Perceiving the Pierced One: a Good Friday Homily

Christ Church Cambridge/ The Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard
Good Friday: Isaiah 52:13-53:12;
Psalm 22; John 18:1-19:42
Friday, April 22, 2011

See, my servant shall prosper;
he shall be exalted and lifted up,
and shall be very high.

…. he shall startle many nations;
kings shall shut their mouths because of him;

for that which had not been told them they shall see,
and that which they had not heard they shall contemplate. (Isaiah 52: 13, 15)

On Wednesday of this week in New Orleans, one year after the explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that set off an environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, family members of the eleven people who were killed boarded a helicopter. Their destination was the graves of their loved ones. After several minutes, the pilot announced that they were flying over the site where the rig had sunk. Slowly, they circled so people on both sides of the aircraft could see site: a vast, unbroken ocean flowing beneath them. As the Associated Press reported, “the only indication that they were at the site was an announcement from the pilot." After they returned to shore, one family member, Arleen Weise, commented, “It was just a little emotional, seeing where they were,” she said. When “asked what went through her mind when she saw where the rig went down, Weise said, ‘Just rise up. I wanted them to come up, but it didn’t happen.’’’ This site of incalculable loss is like a lacuna, an open space that can only barely make visible the loss of their loved ones. They can only look upon its enormity, as if, as Paul reflects in the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians, they have been “swallowed up by life.” How can one take in such a scene?

And yet that is precisely what we are called upon to do—or to try to do—on this day. Vast as the ocean, our readings yet bring into startling, unsettling relief the loss that draws us into the central mystery of our faith, lifting before our eyes a spectacle from which we may well want to turn away. For the one on whom we are invited to gaze this day is our beloved Jesus Christ, the one who poured himself out into our midst, becoming subject to appalling injustice and oppression, even unto death. Emptied out like water, he lived as one us and died an excruciating death high upon a cross. To ancient Christians, this most difficult day was paradoxically and quite literally one of up-lift. Thus the words of the prophet Isaiah—“see, my servant shall prosper, shall be exalted and lifted up, and be very high”—could be read incongruously to refer to none other than the crucified One. Our eyes turn to the One whose crucifixion, alone in the Gospel of John, is expressed as a kind of ascension, of being “lifted up” as a strange spectacle and source of healing (John 3: 14, 12:32). Behold the sheer incongruity at the heart of a day that Christians have dared to call “good.”

But there is a reason for this pronouncement. For by crossing the border between Creator and Creation, eternity and time, walking in our midst even to the point of becoming ensnared by the evils of empire, pierced by a Roman soldier’s spear (as only the Passion according to John describes it), Christ broke open what Letter to the Hebrews calls a “new and living way,” a new passage into God’s own heart (Heb. 10:20). The crucified One stands in solidarity with us in struggle and strife, has the ability to, as Hebrews puts it, “sympathize with” — συμ-παθῆσαι, literally to feel together with—“our weaknesses” (Heb. 4:15). Christ has engraved our deepest experiences of grief, rage, abandonment, horror upon the very heart of the divine. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) would wonder at this marvel, asking, “why should I not look through these fissures into the heart of the rock? The nails announce to me, the wounds proclaim to me that ‘God is indeed in Christ, reconciling the world to himself’”(61st Sermon on the Song of Songs). What Bernard saw in that heart above all was infinite compassion. Two centuries later Julian of Norwich (1342-1416) would also meditate upon these wounds, perceiving in the side-wound a safe refuge (Revelations of Divine Love, Long Text, ch. 24) and a passage from which human beings were born anew (Revelations, Long Text, ch. 60).

There is something almost unbearably peculiar – or peculiarly unbearable – about this day. It isn’t simply that we are invited to look up at the suffering and death of one whom we love, and who loves us so deeply. It is more even than that. What is beyond the pale is the matrix of meaning we are invited to contemplate, the multiple, layered lenses through which we are invited to view this story. Indeed, we are invited to read it, to perceive the pierced one, in intersection with our own lives and communities, our own pain, our own losses. We are invited to open our deepest struggles to the blinding transformation at the heart of the paschal mystery, knowing that all that we are, all that we have been, all that we will be, “is hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:3). Amen.

The Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge

Senior Sermon: "But Now I See"

Kenzie Bok is a Harvard College History Concentrator, President of the Harvard College Episcopal Chaplaincy, and a graduating Senior. Traditionally, Seniors in the chaplaincy have preached a sermon the spring semester of their final year, and Kenzie did so last evening. Her texts were:

1 Samuel 16:1-13, Ephesians 5:8-14, John 9:1-41

“As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘Neither.’” With that “neither,” Christ decouples the realm of worldly good fortune and misfortune from the realm of righteousness and sinfulness before God. The world, we learn here and elsewhere in the Gospel, is not set up to be an earthly system of reward and punishment; the blind man is not blind because he was bad, nor because of the misdeeds of his parents. This assertion is potent because it eliminates one of the easiest ways for people, in Jesus’ day and in our own, to make peace with the injustice of the world: by simply assuming that those who do well really are better, and those who suffer are lacking in some way. Using that calculus, we could take things at face value, praising those who are fortunate and turning our eyes away from those who are not. But our reading in Samuel today could not have said it more clearly:

"But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature (…); for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.’"

This idea is picked up again and again in the Gospels, as Jesus uses parable after parable to praise those who society barely recognizes. In a sense, this point is meant to be reassuring: when human life is difficult or seems unfair, God is there to comfort the sufferer, not to add to the pain by piling divine condemnation on top of misfortune. How cruel if challenging life circumstances indicated estrangement from God!

But of course this message is also unsettling, especially for a particular group of people: those who are fortunate in the eyes of the world. Those for whom it would be just as well if accomplishments, talents, possessions were the things that God focused on. Most likely many of you are familiar with the Beatitudes, Jesus’ famous sayings from the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Blessed are the poor, the hungry, the meek, the peacemakers, the merciful.’ Well we’re here at Harvard, and if there were one place in the world that could rest easier if the Beatitudes read: ‘Blessed are the powerful, the wealthy, the successful, the privileged, the intelligent,’ surely it would be here. Nothing about the decoupling of the realm of worldly fortune from the realm of righteousness says that a fortunate person is not in right relationship with God; one could certainly be both. But for those of us who ordinarily feel ourselves so secure about our position in the world, this decoupling unsettles us, leaving us anxious and unsure about how to know whether we are living rightly.

So what do we do? Well, we turn to rules and authority, we seek systems that will allow us to feel secure, to feel that we have it all figured out again. And then, if something disrupts our new system—threatens to shift the rules beneath our feet—we resist with all our might. You see a textbook case of this in the Gospel today. The blind man is healed, and no one wants to believe it. They see the man and they ask ‘Is this the same man?’ Even when the man bears witness to the miracle himself, they continue to doubt. They call in his parents, who reluctantly confirm that he is their son and was born blind, but refuse to speculate on the cause of his healing.

These people are not us, 2000 years later, doubting the veracity of a miracle we didn’t witness. It has happened before their eyes. So why are they so resistant? Why, in the face of a wondrous work, do they respond with fear? Because it upends authority. Jesus is not authorized to do this sort of work: as the Pharisees say, “We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.” And he is breaking a very established rule to do it: he heals the blind man on the Sabbath, when one isn’t supposed to do any work. So the temple authorities are ready to label him a sinner, but they’re dogged by the question “How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?” This situation seems to upset their settled categories. The parents of the blind man, ordinary practicing Jews, are afraid of stepping into the midst of this controversy: they believe in the miracle, but the power of the sign is not enough to overcome the power of the authorities, who will exile them from the Temple for saying the wrong thing. The formerly blind man has no such qualms: he feels the reality of his own healing too strongly to disavow it. He tells the authorities: “I do not know whether he [Jesus] is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”

There’s an implicit rebuke in this exchange: the authorities have gotten so caught up in the rules that they’ve lost perspective. Keeping the Sabbath is important, but healing the blind is more so. Jesus’ action follows the logic of the two commandments he laid down in Mark’s gospel; asked what commandment is first of all, Jesus answered that the first is to “‘love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” and the second is ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ As he says, “there is no other commandment greater than these.” So in this story, Jesus is carrying out an action of love for his neighbor, the blind man, which supersedes the restriction against work on the Sabbath. This order of precedence resonates with everything we feel about how we ought to prioritize the alleviation of human suffering. But as this story shows, such self-evident truths can be missed when we try to distill God into a rulebook.

