Currently The Fairies in Tradition and Literature (Routledge Classics) By Katharine Briggs see related

Fairies, Alchemists, and Elementals

The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania

Scriptures: The Major Rogation, A.D. 2012 B

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

The ancient Romans called them lares; the Russians called them domovoi.  The Norse named them jotuns, svartalfs, dwerger, and the like, while the Greeks classified them as nereids, oceanids, oreads, and nymphs.  In the British Isles they were hobs, brownies, imps and ogres, and the Quran of the Muslims names them jinni.  For the 17th Century Rev. Robert Kirk they were “the subterraneans,” while C.S. Lewis dubbed them longaevi, “the longlivers.”  But be they trolls, dragons, leprechauns or mermaids, we know the lot of them today simply as fairies.

You’ll find fairy stories in pretty much every culture conceivable, though no one seems to agree on whence, exactly, they come.  Some have dubbed them displaced gods, demoted with the coming of Christ; others believe them to be a special sort of dead, fated to roam the earth for a time in a different form.  Muslims believe that God created them from “smokeless fire,” whilst the harsher Protestant Reformers and Catholic saints condemned them as a sort of fallen angel, not quite evil enough to burn in Hell, but servants of Satan nonetheless.  By and large, however, Christian and pre-Christian peoples alike have agreed that these odd little mythological beasties have a nature all their own: neither human nor angel, they seem to exist somewhere in between, as creatures of “coagulated air.”

Once you get past the origin stories, descriptions of fairies seem rather consistent across cultures, continents, and times.  Fairies act much as mortals: they eat and drink, marry and breed, build homes and halls and even, some say, churches.  They can be killed in a manner of ways, especially by iron, and given time they perish too of great old age.  They are invisible, flitting through the air and living underground, only detectable when they wish to be, or to those with second sight.  Though seemingly capable of shape-shifting and great magic, it ever turns out to be an illusion, called the fairy “glamour.”  And as a race they seem to be dying.

Ever since Chaucer some six centuries ago, belief in fairies was ever said to have died out with “the last generation,” no matter when that generation happened to live.  Many said that fairies left the land in droves as civilization marched forward.  Those that stayed had great difficulty in childbirth, often stealing away human midwives and unbaptized children, or sending fairy maidens for trysts with mortal men.  Even the great Roman king Numa Pompilius is said to have had a fairy mistress!  Foolish humans seduced by fairy illusion would often have their lives drained away and their souls enslaved to serve the elves as fairy-ghosts.  The door seems to have swung the other way as well, with some fairies seeking to become human, often through marriage or even the taking of Holy Orders.

Since they do not appear in the Bible, save perhaps in a handful of debatable verses, good Christian folk weren’t quite sure what to make of the fairies.  Shakespeare had a happy opinion of them, saying that they were not frightened of church bells as demons are.  Luther dismissed them as hellspawn and devils—but he said that about everybody.  Most rustics did not seek out encounters with fairy folk, but often brownies or hobgoblins would take up residence in the home unbidden.  If treated well, and given a lucky horseshoe on which to sit, the brownie was said to help out with household chores.  But if offended or wronged in any way, the brownie would become an irate hobgoblin, flinging little stones called elf-shot and making the house unlivable for even the most courageous of families.

Suspiciously, fairies were usually banished by the Name of Christ and sign of the Cross.  The Scots claimed that the fairies were divided, some aligned with God and others with Hell: these were the Seelie and Unseelie Courts, respectively.  The bottom line is that most Christians, including the clerics, were hotly divided on the topic.  They most all agreed, as did the majority of people across the globe and throughout history, that such critters existed.  But the purposes and allegiances of such spirits remained veiled in mystery—that is, until the alchemists.  Alchemists are often credited with bridging the gap betwixt magic and science; to a certain extent, this is true.  Before the Church (yes, the Church) invented the Scientific Method in the Twelfth Century, alchemists sought to divine the secrets of Nature through experimentation and mysticism, if not empiricism.

Alchemical assumptions make a certain amount of sense if you place yourself within the medieval mindset.  The world around us, we freely confess, is full of transformation and change.  We know that minerals deep in the earth alter their properties; we know that seeds undergo glorious generation to produce plants.  Theologically, of course, the powers of growth and transformation in Nature come from God—from the divine energies that He infuses into the world in order to animate all things.  And this is what the alchemists sought to distill; they wanted to find God in Nature.  Traditionally we say that they sought three items: the alkahest, the philosopher’s stone, and the elixir of life.  The alkahest was a solvent that could dissolve anything.  (Lord knows how you’d contain it!)  The philosopher’s stone could turn base elements into pure gold. And the elixir of life imparted perfection and agelessness to human beings, making them as refined and unblemished as said pure gold.

