postID: 7062; title: The Second Sunday of Christmas
groupKey: secondary
groupKey: other
The Second Sunday of Christmas
O God, who didst wonderfully create, and yet more wonderfully restore, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, thy Son Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Array
(
[date] => 2006-01-08 11:00:00
[scope] =>
[year] =>
[month] =>
[post_id] => 636
[series_id] =>
[day_titles_only] =>
[exclusive] => 1
[return] => formatted
[formatted] =>
[show_date] =>
[show_meta] =>
[show_content] => 1
[admin] =>
[debug] => 1
[filter_types] => Array
(
[0] => primary
[1] => secondary
)
[type_labels] => Array
(
[primary] => Primary
[secondary] => Secondary
[other] => Other
)
[the_date] => 2006-01-08 11:00:00
)
2 post(s) found for dateStr : 2006-01-08postID: 7062 (The Second Sunday of Christmas)
--- getDisplayDates ---
litdate post_id: 7062; date_type: variable; year: 2006
Variable date => check date_calculations.
=> check date_assignments.
=> NO date_assignments found for postID: 7062
displayDates for postID: 7062/year: 2006
Array
(
[0] => 2006-01-08
)
postPriority: 3postID: 60391 (The First Sunday After The Epiphany)
--- getDisplayDates ---
litdate post_id: 60391; date_type: variable; year: 2006
Variable date => check date_calculations.
=> check date_assignments.
=> NO date_assignments found for postID: 60391
displayDates for postID: 60391/year: 2006
Array
(
[0] => 2006-01-08
)
postPriority: 3primaryPost found for date: 2006-01-08 with ID: 7062 (The Second Sunday of Christmas)
The Second Sunday of Christmas
Array
(
[date] => 2006-01-08 11:00:00
[scope] =>
[year] =>
[month] =>
[post_id] => 636
[series_id] =>
[day_titles_only] =>
[exclusive] => 1
[return] => simple
[formatted] =>
[show_date] =>
[show_meta] =>
[show_content] => 1
[admin] =>
[debug] => 1
[filter_types] => Array
(
[0] => primary
[1] => secondary
)
[type_labels] => Array
(
[primary] => Primary
[secondary] => Secondary
[other] => Other
)
[the_date] => 2006-01-08 11:00:00
)
2 post(s) found for dateStr : 2006-01-08postID: 7062 (The Second Sunday of Christmas)
--- getDisplayDates ---
litdate post_id: 7062; date_type: variable; year: 2006
Variable date => check date_calculations.
=> check date_assignments.
=> NO date_assignments found for postID: 7062
displayDates for postID: 7062/year: 2006
Array
(
[0] => 2006-01-08
)
postPriority: 3postID: 60391 (The First Sunday After The Epiphany)
--- getDisplayDates ---
litdate post_id: 60391; date_type: variable; year: 2006
Variable date => check date_calculations.
=> check date_assignments.
=> NO date_assignments found for postID: 60391
displayDates for postID: 60391/year: 2006
Array
(
[0] => 2006-01-08
)
postPriority: 3primaryPost found for date: 2006-01-08 with ID: 7062 (The Second Sunday of Christmas)
The reading_id [73555] is already in the array.
No update needed.
Scripture citation(s): Mark 1:7-11
A Sermon by
Fr. Stafford
on
Mark 1:7-11
✛
A Sermon for the Baptism of Our Lord
Array
(
[0] => 60756
)
book: [Array
(
[0] => 60756
)
] (reading_id: 73555)bbook_id: 60756
The bbook_id [60756] is already in the array.
No update needed for sermon_bbooks.
