Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church, Houston, Texas
The Reverend Neil Alan Willard, M.Div.
The Sixth Sunday of Easter, May 26, 2019

Lord, we pray for the one who preaches. For you know his sins are many. Amen.

There’s a t-shirt that I don’t actually own myself but that I love. It’s a simple design with bold letters that create a short, three-word sentence: Abide no hatred. Folks made it in the disturbing aftermath of the white nationalists who marched nearly two years ago with torches at night through the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.[1] Those who marched were chanting, among other things, “Jews will not replace us.” And in recent months, as many of you know who can bear to listen to the news these days, synagogues have been attacked with bullets and Molotov cocktails in the United States, Muslims at prayer were targeted horrifically in New Zealand, and Christian churches were bombed in Sri Lanka on Easter Day.

Clearly a t-shirt has no power in itself to overturn hatred or racism or what seems like a total absence of love. But the people who made the one I just described have spoken and written words against all of those things. Yet the message to abide no hatred does have a real power, for me at least, as a kind of prayer — a prayer about our hope for the future and something we might be allowed to glimpse now and then, by God’s grace and mercy, within our own sinful hearts and in the broken world around us.

I also love that their message uses the word “abide.” It’s a word that catches me off guard because it sounds old fashioned in my ears, as if only spoken by someone who just stepped out of a 19th-century oil portrait. Like a fine but rare wine, it does pair nicely with the phrase “fast falls the eventide” in the first line of the Victorian hymn “Abide with me.” And yet there’s a fullness to the word that’s quite reassuring, more than simply waiting around for something to happen or a bad experience to pass.[2]

Now surely there are also a few here this morning who, having heard that word “abide,” immediately thought not of the 19th century but of the 1990s. That’s when the Coen brothers’ film The Big Lebowski was released. In that cult movie, the actor Jeff Bridges plays the role of Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski, who remains his casual self in the midst of the chaos of the world around him.

At one point, he says, “The Dude abides.” Those words about himself are spoken to the actor Sam Elliot, who plays a mysterious stranger in a white cowboy hat. The stranger smiles, repeating the same words to himself, “The Dude abides.” He then breaks the fourth wall between the actors and the audience, looking directly at us, the viewers, and saying to us, “I don’t know about you, but I take comfort in that. It’s good knowing he’s out there. The Dude. Taking ‘er easy for all us sinners.”

In that exchange between the stranger and the viewer, abiding — at least a certain kind of abiding — takes on the meaning of something we all need, something deeply theological, something biblical. And it is. Variations of the word for abide appear some 40 times throughout the Gospel of John, and then many more times in three letters elsewhere in the New Testament that bear John’s name.[3] It’s the Evangelist’s favorite word to use about our relationship with Jesus, who abides with us.

We see a shadow of all of that in today’s reading from the 14th chapter of John’s Gospel. There we are promised that God will make a home among those who love Jesus. We’re also promised that we whose hearts are filled with so much fear and anxiety — and rightly so because of the crazy things that are happening both within us and around us — will be given the gift of peace. Who doesn’t long for that gift?

I cling to that promise every time I walk out the front doors of this church, and I hope you will too. We walk beneath that promise whenever we leave through those doors because the lintel bears these words of Jesus from the King James Version of the Bible: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you . . . Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”[4] It’s a promise to those who abide here.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that we’ll feel at peace all the time or even most of the time after we cross the threshold of the church onto Main Street. But we do have glimpses of it now and then — when a good friend or maybe a stranger sits with us in our anxiety, when the chaos around us goes into slow motion as we put one foot in front of the other like the children of Israel walking right through the middle of the Red Sea, when we find we can breathe in wide open spaces because of the love we’ve received from those whom we see no longer. The dead abide with us in that love.

Odd as it may sound, perhaps that promise from the lips of Jesus means the most to people for whom those experiences of peace are few and far between. They can find hope in knowing that Jesus, crucified and risen, will have the last word. And when that final word is spoken on the last day — a divine “yes” in the face of humanity’s cruel “no” — there will be nothing accursed either within us or around us as we continue to abide with him for ever. Raised to life in God’s new creation, and surrounded by divine love, we’ll enjoy a peace that can never be broken — a peace that will guard our hearts and banish from them eternally both fear and hatred.

On the cover of his book Abiding, which has really shaped this sermon, author Ben Quash put a work of art by English painter Norman Adams called Christ’s Cross and Adam’s Tree. He said he likes it because there’s both suffering and glory in the image at the same time, “but the glory is in the ascendant.” And he goes on to write that:

The cross on which Christ hangs — so often described as a ‘tree’ — is at the same time the untrumpable declaration of a love and a life that abide — of a God who will absolutely not go away and leave his people comfortless.