In reality, these three quests were one in the same: the alkahest, according to Isaac Newton, was an intermediary step on the way to synthesizing the philosopher’s stone; and the stone itself, which was really more of a powder, could be dissolved in liquid to then produce the elixir of life.  Find the stone, and you find all three.  Here’s the thing, though: the philosopher’s stone was the distillation of the transformative powers that God Himself had imbued into Nature.  Thus the only way to truly discover the philosopher’s stone was by divine revelation; the heart and soul of the alchemist had to be perfectly pure in order to be deemed worthy by God.  Here then we can see that alchemy was at least as spiritual as it was physical, and for many the true philosopher’s stone—able to conquer all things, to purify Nature, and to make Man immortal—was none other than Jesus Christ in the Eucharist.

So then, what does this have to do with fairies?  Well, medieval Christianity taught that there were multiple choirs of angels, the highest living in permanent communion with God as His heavenly court, and the lowest aiding and guarding things earthly and human.  The middle choirs, meanwhile, were tasked with upholding reality.  Theirs was to enforce the rational laws by which God governs the universe.  Why does two plus two always equal four?  Why can’t you square a circle?  Why does the arrow of time move in only one direction?  Well, because God says so; and because an angel is in charge of making sure that things go according to plan.  Alchemists reasoned, however, that the angels must subcontract—that is, they, as preternatural spirits, are put in charge of natural spirits, which St. Paul in Scripture dubs “elementals.”  This makes perfect sense to an alchemist: their whole deal, after all, involves God imbuing Nature with animating spirits.

Thus did elves and goblins, giants and trolls, dragons and dwarves, all fall under the category of “elementals”—beings tasked with upholding and serving Nature.  For a medieval Christian, this explains everything.  Why do some fairies serve God and others the Devil?  Because in the Fall of Man, Nature fell as well!  (Man’s job, after all, was to steward Nature.)  Why does fairy magic prove an illusion?  Because they’re natural spirits, having only natural powers!  Why do fairies depend on Man, and wither without mortal aid?  Because Nature needs humanity, her stewards, as much as humanity needs her!  This is also why fairies seem to dissolve into earth or air, and why they age slowly—like the trees or the mountains—yet ultimately crumble to ash and dust, as all things in Nature must.  All in all, it was brilliant.  The alchemists had figured out how perfectly to Christianize the fairy creatures which had so consistently baffled humankind.

Anyhow, why bring up all this talk of fairies and alchemists today?  Well, that’s fairly simple: today is the Major Rogation.  Now, there are plenty of holy days on the Church calendar that romanticize Nature and thank God for the bounty that He provides through her, but Rogation is different; Rogation is the flipside.  On the Major and Minor Rogations we acknowledge that Nature is as broken as we are.  Nature shares in the fallen state of Creation.  Fires and floods, tornadoes and hurricanes, blizzards and droughts, testify to her wild, broken, dangerous state.  In Christian art and literature, nothing symbolizes this better than the wild, volatile fairies.  And nothing symbolizes our inability to master Nature apart from God better than the alchemists and their quest for the philosopher’s stone.

On this Rogation, brothers and sisters, let us pray to God for the healing of our sister Mother Nature, and for God to protect and guard us from her violent excesses.  We have broken her; we her stewards rejected in pride our God-given office.  We trust now that in Christ, Nature too shall share in the Resurrection and Restoration of all things.  Until then, may God forgive us for what we’ve done to her, and protect us from the wrath she outpours in response.

Thanks be to Christ, at whose Name even the spirits of Nature must bow or else must flee.  In Jesus.  AMEN.

Creation Resurrected

Scriptures: The Third Sunday in Easter, A.D. 2012 B

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

More than 400 years before Christ, Socrates, the founder of Western philosophy, taught that it is impossible for a good man to come to harm.  By this he did not mean that only good things happen to good people, or that misfortune cannot befall decent folk.  Socrates was neither stupid nor naïve; he knew that injustice runs rampant through our world.  Why, he himself was convicted by his own city in a trumped-up show trial and forced to commit suicide by drinking hemlock, all for crimes of which he was not guilty.  Clearly bad things do happen to decent people, which he knew as well as anyone.

What Socrates meant in arguing that no harm can come to a good person is that the real you, the true you, is your immortal soul—and the only person who can harm your soul is you: the choices you make, the actions you take.  This idea stood in stark contrast to the popular worldview of his day.  The ancient Greeks from Homer on down generally held that the real you, the true you, was your body, and that the only life that mattered was the here and now.  They believed that human beings had spirits, of course—shades, they called them, the Greek term for ghosts—but such spirits were just echoes, just shadows, mere reflections of a life now lost.  The real you was the corpse that you left here on earth, hopefully in a respectable tomb adorned with fame and glory.

Here, then, in ancient Greece, we find the two models of human identity still dominant in our own time more than 2,000 years later.  The pagan Greeks argued that man is but flesh and blood, and might as well pursue the good life whilst he can; a human being, they claim, is a body that may or may not happen to possess a soul.  The Greek philosophers, in contrast, believed this temporal world to be fleeting and illusory, a prison of physicality from which we are liberated at death; here, then, a human being is a soul who just so happens for a time to possess a body.  Most modern peoples, I would argue, espouse one of these two positions today. Materialists believe that a person is but an animal, an animal but a thing, a thing merely atoms, atoms merely forces, and forces merely numbers—so gather ye rosebuds while ye may.  Spiritualists say just the opposite: that this present life is but a walking shadow, and this current world a trap to be escaped.

