Sermon for Easter II A_RCL

May 1, 2011

St. Benedict’s, Los Osos CA
The Rev. Brian H. O. A. McHugh

Acts 2: 14a, 22-32; Ps 16; I Peter 1: 3-9; John 20: 19-31


The French theologian, scholastic philosopher, and logician Peter Abelard (1079-1142) is quoted to have said: “By doubting we come to inquiry, by inquiry we come to truth”. His words are, I think, important to consider on what has come to be “Doubting Thomas” Sunday. Those who designed our present three year Lectionary seem to think that the story is important for our spiritual understanding and maturity; it is the Gospel for all three years!

Abelard’s words from a thousand years ago can, I think, assure us that Doubt is part and parcel of the Journey of Faith. Perhaps we need to be assured of this now and then ~ but I think not every year! I think that Jesus was saying to Thomas, “Thomas, you have been with me, and you have experienced the life of God in me; trust in your experience, and in my promise that God is always with you.”

I would say this: focusing on Doubt in this story is a red herring. When Jesus taught in parables, He included a lot of red herrings ….. things that could distract people from the essence of His teaching. Why? I think of His words, “Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.” (Matt 7: 6, NIV). Now, some of you may go away and say that Brian said that Jesus thought we human beings were dogs and pigs, beneath His attention. No, Brian didn’t say that. Jesus was saying that we must learn not to be distracted by red herrings, but to have “ears that can hear” and to listen for the inner truth. This is what I think is the import of the Gospel today: Jesus is saying to all of us, through Thomas, “You have seen in me that God’s Unconditional Love is real and at the heart of Life. Trust that. Do not be distracted by squabbling over irrelevant “side” issues” ~ if you will pardon the pun. This is the same message of the story of Martha and Mary: “Live Life from the heart of Love; don’t be distracted by unimportant issues; Choose the better part”.

So: what is “the better part” in this story of Thomas? What is the “sacred”, the “pearl”? It has to do with the Beloved Community, with the Community that gathers around the Mystery of God’s extravagant Love, and around us as those who are committed through our baptism to live out Jesus’ plea, which we heard at the Maundy Thursday Liturgy, to “love one another as I have loved you”.

I think it is important that Thomas was not with the community of the disciples when Jesus came to them in the Upper Room. It points to the critical importance of being a functioning part of the Beloved Community and, by extension, of the Human Race, namely of God’s People. It IS all about Love, and we can’t love in the abstract. We have to love someone: God, self, neighbour, enemy, stranger, mother, father, brother, sister, terrorist, friend.

I believe that “church” is, above all things, meant to be a place where we practice becoming loving members of the Beloved Community. Becoming a member of a congregation may begin in the search for simple companionship, but I think it must soon appear to be a place in which we can trust people to love us, and in which we are all learning day by day to live out of trust in God’s unconditional love, learning the character and nature of Love, and learning how to make that real for each other. And I think we need to be intentional about it to the fullest of our ability. It is not enough to be nice, pleasant, or friendly ….. though that’s a good place to start. But as Jesus once said, “even the tax-collectors do that!”. Every Episcopal church profile that I have ever looked at said some version of “We are a nice, pleasant, and friendly church”. But that is only the beginning of “being church”.

Which brings me to my final point. Today’s Collect goes to the heart of the Thomas story: “Almighty and everlasting God, who in the Paschal mystery established the new covenant of reconciliation: Grant that all who have been reborn into the fellowship of Christ’s Body may show forth in their lives what they profess by their faith”. God has proclaimed a covenant of faithful love to Her people from time immemorial. This Covenant in Jesus reminds us that covenant life is not magical. God does not wave a magic wand and – poof – we are all radically loving people. God offers, and we must then say Yes. Jesus has told us that all brokenness can be healed, if we are honest about our sin against Love, desire to change, and look to the Living Spirit as Guide.

I think that we who are members of the Beloved Community here at St. Benedict’s are, to be modest and humble, on a scale of 1 to 10, about 6. And that’s pretty good! I know personally how hard it is to be the Beloved Community of Reconciliation; I have some pretty strong political and theological views and a prickly personality to boot! But trusting in Jesus and the Gospel, I say let’s shoot for a 7.

I need you to help me “increase in love” ….. and I can be a good subject on which to practice!

One should always end on a positive note; so I end with two things:

Douglas Adams, the author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe”, says in his latest book “The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time”, “The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be." The message: Let’s expand our perspective.

And, an act of praise and Thanksgiving, from the Spanish Jew Solomon Ibn Gabirol (c.1021-c.1058) , which I have translated into modern English:

Who can know the secret of Your accomplishments,
when You made for the body the means for Your work?
You gave us eyes to see Your signs,
Ears, to hear Your wonders,
Mind, to grasp some part of Your mystery,
Mouth, to tell Your praise,
Tongue, to relate Your mighty deeds to every comer,
As I do today, I Your servant, the son of Your handmaid;
I tell, according to the shortness of my tongue,
one tiny part of Your greatness.

Lent 4 A_RCL

April 3, 2011

St. Benedict’s, Los Osos CA
The Rev. Brian H. O. A. McHugh

1 Samuel 16: 1-13; Ps 23; Ephesians 5: 8-14; John 9: 1-41

[Sing} Amazing Grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me;
I once was lost, but now I’m found,
I was blind, but now I see!
[We were blind, but now we see.]


