Emmanuel Episcopal Church

Homily for the Day of Pentecost

The Gospel - John 20:19-23

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you." When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained."

Homily by The Reverend John S. Ruef

                Then were the disciples glad when they saw the Lord.

Disciple means follower. The joy of the disciples when they saw the Lord has to do with his being their leader. He is the one who tells them what to do and where to go. They had been desolated by his execution. Now they knew his presence. But he was shortly to leave them. So the story of Jesus reaches its climax, not in his sitting down to exercise his leadership over his followers, but with granting to them the Holy Spirit as their leader and guide, particularly as that has to do with the forgiveness of sins. 

The Prayer, which Jesus taught to his disciples, has the telling verse, Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. This is not some kind of magic power or authority given to the followers of Jesus. It is not the power described elsewhere as the power to bind and loose, or as is also said elsewhere, the keys to the kingdom of heaven. This is rather a description of what the Lord intends the Church to be: a forgiving community. What Jesus states here is not a matter of authority, but an important element of what it means to follow him. 

Forgiveness is then an essential mark of the Church. What is true in economics is not to be true in the Church. In the economic world there is, we are told, no free lunch. In the church we recognize that life is a gift. It is not ours to grant or withhold. This is what Grace is all about. It means that what we have, life, is a free gift from God in which we are to share, knowing that it is not ours. When we speak of the gospel, this is part of what we mean. It is the whole point of speaking of Jesus’ death as a sacrifice for our sins. It is the great sign of forgiveness. Again, it is not some magic power, which we can appropriate, either through our reading of the Bible or by our participation in the life of the Church.

Following Jesus does not involve commands, but invitations. God shows us the way. Jesus goes the way before us. Neither God or Jesus does this for us. We choose freely to exchange the gift of forgiveness with our fellows.

Thus comes about our discovery of what Jesus means by eternal life, an important part of which is forgiveness. 

Homily for the Seventh Sunday of Easter

The Gospel - John 17:20-26

Jesus prayed for his disciples, and then he said. "I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.

"Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you have sent me. I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them."

Homily by The Reverend John S. Ruef

 "And now I am no longer in the world."

The time after the first Easter has come to an end. Jesus is no longer in the world. But his disciples are in the world. As we have come to see on the last three Sundays, John is speaking of the time of the Church. It is our time. Jesus’ departure is celebrated in the feast of the Ascension, which was last Thursday. But somehow this departure was not final. We read at the end of Matthew’s version of the Gospel that Jesus is remembered as saying, I will be with you unto the end of the world. Further more we will come to the Sunday of Pentecost in a week when the presence of God will be perceived once more and given the name, Holy Spirit. 

The Church is left, not with a collection of memories, not simply a set of sayings, but with the presence of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit. When we celebrate the Eucharist we are not somehow just remembering in a special way our most famous hero, our founder, the inspirer of our movement. The central focus of Christian piety has always been the perceived presence of Jesus. Throughout the Gospel story it is not we who come to Jesus, but he who comes to us. This is the fallacy of saying that we bring people to Jesus. He is already there. 

What does it mean when he says to Thomas that he is the way, the truth and the life? It means that he is not absent. We do not have to find him, He is here. This is why in many churches there is always a light burning. It recognizes the presence of Jesus. This is why the Eucharist is the central focus of organized Christian worship. We do not sit and listen to someone tell us about Jesus or interpret what he said two thousand years ago. He is here and he is now. 

It is not so much a matter of finding Jesus, as it is a matter of recognizing him. In the wonderful story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, they knew him in the breaking of bread. The whole business of the 

Church points in this direction. Surely the breaking of the bread in Communion is part of it. But there is also the Kiss of Peace. This was not restored to the liturgy so we could catch up on the latest gossip or exchange recipes. It is a solemn acknowledgment that Christ is present; that we embrace him in our neighbor and look into his face in theirs. 

Of course Jesus ascended into heaven. But because he is who is that simply means that he can also be here with us, by our side, in our neighbor, in our family, in our workplace, always and everywhere. 

Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Easter

The Gospel – John 14:23-29

Jesus said to Judas (not Iscariot), "Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words; and the word that you hear is not mine, but is from the Father who sent me.

