge was among the two or three most notable of my predecessors. St. John’s went through its first big schism
in 1882, and it was Partridge who came in the aftermath and led the
congregation back to health, and remained in office for almost thirty
years. So I took a little time to give
Sarah Healy and her husband Mike a tour.
I took them to the archives
room and showed her our little trove of parish newsletters from her
great-grandfather’s time. I showed them
the photo in the kitchen of the waiters at the Chicken Pie Dinner of 1902, and Sarah
picked out her grandmother, Marion, then just a girl. Then we came over here to this church that
was built early in Partridge’s tenure, and she told me a little more about the
story of that stained-glass window that we just had repaired, the one in the
back that shows Jesus healing a blind man.
As some of you have no doubt
noticed, the dedication on the bottom of that window says that it was given in
gratitude for the recovery of the rector of this parish at Christmas,
1910. Mrs. Healy said that, according to the family
lore, Reverend Partridge was preaching one Sunday where I am standing now when
suddenly he stopped. His daughter Alma was
the first to see that something was wrong, and went and led him down from the
pulpit. For he had suffered a stroke,
and could neither speak nor see. But
after for a time he recovered, hence the window.
That window is an image of
Jesus the man, not Jesus idealized as the Good Shepherd, or Christ, glorified
and ascended, but Jesus as he was when he went about in Palestine ministering
to the people, and it was given in gratitude for an ordinary miracle of healing
in the body of a friend. The two windows
beside it are similar—portrayals of Jesus, the man, in relation to others: as
the kindly teacher, letting the children come to him, as the infant playing on
his mother’s lap. Even this great window
above the altar is not an image of heaven, but of an early spring morning in a
garden near the walls of Jerusalem, and three women who went to visit a
tomb. And the messenger of God who
dominates the frame is speaking to them about Jesus, their departed loved one:
“Why do you look for the living among the dead?
He is not here!”
I don’t know if they did so
consciously, or not, but our ancestors in this church left us, in these
windows, an extraordinary statement.
They surrounded us with images of the holy as encountered in the lives
of human beings like us, as if to say this
is what religion is about. In a sense the gospel lesson for today has
much the same message. We have followed
the course of Mark’s Gospel through the year and have finally arrived, with
Jesus, at the temple in Jerusalem. But
now that he’s there, he seems entirely unconcerned with the official worship that
is going on, with the priests and the cultic rituals that are supposed to be
the whole point. What Jesus pays attention to are the people in
attendance, and all that’s going on around the edges, if you will, of the main
event. He wants his disciples to see who
is profiting, and who is paying the cost, who is making a show of his
importance before Israel, and who is humbly worshipping Israel’s God.
And yet nowhere in all of this
does Jesus criticize religion as such. He
does not call the poor widow deluded for giving all she has to the temple; but
he praises her generosity. Jesus is concerned
about the spirit in which his people practice their religion, and what it
really says about their love of God and neighbor, but he does not advocate a
purely human spirit. He does not reduce
all values to human values. Jesus wants
us to look for the true measure of the pomp and grandeur of the temple, in the poor
widow who contributes to its upkeep. But
this standard is almost impossibly difficult.
Not for the first time in the
gospel, he advocates giving away all one’s wealth. He equates it with giving away one’s life, which,
by the way, he’s also recommended.
Which implies that there is
some other standard by which to judge our lives, some other way to understand our
proper role and destiny, some orientation for our hopes and our efforts that
makes us more than particularly clever animals.
We are called to pursue something more than what an animal wants—comfort,
security, survival, successful reproduction—and there is a fulfilment that lies
in store for us that is greater than that which we will find simply by meeting
those creaturely needs. We are called to
know that we are something more than individual members of a species, to know
ourselves not as separate, disconnected from all that is not “us”, but that our
true identity somehow includes everything.
The church measures its value
to the world by its saints; by the men and women who met that standard, and followed
that call, and gave their whole lives to the service of that “something greater”—holy
virgins, monks, and martyrs, missionaries who left behind all that was familiar
to preach the gospel to strange peoples far from home, servant pastors who gave
up social privilege to live among the poor.
We remember them, and honor their greatness of soul in offering themselves
so completely for love—love of the
supreme truth, the supreme goodness, the supreme beauty that fills and transcends
all singular forms. We celebrate that in
doing so, they became embodiments of what they loved.
The saints reveal an
alternative image of what it means to be human, but this image that does not
easily conform to conventional cultural values, be they Jewish, Greek, or
Roman, English or Mexican, Ethiopian or Japanese. It confronts what we take for granted as the aims
of life with the stark question of the ultimate. The traditional Christian ideal of holiness
says to us that, while all we do to satisfy ourselves may be well and good, the
individual existence that so preoccupies our lives will not endure
forever. It will end, and it will come
under judgment. And the standard of that
judgment will not be the conventional wisdom of our culture, but Jesus Christ,
who gave himself up to death on a cross, though he was the unacknowledged ruler
of the world.
As we come to the end of the
Christian year, our Sunday readings bring us again to Jerusalem and to that
cross. And it looks different in the
falling darkness of November from how it appeared in the rising light of
spring. Then it was something that
happened to Jesus and his disciples, in an out of the way corner of the world,
and it resulted in the birth of something new, the church. But now it appears as a judgment that is
falling on the whole earth, the church included. Nevertheless, we are not afraid. We take heart in our communion with the
saints, who hope for nothing more than the coming of that day. They live as if they already stand under that
judgment, and ask nothing from this age of the world, but that it pass away
before the glorious advent of the Kingdom of God.
But the end of the Christian
year, like everything in our tradition, is not just that simple. Because there’s another theme that now appears
in our Sunday readings, like Ruth quietly stealing in to lie down with Boaz on
the threshing floor. It comes with an
earthly kind of hope, a woman’s hope for the ordinary blessings of love and
security, and a happy old age. It seeks
an ordinary holiness, in faithful friendship, and family ties, in worldly
wisdom, and the kindness of strangers.
And its sign is the birth of a child.
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