These days for me are an exciting time of rethinking and clarifying many things. This hymn verse is troublesome, and always has been for me, despite the powerful emotional appeal. I’m OK with “Grace”; I know that Life is intrinsically full of astonishing Gifts. I’m not OK with “wretch”; I don’t accept as Biblical the doctrine of Original Sin; that doctrine erupted out of Augustine’s troubled mind. A church that claimed to be the only way to “salvation” knew a good thing when they saw it! I acknowledge and live by the doctrine of Original Blessing ~ that we are created Good in the Image of God. The implications of living by one and the other are profound. As to so-called “miraculous healings”, I accept what the 3rd C Christian writer Pachomius has to say:

After the manifest healings of the body, there are also spiritual healings. For if a man intellectually blind, in that he does not see the light of God because of idolatry, afterwards is guided by faith in the Lord and gains his sight, in coming to know the only true god, is not this a great healing …? One of the brethren asked me, "Tell us one of the visions you see.". And I said to him, "A sinner like me does not ask God that he may see visions: for that is against His will, and is error....Hear all the same about a great vision: If you see a man pure and humble, it is a great vision. For what is greater than such a vision, to see the Invisible God in a visible man, His temple?" I don’t accept as literal so-called healings which reverse natural law; but I certainly have experienced in myself and others the intellectual and emotional restoration to wholeness that can be effected by the light of Jesus’ Wisdom, by trust in God, and by practicing Jesus’ Wisdom.

The business of Original Sin vs Original Blessing is relevant to the Lectionary for today. We come here Sunday by Sunday for many reasons. But one of the principal reasons is to be reminded Who We Are. What is our essential Identity, as individuals and as a community – and not just any community, but as God’s Beloved Community? This issue of Identity is raised in the story we have from the Gospel called John this morning, of the man born blind who is given sight by Jesus. “The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, "Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?" Some were saying, "It is he." Others were saying, "No, but it is someone like him." But it is established firmly that this guy is the same one who was in darkness and then brought into the light of a new understanding of Life and Divine Compassion. The “man born blind” is you and me. Our “eyes” require opening. We each need the healing salve of the Word of God’s Love applied to our often-wounded Life. In our Life within the Beloved Community, we are, like the Blind Man, washed with God’s Love in Word and Sacrament and Community, washed in baptismal water to which the Spirit is “sent” – our own Siloam - and then we are sent to live the Life of the Beloved Community.

The most chilling, even evil, phrase in the whole convoluted reading is, to me, this: "This man is not from God, for he does not observe the sabbath." It is of course likely that much of the Gospel texts which vilify the Pharisees was inserted into the text by early Christians. Be that as it may, the behaviour of the Pharisees implies that the keeping of religious rules is more important that practicing the Compassion of God, and that one is “saved” by what one believes rather than by showing Compassion. Or, as Robin Meyer puts it, in his book Saving Jesus from the Church, by believing in Jesus rather than by following Jesus. Since the time of Nicea in the early 4th C., this “blindness” has inflicted much of the Christian Church. Countless people have been killed or ostracized or shunned because they did not believe in the Trinity, or in Biblical or Papal infallibility, or in countless other rules of so-called “orthodoxy” set up by the Church to control its membership and protect its power. The same is true of other religions as well; we are awash in ‘salvation by belief’ in the World today, requiring people to accept often complete absurdities, or the rule of moral tyrants, or otherwise suffer often horrific consequences. In America, not believing in the Virgin Birth can bring down a presidential candidate! And shamefully, in the Episcopal Church, espousing Buddhist prayer practices and acknowledging the Wisdom of the Buddhist path kept one man who was elected by his diocese to be their bishop from being ordained.

Apparently people choose to forget the wider implications of Jesus saying, “Man was not made for the Sabbath; the Sabbath was made for man.” In other words, Nothing must get in the way of radical Compassion ….. especially “church”. Yet Jesus was murdered, in part, for challenging the power of the religious elites ("church") of His time.

I am not saying that the Church shouldn’t have doctrines and guidelines. I am saying that those doctrines and guidelines must not prevent us from being Followers, disciples of Jesus and His Gospel. I became and remain an Episcopalian for many reasons. One of them is that, however messily, the Episcopal Church strives to “walk the walk” of following Jesus over believing in Jesus as defined by church doctrine. Knowledge is not redemptive. We are not “saved” by believing the “right thing”; we are confirmed as an Heir of the God of Love by imitating Jesus’ radical inclusiveness and compassion for all persons. Dennis and I worship here at St. Benedict’s because it strives to Follow – a symbol of which is our welcoming of all to full sharing at God’s table ..... our little rebellion against “church regulations” for the sake of living God’s policy of No Outcasts.

Robin Meyers says, “..one of the great divides in the church could be healed if we got one thing straight: the truth of which Jesus speaks is wisdom incarnate, not intellectual assent to cogent arguments made on behalf of God. Indeed, a quick glance around this broken world makes it painfully obvious that we don’t need more arguments on behalf of God; we need more people who live as if they are in covenant with Unconditional Love, which is our best definition of God.”

The holy bread and wine we share, for which we pray in the Collect today, is a sign of that Covenant of Trust and Love we have made with God and with each other. The Eucharist is the food of Followers like us; and “following”, as Meyers says better than I can, is “not about knowing new things or subscribing to certain theological statements or positions, but about the never-ending process of dying to an old self and being reborn into a new one. The evidence for this rebirth was not a clever argument or allegiance to a certain rabbinical school. It was made obvious by a new way of being in the world. Good Friday and Easter are therefore not isolated events. They are the twin polarities of wisdom – as we constantly die to the bondage of blindness and are reborn to the light.”

Like the man blind from birth, we have been flooded with light by God’s love incarnate in us. Now we “see”. The Invitation is to live our Truth confidently and without Fear.