Most Christians, I would wager, espouse the latter worldview.  We tend to think that upon death our souls flit off to their eternal reward and that’s that—much like how the ancient Celts believed that our ghosts fly off to blessed isles in the western sea, there to drink beer and strum the lyre for all eternity.  But if such were the case, brothers and sisters, I’m afraid that the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, which we celebrate so exuberantly for these 50 days of Easter, would have little meaning or relevance to us at all.  “Alleluia!  Christ is risen!”  So what?  Why did He have to come back and pop out of the tomb at all?  Didn’t His soul just shoot straight to Heaven when He died upon the Cross?  And isn’t that what happens to us the instant that we die, leaving our bodies forever behind?  The Church’s answer to such questions, of course, is a resounding “No!”

Christianity, my friends, has long baffled and frustrated the world by adamantly affirming God’s love for both spiritual and physical reality.  Where people dreamt up the notion that Christian faith is all about pie in the sky by and by, I’ve no idea.  The earliest Christians scandalized the Greco-Roman world by asserting that humanity consists equally of both body and soul.  Pagans argued that the physical is what’s important and the immaterial, well, immaterial; philosophers, meanwhile, poo-pooed this corrupt matter and espoused the invisible and ephemeral.  But Christians would not have it all one way or all the other; we proclaim, as Christ has taught us, that both body and soul are equally important to God, both equally involved in our eternal destiny.

Deep down, of course, we know this instinctually; we know that body and soul are intended to exist in permanent union.  Such is why, whenever we encounter one without the other—that is, either a corpse or a ghost—we react with repugnance and fear.  God made a physical world, breathed into it spiritual life, and judged it good.  This is why early Christians always stressed the future Resurrection.  The God of Christianity promises a fully redeemed and resurrected world, in which birds and beasts, rocks and trees, men and women, all share a single divine destiny.

This hope explains many of the quirky peculiarities of Christianity.  Most pagan cultures prefer funeral pyres to burials, for whether you happen to be a materialist or a spiritualist the bottom line is that you won’t be needing your body anymore.  Christians, in stark contrast, actually reverenced their dead, treating faithful corpses as relics, adorning them with gold and jewels, behaving as if those rotting bones would someday just awake and sit up again—which of course they will.  This is why the Church puts such glorious emphasis on Christmas, on God entering and becoming one with Creation, and on Easter, when God thunders that He will redeem the physical world rather than dispose of or replace it.  This too is why the Bible insists that faith in the eternal, that love of the invisible, generates living charity in the here and now: why love of God and love of neighbor are now and forever one in the same.

Not many people realize that, according to the Book of Revelation, the End of Time comes not when God wipes out the world and good souls flee up to Heaven, but comes instead when Heaven comes down to earth and they merge as one—a new Heaven and a new earth—with the physical and the spiritual in perfect eternal harmony in God.  Then will Christ be all in all!  This astounding truth, that God intends for body and soul, Heaven and earth, to be joined eternally and inseparably, leads to a wondrous and astounding worldview that can grasp the eternal in the everyday, the glorious in the humble, the infinite contained in finite things, and God the Spirit active in all the world around us.  Eternal life now bursts forth suddenly from simple water, from the very Body and Blood of God offered for us in what was mere bread and wine! Life becomes Sacrament.

For a thousand years this worldview reigned supreme: a time that we tend to call the Middle Ages, but should be named more appropriately the Age of Faith.  Contrary to popular belief, our medieval forebears were not all ignorant rubes and superstitious savages; they took philosophy, architecture, literature, music, and metallurgy to heights never before seen.  The medieval Church birthed the university, hospitals, the Age of Exploration and the glories of the Renaissance—not to mention, in the Twelfth Century, the Church invented the Scientific Method.

And while they did so, the medieval Christians came up with such revolutionary ideas as the concept of limited and just warfare, never targeting civilians, giving full quarter to enemies, providing universally for the hungry and homeless, putting tight constraints on the powers of government to tax and wage war, abolishing slavery, and asserting the value of human life regardless of age or social standing.  All this, mind you, they accomplished during ceaseless barbarian invasions, Viking raids, Muslim incursions, vast famines, a miniature Ice Age, and the Black Death.  How could they forge such resilient and idealistic societies in an age of such unrelenting mortality?  It was because they saw the hand of divinity in the motion of the stars, the light of the moon, the face of the beggar, the smile of the child, and even in the rictus grin of the skeleton’s skull.  Their God was the resurrected Jesus, flesh and bone, scars and all, Who rose from the dead to join them at their humble tables for a meal of broiled fish.

