Grace Cathedral

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“[B]e kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you” (Ephesians 4).

“Why is life sacred? Because we experience it within ourselves as something we have neither posited nor willed, as something that passes through us without ourselves as its cause – we can only be and do anything whatsoever because we are carried by it.” The French philosopher Michel Henry (1922-2002) wrote these words in a book about the art of Wassily Kandinsky.¹

On the first page of her book Prague Winter Madeleine Albright writes, “I was fifty-nine when I began serving as U.S. secretary of state. I thought by then that I knew all there was to know about my past, who “my people” were, and the history of my native land. I was sure enogh that I did not see a need to ask questions. Others might be insecure about their identities; I was not and never had been. I knew.”

“Only I didn’t. I had no idea that my family heritage was Jewish or that more than twenty of my relatives had died in the Holocaust. I had been brought up to believe in a history of my Czechoslovak homeland that was less tangled and straightforward than the reality.”²

Life, sacred life, passes through us. Yet this life, like Madeline Albright’s past, is mostly hidden from us. In my experience it becomes clear in Jesus. Jesus is so near and yet most of us, most of the time, do not know who he is.

It is hard to talk about Jesus in this culture when his name has become the basis for a politics of condemnation and exclusion, a symbol expressing fear and hatred. Fellow citizens violently attacked the US Capitol building in his name. But Jesus teaches us that God is love and that through him we might have abundant life. This morning we will address three questions: Why does Jesus matter? What do we learn from Jesus? How will he change us?

1. Why does Jesus matter? Because even if you may not see it right now, life is hard. Let me warn you this part of the sermon hurts. Raymond Carver wrote a short story called “A Small, Good Thing.”³ It begins in a bakery with a mother ordering a cake for her eight

year old son Scotty that will be picked up for his birthday on Monday. Excited, walking to school on Monday, not paying attention, the boy steps into the street without looking and is struck by a car.

At first everything seems somewhat okay. The boy walks home. He has a kind of seizure. It seems like only a mild concussion, but each day the situation looks worse. The parents are utterly preoccupied with their son’s coma when the father receives a phone call about the cake. He doesn’t understand and hangs up. Later in the week as their son’s health plummets they receive phone calls that confuse them. An unidentified voice says, “Have you forgotten Scotty” (75)? Finally, the son dies. It takes two more crank calls with bitter cursing from the parents but finally the mother takes in what has been happening, that the calls are probably coming from the baker.

Realizing this at midnight, the grieving parents with a “deep burning anger… that made [them] feel larger than” themselves, go to confront the baker at his shop. At first he refuses to talk with them or even let them in. At the door to the bakery the parents confront him. As he hits a rolling pin into the palm of his hand it seems like this might even end in violence.

And then it happens. A moment of grace. The mother tells the baker about her son and breaks down, repeating, “it isn’t, isn’t fair.” The baker puts out chairs for the three of them and apologizes saying, “God alone knows how sorry” I am. He goes on, “I’m just a baker… Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a different kind of human being. I’ve forgotten… I’m not an evil man… what it comes down to is I don’t know how to act anymore, it would seem.”

The baker made them coffee with a carton of cream on the table and a bowl of sugar. He said, “eating is a small, good thing in a time like this.” And he served them warm cinnamon rolls just out of the oven the icing still runny.” Although they were tired the baker broke open a “dark loaf” of bread that tasted of molasses and coarse grains. “And they talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.”

You might be thinking. “Those parents are not me. I’m not like the baker.” But we are. This Wednesday one of our families woke up to discover that their beloved teenaged daughter had died in the night. They told me that more than anything she believed in the power of being kind. Why does Jesus matter? Because we get tangled up like the baker and the parents. Because when things go tragically wrong we need help from beyond ourselves.

2. What do we learn from Jesus? We learn that the bread of life is love. We learn to find our way between the simplistic tribalism of a fundamentalist outlook and the debilitating relativizing view that nothing matters.⁴ From Jesus we learn that love is not abstract.

The poet Wendell Berry quotes Orlando in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Near the end of the play Orlando says, “I can no longer live by thinking.” This is not an anti-intellectual statement. It is his realization that he is ready to marry Rosalind. He is ready for commitment, ready for incarnation. There is a time for thinking. The life of the mind matters. But there comes a point when all of us must say to ourselves, “I can no longer live by thinking.” I need to be committed to a particular him, to a particular her, to a particular them in a particular place and time.⁵

Alan Jones used to say that the Bible can be damaging or healing, that it “provides an an architecture for our thoughts, that the parables are an antidote to our cycles of jealousy, vengeneance and violence.”⁶ The Bible shows the deep compassion that Jesus feels for outcasts, strangers, the poor and vulnerable. But more important it shows his love for us.