Now let us be clear: this criticism is not meant to be left at the feet of the ancient Hebrews. As always in the Gospels, we are intended to meditate on how the failings of its characters reflect in our own lives, to ask “Would we too do this?” Karl Barth, a twentieth-century neo-orthodox theologian, often criticized Christian churches on precisely this point, arguing that when the Church tries to reduce and master the divine by “transforming the service of God into ‘pious practices’ and righteousness into a law of righteousness,” it pursues the human activity of religion but loses sight of God. We end up with an ossified structure, one that concerns itself with correct and incorrect behavior but not with justice and injustice and not with the transcendent power of the Holy Spirit. Today, in our churches and in broader secular society, we continue to draw up such limiting scorecards. We are eager for something straightforward: we like rules we can follow, games we can play. I for one am extremely fond of games, as a number of people here today can attest. But the problem is that God doesn’t want us to live life like a game we can win or lose according to a rulebook.

So what does God want for us? If we become suspicious of our efforts to take refuge in authority, what is the answer to how we should act in the world? Must we just stand paralyzed, or decide that there is no such thing as a right or wrong way to live? I think today’s readings answer that question with the language of sight and perception. God is not trying to give us a rulebook by which to assess the world but instead a light by which to see the world illuminated. God wants to strip away our blindness, to renew our sight. What would seeing the world with renewed sight look like? Well, it would mean seeing a world in which our fellow human beings—those neighbors we are meant to serve—show up more brightly than anything else. Picture it this way: you stare at a room full of dazzling treasure—something like those mountains of gold in Disney’s Aladdin, for example—with a few people sitting and standing amongst the piles. The treasure is likely what you focus on: it’s astonishingly beautiful, and you begin to plan how you might snag some. But then imagine seeing the same scene with infrared goggles on. The treasure would fade into the background, turning various shades of grey, while the living people would stand out in the red of the thermal imaging. You’d see a world in which the most important things are not treasure of various types—power, fame, wealth, recognition—but the living, breathing people who surround you. Based on the Gospel, this is how God means for us to see the world. Indeed, I’d go even further and say it is how we see the world, deep down. But we fear disrupting the authorities we’ve established for ourselves, and we want to think that the treasures we cling to are as shiny as they appear. So we wear blinders, often made for us by our society but held to our eyes by our own volition, since we fear the responsibility that would come with stripping them off and fully recognizing God and other people.

This is a pity, because when we open our eyes as God calls us to, we see something far more dazzling than the Aladdin treasure piles: we see the image of God. That image is inscribed in our hearts and our persons as human beings. But often the easiest place for us to see it is not in ourselves but in the face of another. It’s when we feel connections that transcend our differences that we start to recognize the common image that we human beings really share. And tracing the outline of the image of God in each other is what inspires us to live into that image by doing God’s work in the world. When we see things as they really are, when we perceive the world illuminated by God’s light, we are inevitably drawn into participation in God’s work, drawn into service and love for one another. This is what our Ephesians reading for the day means when it says: “Live as children of light—for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.” When our world is bathed in light, we become able to live as we could not when we were submerged in darkness. So we must not be afraid of light, we must not be afraid of seeing. We must step out from behind the security of superficial measures of success that assure us we are doing well, step out from behind the security of rulebooks and authorities that tell us exactly what to do. We can each think of times that we have taken refuge in such things—I for one certainly do so multiple times a day. Abandoning this security is scary, but it’s also the only way to live honestly and courageously, in our full stature as human beings. God calls us to step out and open our eyes.

Lent Class

All the info is one the poster, the website, and on an e-mail we're sending out. Anyone who's interested is free to come! It's an excellent opportunity for a form of Lenten meditation, coming to terms with the Christian faith.

In-gathering Memoriam

As you no doubt have heard by now, the Reverend Professor Peter Gomes, a veritable institution at Harvard's Memorial Church, the Divinity School, and the broader University, died Monday evening from complications of a stroke he suffered last December. As tributes have poured in, story after story written, the sheer magnitude of his life and legacy overwhelms.

In this seismic moment for the University more broadly, and for religious life on campus in particular, the loss is keen for members of the Episcopal Chaplaincy because of our longstanding connection with both Memorial Church and with Reverend Gomes. A statement from Bishop Shaw of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts in this morning's Boston Globe says it well: “I always liked to call Peter the bishop of Harvard...I’m so grateful for his ministry, particularly to the Episcopal Church, and the way he encouraged so many in their vocations. He was a singular man, and I’ll miss the example of his deep commitment to the Gospel, his keen mind, and his outrageous sense of humor.’’

