Hearing Jesus’ Voice Amidst the Noise

This sermon was given by the Revd. Luther Zeigler at our last evening service of the semester this past Sunday, May 11. We look forward to worshiping together again at the resumption of our services in the fall!

“He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out . . . and the sheep follow him because they know his voice.”   John 10:3-4

“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of the bread and the prayers.”  Acts 2:42

“The Good Shepherd calls his own sheep by name and leads them out . . . and the sheep follow him because they know his voice.”   John 10:3-4.  In today’s gospel reading, Jesus invites us to listen for his voice, and seems to assure us that we will know it when we hear it, and that we will be able to distinguish his voice from all the other voices competing for our attention – the voices of strangers, thieves, bandits, and others who may not have our best interests at heart.  And so, with this invitation in mind, in our opening collect today we prayed for the grace to “hear Jesus’ voice,” so that we might “follow where he leads.”  

And yet, if we have learned anything during the Easter season, it is that listening for Jesus’ voice is not quite so simple, as the first disciples prove time and again.  Last week, for example, we heard Luke’s story of the two disciples who are passionately in conversation with a stranger on the road to Emmaus without even knowing it is the risen Christ himself.  Buried in their own grief and sense of disappointed expectations, Cleopas and his friend walk with Jesus for miles, engaging him in animated discussion, all the while failing to recognize either the face or the voice of Jesus even as he teaches them during their journey.  Not until Jesus reveals himself in the breaking of the bread do these disciples see and hear their great Teacher.  

And a few weeks before that, on Easter morning, we heard John’s account of Mary Magdalene’s visit to the empty tomb.  Panicked and confused by the disappearance of Jesus’ body, Mary encounters a stranger outside the tomb.  Believing the stranger to be a gardener, Mary interrogates him concerning the whereabouts of Jesus’ body.  It is, of course, the risen Jesus to whom she is speaking.  But she is so engulfed by her own grief that she recognizes neither his voice nor his face, until Jesus calls out her name:  “Mary!”  

These scenes would be outrageously funny if they weren’t so true to our own experience, so illustrative of our own deafness to God’s voice.  What these resurrection narratives teach is that the voice of Jesus often comes to us in unexpected ways, that he can sneak up on us unaware, that he speaks to us through the seemingly ordinary people in our lives, and that all too often we are so preoccupied with our own stuff that we end up being deaf to his presence in our very midst.

So, if the first disciples were so consistently unable to recognize Jesus’ voice when he was literally whispering in their ears, what gives us any confidence that we will hear him?  What hope do we have of hearing Jesus’ voice amidst all the noise in our lives?

I want to suggest that this very question lies at the heart of our first lesson today from the Book of Acts.  We are so accustomed to the institutional presence of the Church in our lives that it is difficult to imagine a time when there was no church.  Yet, after the disciples’ initial pattern of desertion, doubt, despair, confusion, and enough raw fear to hide behind locked doors – and after their eyewitness encounters with the risen Christ – it is only then that Jesus’ first followers begin to develop a growing awareness of the enormity of what has happened.  Its only then that they ask themselves:  now what?

To be sure, they are not left entirely to their own devices, thank God.  They are given the gift of the Holy Spirit, and they experience the Spirit’s guidance and power directing them in new and fresh ways. And they know enough from what Jesus has taught them to go out into the world, led by Peter, preaching the gospel and baptizing all who are willing to listen.  But what then?  How are these newly converted souls to relate to one another, what practices will hold them together in community, what will they do to ensure that Christ remains at the center of their lives so that they will continue to hear and follow his voice?

Our lesson today from Acts seeks to answer this question by articulating the four foundations of a distinctively Christian life:  namely, a community devoted to (1) the apostles’ teaching, (2) to fellowship, (3) to the breaking of the bread, and (4) to the prayers.  Acts 2:42.  By adhering faithfully to these principles of Christian community, the apostles teach us, we are given a framework for “holy listening,” one that makes room for Jesus to speak amidst the cacophony of all that surrounds us.  Let us briefly reflect on each:

First, the discernment of Jesus’ voice requires careful attention to the teaching of the apostles, as handed down by tradition; what we now know as the study of Scripture.  The regular and careful reading of the Bible, in light of the challenges and opportunities of our daily life, provides the appropriate framework for discerning Christ’s call to us at any particular moment.  Rather than obsessing about our own individual stories, we immerse ourselves in the biblical narrative so as to understand how we are a part of God’s story.  Where life with God gets rich and provocative is when we dig deeply into a tradition that lives outside of ourselves, that is bigger than we are, and that brings fresh truth and light to our role in God’s life.