In medieval Christianity, storms were personified as dragons, trees as elves, seas as mermaids, stars as angels, seasons as giants, and Nature herself as a woman whose reign encompassed everything from the Moon on down.  Alchemists blended magic and primitive science in attempts to distill the transformative powers of life and growth that God imbues into each aspect of Creation.  Miracles and magic, heroes and monsters, secret lands and hidden peoples, all abounded just outside one’s door for those who lived in the 1,000 years of the Age of Faith.  And they saw the world like this not because they were foolish or naïve, not because they were unaware that the world works by rational laws—enforced, they insisted, by angels and elemental spirits!—but they could see such wonders, such beauty, because the presence of God in Creation, His union of the physical with the spiritual, made all the world into a glorious and overflowing Sacrament, in which God and His wonders ever come to bless humankind in daily life and toil.

This unity, this ancient Christian worldview that combines the eternal with the temporal, religion with justice, faith with good works, now with forever, and God with our neighbor and our everyday lives, has been so neglected today as to be nearly lost.  Brothers and sisters, let us live in the Resurrection; let us refuse to separate the physical and the spiritual; let us explore the wonders of a risen, hungry, flesh-and-blood Christ; indeed, let us merge the medieval with the modern!  Perhaps then our lives and those of all around us would seem less a struggle and more a Sacrament.

Thanks be to Christ, Who brings Heaven to earth and God to us.  In Jesus’ Name.  AMEN.

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Empty Tomb

Scripture: The Resurrection of Our Lord, A.D. 2012 B

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

God wins.

That, brothers and sisters, is the triumphal truth of this Holy Passover, this great Resurrection of Jesus Christ, which we term Easter.  God wins.  In Christ Jesus, God has broken the back of death and Hell, and offered up His very Self to seal the chasm between God and Man caused by our wickedness and sin.  In spite of all our fears, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, in spite of our own doubts and cruelties and rebellion, on this day, this Sunday, this Easter, God wins.  Life wins!  And, by all that is holy, Love wins.

The tomb is broken.  The curse is healed.  The long night has ended.  As Nature herself erupts in joyous celebration, blossoming forth with new life in reflection of the God she shares with us, we revel in faith, hope, and love, joyously proclaiming all that Christ has done for us, all that He now shares with us, and the fullness of all the promises to come that He is even now fulfilling.  This should be the pinnacle, the ultimate moment of unbridled celebration, of joy, of ecstasy.  And yet—how does the Gospel say that the first Christians reacted?

According to St. Mark, three of the women who followed our Lord ventured to Jesus’ tomb just after dawn on Sunday in order to anoint His Body.  But there they found the tomb empty and the stone rolled away.  And an angel appeared to them, proclaiming, “Do not be afraid!  You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, Who was crucified.  He is not here; He is risen!  Go; tell His disciples and Peter!”  Yet in response to this glorious heavenly proclamation, Mark writes: “Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb.  And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

Afraid.  They were afraid.  Now, we certainly have many reactions to, many associations with, this brilliant Easter morn.  But the first one recorded in the Gospel is fear.  “Christ is risen!  And they were afraid.”  Now why do you suppose that is?  Sometimes we forget just how often people in the Bible react to encounters with God in fear.  In fact, I’d be willing to bet that it’s the primary emotion folks exhibit when faced with a close encounter of the religious kind.  “Do not be afraid!” the angels always say.  And the very next line is: “And they were terrified.”

Fear and awe are perfectly understandable, even expected, reactions to the Bible’s theophanies.  Even during His earthly ministry, as Christ went about teaching, healing, and working miracles, His closest friends and disciples are described as being “amazed and afraid.”  I mean, when somebody can feed 5,000 people with a few loaves and some fish, that’s kind of scary, isn’t it?  There’s a strangeness to Jesus, an untamed wildness, that we often gloss over or seek to forget.  (But then, that’s probably true of love in general, don’t you think?)

So often, in our society—and indeed, in every generation before us, stretching back 2,000 years—people try to take a middle ground on Jesus.  “Oh, sure, I may not worship Jesus, I may not think that He’s God, but He was certainly a nice guy.  He was a pleasant religious fellow, a wise moral teacher, echoes of Confucius or Buddha or Deepak Chopra.”  Jesus, in other words, is just like everybody else—and therefore completely forgettable.  But then, nobody ever got angry enough to crucify Deepak Chopra, did they?

Jesus Himself forces us out of this middle ground; He forces us to make a choice.  He explicitly claims the authority of God; He always acts in the person of God.  “Who do you say I AM?” He asks us.  And we either believe His claim—that indeed He is God in the flesh, God-With-Us—or we must admit that He’s a dangerous fanatic, Who probably ought to be eliminated.  As C.S. Lewis put it, Jesus is either “mad, bad, or God.”  There is no in between.  And this all-or-nothing nature of Christ is in and of itself pretty radical, pretty scary.