"I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. You heard me say to you, `I am going away, and I am coming to you.' If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I. And now I have told you this before it occurs, so that when it does occur, you may believe."

 

Homily by The Reverend John S. Ruef

"Those who love me will keep my word."

There are several things going on in this passage: Loving [Jesus] is contingent upon keeping his words, which are also God's words; they will not remember everything he has said and there will be more words to come. The counselor will remind them of what Jesus has said and other matters which will come in the future. Even though he is going away, he will come again. All this is told to them so that they will recognize what is happening when it happens.

This is Jesus speaking in the Gospel format, but the concerns which he is addressing are those of the early Church. The first one is that Jesus has given and will continue to give those principles upon which his followers should live their lives. He will come again, but when and where are not made clear. The important thing is that the Counselor i.e. the Holy Spirit will make clear the meaning of the words.

Jesus makes it clear that his Peace is not like that of the world. The peace of the world is often bought at the price of expediency. Jesus grants a peace which has nothing to do with the standards of the world. Perhaps the Church has already suffered persecution. The Holy Spirit will be with them to guide them in a world which values law and order above all else. Denying the worship which Caesar sees as his due can cost one one's life.

In the church of our day with the more or less strict separation of Church and State, the problem takes on different forms. We are more apt to run into ingrained attitudes of society: things which we believe without really knowing why. I am sure we can remember our feeling about black people and wonder where such feeling came from. In many places these feelings still exist. We can remember how we felt about divorce. We can remember perhaps a time when divorced people could not be remarried in the Church.

Then there was the matter of ordaining women. To many it was unthinkable. There was a time when girls could not be acolytes or serve on the altar. All this, including a major revision of the Book of Common Prayer, came as shocks to ingrained and unexamined prejudices taken for granted and unquestioned for many years. And finally in the matter of ordaining openly gay people the strain was too great.

For those who had not come to the realization that the Church was indeed guided by the Holy Spirit that it was more important to love one another and work differences out as brothers and sisters in Christ, the various prejudices unexamined over the years came to have the upper hand. But we also believe that the Holy Spirit, the counselor will aid us in working these things our. We will have peace, not as the world thinks of peace but as Jesus speaking through his Church has promised.

Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Easter

The Gospel - John 13:31-35

Homily by The Reverend John S. Ruef

"By this, men shall know that you are my disciples."

Jesus, according to the author of the Fourth Gospel has given the disciples a new commandment: to love one another. Furthermore this is not only a governing principle of their life together. It is also a distinguishing mark for them in society in general. We get the picture of an idyllic lifestyle within a special community dedicated to Jesus.

Now the problem comes when we compare this with what Jesus has to say elsewhere in the gospels. When Jesus is asked to summarize the Jewish tradition, he replies with the maxim of loving God, to which he adds “and love your neighbor as yourself.”  What about the Parable of the Good Samaritan?

This is occasioned by the question, “And who is my neighbor?”   Jesus gives the answer in the form of this parable.  We are left with the question, not who is my neighbor, but who is not my neighbor?

It is one thing to stand within the borders of Judaism and listen to Jesus commenting upon the restrictive measures of keeping the Jewish tradition. It is quite another to stand within the confines of the new and problematic community of believers such as we see in John trying to figure out what it means to be a Christian. How does the Christian community differ from the society which surrounds it? The answer seems simple: they love one another.

But when Jesus takes the Samaritans held in low esteem by the Jews as his example as he does in some of his parables, what are we to say about the self distinguishing mark of the community? When are we listening to Jesus and when are we listening to the Christian community trying to characterize itself? To what extent can we say that something said and taken as a maxim for life then still holds true today?

It is probably a good thing that we have come to emphasize once again the quality of love which holds or ought to hold the Christian community together. The reason why we have so many different branches of the Christian family today is not difficult to understand. The New Testament itself bears witness to the fact that, from the beginning the churches (plural) pictured Jesus in different ways  depending upon what their problems and social situations were.

Why cannot we realize that we are still a community trying to understand the implications of Jesus' sayings for our own time and not always doing a good job of it?