Meanwhile, as we wrestle with this loss, I am mindful that the Harvard community also recently lost senior Ilya Chalik, a History and Science concentrator and leader in the Hillel community who was also known to and mourned by members of the Episcopal Chaplaincy. It has only been two weeks since Ilya's death, and now this.

If you are wondering how to make sense of it all, you are certainly not alone. And at times like this, one of the most important things we can do is to bring our grief, our bewilderment, our numbness-- whatever it may be-- into community, particularly into spaces of worship, where it can be gathered together with that of others, collected and offered up. There is a moment in Thomas Cranmer's Eucharistic prayer that reads, "and here we offer and present unto you, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy and living sacrifice." That self-offering is an invitation to bring forward and lift up to God all of ourselves, all of the burdens we bring, our sorrows, our anxieties well as our triumphs and joys. All the complexities of who we are in the intensity of moments like this.

That kind of self-offering is certainly a major part of Peter Gomes's legacy. Article after article stresses not only his learning and articulateness, his courage and integrity-- particularly at coming out as a gay man in 1991 as the Harvard community grappled with a spate of homophobic harassment-- but especially his complexity, his uniqueness as a human being. As Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. put it on the New Yorker blog, "Gomes was a large, warm, and mischievous soul, who contained a multitude of identities, each worn with a certain roguish sense of irony....In an era of sometimes confining identity politics, Gomes continued to insist on his own freedom. Cape Verdean and Jewish; Virginia and Massachusetts; gay and Baptist; slave and free; a counselor to the powerful and to the powerless: Peter Gomes smoothly navigated his own Mayflower through this sea of identities, because he anchored himself to none." Or as Reverend Gomes himself put it, as quoted by the New York Times, , "“The oddest thing about being an oddity is that there are very few oddities like you.’’

So bring yourself-- all of yourself, however you feel-- forward, take your place alongside one another as we grapple and grieve together.

Tomorrow the Memorial Church gives us that opportunity with a vigil in memory of Reverend Gomes. After morning prayers at 8:45 a.m., the vigil will take place from 9am to 10pm. Throughout the day, the University Chaplains of all faith traditions will take turns keeping watch, carrying out this ancient tradition of presence. My turn will be at noon. The day will end at 10pm with a service of Compline: a peaceful night, and a perfect end.

Mid-Week Prayer: Compline

We'll be holding our first mid-week prayer service this evening at 7pm in Christ Church. We will be using the traditional form of Compline, which is found in the Book of Common Prayer.

For any of you who have never taken part in a Compline service, it is one of the oldest forms of prayer in the Christian Church. It was originally an adaptation of one of the monastic offices (times of prayer) and has always consisted mainly of Psalms and readings from Scripture, with some short written prayers and opportunity for silent reflection. You can find a short little description in this article from Wikipedia.

We will have a very simple format; no experience required! One of the main points of the service is to become familiar with this style of prayer, to get it in your heart and mind and under your tongue. As the semester goes on, we may add to the service some simple music or chant and different liturgical actions (using icons and prayer candles, for instance, or different forms of prayer). But our first several meetings will be very simple.

We'll look forward to seeing you there.

Zack Guiliano

Kellogg Fellow

On Vocation—Jesus Was a Carpenter First

During this season of Epiphany we celebrate the manifestation of Christ on Earth, and in particular the visit of the foreign Magi with their three—mostly impractical—gifts to the infant Jesus. Also during this time, Eastern churches celebrate Jesus’ baptism. Both of these moments mark the manifestation, or “epiphany,” of the second person of the Trinity as a human being in Jesus Christ.

But together, these two moments also mark a significant gap in what the Gospels tell us about the life of Jesus. John and Mark both entirely leave out any mention of a young Jesus, beginning their narrative just prior to his adult baptism. Matthew describes King Herod’s “Massacre of the Innocents” and the family’s flight to Egypt, but says nothing specifically about Jesus between the Magi and the River Jordan. Only Luke offers us any glimpse into the post-infant Jesus, relating how as a twelve-year-old he spent three days at a temple in in Jerusalem, listening and questioning the teachers, who were very impressed with his grasp of the material (Luke 2:41-50).