And, it came to pass…that Jesus came from Narareth and was baptized of John in Jordan (Mk 1.9)
The other evening, I sat down to read through this year’s assortment of Christmas letters for one last time. You receive them too. Usually mass produced, they are tucked into the holiday greetings of family and friends; their function, to summarize, in a general way, the experience of the year now past, informing the reader of sundry changes and updated personal histories. Sometimes, they are inscribed with a few personal remarks, thoughts penned somewhere on the blank margin. As I read, I learn that my god daughter, Gabrielle, is enjoying her first semester in college in Wisconsin, my friend Cynthia has traveled to Bhutan on an elderhostel excursion, and a new job continues to go well for my cousin, Jim. Good wishes in the margins of several letters tell me I am thought about, missed, and should plan a visit in the summer. Something, fellow Minnesotan, author and radio host of The Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor, once said, now comes to mind; that Christmas letters typically include “the life of steady accomplishment and upward movement on life’s graph [that] is mostly fiction. The reality is that we are all in over our heads. I am and you are, God help us. And so far He/She has. It could be worse!” Even though I agree with Garrison’s sardonic assessment of the inflated and, at times, pretentious character of many of these seasonal epistles, some truths, however, pierce the superficiality. I go on to read that a long-time parish friend, Chris, his devoted wife Betty writes, is slipping deeper into the abyss of Alzheimer’s. In another letter, I am told my former colleague, Stuart, has been called-up for active duty in Pakistan and eventually Iraq, and his reserve unit is now training at Ft. Bliss. And belatedly, I am informed, in another missive, an elderly neighbor in Minneapolis, Harry, whom I have for over twenty years affectionately called “Ol Norske,” died in a nursing home in November. These are examples, I think, of what Garrison means as being in water over our heads, times and places where we require God’s help. And, I begin to rethink or re-imagine the nature of these holiday letters, which often betray the mix of pride and vulnerability characterizing the human condition. This annual phenomenon of the Christmas letter might, I think, be better understood, if it can be seen in new light. And, I now think of them as intercessions, which is to say, our own words and observations about daily life, that mysterious imbalance of world and spirit, that is, I think, what the Prayer Book terms the sorts and conditions of men (c.f., Office of Morning Prayer). And, to our topsy-turvy life and the various sorts and conditions of our humanity, to a world where contemporary poet Joseph Brodsky says, “…living at all is a kind of dilemma” (“Speech Over Spilled Milk” 6, ln 6, Nativity Poems, FSG, p. 15), God has come down from heaven, as the story goes, into our life of idolatrous fiction and fragile reality, what we call, human history. “God help us. And, so far He/She has.”
But, I am not here to talk about Christmas letters. I want to talk this morning about what I believe is the most important, most interesting, and most mystically beautiful Gospel in The Book, that being, today’s Gospel, the Baptism of Christ, our Feast Day for this first Sunday after the Epiphany, which concludes the theme of the Word become flesh, first announced to the Blessed Mother by the Archangel Gabriel, realized in the birth of Jesus at Bethlehem, and celebrated on the Church calendar in the twelve days of Christmas. One is now amongst us, king and servant both, who is foretold to be the subversion and reversal of all that is. Christians believe that this is the Christ, Son of God and Son of Man, who, in his birth, says theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, has taken on “…the form of all humanity not just that of a single human being.” (c.f., Christmas with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Augsburg Press). Therefore, today’s Gospel tells us that what Christ is doing, he is doing once and for all, doing it for each of us and for the entire creation. Thus, if we believe that Christ is not simply a single human being but all humanity – more especially, the world — its people, places, things, and the events of all time — then, what is happening today must be paradoxically seen as an offering, an intercession, a sacrifice. If Christ is who Scripture says he is, Son of God and Son of Man, then in his baptism by John in the Jordan, Christ shows us why he has come. He comes to close the chasm between God and Man, the world of the divine now joined with the world of the secular, time tethered to the eternal, the unseen and visible now yoked in mystery. Christ does this by embracing all that is human; the fiction, the reality, and the dilemma of life. He takes upon himself the sorts and conditions of men in this troublous world. This he does not to cancel or erase any of it. He is not a magician. But, he comes to transform/transfigure it, which is to say, to make of something old something new, a mystery whose purpose it is to complete or to fulfill creation as originally intended. Into the kingdom of heaven, uniquely by his baptism, he brings all, and all that is, ever has been, and ever will be. Into the Jordan he enters as all humanity, all history, and the created universe, bringing all that is seen and unseen, into a sacramental death and rising to new and eternal life. Incarnation, the mystery that poet T S Eliot terms “…the gift half understood…” (c.f., “The Salvages,” Four Quartets, p. 136, The Complete Poems & Plays, HBJ), is, therefore, gloriously revealed in the new light of the waters of today’s Gospel. God becomes flesh in a divine intervention of love on behalf of man and this world, one mystery uniting with another; incarnation with baptism and baptism with Christ’s Passion, death, and resurrection. Thus, the Spirit of God is now working within history and the sorts and conditions of men, the lives, of people like you and me, Christ “living”, says fellow New Yorker, Episcopalian, author, and theologian, William Stringfellow, “…in the midst of the traffic and turmoil and conflict of the world on behalf of the world” (p. 19, A Private and Public Faith). So in the baptism we witness today, we see that in the Incarnation, God has come to serve us, and in the Jordan, God makes us servants to the world, participants in an unique sacrifice, offering, and intercession united with Christ’s Passion, death, and resurrection. Death, today, is not eliminated, but the power and sting of Death are conquered this morning. A new time has come, and Mark opens his Gospel, therefore, with a beginning that is also an ending, as Christ, today, establishes a new covenant for all peoples and all times to supercede that of God’s covenant on Sinai with Moses, “For the law was given by Moses” [writes the Evangelist John in the words of the Prologue we heard read on Christmas Day] “…but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ” (1.18). “God help us. And, so far He/She has.”
