The Last Sunday after the Epiphany, Year C (2022)

Exodus 34:29 – 35 / Psalm 99 / II Corinthians 3:12 – 4:2 / Luke 9:28 – 36

 

This is the homily given at St. John’s, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, by Fr. Gene Tucker on Sunday, February 27, 2022.

 

“OF MONUMENTS AND MOUNTAINS”

(Homily text: Luke 9:28 - 36)

“Lord, it is good for us to be here. Let us make three booths, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah”.  Those are the words of Peter, in response to seeing the Lord’s appearance being changed before him as he, James and John were with the Lord on the mountaintop. (It’s interesting that Luke adds the comment that Peter didn’t know what to say.[1])

The motivation for Peter’s statement might be a bit puzzling to understand. Maybe Peter was motivated to try to create a lasting memorial or remembrance to the event in which God’s glory was shown in the person of Jesus Christ. Or, perhaps, Peter wanted the Lord, Moses and Elijah to remain with the three disciples for awhile. We can only guess.

What we can be sure of is that these three disciples remembered the event, and they remembered it quite clearly. For we have the record in three of the Gospel accounts[2] of this event. In addition, sometime later, in the Second Letter of Peter, this recollection was written: “For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased, we ourselves heard this voice from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain.”  (II Peter 1:16 – 18)

The transfiguration event towers above the challenges and the trials that Jesus and His disciples had endured up to this time. A bit earlier, the Lord had made the prediction that, once He reached Jerusalem, He was going to be killed. Then, adding to this prediction, He told the disciples that they, too, must take up their cross and follow Him. And, we know that, once they had come down from the mountaintop, more challenges and trials would come their way: Jesus made two more predictions about his coming death. Some places would reject Him and His message. Others were openly hostile. Jesus would lament over the spiritual condition of Jerusalem. All of these things would culminate in His suffering, death, burial and resurrection.

Perhaps at the time, Peter, James and John couldn’t see how important that glimpse of God’s glory, shining in Jesus’ face as His appearance is transformed, was in the great, big scheme of things. But in time, quite likely, they realized that God had given them a great and lasting gift: They got to see the big picture of Jesus’ true identity, of His oneness with the Father, of the eternal glory that is His.

In time, the transfiguration became a monument, one erected in the hearts and minds of those three disciples (and, as they shared their accounts of that event, the other disciples, as well), one to which they could look and be inspired to carry on, despite the challenges, the trials, and the rejections that would lie in their paths.

You and I need monuments. Monuments that are erected in our hearts and in our minds, past evidence of God’s presence in trying times. If we look, perhaps we can see such lasting monuments to God’s acting in our own lives.

And perhaps we can be strengthened to go on, confident that, as God had carried us through trying times in the past, He will do so again.

AMEN.

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[1]   Mark also mentions that Peter didn’t know what to say.  Matthew omits this detail.

[2]   Matthew, Mark and Luke. John does not record this event.

Epiphany 7, Year C (2022)

I Corinthians 15: 35 – 38, 42 – 50 / Psalm 37: 1 – 12, 41 – 42 / Luke 6: 27 – 38

This is the homily given at St. John’s, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania by Fr. Gene Tucker on Sunday, February 20, 2022.

 

“SACRAMENTAL LIVING”

(Homily text:  Luke 6:27 – 38)

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Sacraments. The Sacraments, which are defined as being an “outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace”, are means by which we receive God’s grace and goodness in uniquely beneficial ways.[1]

For example, in Holy Baptism, we believe that God has claimed the one being baptized as His very own, unique and special possession. The grace of the Holy Spirit is given, we maintain, in Baptism, enabling the baptized person to be able to discern God’s working in their lives and in the lives of others.

In Holy Communion, the bread and the wine denote the Lord’s real presence in the Sacrament. We are fed by the Lord Himself in this ritual meal.

The world we live in is a sacramental creation. Everything in it reflects God’s creative work, hidden in all that exists.

