Year A
Isaiah 45:21-25
Philippians 2:5-11
Psalm 98
John 12:31-36a

May the words of my mouth… O God… speak your Truth…

Hurricane Sally hit the gulf coast this week… and there’s a climate crisis that’s in various stages of acknowledgement or denial… wildfires are burning out of control up and down the west coast… institutional and systemic racism has finally come to light… though some of our country’s leaders deny it’s existence… there’s a global pandemic that’s killed almost 200,000 Americans… and there’s no comprehensive national plan to combat it… it may seem like things are spinning out of control…

And Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on the eve of Rosh Hashanah… and there’s a Jewish teaching which says that those who die just before the Jewish new year… are the ones God has held back until the last moment… because they were tzaddik… Maimonides wrote in the Middle Ages of eight levels of tzedakah… the highest of which results in an act that creates a sustainable form of justice… and not everyone does that…

Many years ago… the Emperor Constantine ordered the construction of a complex of buildings in Jerusalem… on a scale of imperial magnificence… to which all would be attracted… and which all would venerate… it was the blessed place of our Savior’s resurrection… the overall supervision of the work… on the site where the Church of the Holy Sepulcher now stands… was entrusted to Constantine’s mother… the Empress Helena…

In Jesus’ time… the hill of Calvary stood outside the city walls… but when the Roman city Aelia Capitolina was built… after the destruction of Jerusalem… that hill was buried under tons of fill… but it was during the excavations directed by Helena that a relic… believed to be a part of the True Cross… was discovered…

Constantine’s shrine included two primary buildings… a large basilica that was used for the Liturgy of the Word… and a circular church called… The Resurrection… used for Eucharist… and its altar was placed on the site of Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb…

There was a courtyard which separated the two buildings… and through which the faithful had to pass on their way from one building to the other… from Word to Sacrament… and toward one side of the courtyard… the top of Calvary’s hill had been exposed… it was there that the veneration of the cross took place on Good Friday…

The dedication of the buildings occurred in the year 335… on September 14… the seventh month of the Roman calendar… it was a date that was suggested by the text in 2 Chronicles… suggested by the account of the dedication of Solomon’s temple in the same city… in the seventh month of the Jewish Calendar… hundreds of years before…

When we dedicate a building… a library for example… we commit to use it in a particular way… we enter it with a sense of quiet reverence or respect… for that for which it stands… for the values it embodies… and with an appreciation for the learning which has occurred within it… 

We are formed by our family of origin… by our culture and society… by the entertainment and the food we ingest… perhaps even by our community of faith… and when we dedicate ourselves… we commit our lives to a particular cause… to particular principles… to particular standards… we may not always live up to them… but we make public professions of our intent… we may even make vows… we become accountable…

But we are also formed by Jesus… by his words and actions… by reading… learning… and inwardly digesting scripture… by the Truths contained therein… we grow from spiritual infants… to spiritual adolescents… we climb the ladder of incremental formation… until earthly ways are replaced with divine ways…

In today’s Gospel Jesus says… Walk while you have the light… so that you may become children of light… if you walk in the darkness… you do not know where you are going… 

In Matthew’s Gospel 5:15… Jesus says… no one… after lighting a lamp… puts it under a bushel basket… but on a lamp stand… and it gives light to all in the house… in the same way… let your light shine before others…

A few chapters earlier in John’s Gospel… in 8:12… Jesus spoke to them saying… I am the light of the world… whoever follows me will never walk in darkness… but will have the light of life…

But the last line of today’s Gospel… is only the first half of verse 36… v. 36a we say… for some reason… those who compiled today’s lectionary left off 36b… and it’s interesting… it’s surprising… because it says… after Jesus had said this… he departed and hid from them… he departed and hid…

Former Presiding Bp. Katharine Jefferts-Schori wrote… but this is not a new pattern… Jesus is alternately there and not there when people are in crisis… when he stirs up a near-riot in the synagogue in Nazareth and then disappears… he’s not there when the disciples are trying to row across the stormy sea in the middle of the night… when the tomb is empty on Easter morning… and Jesus leaves them on the day our other named congregation… celebrates as Ascension Day…

And Katharine wrote… there’s something very important about Jesus’ absence… it’s as though he’s reminding his followers… or training them to cope… when he’s not physically in their midst… how are you going to walk in the light when I am no longer walking around with you… one of the ways we do it… is by seeing and honoring… the Christ in each other…

For me… the Cross is one of those theological conundrums… something that ought to be finite and final… but which has become infinite and eternal… and the scandal of the Cross… is that it rejects the values of Empire… and turns them on their heads… turns them upside down… the scandal of the cross is God’s YES… to Empire’s NO… God says… is that the best you’ve got… I’ve got Jesus…

It may feel like our lives are spinning out of control… just like Hurricane Sally spun destruction along the Gulf Coast… and while the church is not the building… we can still seek the support we need from each other the way Jesus sought support from his friends in the Garden of Gethsemane…

So what do we do when it feels like Jesus has run off and hidden from us… we lament… cry out… reach out… we feel all of our feelings… we distract ourselves from all of our feelings… we call a friend and pray together…

We are waiting… but these days our waiting may feel less like Advent and more like Good Friday… and we wonder whether salvation will ever come… but Easter will come… and the Tomb will be empty… Jesus has risen… and feeds us with himself… in fact… this is the only corpus I have ever seen… in which Jesus as the risen Christ… feeds us with bread and wine… and always with spiritual communion…

But more than just feeding us… Jesus saves us from ourselves… saves us from our small selves… saves us from being small-minded… saves us from being judgmental… saves us from the myopic tunnel vision of our worldviews… saves us from believing that our opinions are right… saves us from the tyranny of our personalities… saves us from the shame of acting like God… because when we get rid of our false… egotistical… self-righteous selves… we have room for righteousness…

Constantine thought that everyone would be attracted to… and venerate… the imperial magnificence which he had built… but when the forces of darkness are driven out… when things seem like they’re spinning out of control… then our vision will be drawn not to works like those… but to Jesus lifted up… and we will pass from Word to Sacrament… and we will not regard being loved by God as something to be exploited… but empty ourselves… then God will exalt us too… and we will take on the mind that was in Christ Jesus… and it’s from that place… from that vantage point… from that style of functioning… that we will see ourselves as we truly are… and the world as it truly is… and God will replace our divisive hearts of stone… with unitive hearts of flesh… and we will have become… tzaddik…