In Jesus, God Welcomes Us Home

Yesterday Eve and I went to see the new movie Amazing Grace, the story of William Wilberforce. This month is the 200^th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire – the abolition movement in Parliament led by William Wilberforce. I would like to remember this story next Sunday, but in the meantime I highly recommend the movie with its extraordinary collection of excellent British actors – Albert Finney is John Newton, author of the hymn Amazing Grace. William Wilberforce is on the calendar in the front of The Book of Common Prayer and it is a story for disciples of Jesus two hundred years later to know.

The opera The Dialogues of the Carmelites – at the Lyric Opera this coming week –has a text by the great French novelist Georges Bernanos, one of a circle of great writers, who were Christians, Claudel, Mauriac, all very important voices in the new preaching of the Gospel to our secular world, the new evangelization. The Dialogues of the Carmelites is also based on a true story, from the French Revolution, of the execution of a community of French Roman Catholic nuns on July 17, 1791.

The Carmelite Order in the Roman Catholic Church is ancient. The Order was reformed in the late 1500s in Spain by the towering figures of St. Teresa of Avila and the poet St. John of the Cross. They set up a rule of life for the monasteries of the order of a devotion to prayer, set in a very austere and poor lifestyle.

In The Dialogues the young French aristocrat Blanche de la Force asks to enter the Carmelite monastery, and the aged Mother Superior asks if she’s thought of a new name. Monks and nuns often take – or used to often take – new names as a sign of their new life. And Blanche says she wants to be Sister Blanche of the Agony of Christ. A heroic name, probably little understanding what it would mean to actually share in Christ’s agony as she would.

The opera is very much a meditation on sharing in the suffering of Jesus. The elderly Mother Superior faces her own death, in bed, of natural causes, after a long life, but not easy. And then at the end, the community of sisters – everything taken away from them, go to the guillotine, one by one.

When Eve and I saw this opera in New York, the sisters left the stage one by one as the blade fell, but in this production they lay down on the stage. We have seen so many photos in our time of fields of bodies, it was very powerful to have the sixteen there.

Blanche had run away home, but she reappears at the end, to be the last one to die. They go to the guillotine singing the hymn Salve Regina, “Hail Queen,” which monks and nuns sing at the end of Compline, at the end of the day, when night has begun. And then Blanche sings the great ending of the hymn Veni Creator, “Come, Creator Spirit” – Come, Holy Spirit to give us courage and strength and wisdom to love even to death. To follow Jesus to the end, offering ourselves in love. Come, give us the courage to enter into the human experiences of suffering and desolation and poverty and death itself, trusting, when there is only naked trust left.

Two recommendations and two comments about our First Reading today, from Genesis. We hear God’s promise to Abraham.

The Lord brought (Abram) outside and said, "Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them." Then he said to him, "So shall your descendants be."

Note that in this story Abraham has his old name Abram. In chapter seventeen of Genesis God gives him the new name Abraham – so Simon became Peter, Saul became Paul, and Blanche became Sister Blanche of the Agony of Christ.

In Genesis, Abraham and his wife Sarah were the first to believe in God, and all people of faith, all who follow believing in the God Abraham believed in, are descendants of Abraham and Sarah, including us, including people of faith who are Christians.

Pope Pius XI in 1938 said “Spiritually, we are all Semites.” Formerly the librarian of the Ambrosian Library in Milan, Pius XI was Pope from 1922 to 1939. This is the 70^th anniversary of his writing, on March 17, 1937, a courageous encyclical against Facism, “Mit Brennender Sorge”:

It is with deep anxiety and growing surprise that We have long been following the painful trials of the Church and the increasing vexations which afflict those who have remained loyal in heart and action in the midst of a people that once received from St. Boniface the bright message and the Gospel of Christ and God's Kingdom. (Holy See website www.vatican.va)

. . . in other words, in Germany.

And in an address to Belgian pilgrims in 1938 he said that Anti-Semitism:

… is a movement with which we Christians can have nothing to do. No, no, I say to you it is impossible for a Christian to take part in anti-Semitism. It is inadmissible. Through Christ and in Christ we are the spiritual progeny of Abraham. Spiritually, we are all Semites.