Having said all this, however, I still don’t think that these reasons combined can account for the reaction of the women at the tomb.  I mean, these were people who loved Jesus, who followed Him straight into Jerusalem and right up to that Cross.  These were people who heard His proclamations that the Son of Man would be slain by those whom He came to save, and that He would rise again on the Third Day.  This empty tomb, this angelic annunciation, should be the fulfillment of their every hope, the vindication of all Jesus’ wild claims.  They should be dancing in the street, shouldn’t they?  They ought to be proclaiming what they’ve seen and heard from the rooftops!  “Yet they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

It doesn’t say that they were afraid when Christ was arrested.  It doesn’t say that they were afraid when He was tortured, tried, and unjustly murdered.  It doesn’t even say that they were afraid when they laid Him in the tomb.  No: they grow afraid when Christ is risen.  Why?  What makes Easter scarier than Good Friday…?

I suspect, brothers and sisters, that it has to do with the problem of evil.  Here’s the deal: every religion on this planet has to wrestle with why our world is broken.  Humanity knows, down in our bones, deep in our souls, that they way things are isn’t the way things ought to be.  The world is full of injustice, brokenness, and suffering, and we know that this is wrong.  Many people see a planet wracked by war, disease, and natural disaster, and conclude that there must not be a God—or, worse, that God must not be good—because how could a good God allow for rape and murder and lies and hatred and car wrecks and cancer?  Most folks’ biggest problem with God is, simply, evil.

Now, admittedly, there are a number of flaws in this reasoning.  First up, God didn’t break the world; we did.  How dare we muck up His Creation, then scold Him for it?  For that matter, who are we to judge God?  To do so is to claim that we’re gods over Him—the very mistake that got us into this mess in the first place.  Beyond that, there’s the rather ridiculous notion that right and wrong would cause us to deny God when in fact God created right and wrong.  Denying God effectively denies morality, and so what injustice is left about which to be outraged?  Yet such responses to the problem of evil stand as cold comfort to those undergoing actual human suffering: fear and sickness and vulnerability.  When we hurt—and worse, when the ones we love hurt—we simply want to know where God is, and how He’s going to make this right.  Get off Your duff and do something, Lord!

And, see, that’s what brings us to Easter.  By the time of Christ, God’s people Israel have been waiting a thousand years for God to send a Messiah from heaven.  Some even believe that the Messiah will be God Himself come down to earth!  By the time of Christ, the children of Abraham have been waiting more than 2,000 years for God to make good on His promise that Israel will prove instrumental in saving and healing the world.  Even the heathen nations scattered across the planet, consciously or not, have been yearning for untold eons to return to that paradise with God enjoyed and then lost by humanity’s first parents.  People want God to fix the world; they expect Him to come take care of the problem of evil.  The Jewish prophets, the Greek philosophers, the pagan myths, all of them are waiting for God, waiting for Him to come in the flesh as Jesus Christ, to wipe away every tear, to heal every wound, to raise the dead from their graves, and to set all things right.  Everyone wants God to do something.

Then finally this vaunted Messiah comes, and where does He end up?  The Cross.  The tomb.  The land of the dead.  This isn’t what we expected.  This isn’t what we wanted.  We wanted a warrior, a tough guy, a bloodthirsty king, who would come to conquer the world, to crush resistance, and to burn the wicked with fire!  Instead we got the Prince of Peace, the Suffering Servant, the sacrificial Lamb of God.  We wanted God to do something about the problem of evil, to wave His hand and destroy all wickedness, to force the world back into the way that it ought to be.  After all, that’s what we’d do, if we were God, right?  We’d make it be good.

But we’re not God; Jesus is.  And Jesus does what we cannot.  He fixes the problem of evil; He heals the brokenness of this world.  But He does not do so through force, through power, through the tyrannical strength of His Almighty arm.  He does something about our vulnerability by becoming vulnerable Himself.  He does something about our suffering by joining us in it.  He conquers our hearts not by slaying the sinners, but by letting we sinners murder Him.  And He conquers death by dying.  It’s bizarre; it’s alien; it’s wild and strange.  It’s unlike anything we would expect, anything we would think to do.  And that’s why it works.

The empty tomb is scary because it proves Jesus right about everything.  It shows God’s Love to be so radical, so powerful, so impossible, that we can scarcely comprehend such unfathomed depths of self-giving.  It shows us that nothing, nothing—not sin, not death, not cancer or war or the very gates of Hell—nothing can separate us from the Love of God in Christ Jesus.

And that is how God wins.  Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!  Alleluia!  AMEN.

Prayers of Intercession:

With a new heart and new life, let us pray for the Church, for the world, and for all those who are in need…

Lord, for 40 days and nights / Of Lent we walked through gloom and doom

But now we turn to life’s delights / As You throw wide the empty tomb!

Love has risen from the ground / And spread His life from pole to pole

So now we burst with joyous sound / As You revive the weary soul

Bring us Spring for fruitful fields / Abundance that we all may share

New life Your Spirit in us yields / In Your mercy—hear our prayer

Alleluia!  Christ is risen! / Cry Your Word throughout the world!

