Per Caritatem

A Homily for Early Morning Mass, by William J. Nielsen

Psalm 69:1-2,29-36 (31-38 BCP)

I was trying to stay cool the other day in a swimming pool. I thought it would be fun to try and float on a beach ball. Have you ever tried that? You expend more energy trying to keep the ball under the water and yourself on top of it than you would just treading water. After a while I gave it up, feeling a little silly.

Life indeed can feel like trying to float upon such a great beach ball. It requires of us great energy as we attempt to manage all its facets, trying to stay afloat. God has given us great grace and creativity to overcome many terrible enemies in this life. Polio, for example, once ravaged our children; now it is largely in the West a phantom of time past.

Nevertheless, there are those times in all of our lives – those times, plural – when God allows suffering that is immeasurably beyond our capacity, beyond all human capacity; that he might move us out of ourselves. Like Abraham, who was to sacrifice his only son Isaac, the very embodiment of God’s promise to Abraham – of Abraham’s faith; so too in seasons of great suffering we find our own faith lain out raw, bare, naked upon the altar of God.

The evil agents of this world, like tightly coiled vipers hiss and spit and strike. We too are brought to the point where it seems that the impossible is asked of us. Satan would whisper in our ear that we are alone, that God has abandoned us to be devoured by these serpents. It can seem that we are asked to sacrifice our very faith upon the altar of God, where we find ourselves with knife in hand, crying out with the psalmist, “Save me, O God, the waters are up to my neck. I have nothing to stand on.” If you do not do something, O God, I will perish.

It is during these moments when we cry out in the sort of angst that bubbles thickly from the hidden recesses of our hearts that we find something strange, inexplicable, miraculous is happening to us. It is in these acrid places, moments in our pilgrimage that God has mysteriously orchestrated, that we find we are moving forward precisely in the impossible. That is, we see in sharper focus that God is in the business of making the im-possible possible.  Just as he provided the sacrificial lamb for Abraham, sparing Isaac, the embodiment of Abraham’s very faith in God, so also we find that God acts in our stead just as powerfully. For God, the psalmist reminds us, “hears the cries of the needy” (v 35 BCP).

These moments of great suffering are, indeed, for some, great tsunamis of the soul in which it may seem quite like God is willing to smash their very faith to pieces. The paradox is that in these very moments of our exposure and weakness God works in us the very power that raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead.

One day we will be raised from the dead in a final fashion. Between that time and this we find that God has been – and continues to be – intent on nothing less than preparing us for that Day by working the same power in us to work out our salvation that we may will and work for his good pleasure.

Like a phoenix rising from its ashes we find that we too must molt our old worn out feathers that we might brandish new plumes of greater beauty and splendor which are more closely fashioned after the resplendent hues of the Magnificent One, Jesus Christ.

But let’s face it. Many of us, deep down, want a religion that is safe, one that will not demand much of us and will encourage us in whatever seems best to us. I’m here today to tell you that Christianity is not that religion.

This is plain in the books we read our young children. In C.S. Lewis’ allegory The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Susan nervously asks Mr. Beaver of the great lion Aslan (the Christ figure of the book), “Is he quite safe?” Mr. Beaver replied, “Who said anything about safe? Course he isn’t safe…..but he’s good. He’s the King I tell you.”

Lewis reminds us that we will not find the great communion with our Lord for which we long if we insist on a spirituality of playing it safe. To do so is to grow contented with living in the ghetto of popular, nominal so-called Christianity. It is to be sucked into the soft-pedaled ever-present religion that promises that you risk nothing and get everything.

In stark relief to this, Christ calls us out to places that are beyond ourselves. He calls us up, out of our very ashes, that we might have our hearts dilated wider still and our capacity to worship and commune with the lover of our souls grown deeper still.

And so it is my prayer that we who are needy will indeed cry out to the One who raises the dead; that we will indeed “sing his praises” in the face of the greatest depressions and afflictions of our souls to find that the new life he gives us is nothing less than Christ Jesus, Himself.