Pius XI’s statements are not much remembered today, I daresay because they are overshadowed by the silences of his successor Pius XII during the Second World War. I see no evidence that Pius XII spoke up against the destruction of his own church in Poland, (the murder of priests like Maksymilian Kolbe), nor against the destruction of the Jewish people. That silence was one of the great failures of leadership in the churches in the 20^th century. Since I am speaking about the Papacy – as an Episcopal priest, with a great respect for and love for the Roman Catholic Church – I believe the late Pope John Paul II, whose priesthood was forged in the Poland of the Second World War, was an eloquent voice for basic human rights, given by God our Creator, and for the church to be a voice for those rights.

I believe God calls the church not to be silent, not to run away, but to be a voice for human rights, remembering that in a free church, in a free society, there will always be a lively debate about our understanding of what these human rights are, whether about cases before the Supreme Court, or stands we take, on conscience, as Christians.

It is deeply important to affirm the God-given dignity of people of color, of women, of keeping children safe, of stopping abuse, and now, in the current controversy, to affirm the place of gay people. I find deeply troubling the silence in the documents we have been given to read – and we have passed on to you to read – about the upcoming severe legislation in Nigeria against gay people.

Martin Luther King’s great original contribution to Christian theology, I believe, was to read the story of the cross of Jesus, as telling us, followers of Jesus in our time, to not run away, stand for basic human rights in non-violence, as he faced what came in non-violence, not running away, facing the consequences in love, facing those who did evil in love.

We are called to the imitation of Christ in the city and world, to take up the cross and follow him.

My second comment about our first reading is that the sentence:

“ … Abraham believed the Lord, and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness”

was later of the first importance in the writings of St. Paul, for instance in the fourth chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Romans.

What does it mean? What does it mean for you and for me?

God calls us to trust in the love and mercy and promise we find in Jesus; to trust in the promises – the promise of resurrection, the promise of forgiveness, the promise of salvation; to trust in God’s presence with us and love for us and companionship with us on the way in Jesus Christ – this Eucharist given to us as the great sign of that presence and friendship. Our trusting, our believing, our faith and trust in God is what puts us right with God, not how perfect we are. If that was the case, we’d all be sunk, because none of us is perfect. We are forgiven, and we are brought home by God’s saving action in Christ – not by anything on our part. We are justified – made just, made right, brought where we are meant to be – by faith. It is all gift, all grace. The young priest in Georges Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest, wrote “Tout est grâce.” It is all grace, it is all gift. And it is grace that brings us home to God at the end. It is grace that brings us home to God here and now.

I love the imagery in today’s Gospel (Luke 13:22-25) of people coming from everywhere to Jesus.

“Then people will come from east and west, from north and south, and will eat in the kingdom of God.”

All sorts of people, the sick, the poor, the outcasts – especially the people on the outs, on the edge of the crowd, on the edge of life – all come and are welcomed home.

Two weeks from now we have the great story of Jesus of the father’s welcome home to the prodigal son. I think it was three years ago when this was coming up in the lectionary, I was on a hike downtown, and the Pauline Bookstore on Michigan was selling a poster of Rembrandt’s great painting of the father’s welcome. I went to get it out last week to put in the glass case in the cloister and could not find it, and asked both my secretary and my colleague Terri – have you seen the Prodigal Son anywhere? I stopped by the bookstore, and the sisters were bemused by my having misplaced the Prodigal Son and I got another, and meanwhile Eve found the one I have so now I have two. The original, larger I think than life size, is in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. Jesus’ great image of our welcome home to God in him:

But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. Luke 15:11-32

So God welcomes us home, here and now, when we come and ask forgiveness as we do in a moment, and are forgiven, and as we come to the table.

(This sermon was preached by the Rev. Raymond Webster, Rector, in St. Chrysostom’s Church, Chicago, Illinois, on Sunday, March 4, 2007, The Second Sunday of Lent.)