Free us from our ego prison / Give us mighty wings unfurled

Cynicism, lack of meaning / Self-obsession rots the land

Break us of our selfish preening / Move us with Your mighty hand

Christ is risen!  All salvation / Now is given, sweet and fair

Lift us up from ev’ry nation / In Your mercy—hear our prayer

Fix our eyes on heaven highest / Ever set on Paradise

Let our hearts and minds be spryest / In the face of wicked vice

Give us faith that we are tourists / In this world a little more

Let us never act as jurists / Judging others, keeping score

Let us live with love and sureness / That the best awaits up there

Bring us into Jesus’ pureness / In Your mercy—hear our prayer

Lord Jesus Christ, by Your death you have broken Death’s back, and by Your glorious Resurrection You have brought us all into new and abundant life.  Hear now our prayers, as You promised You would, especially for those we name before you, silently or aloud… for Lisa, Rylie, Bob, Jackson, Gabriel, Arlyss, Sandy, Lon, Sue, Jennifer, Judy, Jared, Misty, Janice … for those battling cancer and illness… for those on dialysis… for the depressed… for the newly wed and newly baptized… for those who dare not pray to You… for those who govern and protect us… for our bishops and the greater Church… and for all children undergoing medical care.

Into Your hands, O Lord, we commend all for whom we pray

Trusting in Your mercy to light and guard their way.  AMEN.

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The Legend of the Cross

Adam dies; Seth speaks with the angel; the great Tree looms.

Scripture:  Maundy Thursday, A.D. 2012 B

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

There is an ancient legend associated with the Cross of Christ, a story at least a thousand years old.  Most often we call it the Legend of the Holyrood—“rood” here being an archaic term for a rod or cross.  The story goes something like this: Adam, father of all humanity, upon coming to the end of his long and storied life, asked his son Seth to return to the Garden of Eden from which our first parents had been expelled for their original sin.  There Seth was to beg of the angel guarding Eden’s gate some small clipping or fruit from the Tree of Life, that Adam might be revived and spared ignominious death.

It wasn’t hard for Seth to trace his father’s footsteps, for, according to the legend, Adam and Eve’s footfalls had scorched the earth as they fled from terrestrial paradise.  Soon he came to a place where all of Nature seemed to flourish as never before, but a great wall surrounded the garden and indeed an angel, flaming sword in hand, barred his way.  Before Seth could speak, the angel read his soul as a man might read a book.

“Alas,” the angel said, “The time of pardon is not yet come, for thousands of years must roll away ere the Redeemer shall open this gate to Adam, so closed by his disobedience.  But as a token of future pardon, the wood whereon redemption shall be won shall grow from the tomb of thy father.  Behold what he lost by his transgression!”—whereupon the angel threw open the gates of God’s garden, and Seth beheld a great tree growing up before the font of eternal life.  Its roots bled down into Hades, but its branches reached up to the heavens.  And the most glorious of its fruits glowed like the sun: a resplendent little Baby, Seth saw, awaiting His promised time.  From this heavenly tree the angel gave to Seth three little seeds, with which he returned to his father.  When Adam perished, Seth placed these seeds within the corpse’s mouth, and he buried Adam at a spot we would later come to know as Golgotha, the Place of the Skull.

Soon the little seeds sprouted up from Adam’s grave.  Eastern Christians tell us that these three were a cedar, a cypress, and a pine, and that they grew together, their natures mingling to produce a single mighty tree.  A bough broken off from this tree became the staff of Moses, by which he and his brother Aaron worked so many of God’s miracles, and upon which he hung the bronze serpent for the healing of the Israelites in the wilderness.  Later, this staff, which had miraculously bloomed for Aaron, came into the hands of one Joseph, a carpenter, and again bloomed to indicate to the Temple priests in Jerusalem that God had chosen Joseph as spouse to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

As for the main body of the tree itself, here beneath its branches did King David sit when he bewailed his sins, and David’s son Solomon, during his own reign, cut down the great and holy tree to serve as the main support pillar for his palace.  The tree, however, seemed to have other ideas, as it kept miraculously changing sizes on Solomon, until at last in frustration the wise king cast it over the Kidron brook as a bridge—that all crossing the Kidron would trample the blasted thing!  When the Queen of Sheba came seeking Solomon’s famous wisdom, a flash of divine inspiration revealed to her the holiness of this log-bridge, and she raised it up to reverence it.  Solomon, unable to rid himself of the persistent tree, now buried it.  (Later on the king would dig the pool of Bethesda upon this spot, and the ancient tree imparted to the waters those healing properties revealed in the Bible.)

There the holy rod sat soaking, until, at long last—untold eons from the time of Adam, 15 centuries after Moses, a thousand years from the reign of King Solomon—Jesus Christ, Savior of the world and Son of God, came to Jerusalem to die.  Its destiny at hand, the sunken tree surfaced, and the Romans found it to be quite suitable for the beam of a cross.  Thus did God Incarnate embrace the Cross and die; and the Cross was buried near its victim upon Calvary, awaiting the day when St. Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine, would dig it back up.