The point I want to make this morning is the power of the Gospel and the mystery at the heart of Catholic Christendom: we no longer live solely unto ourselves; God has sought us out; God has found us; God has made us and creation God’s own! The great mystery for believers is that we are now in Christ and Christ in us, because by his baptism, Our Lord has taken the fiction, the reality, and dilemma of mortal flesh, our pride of upward mobility, our grief, and sorrows, our pretenses, our lusts, our selfishness, our strengths and accomplishments, in other words, our everything – and made it all something more than a cover for violence, fear, and death. Christ has done something new. He has made all, and all that is, inseparably part of his own death and resurrection, has made what is mortal and secular part of what is now divine. And, this he has done simply out of love, love that makes him the Son of God, and, at the same time, makes us, forever, children of the One he has taught us to call Abba, Father. Christ, therefore, has not come to take us out of the kingdom of this world, nor has he come to prevent us from stepping into troublesome and deep water. Christ comes, instead, to bring us hope, a saving hope, as the Apostle Paul refers to it in his Letter to the Church at Rome (8.24), writing, “If God be for us, who can be against us?” (8.31). And, in hopefulness and service to others, friend and stranger, alike, we worship this God, with certainty, says William Stringfellow, “…the certainty of His care for the whole of life – with all the controversy and tension and conflict and passion which mark the ordinary existence of men in society” (op. cit., p. 21) “God help us. And so far, He/She has.”
The best analogy that I have for what is happening in today’s Gospel is to turn your attention ahead to the Last Supper, which the Church has always linked with baptism and with Christ’s Passion, death, and resurrection. The parallel is this: what Christ does with bread and wine, Christ in the Jordan does with the fictions, the realities, the sorts and conditions, and the dilemma of our lives in this imperfect world. This is to say, like bread and wine in the hands of God, all is now transfigured/transformed, the imperfect is perfected, the incomplete made whole. The outside remains the same, yes – but, the inside is different, changed. A change that needs only our imagining to see, what the Church calls faith and what science and reason call foolish. By the grace of God, and in the baptism of Christ, in the breaking of bread and the drinking from the cup he offers us, and in his Passion, death, and resurrection, we and all creation are made something we were not, and all by a love which Bonhoeffer says, “…wins and saves us” (ibid.). This is a love where impossible things are possible, as the angelic visitor promised the Mother of Our Lord at the Annunciation. But, back now for a brief revisit to my opening remarks. Thus, in the waters of today’s Gospel are Chris, Stuart, and the “Ol Norske”- all those loved ones remembered in Christmas letters who are in water’s over their heads – as are Gabrielle, Cynthia, and Jim – which is to say, all those who are living successful and fulfilled lives; also, all those who really shouldn’t be there at all, one’s enemies, for example. Heaven and Hell, I am saying, are there today in the Jordan, because Christ has brought the whole shootin’ match of life into those miraculous and living waters that heal ancient wounds that run deep. Today is the revelation of something unexpected/unanticipated, a mystery of new life revealing the great unity and reconciliation accomplished in the oblation and sacrifice of the life and ministry, and especially in the Passion, death, and resurrection of the One who is Son of God and Son of Man, the double natured one who is a final and complete intercession for the sins of the whole world. This initiative and action of the only begotten Son of God are also the mystery of love, the mystery by which all are redeemed and judged, the waters in which our lives float and are buoyed into eternity. Thus, the chasm between light and darkness is closed forevermore. “God help us. And so far, He/She has!”