We Christians are called to engage in sacramental living. We are called to emulate and reflect God’s holiness in all that we do. I think that’s the gist of Jesus’ comments, heard in our Gospel text this morning. “But I say to you who hear, ‘Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you’.”

Such statements as this (and the others that follow) are countercultural calls to a different way of seeing things, to a different set of values, to a path which promotes peace and goodwill among people.

Jesus’ instructions aren’t at all new. They aren’t things that God’s people had never heard before.

Consider the Old Testament prophet Isaiah’s proclamation: God says, “I will send you as a light to the nations, that you may be my salvation to the ends of the earth.” (Isaiah 49:6b)

Jesus, in His Sermon on the Mount, issues the stark challenge that says that “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven”. (Matthew 5:20)

And when the Good News of God in Christ went out into the world, the early Apostles reminded the early Christians that they were to be different in their attitudes and in their behaviors toward one another, and to those outside the community of faith, the Church.

We could paraphrase many of St. Paul’s admonitions by summarizing them thusly:[2] “Once you have come to faith in Christ, you can no longer live as you did before you came to faith. You must put away your pagan ways and attitudes.”

Holiness before God and before others was critical. The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews says that, “without holiness, no one will see the Lord.” (Hebrews 12:14)

What a high and seemingly unattainable standard to live into.

In order to achieve that standard, and to begin to amend our ways and our attitudes, we will need the Holy Spirit’s help. The blunt truth is that the transformation of our inner selves is the beginning place of being able to show by what we say and do that we strive to live into the high standards that God has for His people.

Notice that we’ve now returned to the matter of inner attitudes and outward actions. That’s sacramental stuff, to be sure.

How do we begin this arduous journey?

The only place we can begin is by admitting our own helplessness to be able to amend our lives. This is, to be sure, a zero-sum proposition, the total surrender of self and of our own sense of power and ability.

For, in truth, St. Augustine of Hippo was right: Our sense of ourselves is so skewed by our sinful condition that we are unable to truly see ourselves as we really are. We’re going to need God’s Holy Spirit to begin and to continue the process of integrating our inner selves with our outer acts.

We are, as ancient Israel was, sent by God to be a light to the nations, that God’s salvation might be known to the ends of the earth.

In order to be that light, what people can see of what we do and say must emulate the high standards that our Lord has established for His people. It won’t do for Christians to think that they can behave badly and still rightfully claim the name of Christ.

The old adage sums up this reality quite succinctly: “What you are doing speaks so loudly that I can’t hear what you’re saying.”

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[1]   It’s important to note that God is free to act outside of sacramental means, He is not confined to working strictly within the Sacraments.

[2]   This is my paraphrase.

Epiphany 6, Year C (2022)

I Corinthians 15: 12 – 20 / Psalm 1 / Luke 6:17 – 26

This is the homily given at St. John’s, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania by Fr. Gene Tucker on Sunday, February 13, 2022.

 

“THIS ISN’T ALL THERE IS”

(Homily text:  I Corinthians 15: 12 – 20)

Our appointed Epistle reading from St. Paul’s first letter to the early Church in Corinth places before us the central and important question of the Lord’s resurrection and the blessings and benefits that we, as people of faith, receive from the Lord’s coming to life again on Easter Sunday morning.

The question of the resurrection of our Lord figured prominently in my own path toward ordination as a priest. As part of the preparation for ordination, proof of competency in a number of areas is required by the Canons of the Episcopal Church. In general, this testing means that most people take an exam which is known as the General Ordination Exam (GOE). The GOE was, in the time that I took it, a three-and-a-half day affair, an open book exam, which posed questions in the required seven areas to be tested, questions which were answered online.

When the results of my answers to the exam were received, it turned out that hadn’t done well on the first question, which had to do with the resurrection.