Second, as Christians we practice fellowship, or what the early church called koinonia – we stay in community with one another as a guard against the vicissitudes of self-interest, self-deception, and individualism.  Left to our own devices, we too often see things the way we want to, rather than the way God wants us to.  By remaining in community, we keep one another honest.  There is nothing challenging about having deep thoughts all by oneself.  What is interesting is searching for meaning in community, where other people might call us on stuff, or heaven forbid, disagree with us.  Communal discernment turns I-questions into God-questions.  We ask not what will fulfill me or satisfy my wants and desires, but rather, where does God want me, want us to be?

Third, we draw close to Jesus’ voice by breaking and sharing bread together.  This is, after all, what Jesus instructed us to do at the Last Supper, and what the Emmaus story from last week showed us is the true touchstone for discerning Christ’s presence in our lives.  In the mystery of the Eucharist, the offering of our lives meets the offering of Christ’s life for us at the altar. In communion, we invite Jesus into the depths of our hearts, and ask him to do whatever he needs to do to transform us.  In these moments, we know ourselves to be, not discrete individual egos, as we normally imagine ourselves, but rather, and as we’ll sing in our Offertory Hymn, one in the Body of Christ.

And finally, we pray.  Prayer is that central act of relationship with God in which we intentionally and attentively make room for him in our lives.  Through private prayer, corporate prayer, and praying for each other, we open our ears to Jesus’ voice by pushing to the periphery all the clutter that we normally let fill our heads and our hearts.

When I was at seminary in Virginia, I learned much about becoming a priest from my professors in the classroom, I gained practical experience in leading worship in field education, I grew in my pastoral caregiving skills by doing the required hospital ministry, and I was profoundly formed by daily corporate worship as well. But what stands out most in my memory from those days was Virginia’s practice of “small group worship on Friday mornings.”

Each entering class at the beginning of the year was organized into small groups of about 8-12 students and paired with one faculty advisor. Then, every Friday morning during term, we met together in the advisor’s home for several hours.  During this time, we did Bible study, each taking turns leading the discussion; we also took time just to “check in,” listening deeply to each other’s lives, and our personal and professional struggles; we prayed together, in silence, out loud, in song, sometimes scripted, sometimes not; we committed to stay in relationship with one another throughout the year, and to pray for each other every day; and we ended our time on Friday mornings by breaking bread together, either Eucharistically, if our faculty priest was available to celebrate the sacrament, or sometimes just over Blueberry scones and coffee.

It was in that intimate gathering – anchored by the four practices described by the Acts of the Apostles – that I truly learned for the first time in my life what authentic, intentional, Christian community and worship looks and feels like.

My hope is that our Chaplaincy community this year has at least approximated this apostolic ideal for each of you.  While part of me wishes that our numbers were even greater than they are, one of the great advantages of who we are as a small community is that we have an intimacy, a depth of relationship and care, that is often lost in larger congregations. And for that I am deeply grateful. I hope it has served you well. And I pray that whatever the future may hold for you – whether you are returning to us next fall or are moving on to a new place of opportunity – that you will find a community of faith that gently and lovingly holds you in its palm just as we have sought to do so here.  God bless you all.

Amen.

Harvard Chaplains Speak Out Against a "Black Mass"

The Reverend Luther Zeigler

President of the Harvard Chaplains and Episcopal Chaplain at Harvard

This statement will appear in the Harvard Crimson on Monday, May 13.

As Harvard Chaplains, we write to express our concern about the plans of a student group at Harvard’s Extension School to host a re-enactment of a “Black Mass” on campus this coming Monday evening. The students, who call themselves the Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club, are partnering with a New York-based organization known as the “Satanic Temple” to put on the event. Although the students have not released details of the performance they intend to stage, a “Black Mass” by its very nature typically involves the mockery and ridicule of the Christian sacrament of Holy Communion.

For many Christians, the practice of sharing the bread and the wine of Communion embodies some of our deepest beliefs about humanity’s relationship to the transcendent as reflected in the life and teachings of Jesus.  It is for us a sacred rite to be treated with the utmost respect and love.  For this reason, many in our community – including especially our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, who appear to be the target of this event – are understandably distraught and hurt when they learn that some of our students believe that an appropriate way to engage in learning about the religious beliefs and practices of others is to denigrate them through a mock performance like a “Black Mass.” 

The Harvard Chaplains represent a wide diversity of religious and philosophical perspectives – including most of the major Western and Eastern religious traditions, as well as the perspectives of atheists, agnostics, and those genuinely uncertain about what they believe.  One value that we share, however, is a commitment to engaging in discourse about life’s “big questions” in a manner that is open and honest, but also respectful.  Our aim is to support the wider Harvard community in framing a thoughtful conversation about issues of meaning and value without the need to vilify or parody those with whom we differ.  As chaplains we desire to help the wider community seek mutual understanding about religious matters; but just as importantly, when there is disagreement, as there often is, our hope is that we can learn to disagree in ways that are civil, caring, and supportive of our shared humanity.