The importance of what I am saying and what we are celebrating today is, therefore, the cultivation or adoption of a certain spirit of optimism and thankfulness that must over-ride our longings, our unfulfilled questions and expectations in daily life. Call it fear of God; which is to say, that the God who is God above and beyond all else is now the daily mystery in which we live, move, and have our being. And, this good fear which is also the spirit of the God who is Love, must move us beyond the myopia of religious narrow-mindedness and literalism and self service to a radically new vision of what it means to be human as well as divine, a new vision of what it truly is to live in love. I speak of cultivating confidence and power beyond this world’s climate for fear and death and violence. This is the Gospel commendation and imperative to love and live by a faith that is the reversal of all that this world holds important. Love is now the way, a paradoxical, transfiguring way of living in the noise and traffic of this world that is none other than the way of the cross. Into this mystery that the Church terms the kingdom of heaven, God has today led us. And, in giving Himself for us, asks us to not withhold giving our selves for one another, for that is what Christ has done for us. Sacrifice is what we are called to do in this new time and new world that also deceptively looks a lot like the old. An imperative spoken by Hamlet comes to mind, “Suit the action to the word” (Hamlet, III, ii, ln 19). Therefore, if love is the Word come down from heaven, let us now suit love to the action of living a new history begun in the waters of today’s Gospel. Let us, too, make love incarnate. Let us give it flesh, our flesh. More of Christ: less of ourselves. More of mercy and forgiveness: less of resentment and willfulness. “God help us. And so far, He/She has.”
In summary, I have said three things this morning. 1) All that is in heaven and on earth is now in Christ. 2) As Christ has died and risen to eternal life, so has all that is in Christ died and risen. And, 3) Christ is our hope, and as Christians, we live and act in hope of eternal life, already but not yet fully revealed.
I conclude with three suggestions/three actions mindful of today’s Gospel, three ways of living in the mystery of the passion, death, and resurrection of the Christ of God. 1) Surrender. Director, Ang Lee, in the film of Annie Proulx’s short story, “Brokeback Mountain”, tells the tale of a scandalous love between two friends over a twenty year period of time. One of the partners is murdered by violent and fearful men. The other is reconciled and freed. To the Christian, scandal, reconciliation, and freedom through the sacrifice of love is a familiar theme. And, so is stumbling in life, that is to say, getting caught in powerlessness and life’s unmanageability (skandalizein, Gr v., to limp), literally, limping along. Anything that causes us to stumble is also for the Christian the means to new life, if we are willing to surrender to God’s grace. Some surrenders require of us a lifetime of giving ourselves over to the love of God. Today is about surrender; Christ’s, ours. 2) Act as if. Regarding grace, or the help that God provides to do and accomplish His will, don’t always feel compelled to wait until you are ready to begin something new. The most important professional work that I have done was twelve years spent in the Times Square area working with HIV/AIDS. When I was initially asked to do the work, I remember saying, “But, I don’t know anything about what needs to be done.” The reply was that “I would do fine.” I have learned that God wants us to rely more on Him and less on our fears. In water that is over our heads, help comes. God intercedes. God promises the strength and tools we need. Sometimes, we need to act as if we already have the power to do what needs doing. Today is about putting life in the Father’s hands; Christ’s life, our life. And, 3) Gratitude. In my work with the sick and dying in those years, I came to see death as the great crisis lurking in each and every life. I also came to understand that the dying teach us to live, help us determine who we are and whose we are. They tell us of the need for compassion, mercy, and forgiveness – as well as the joy of laughter and gift of thankfulness for all that is good. Men shall always fear death and the eternal unknown, but today’s Gospel tells us God, too, is in the waters that must ultimately claim our lives, and this is a God who is ultimately beyond our imaginings but is the destiny of men and nations. Of this eternal destination we can be certain, and of this, we can be grateful. Today, is about thanksgiving for being found in a way we can never be lost from God. Christ’s life is our life. “Now” [writes William Stringfellow in his book, A Private and Public Faith] “… the dread of death is dissipated, since, God, and not death reigns. And now, at last, men are free to be men (p.91). Thus, in today’s waters we are free, free to be men. “God help us. And, so far He/She has!” Thanks be to God!