Once the results of the exam were made known to the Bishop and to the Standing Committee of the Diocese, I had to have a final interview with the Standing Committee (as everyone in the process does). The matter of my unsatisfactory answer to that first question, the one having to do with the resurrection, came up. I was asked about my answer. I said that I believed that my answer was unsatisfactory because I believe that the Lord was actually raised from the dead again on Easter Sunday morning, and that the Scriptures faithfully relate that event to us. I added that I believed that many people within our own Church, and in many other parts of the Church beyond our own, for that matter, don’t believe the Lord’s resurrection to be an actual event. That is why, I believed, that my answer was unsatisfactory. (I can’t prove that, it’s my guess.)

(Just for the record, I continue to stand by my answer.)

The matter of the resurrection must’ve been a critical one for the early Christians in Corinth. As evidence of that importance, consider the fact that Paul devotes all of chapter fifteen of his first letter to the matter of the resurrection. (Chapter fifteen is a long one, Paul has lots to say about the subject.)

The question of the resurrection is also a critical one for us today, as twenty-first century believers.

We might begin our consideration of the importance of the resurrection by examining some of the attitudes and beliefs of people in the first century to the question.

Among the Jews, the Sadducees, the priestly caste, didn’t accept the idea of the resurrection from the dead. The Pharisees, however, did accept and believe in it.

In the Greco-Roman world, many believed that there was no such thing as life after death, while others accepted the idea that some people, in extraordinary and unique circumstances, might come back to life again. The Christians in Corinth might have accepted the idea that Jesus was raised from the dead, which would reflect some of the commonly-held ideas that circulated among the secular society of the time. But it’s likely that at least some of them didn’t really think that any of them would also be resurrected after their own deaths.

Paul meets this challenge head on, saying that, if there is no resurrection in a way that will also apply to each one of us, then we are, of all people, the “most to be pitied”. The reason, he says, is that we’ve been putting our faith and our hopes into what amounts to a lie or a fable.

Is God’s power to create and to re-create limited? To deny the idea that God’s saving act in raising Jesus from the dead was a reality that also applied to each and every Christian believer is to say that God had limited His power to create and to recreate to Jesus alone, and not to all who are in Christ. I think that’s one reason that Paul uses the word “first fruits” (verse 20). In the Bible’s understanding, “first fruits” signify that the first fruits of the harvest are important not only for the first part of the harvest, but that the first part of the harvest, which is presented to God in thanksgiving for the harvest, also applies to the rest of the harvest, all of it. In the same way, the Passover event at the time of the Exodus from Egypt preserved not only the lives of the first born among God’s people, but it pre-signified the saving of the lives of all of the people.

Perhaps, for those early believers in Corinth, the problem was one of proof. There may have been questions about being able to prove that Jesus actually rose from the dead. After all, none of those Corinthian Christians (most likely) had actually encountered the risen Lord Himself. It’s possible that some of the other Apostles had been in Corinth, those who had actually seen and touched the risen Lord. We don’t know that for sure. But it is possible that they had heard about those other original Apostles and the testimony that they offered. Certainly, Paul would have told them about his own resurrection encounter with the risen Lord on the road to Damascus. But those Corinthians hadn’t seen the risen Lord for themselves. They had, however, seen the faithfulness and tenacity with which Paul had proclaimed the Lord’s resurrection, even in the face of resistance, hardship, and suffering. It’s also possible that they’d heard about some of the work of the other Apostles elsewhere. Perhaps that should have provided proof enough.

If the resurrection isn’t a central reality of the faith, then what we believe is reduced to a set of ethical principles. If the resurrection isn’t a central reality of the faith, then it’s possible that, in our own estimation and belief, the Lord is reduced to being a great and heroic figure in history, a gifted teacher and role model for life.

But believing in the Scriptures means much more than simply accepting as an idea, as a mental exercise, certain propositions of faith. Faith in the Bible is much more than that: Faith equals power, power to change, power to see that God has and will have the final word in all things. In all of this, we are in need of the Holy Spirit’s power to help us to see with the eyes of faith the reality of the resurrection, not only the Lord’s but ours as well.