Norman Adams’ bright colours, and elemental shapes suggest the resurrection breaking through the veil of pain, announcing that even the tree of shame has its roots in the eternal abiding of God’s own life; that this life courses through its veins and will make it a fruitful tree. . . .

In its own way, this image, too, shows the primacy of peace. Adam’s tree sprang up in Eden. When that tree became the source of a fall into a violent order, a second ‘tree’ was planted to restore the paradise that had been lost. In some legends, the cross was made from the same wood as the tree from which Adam ate, and was planted in the same place. . . . The painting shows the ultimate abiding of God with us: an abiding in and through death.[5]

The Gospel of John leaves us with its own image at the foot of the cross of Jesus. There we find Mary, the mother of Jesus, standing with several other women. And standing beside her is someone who is described only as “the disciple whom he loved.”[6] As he dies, Jesus says to his mother:

“Woman, here is your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.[7]

In other words, “Jesus bestows them on one another, and enjoins them to abide with one another.”[8] They are to draw from the wellspring of his own abiding with them.

And who is that disciple, the one whom Jesus loved? We often think of him as John, and that’s certainly the claim of tradition. But the Gospel of John is written in way to suggest that, on a different level, the disciple is meant to be each of us. The disciple whom Jesus loves, who reclines next to Jesus at the Last Supper, stands beside his mother at the foot of the cross, and later runs to see the empty tomb, is really you.

My prayer is that the places where we dwell with the family of Jesus, which are by no means limited to the walls of churches, will be places where we’re given a glimpse of the peace that’s been promised to us. So abide in his love and limitless mercy today.

AMEN

1 BACK TO POST The Bitter Southerner is the online publication that designed this t-shirt after its editor Chuck Reese wrote about the events in 2017 in Charlottesville, concluding: “White faces have to look straight into the eyes of other white faces and say: I will not abide your hatred.” Here is part of its stated purpose and mission:

[We promise] to call out those who would deny the rights of — or commit violence against — anyone they see as “the other.” We [pledge] . . . to try our best to understand our region better, even if that means confronting the distasteful. . . . Lord knows, most folks outside the South believe — and rightly so — that most Southerners are kicking and screaming to keep the old South old. But many others, through the simple dignity of their work, are changing things. We’re here to tell their stories.

One of those stories that often comes to mind for me is an essay with beautiful photographs of people standing in line to hear former President Jimmy Carter teach his Sunday School class in Plains, Georgia, on the Sunday after the last presidential election in 2016. At the end of his class, President Carter pointed those who had come there to the kind of love that Jesus embodied and noted how hard it is to do:

Loving people who don’t love us back. Loving people who are different from us, loving people who are unlovable.

2 BACK TO POST Ben Quash, Abiding (London: Bloomsbury, 2012) 1. This book, which the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams selected as his “Lent Book” for 2013, includes in its discussion of abiding the hymn “Abide with Me,” the movie The Big Lebowski, and the scene with Mary and the beloved disciple at the foot of the cross in the Gospel of John, all of which I’ve used to frame this sermon.

3 BACK TO POST Ben Quash, Abiding (London: Bloomsbury, 2012) 211-212.

4 BACK TO POST John 14:27 (King James Version).

5 BACK TO POST Ben Quash, Abiding (London: Bloomsbury, 2012) 223-224.

6 BACK TO POST John 19:26.

7 BACK TO POST John 19:26-27.

8 BACK TO POST Ben Quash, Abiding (London: Bloomsbury, 2012) 224.

Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church, Houston, Texas
The Reverend Neil Alan Willard, M.Div.
Easter III, May 5, 2019

Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom,
and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing. (Revelation 5:12, KJV)

Lord, we pray for the one who preaches. For you know his sins are many. Amen.

So a weird thing happened to me recently. Several months ago, I stumbled across a short list of papers that are in the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. They are some of the writings of John Philip Meurer, who was not only a Moravian minister but also my 6th great-grandfather. The list included a poem from 1744.

I was really curious about that and received an enthusiastic response from a young researcher who wrote back to me. He said it had apparently been miscatalogued because, as it turns out, it’s really a 37-verse hymn. The numbering skips from verse 24 to verse 26, so I guess there are only 36 verses. And it’s now been translated from German to English if we want to use this “shortened” version next Sunday as our processional hymn. Fear not, that won’t happen! However, I will quote part of it today, beginning with the second verse, which refers to Jesus Christ as the Lamb:

When I consider the previous time,
the trouble the Lamb has taken with me
when I brought him very little joy,
his heart still burned with love.

In love, he was always near to me . . .
His spirit and grace always surrounded me . . .

The dear Lamb redeemed me,
forgave me my sins.

That contrast between the Lamb and my 6th great-grandfather, or anyone else who is an imperfect human being, which is to say the person sitting next to you, is fully on display in this morning’s reading from the Book of Revelation. The one who is worthy to receive honor and glory and blessing is neither among “the myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands” of people who are singing nor on the throne of the Roman emperor who demands total loyalty and worship as a god. Only the Lamb is worthy to receive all of that, and the Lamb, as in Meurer’s hymn, is Jesus Christ.

