April 17, 2025 Sermon Dcn Janice Hicks - Maundy Thursday
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I was once on a beach reading a book by Cynthia Berjolt, an Episcopal priest and mystic, and this phrase struck me. She writes, our visible created universe is God's love itself. So maybe it was the setting of the calming beach and waves or the preparation of that quiet week, but this statement jolted me like lightning, profoundly and suddenly and deeply as a truth. For a few minutes I felt a lightness and bliss and had a moment of oneness with the surroundings. It's times like these when the veil between heaven and earth parts, even if only momentarily. Heaven and earth, the spiritual and the material. Countless generations of theologians, philosophers, and scientists have tried to describe our human condition, but words still fall short, especially when we get tied up in dichotomies like spiritual versus material.
As a scientist, I've always appreciated the fact of how improbable it is that we exist. The universe's structures, constants, and laws are inherently suited to a precise degree for the existence of us, life. The stability of the solar system, the sun, the fragile conditions of atmosphere, water, and energy on earth all depend on a narrow set of conditions that line up perfectly to allow life as we know it. And now, did you hear this? Maybe microbial life on planet K2-18b reported just this week, 124 light years away in the constellation Leo. But back to Earth. How valuable our lives are. How miraculous they are. We are fearfully and wonderfully made. In the grand scheme of things, what we do matters. Even in times like now when there's so much turmoil and chaos in our country, in the world at large, and with the health of our planet at stake, we are alive and en Cristo, in Christ, the recipients of copious amounts of grace and love and mercy.
I like to think of Holy Week as walking this bound between heaven and earth. Some teachers say that Christ himself is the living, breathing cosmic boundary, both material like you and me, and divine. Our setting this Holy Thursday, the upper room, the table, the oil lamps, couches screeching on the wooden floor, the bread, the wine, the loaf, the cup, the towel, the bowl, the living water, a night of friends getting together to celebrate in Jerusalem around the time of Passover. On Holy Thursday, we celebrate Christ's institution of Holy Communion in caring for his friends and us before his departure. Jesus' gift this night was the sacrament of the Eucharist, as recorded in the first letter of Paul to the Corinthians that was read this evening. The Gospel of John that we read does not mention the institution of the bread and wine that the other Gospels do, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. But in John, we were already shocked seven chapters earlier when he writes that Jesus said, whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up the last day. My flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.
The Eucharist is at once material, the bread and wine, and spiritual, an outward visible sign of inward and spiritual grace. For St. Augustine, he said if we receive the Eucharist worthily, we become what we receive. Jesus is remaking the world where now the material grants the eternal.
A couple of weeks ago, my nephew Jamie just randomly asked the question, don't some people believe that God is in everything, even rocks and trees? That reminded me of some Native American tribes who believe this. They believe that all is infused with God, even praying to the wind as carrying God. As a child, I was raised Catholic, and I recall learning the Baltimore Catechism that asked, where is God? And the iconic answer was, God is everywhere. I remember looking around the Sunday school classroom and trying to imagine that God is everywhere. But then we were taught the prayer, our Father who art in heaven. And where to a child is heaven? God's up there. My niece one time confused God with Mickey Mouse because she was told she was getting in the airplane to go see Mickey Mouse. And she thought she was going to see God. No wonder we're confused about the nature of God, heaven, and earth, and our place in it all.
As the Holy Spirit works, I got an answer to Jamie's question when I just happened to notice a retreat that's offered at the National Cathedral led by John Philip Newell, a spiritual teacher associated with Iona Abbey in the Western Isles of Scotland. And I decided to get his book, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul, to help me choose whether to attend the retreat. And actually, the book's on Spotify if you have that, and I listened to it while I was driving this early spring. Newell describes the Celtic tradition in Christianity. Long ago, there was a tribe called the Celts who lived at one time in lands spanning from modern-day Turkey to Portugal. I didn't realize that. I thought they were mostly like England and Ireland. But you may remember they were warriors, famously sacking Rome 400 years before Christ. But theirs was an earth-centered religion, and they revered nature and its forces. When the Celts adopted Christianity in the 5th century, they did so preserving their reverence for the earth. And Newell describes how Western Christianity tried to silence the Celtic, but the thread survived in certain churches and with certain theologians. Nowadays, Celtic spirituality is seeing a resurgence. I guess thus that retreat, which by the way was sold out by the time I finished the book, so I guess I'm not going.
If our relationship with matter is that God is in the matter, emphasizing seeing God in all things, then wouldn't we act more responsibly, more respectfully towards it? And if our relationship with others is that God is in others, we would be more caring of them. In fact, heaven is to be served in the material needs of humanity and the earth. At the Last Supper, Christ says, just as I loved you, you should also love one another. So I think interest is growing in this view because people are realizing we need to band together before humankind destroys our ecosystem to the point of extinction. And Newell writes a little more eloquently, it is also to say that the stuff of earth is sacred and how we handle the earth's resources, how we handle them with a view toward equity and justice and well-being for every nation, every person, these are sacred matters.
What does it mean to say that we are made out of God, the substance of God? It is to say that the wisdom of God is deep within us. It is to say that the creativity of God, something of the creativity that's part of the forever unfolding and expanding universe, is deep within us. This is wholly within our understanding of what Jesus taught and instilled at the Last Supper, right? I think today people are yearning to hear this message. Facts alone cannot help us address racism, social inequalities, climate change, and combat plagues like COVID, as people will dismiss or ignore facts, as so many are doing. Indeed, what is needed is an awakening to the sacred in people, plants and fish, air, rocks, trees, and water, and yes, even planet K2-18b.
George McLeod was the man that rebuilt Iona Abbey starting in 1938. He wrote, it is not as if the spiritual is some separate category of life that relates in a limited way to prayer and spiritual practice. The divine is to be sought at the heart of every moment, every place, and every encounter. To seek the divine in matter is to look for it in places both of beauty and agony in the world. At the beach, on an outing with a family member, during the vigil tonight in our beautifully decorated chapel, at the unemployment office, and at the deathbed. And to do this, we need the help of grace.
Three questions from our catechism in the Book of Common Prayer. Question, what is grace? Grace is God's favor towards us, unearned and undeserved. By grace, God forgives our sins, enlightens our minds, stirs our hearts, and strengthens our wills. Question, what are the benefits we receive in the Lord's Supper? The benefits we receive are the forgiveness of our sins, the strengthening of our union with Christ and one another, and the foretaste of the heavenly banquet, which is the nourishment in eternal life. Question, what is required of us when we come to Eucharist? It is required that we should examine our lives, repent of our sins, and be in love and charity with all people.
Whether you see the created world to which we so delicately belong as God's love itself, or whether on occasion you bow and kiss the earth as a way to ground yourself, I invite you this evening to remember that our Holy Communion is a way to simultaneously touch the earth and the divine and our holy week observances to visit Christ who shatters the boundary of heaven and earth.
Amen.