For if we come to the place of believing that God has the power to create and the power to re-create, then we can also know that everything in this present life takes on a different perspective, for God is making all things new in the here-and-the-now, even as He will make all things new in the fulness of time.

Thanks be to God!

AMEN.

         

The Burial of the Dead

Proverbs 31: 10 – 12, 15, 17, 20 – 21, 23 / Psalm 23 / I Corinthians 13: 1 – 13 / John 14: 1 – 6  

This is the homily given at St. John’s, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania by Fr. Gene Tucker on Saturday, February 12, 2022 on the occasion of the Celebration of Life observed for parishioner Estelle Yelnosky.

 

“THE ‘ALREADY’ AND THE ‘NOT YET’”

(Homily texts:  I Corinthians 13:1 – 13 & John 14:1 – 6)

Perhaps most of us have had the experience of setting out on a trip, only to have some one or more of the younger members of the household say, “Are we there yet?” (Usually, in my experience, this question gets asked about five minutes into the trip.)

Setting out by car on a trip is an “already” experience, the one of being on the way, and the “not yet” experience of not having reached out destination quite yet.

Life is, if we think about, filled with a good deal of “already” and “not yets”.

For example, when we were in school, we used to dream about the days when we wouldn’t be sitting in a classroom, perhaps. We were, as we sat in those classrooms, in the “already” experience of making our way to graduation, or to the conclusion of the course of study we were engaged in, on our way to the “not yets”, graduation or the completion of our work, that hadn’t, in the fulness of time, taken place.

We could say the same thing about any number of other life experiences.

Our walk with God is also filled with the “already” experiences of such things as Holy Baptism, of Confirmation or First Communions, and of other experiences as we come to know God as He is revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, and as we grow into the full stature of Christ.

Our walk with God culminates in the “not yet” experience of the end of this part of our walk with God, our walk in this life, among those who know and love us, and of the end of our earthly journey in this body. Then, at death, we finish the “not yet” of life, and enter into the “yes!” of the full, complete, face-to-face experience of God.

Our Gospel reading, from John’s account, chapter fourteen, points to the “already” and the “not yet”: Jesus says that He is going away. He tells His disciples this news as they are all together in the “already” of their presence with one another before His suffering, death and burial. But He points forward to the “not yet”, the reality that He will return to claim those who belong to Him.

How can we be sure that these words are trustworthy? I think the answer lies in the Lord’s resurrection from the dead on Easter Sunday morning. Then, in that experience, the Lord returns with his physical body intact, still bearing the wounds of His suffering, but now free from the limitations of time and space. His return, His appearing to the gathered disciples on Easter Sunday evening, is the guarantee that, through God’s power, He has pierced the veil of death, and has returned to say that, as He has passed from death into life again, we, too, will do the same thing when the “not yets” of our lives become the “yes!” of eternal life in God’s presence.

For now, we who are in the “already” phase of life, look into the face of death, and into the reality of the one we have known and loved, but who has now passed through the veil of death, and is now in the “yes” of full and complete life in eternity, and we might say, with the disciple Thomas, “Where are you going? We don’t know the way?” Truly, St. Paul was correct when, in writing to the early Christians in Corinth, he said that, “Now we see as in a glass dimly, but then we shall see face-to-face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

The reality of God’s power over death, that reality which means that life has changed as we put off this mortal life, with its pains, its aging process, its diseases and ills, is now free of all these things. God, making His power visible through the reality of Jesus’ rising from the dead on Easter Sunday morning, is the window through which we can believe that these promises are true and trustworthy.

Thanks be to God!

AMEN.

         

         

Epiphany 5, Year C (2022)

Isaiah 6:1 – 8 / Psalm 138 / Luke 5:1 – 11

This is the homily given at St. John’s, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania by Fr. Gene Tucker on Sunday, February 6, 2022.