Also according to Luke, “Jesus was about thirty years old when he began his work” (Luke 3:23). That means that for thirty years of his life on Earth, the Word made flesh was doing something other than “his work,” or as the English Standard Version translates it, “his ministry.” So what the heck was he doing?

Mark 6:3 tells us that Jesus was a carpenter: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary…?” (The Greek, “τέκτων,” can mean a craftsman of many different sorts, but whatever his craft, it doesn’t seem to have been, at that point, the saving of souls.) This explains the bumper sticker I saw the other day in a church parking lot, “My boss is a Jewish carpenter.” It doesn’t explain, though, why Jesus waited thirty years before beginning his ministry—his true vocation.

Last summer I conducted a number of interviews with political, business, and community leaders, asking them about the role faith played in their leadership and their lives. Many of the people I interviewed, and especially the people that seemed the most comfortable and the most “at home” in their jobs, hadn’t started out in their current profession. Instead, they pursued their first career on the basis of social pressure and a sense of what they felt they ought to do. In contrast, their second career fulfilled an inner spiritual obligation, and provided a sense of fulfillment missing from the first career—even though, in many cases, the sacrifices were far greater and the material rewards far smaller.

In my own life, I spent roughly ten years working in politics, mostly on campaigns. I found the work challenging and interesting—and it certainly paid well—but it sucked the soul right out of me. I ended up working as a hired gun for candidates I had little interest in and, occasionally, didn’t even think should win. Now, here at age 30, I find myself at divinity school, looking to find my own true vocation.

Ultimately, why Jesus waited until age 30 to begin his ministry may simply be one in a series of unanswerable questions. Of course, when compared with the many other great mysteries of God, this particular question seems somewhat insignificant. But as we consider our own lives, and the ways in we manifest our faith through how we live, it may help to remember that even our Lord didn’t get started right away.

If we find ourselves lost in a career that doesn’t fulfill us, one that doesn’t answer the voice of God calling us to be and do something more, we may still have time to answer that call. After all, even Jesus had a career before his calling.

Jeff Bridges worked for ten years in Democratic politics and is currently a graduate student at Harvard University's School of Divinity, where he also serves on the leadership team for Hope in Action Cambridge, a project of the Massachusetts Episcopal Diocese. Check out his website at jeffbridges.net

The Words of Our Teacher

Living as a Christian can be a difficult task. Our calling to live as “the light of the world” offers a number of challenges which often seem insurmountable. Just look again at a few of the Beatitudes which we considered this past Sunday:

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.

Blessed are the pure in spirit, for they shall see God.

In a recent sermon, I tried to gesture towards the difficulty and tension that we can feel anytime we try to “live up” to the Beatitudes. We are immediately faced with questions for ourselves (Am I meek? Hungry for righteousness? Pure?). I also suggested that some of these tensions can be overcome when we accept our initial vocation, which is to become students of Jesus Christ, our Teacher. We must take our first steps on the road before we can “run the race” which is the Christian spiritual life.

Yet what promise do we have of finishing that race? Is it all difficulty, or do we have some relief?

One of the readings our Church offers today for meditation and prayer is Isaiah 55:1-13. It’s really quite a remarkable passage, and I would suggest reading it, slowly and carefully, if you find yourself in need of encouragement and refreshment today.  But let me break off a few pieces of it here, pieces of spiritual bread which I think pertain to our concerns about the spiritual life.

What this passage can remind us is that our teacher, the Lord himself, does not give us words or direction which are powerless. What we learn from our Teacher has an effect. As the passage says,

As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, 

and do not return there until they have watered the earth, 

bring forth life and giving growth, seed for the sower and bread for the eater, 

so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; 

it shall not return to me empty, 

but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

Isaiah 55:10-11

You see, God wishes us to live our Christian lives as much (indeed, far more) than we do. When we face the struggle, we should remember that we are not alone. The words which we hear from the mouth of our Teacher have great effect, and we are promised that they will bring about their purpose in us. The newly formed life we are trying to lead will come because God is the one bringing about the new creation in us. And God cannot fail. The word shall bring forth new life, no matter how tentative, and the new life will remain.

To end with the words of Scripture, which vividly portray this promise:

You shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace; 

the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, 

and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. 

Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; 

instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle;

and it shall a sign of the Lord, 

an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.

Isaiah 55:12-13