Pope Pius XII called the twentieth century Reformed Protestant Karl Barth (1886-1968) the greatest theologian since the medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). I have a shelf full of Barth’s books. He was asked to summarize all of his theology in one simple sentence. He said, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

In John 6 we hear about Jesus having compassion on the crowds and feeding 5000 people. They wanted to make him king and so, “he withdrew again to the mountain by himself” (Jn. 6). When a storm came up, threatening to sink his friends’ boat, he walked on the water out to them. He says, “It is I; do not be afraid.” Jesus says, “I am the bread of life… anyone who comes to me I will never drive away.”

3. How will Jesus change us? Through prayer and the sacraments thousands of people have been changed by meeting Jesus here at Grace Cathedral. The preacher Frederick Buechner writes that the expression “becoming a Christian” sounds like an accomplishment like winning an Olympic gold medal or becoming a billionaire.

Buechner says that to him it feels more like “a lucky break” or “a step in the right direction.” Church was not part of his childhood so on the one hand it was unlikely that he would become a person of faith. And yet, “through a series of events from childhood on, I was moved, for the most part without any inkling of it, closer and closer to a feeling for that Mystery out of which the church arose in the first place until, finally, the mystery itself came to have a face for me, and that face was the face of Christ.”⁷

Some people think a Christian is someone who believes certain things, like Jesus was the son of God, that Mary was a virgin or that all other religions are wrong. Some people think that a Christian is someone who does certain things like going to church or reading the Bible or helping the poor. But Jesus says something different. He says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me” (Jn. 14:6). He does not say that one religion or believing a particular thing is the way. We are not required to do anything in particular either. Being a Christian means becoming caught up in God’s dream of justice and love, and in the way of life that leads to harmony and peace.

To the Ephesians Paul writes about what it means to be in Christ. Then we will speak the truth. We will not use language to divide people. We will not give in to rash acts in moments of anger. It means work that brings about goodness. Above all it means forgiving others and being kind to them. In this way we are called into being by other people and by God.

Not long before his death Raymond Carver wrote the poem that his family put on his tombstone. “And did you get what / you wanted from this life, even so? / I did / To call myself beloved, to feel myself / beloved on the earth.”⁸

Early Friday morning after a hard week I gave my friend’s 17 year old daughter her first surfing lesson. She had never even seen the Pacific Ocean before. Everything was so new, it was like she had only just been born. Although the water felt bitterly cold and the fog never dissipated, we saw lines of awkward pelicans, whales breaching offshore and her favorite, a juvenile seal curiously examining us from only a few feet away.

She needed a picture to show her grandmother. I don’t know why but as I took a photograph of her holding the board with the vast Pacific Ocean in the background, in my mind’s eye, I imagined Jesus standing next to her.

We began by asking Why is life sacred? What is that spirit that carries us through? I have found a small, good thing. Jesus speaks to us, not so often in syllables and words but through the bread we share at this table and in the events of our lives. Over time we begin to recognize that the bread of life is love. However faintly we hear Jesus, he is speaking directly to us. His precious words have the power to make us whole again and ultimately to bring us home.

¹ Michel Henry, Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky tr. Scott Davidson (NY: Continuum, 2009).

² I was fifty-nine when I began serving as U.S. secretary of state. I thought by then that I knew all there was to know about my past, who “my people” were, and the history of my native land. I was sure enough that I did not feel a need to ask questions. Others might be insecure about their identities; I was not and never had been. I knew.
Only I didn’t. I had no idea that my family heritage was Jewish or that more than twenty of my relatives had died in the Holocaust. I had been brought up to believe in a history of my Czechoslovak homeland that was less tangled and more straightforward than the reality. I had much still to learn about the complex moral choices that my parents and others in their generation had been called on to make-choices that were still shaping my life and also that of the world.
I had been raised a Roman Catholic and upon marriage converted to the Episcopalian faith. I had—I was sure—a Slavic soul. My grandparents had died before I was old enough to remember their faces or call them by name. I had a cousin in Prague; we had recently been in touch and as children had been close, but I no longer knew her well; the Iron Curtain had kept us apart.
From my parents I had received a priceless inheritance: a set of deeply held convictions regarding liberty, individual rights, and the rule of law. I inherited, as well, a love for two countries. The United States had welcomed my family and enabled me to grow up in freedom; I was proud to call myself an American….Madeleine Albright, Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War 1937-1948 with Bill Woodward (NY: HarperCollins, 2012) 1.

³ Raymond Carver, Cathedral (NY: Alfred Knopf, 1983) 59-89.

⁴ “The Bible… cuts through both crude fundamentalism and the modern relativizing view that nothing matters.” Alan Jones, Grace Cathedral Sermon, 9 September 1989.

⁵ This is pretty much the same language Alan Jones used to describe Wendell Berry’s article “The Futility of Global Thinking,” Harper’s Magazine, September 1989.

⁶ Alan Jones, Grace Cathedral Sermon, 9 September 1989

⁷ “It was a slow obscure process… and the result of it was that I eneded up being so moved by what I felt that I found it inadequate simply to keep it inside myself like a secret but had to do something about it.” Frederick Buechner, “The Face of Christ: February 1,” Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner, (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992) 30.

⁸ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Carver