“VOLUNTEERS FOR GOD”

(Homily texts:  Isaiah 6:1 – 8 & Luke 5:1 – 11)

Recently, I’ve engaged in conversation with others about what it takes for an organization which is run by volunteers to be successful in carrying out its work and mission. To be successful in achieving its goals, people will be needed, many, if not most, of whom will be volunteers. Three essential ingredients should be a part of the organization’s drive to recruit volunteers and to retain them. The three ingredients that have come out of our conversations are these: 1. Instill in volunteers a desire to be a part of something that is greater than themselves; 2. Give volunteers a sense of satisfaction in getting things done; and 3. Showing appreciation for their efforts (saying “Thank you”).

This morning’s appointed readings share the common theme of God’s call to service, first for Isaiah, back in the eighth century BC, and then for the first disciples that Jesus called, Simon (Peter), his brother Andrew, and their friends and coworkers, James and John.

It might be helpful for us to look at God’s call on each of these individuals’ lives, and how the three factors we’ve identified above figured into that call.

Let’s begin with God’s call itself.

In Isaiah’s case, God’s call was overwhelming: God’s revelation of Himself, His unmistakable majesty, power and presence, filled the temple with smoke. It was a presence that made the foundations of the temple shake. In response, Isaiah laments that he is “a man of unclean lips, one who dwells among a people of unclean lips”.

As Jesus called Simon Peter, Andrew, James and John along the shores of the Sea of Galilee, God’s call comes in a different form: Jesus’ knowledge of where to find a great catch of fish discloses a knowledge that is beyond normal human abilities to know. In response, Simon Peter apparently understands the source of this knowledge, that it is from God, saying to Jesus, upon hauling in the nets which were nearly bursting from the great number of fish, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”

In each of these situations, a call that is clearly from God carries with it the reality that the one called will be engaged in a cause that is much, much greater than themselves. What else is worthy to note is that each one of these could have said “No” to God’s call. As it turned out, the clear and powerful call from God took precedence over any thought these might have had about refusing that call.

Turning to the second aspect of volunteering for God’s service, the sense of accomplishment and the knowledge that good things were being done for God, the record isn’t one of continued and complete achievement and accomplishment for any of these five. Being a prophet in ancient times (or in Jesus’ time, or in our own times, for that matter), isn’t an easy calling. Prophets like Isaiah and those called into God’s service like the four disciples often experience rejection, hostility, a lack of understanding, hardness of heart, and perhaps many other adverse responses to their work.

And yet, there were successes that came, along with the challenges and the hardships. Some did listen and respond to God’s word and work. Some amended their lives in response to that word and work. Lives were changed. Relationships with God were restored. The record we have in Holy Scripture of the work that Isaiah did, or the work that Simon Peter, Andrew, James and John did is testimony to their faithfulness and the changed lives that resulted. As Jesus said to those first four disciples, “From now on, you will be catching people”.

And what about appreciation for the work of Isaiah, of Simon Peter, Andrew, James and John?

It’s hard to know just how much thanks resulted from their work, or just what the ratio of thanksgiving was to the hardships that came along with God’s calling.

Perhaps the sense of accomplishment, whenever it came and however sporadically it might have come, buoyed these servants of God up as they continued to be faithful to God’s call. Perhaps God’s Spirit was able to use those successes to install in the hearts of these a sense that God was well-pleased with their faithfulness and their endurance.

Now, what about you and I?

Are we called into God’s service? “Yes”, the answer must surely be, for in Holy Baptism, we say that we are “marked as Christ’s own forever”. To be so marked is to be called into a cause that is much, much greater than ourselves, for we are sent out into the work of introducing people to God and God to people, and to nourish and encourage that relationship. We do this by what we say and by what we do. There can be no higher calling than that.

Successes will come, along with the challenges. In that, we walk the same walk that Isaiah walked, the same walk that Simon Peter, Andrew, James and John walked.

God’s “thank-you” comes in the form of the assurance of God’s approval, of God’s saying to us in some way or another, “Servants, well done!”

AMEN.