We hasten to add that we do not think the issue presented here is primarily one of “academic freedom.” Just because something may be permissible does not make it right or good.  Whether or not these students are “entitled” to express themselves through the ceremony of a “Black Mass” as a matter of law or University policy is a distinct question from whether this is a healthy form of intellectual discourse or community life.  We submit it is not.

We urge the student organizers of the “Black Mass” to re-consider going forward with this event.  If the event does go forward as planned, we would urge the rest of the community not to dignify it with your presence.  

“How shall I repay the Lord for all the good things he has done for me?” A Farewell Sermon from the Kellogg Fellow

This is the last sermon given by Emily Garcia as our Kellogg Fellow, on the Sunday of Easter, May 4th. The readings for the day (in particular the Psalm and the Emmaus story) can be found here.

For a long time my favorite Psalm was 42: “As the deer longs for the water-brooks, so longs my soul for you, O God. / When shall I come before the presence of God? My tears have been my food day and night, while all day long they say to me, / “Where now is your God?” / When shall I come before the presence of the living God?”

            This was the Psalm I prayed, the Psalm I prayed on or in, the Psalm where I rested. It affirms a love and hope in God’s comfort, but the poem never reaches that comfort. It remembers times of strength, it hopes for God’s presence, but it stays in longing and distress. That’s where I was, in much of my life and in much of my relationship with God.

            But things changed. I was healed, through the love and patient care of friends and family, and new friends in the Church. I was healed by God’s love mediated to me through my priest, Steve White, and my Bible Study friends Laura Johnson, Alana King, Rebecca Legett, Jill Young; I was healed by good pastoral teachers like Elaine Pagels and Ellen Charry; I was healed by the Book of Common Prayer and the quiet high liturgy of a Gothic chapel.

Through these things God healed me, and my life changed, and my relationship with God changed. Somehow, in the last few years, I happened upon Psalm 116, of which we read excerpts today. “I love the Lord because he has heard the voice of my supplication; / I came to grief and sorrow, / I was brought very low, and he helped me. / Turn again to your rest, O my soul, for the Lord has treated you well. / How shall I repay the Lord for all the good things he has done for me? / I will lift up the cup of salvation, and call upon the Name of the Lord. / I will fulfill my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people.”

Being confident in God’s love means that my relationship with God has changed. The more confident I am in his love, the stronger I am, the more I know him—then the more responsibility I have in mediating God’s love. Having been healed, standing strong in my relationship with God, I must ask,  “How shall I repay the Lord for all the good things he has done for me?”

How shall I repay him? How shall I fulfill my vows in the presence of his people.

The story of Emmaus shows me one way.

Before we even get to Emmaus we hear hints of it: in our Collect we pray that God will “open the eyes of our faith”; the multitude hears Peter speaking and is “cut to the heart”; Paul says that we have been born again, made pure by obedience to the truth, and now that we have “genuine mutual love,” we are to love one another deeply, from the heart. But these are just hints! And in the story of Emmaus, we see our task more clearly.

Jesus was always listening to people who you were supposed to ignore or dismiss. In the Emmaus story, he gets to play the other side. He’s gone back to being some back-country rube, who doesn’t know any of the big city news.

These two followers respond to this stranger’s innocent question with incredulity—“Who IS this guy?” or “Are you kidding me, man?” They take pity on this poor guy out of the loop, they fill him in. And then this stranger (who apparently knew less than they did), says straight out, “Oh, how foolish you are.” Perhaps translated to our time and context, it might sound more like, “I can’t believe you guys,” or “You know you’re totally missing the point, right?”

This stranger keeps talking, and the two followers keep listening, and their hearts burn as he speaks, and they want him to stay with them and keep talking together. They are rewarded with God’s own wisdom about God’s self, from a person they may have at first dismissed. They were with God and didn’t even know it.

How shall I repay the Lord for all the good things he has done for me? When we “love one another deeply from the heart,” when we are strong enough and steady enough, we can listen to other Christians say, “Oh how foolish you are!” We can listen to other Christians implicitly or explicitly call our beliefs wrong or harmful or offensive; we can listen to Christians share their own beliefs that we might find wrong or harmful or offensive.

And then! It’s not enough just to listen—we need to ask God to open the eyes of our faith; we need to love this other person deeply, from the heart, with a genuine mutual love. And we need to be open to being “cut to the heart,” to feeling our hearts burn—because we might be hearing God without knowing it.