Whew!  It’s quite a tale, isn’t it?  And there certainly exist variations on the theme.  Some tell of the Holyrood being watered by Abraham’s nephew Lot; others claim that it spent some time as part of the Temple in Jerusalem.  Churches all over the world incorporate chapters of this story into the art of their mosaics and stained glass.  But no matter which version of the legend one may embrace, it knits together the entire history of God’s relationship with His people: starting with Adam, touching on Abraham, incorporating Moses and Aaron, sheltering King David, and even making wise King Solomon out to be something of a fool—for indeed, the Cross makes foolish the wisdom of the wise.

This “Legend of the Holyrood” is just that: a legend.  It has little to no standing in either Sacred Scripture or Church Tradition.  And yet… in many ways it is a deeply biblical, a deeply theological story, because it illustrates so beautifully how everything in the history of our salvation has led up to Christ on the Cross.  For the Christian, it doesn’t matter if we read the Old Testament or the New Testament, if we read of the Jews or the Greeks; we always interpret the Bible, we always relive sacred history, with Jesus Christ as the Alpha and the Omega: our true origin and our eternal destination.  We can only understand the story of God and His people as it revolves upon the axis of the Cross: upon the God Who gave up everything, pouring out even His very life, to reconcile us wicked, broken sinners to Himself.

I can think of no more appropriate message around which to gather on this Maundy Thursday!  Tonight, brothers and sisters, ties the story of God’s love for His people together.  The events of this evening reach back thousands of years through history, and forward to history’s culmination in the eternal life of Christ.  Jesus and His disciples came to Jerusalem, you see, in order to celebrate the Passover: the holy festival and ritual meal established by God to commemorate the liberation of His people from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land.

Now, this liberation under Moses all occurred some 1500 years before Christ, but faithful Israelites knew then, as they know today, that the Passover meal is not simply a remembrance pointing back to something long since past.  Quite the contrary!  In the Passover meal, celebrants do not simply reenact Israel’s liberation as in a theatrical play; rather, they relive and rejoin the original Passover event.  They do not simply remember their ancestors’ liberation, but they too are liberated!  In returning to God’s intervention in history, in returning to the eternal liberation that transcends mere mortal time, celebrants join with all those generations before them and all those yet to come in one and the same Passover.  Greeks call this “anamnesis”: when we don’t recall our history but we become our history.

Yet Jesus does something new.  When He celebrates the Passover, when He joins in this meal beyond normal human time, He transforms it, transfigures it, fulfills it.  He holds up the bread and proclaims, “This is My Body, given for you.  Do this in remembrance of Me.”  Then He lifts high the cup, blesses it, gives thanks, and says, “This cup is the New Covenant in My Blood, shed for you and for all people, for the forgiveness of sin.  Do this in remembrance of Me.”

My God, what a shock this must have been to His loyal disciples!  At the Passover we gather to remember, and thus to share truly, in what God does for us, past, present and future.  Yet Jesus does not say “do this in remembrance of what God has done” but “do this in remembrance of Me”—taking the divine role upon Himself!  He decrees that His cup is a New Covenant, in Blood, for the forgiveness of sins.  Who is this Man, that He can declare New Covenants between God and His people?  Who is this Man Who asks us to drink Blood, an act forbidden by the Lord?  Who is this Man Who claims forgiveness, God’s exclusive prerogative, as His own?

In this Meal—in this Last Supper before the Cross—Jesus fulfills for us every hope and expectation of Israel.  Every promise made to the prophets, to David, to Moses, to Abraham—even the legendary promise of remission made to the dying Adam—every one is fulfilled when God sacrifices Himself for us on the Cross that we fashion for Him: offering to us His Body, pouring out for us His Blood.  This New Testament, this New Covenant, does not replace the relationship that God has shared with His people since time immemorial.  Rather it fulfills the relationship—and opens it now not just to the Israelites, but to Greeks and to Romans, to barbarians and foreigners, and to all those generations yet to be.

We call it Easter, but really it is the Passover: God’s deliverance of Mankind, liberating us from slavery to sin and death, leading us to the land that God promised to our ancestors—not just to Abraham but to Adam—all by the Blood of the Lamb.  Tonight we meet God in this Meal, as His people ever have.  And we gather not simply to remember the Body of Christ, but to remember that we are the Body of Christ.

Thanks be to God: the Hinge of History, hung on a Cross.  In Jesus’ Name.  AMEN.

The Queen of Sheba venerates the bridge that will become the Cross.

Anamnesis

Midweek Lenten Vespers, Week Five, A.D. 2012 B

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

The holiest day on the Christian calendar is Sunday.  It is always Sunday.