Sadly, the Book of Revelation has been used to terrify people, filling them with fear about the news of the day. It’s meant to say that, yes, God will have the last word over all the terrible things that happen and will continue to happen in this world. But it’s also meant to provide encouragement for those who are struggling, even a sense of wonder that Christ’s death and resurrection — what Meurer later describes in his hymn as “our dear Lamb’s wounds” — are somehow able to untangle the knots within us and around us. Before receiving communion, we often proclaim the same message, singing that Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

The Book of Revelation, by the way, heartily endorses singing, as if to say that in the midst of humanity’s cacophony, and after all of that disharmony has ended, singing will have carried us through it and remain with us beyond it. There are more than 15 hymns sung in this book, surrounding us with encouragement from behind the curtain of materiality. Yes, some things are seen. Others, just as real, are unseen.

Near the end of the Book of Revelation, there’s another biblical image of the Lamb that appears, painting a vivid picture for us of what heaven is like. It’s the marriage supper of the Lamb — a wedding feast, which, in the ancient world, was a kind of dinner that went on for days, overflowing with abundance. There, at the end of the Bible, it’s a party hosted by Jesus. And it’s a party to which all of us are invited.

Angie and Stuart Kensinger, whose double funeral was held in this church last week, used to host fabulous dinner parties in their home. And they’d print menus for these fun events. Here’s one of them. The Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem attended this particular dinner, and he was invited to sign a copy of this so the Kensingers could keep it as a memento. That’s not surprising. But what is surprising is that the Kensingers asked every other person at the dinner to sign that menu, too, as though we were all celebrities. It was then framed and hung on a wall in their kitchen.

Those walls are filled with these framed menus. My wife Carrie had this to say about that in an essay posted on Mockingbird on the day of Angie and Stuart’s funeral:

Every time there was a new dinner party, a new menu would be printed, signed, and framed, and they would squeeze the other frames together and rearrange to make space for the new one. There wasn’t ever a sense that they’d run out of room for more menus, even as the walls filled with memories — they’d simply make more room. I imagine that the [Jewish, Christian, and Muslim] young people in Jerusalem Peacebuilders and [the girls] on Angie’s lacrosse teams felt the same way that I did — we all knew there was enough room in the Kensingers’ hearts for all of us. We all just squeezed together to make more room.

I imagine that the kingdom of heaven is not unlike Stuart and Angie’s kitchen, with its walls filled with signed menus. There will be someone who is always, always glad to see us and treat us as an honored guest. There’s no fear that the host will run out of room, and old friends will squeeze together to make room for new ones.

That’s a beautiful portrait, I think, of how our life together with God might look. Now and then we get to have a glimpse of it here, where our songs and laughter and feasting and friendship and small acts of love are like a thunderous chorus of praise to the Lamb who was slain. And sometimes we’re overwhelmed with a very real sense that those who have died, having fallen asleep in Jesus, are still with us, and not just in our memories. They are among “the myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands,” encouraging us as they sing to the Lamb and surround the throne of God with their own Easter alleluias. That, my friends, is the communion of saints.

My first experiences of that happened as a child in North Carolina at the Moravian Easter sunrise service. The service always began in front of the church and ended in the graveyard as we stood with the saints, living and dead. I also felt it as a teenager when I crossed the threshold of an Episcopal church for the very first time at St. Thomas, Fifth Avenue, in New York City. That parish church moves from plainness to glory in two directions, from bottom to top and from the back to the front. And there at the front is one of the world’s largest reredoses — an ornamental screen behind the altar, brightly illuminated and highlighting a multitude of saints. It was while looking at them that I first heard an Episcopal priest sing these words:

Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious Name; evermore praising thee, and saying, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts: Heaven and earth are full of thy Glory.”

Last Sunday morning, my wife and I were in New York City and attended the 11:00 Festival Eucharist at St. Thomas. While hearing those now familiar words and looking at that reredos soaring heavenward, I thought about the past, just like John Philip Meurer did in the words of his hymn, and how Jesus has always been close to me in love, even when — especially when — I wasn’t aware of it. And I also thought about the saints of God here at Palmer who’ve died. We’ve buried three of them from this church during this season of Easter, with three more funerals to be held over the next couple of weeks. Others are mourning the loss of close family members. It’s too much to bear. Yet the love of Jesus sustains us as we sit in the shadow of death.

As a friend of mine recently said to me, “The love of Jesus precedes everything else, and the love of Jesus creates love within us.” And that divine love that fills our hearts within these walls is the same love that overflows into the world beyond these walls. That’s the love that goes with us today as we step onto Main Street. This I believe.

AMEN