That’s the task that Emmaus sets before us. That’s what we’re getting ourselves into    when we’re born anew in God’s love—when we go from the longing of Psalm 42 to the confidence and praise of Psalm 116.

In my own life, this has looked like many different things. Mostly, it’s looked like trying and failing, and trying, and failing and so on. The few times it’s looked better, it’s been first because of God’s grace—that inexplicable gift that occasionally helps us to do something we couldn’t do alone. It’s also because of friends and family situated along the spectrum of Christianity who are respectful and loving, with this genuine mutual love Paul exhorts us to. So here are two quick examples.

When I went from “grief and sorrow” to “praise and thanksgiving,” for me it meant leaving the Evangelical Free Church of my parents for the Episcopal Church. I had been hurt by the church, as many have been, and for a long time I did need some distance. But slowly that changed, and eventually I found myself sitting at breakfast with my Dad, talking about homosexuality (as one does). We ate beignets and drank chicory and Dad said that he thought it was a sin, and I said I didn’t, and we asked each other how we’d come to believe these things, and we kept eating breakfast, and then we moved on to talking about men’s ministries, and bicycles and things (as one does). Big disagreement, hard conversation, no big deal.

What made this possible was my father’s and my love for each other. I had learned to keep my eyes open to all the ways that Dad was living a beautiful Christian life—his patience in all kinds of situations, his kindness to everyone, his forgiveness and his asking for forgiveness. I didn’t trample on his beliefs or his devotion to God. And Dad didn’t try to convince me to change my mind; he had his eyes open to the work God was doing in my life, and could appreciate that even as he disagreed with me.

My other example is a crowd I call my “Conservative Young Men’s Discussion Group,” (a.k.a. Handsome Men in Bow Ties—though to be fair they don’t all wear bow ties). This is a group of three young men, all Christians, who believe things that I do not believe. Their own beliefs differ, including as they do a liberalish Mormon, a somewhat radical Anglo-Catholic, and a traditionalist Episcopalian. I love talking with each of them. They can express respectfully ideas which I might find harmful, and we can have clear debates about complex theological issues which are, with other people, too hot to handle. We can do this because we each believe that the others are in close relationships with God. If one of them were to say to me that he isn’t sure women should be leaders in church, I could hear this without reaching across the table to slap him, because I have seen how he loves God! And seen how he has formed so much of his life around loving others and caring for them. And I think they, too, can hear what I say because they trust that I try to listen to God and be close to Him.

So those are two ways I have tried to listen to strangers on the way to Emmaus. I think God has spoken to me through these people with whom I disagree. There was a big dose of God’s grace involved, the kind of grace that opens your heart bigger than you think is possible. And, like I said, I’ve been lucky to have such amazing friends and family, because this isn’t the sort of thing you can do on your own. “Genuine mutual love” means you need at least two people to be loving each other!

But you know, IDEALLY, it’s not just two people—it’s a whole community! A community like—say—a chaplaincy!

One of the things I love about how ECH has grown in the last four years is that increasingly we are able to behold God in each other and in the world around us.

When I first came it was a quiet and thoughtful community, one that I needed. I found special welcome in the persons of Cameron Partridge, Emma Brown, Lorel Clafton, and Jerome Fung. But something needed to change; there was a kind of narrowness to our conversation, to what we found acceptable or sensible or right. And things did change! Our new chaplain, Luther—our student leaders Graham Simpson, Emma Brown, and Alice Kenney—our first Micah Fellow, Tiffany Curtis, and our current Fellow, Abi Strait—our unofficial professorial advocate, Adrian Vermeule—and other leaders, official or no, slowly helped change the culture.

            And it wasn’t just the official leaders who effected this change; it was all of you! When you came, you decided to be a part of this. You decided to love each other.

We still have some growing to do, but we’ve come a long way! Now, we include people from a variety of different backgrounds, different ways of praying, different tastes in worship and prayer styles and sounds—we don’t just “include” these people, we are these people. We have different ideas and different ways of relating to God, and many of us feel them very strongly. We get along and are a family together not because we have wishy washy ideas that don’t really matter—we get along because we have decided to love each other, deeply, from the heart. We have decided to love each other.

I can’t really believe that I’m leaving ECH, but I guess it’s happening, and I guess it’s happening soon, and so I want to share one of my hopes for our community—for those of us leaving and for all of you who will stay and continue to grow together. I hope that this will be a place where you can meet God in those with whom you disagree. I hope that this will be a place where we love each other regardless of who we vote for or how we sing or how we dress or which creed we prefer.

I hope that this is a place where we are born anew and know a genuine mutual love. Where we can say, “Turn again to your rest, O my soul, for the Lord has treated you well. / How shall I repay the Lord for all the good things he has done for me?”