The earliest Christians fasted every Wednesday, for on a Wednesday was our Savior betrayed, and again each Friday in mourning for the Crucifixion.  Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, was not considered a binding day of rest for Christians, though it became now the day when God rested in His tomb.  Sunday, the glorious day of Resurrection, the Day of the Lord, occupied the focus of early Christian life.  Every Sunday the assembly would gather, from earliest times, around Word and Sacrament, the Bible and the Lord’s Supper.  Back then, of course, people labored on Sundays, so the followers of Jesus would gather for prayer in the morning and reconvene after work for a communal meal centered around the Eucharist.

Thus every week of Christian life—and indeed, every cycle of evening and morning—became a reenactment, a merging, with the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.  The Greeks call it “anamnesis”: a remembrance that does not simply reenact an event but that recreates and merges you with the original event.  In every week, in every gathering, in every Sunday, new believers joined, quite literally, in the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Of course, as time passed and generations began to roll by, Christians came to view larger spans of time in light of Christ’s Resurrection as well.  The Church celebrated important milestones in the Christian life from before the cradle to beyond the grave.  A three-year cycle of Gospel readings evolved, mirroring the three years of Jesus’ earthly ministry.  Soon the year itself became a joining, an anamnesis, with the life of Christ, starting with the season of Advent, when we await our Lord’s arrival; moving on to Christmas, when we celebrate His birth; then the time after Epiphany, as He is revealed to the world; Lent, when we mourn the sufferings of His Passion and the salvific tragedy of the Crucifixion; Easter, the joyous celebration of our Lord’s Resurrection and triumph over death; and, finally, the time after Pentecost, as the ministry and miracles of the risen Christ continue through His Body the Church.

The climax of this eternal drama, as you might imagine, was and still is the final week of Lent leading into Easter: that is, Holy Week.  Sunday, we must recall, remains the holiest day on the Christian calendar—but Holy Week is Sunday for the year!  In Holy Week we relive the final days of our Lord’s earthly ministry, walking with Him into Jerusalem and the open mouth of the grave.

Holy Week begins with the “Palm Sunday of the Passion,” a day that long confused me.  Palm Sunday marks Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the City of David, home to the Temple of God.  The crowds greet Him with jubilation, proclaiming Him to be the promised Messiah and paving His way with palm fronds.  They have gathered from across the globe to celebrate the Passover, you see: to remember God delivering Israel from slavery in Egypt.  Now, look!  Here comes the Messiah, to deliver us anew!  Hosanna in the highest!  Indeed, throughout most of the Christian world the Resurrection is not known as Easter (which simply means “spring”) but as the Pascha—God’s holy Passover.

Yet after this processional Gospel, the liturgy for Palm Sunday immediately turns to one of the Passion narratives, describing Jesus’ suffering and death, which as a child I thought to be more appropriate for later in the week.  How jarring to greet Jesus with shouts of “Hosanna!” only to cry immediately thereafter, “Crucify Him!”  Later, however, it was pointed out to me that many in the crowd welcoming Him to Jerusalem would later turn on Him—because while He was God’s Messiah He was not the Messiah whom they’d expected: a mighty warrior, a Jewish conqueror, an army-leading avenger against the pagans of Rome.  They wanted a King of Carnage, not a Prince of Peace!  Really, then, Palm Sunday does not precede the sufferings of Jesus but is an integral part of them.  The false praises, the worldly expectations, Jesus’ foreknowledge of inevitable betrayal—these too are sufferings which we inflict upon our God.

Holy Week continues with the somewhat unimaginatively named Holy Monday and Holy Tuesday, continuing into Spy Wednesday—this latter so-called because it was on the Wednesday before Jesus’ death that Judas agreed to spy upon and betray Him.  Then we enter the Triduum, or the latter “Three Days” of Holy Week.  The Triduum begins with Maundy Thursday, the night when Jesus shared the Last Supper with His disciples, instituted the Eucharist for all people until the end of the world, and humbly washed the Apostles’ feet.  He gave to us His final commandment: that we love one another as Christ has loved us.  Another term for commandment is mandate; thus the name Maundy Thursday.  Maundy Thursday ends with the betrayal, capture, and trials-by-night of Jesus Christ, leading to His torture and agonizing death by Crucifixion the following day.  Bizarrely we remember this litany of horrors as Good Friday—not because of our shameful murder of the one true God, but because of the salvation won for us, died for us, upon the Cross.

This brings us at last to Easter Vigil, held upon the Saturday night of Holy Week.  In biblical as well as medieval times, days were reckoned not from midnight to midnight but from sunset to sunset; thus, the Saturday night before Sunday is Sunday.  After dying for us all and spending 40 hours in the tomb, Jesus shatters the bonds of death and Hell and rises gloriously upon Easter morn!  At the Vigil we light the night, we remember His promises, we prepare for His Resurrection—and then witness it anew—relive it in anamnesis—thus to revel in life eternal won forever for sinners such as we!  On Easter we rise with Christ, passing over from death and damnation to life everlasting.

We turn now to Holy Week, dear Christians.  We turn now to Sunday for the year.  And we turn, as always, to the Resurrection of Jesus, in Whose Name we pray.  AMEN.