Grace Cathedral
“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want” (Psalm 23).
When I was at Harvard, on the advice of a friend who is a nun, I decided to take a leadership course at the Kennedy School of Government. My fellow classmates came from twenty-six countries and included CEO’s, a judge, a District Attorney, an army general, a state senator, the founder of an investment bank, the co-founder of a Political Action Committee, an ambassador, a university dean, the head administrator for airports in Israel, etc.
Our teacher Ronald Heifetz changed who I am. He spoke with uncanny and absolutely non-defensive frankness. He had an MD, practiced as a surgeon, and had previously taught at Harvard Medical School. He was a cello virtuoso who had studied under Gregor Piatagorsky and music was central to his understanding of leadership.1
This week I read all my class notes – everything from doodles that spelled my wife’s Hawaiian name in Greek letters to quotes with three stars in the margin (such as, “in disagreements the first value we lose sight of is the ability to be curious”).2 The syllabus says directly that the course’s goal is, “to increase one’s capacity to sustain the demands of leadership.” It was perfect preparation for the rest of my life.
On the first day Heifetz said, “if you are going through a difficult time I strongly urge you not to take this course.” He was right. This was not an ordinary lecture class but a seemingly entirely improvised discussion. Heifetz would start by saying something like, “What do we want to address today?” It felt strangely dangerous. Nothing was going to come easy or be handed to us on a silver platter. We talked about the feeling in class and agreed it was tense.
At one point in the early lectures Heifetz just stopped being an authority figure for a while. In the resulting chaos we learned how much we all crave authority and guiding norms. It felt more like a Werner Erhard seminar than a Harvard lecture.
Heifetz might not always say it directly but he regards leadership above all as a spiritual practice. The motivations for good leadership are spiritual. The character and the skills that we need to develop for leadership are spiritual. To be effective we have to recognize forces that were previously invisible to us and experience the world with intuition and based on a real understanding of ourselves. Leadership success requires curiosity, compassion, wisdom, honesty, courage, humility, self-knowledge and the right balance between detachment and passion.
Today is Good Shepherd Sunday. In the Fourth Gospel Jesus faces accusers who seek to kill him. He uses the metaphor of a leader as a good shepherd. This idea was already ancient in his time and mentioned in the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Psalms. You might be thinking, “No one listens to me since I retired,” or, “I’m at the lowest level in my company, or I’m just a kid, what could leadership possibly have to do with me?”
Heifetz makes a central distinction between authority and leadership. Authority comes from one’s institutional standing and involves managing people’s expectations.3 Jesus was not the Roman governor or the high priest. He did not have this authority.
Leadership on the other hand means mobilizing resources to make progress on difficult problems.4 In many instances people exercise more powerful leadership without having formal authority than with it. Jesus did. And make no mistake Jesus expects each of us to act as leaders regardless of our formal or informal authority. We exist to glorify God and to help solve the problems we encounter. For homework I invite you this week to consciously exercise leadership that is inspired by Jesus.
1. Adaptive Challenges. This morning I am going to do the opposite of what my teacher did, I am going to speak directly and briefly about three of his observations concerning leadership.5 One of Heifetz’s primary ideas concerns the difference between a technical problem and an adaptive challenge. A technical problem is one that we already know how to respond to; best practices, if you will, already exist. It may be simple like setting a broken bone or incredibly complicated like putting a person on the moon, but an expert, a mechanic, surgeon or rocket scientist, already knows how to handle it.6
An adaptive challenge is different. No adequate response has been developed for it. I have in mind our terrible problem of people without housing, racial prejudice, addiction, education, misinformation, poverty, war, white Christian nationalism, election denial, despair, isolation, etc. It is tempting to treat an adaptive challenge as if it were a technical problem, to look to an authority to solve that problem for us. But problems like this require cooperation among groups of people who are seeking solutions, not pretending to already know all the answers.
What was Jesus’ adaptive challenge? His disciples thought it was overthrowing the Roman Empire or enthroning a king who shared their identity. But this was not it. Instead Jesus was what the theologian Paul Tillich calls “the New Being.” Jesus inaugurated a new way of being human which he called “the realm of God” in which all people would be healed, cared for and treated with dignity. It is a realm of spiritual well-being in which we experience God as a kind of loving father such as the father in the Prodigal Son story. This is what Jesus means when he says, “the Father knows me and I know the Father” (Jn. 10).
As a spiritual community Grace Cathedral shares this adaptive challenge of working for the realm of God. And in a society where Christianity is justifiably associated with misogyny, homophobia and unkindness we offer a vision of community in which anyone can belong before they believe. On the basis of our conviction that every person without exception is beloved by God we have taken on the adaptive challenge of transforming Christianity, of reimagining church with courage, joy and wonder.7
2. Strategic Principles. Heifetz speaks a great deal about the practical work of leadership. He describes this as creating a kind of holding container for people working on the problem and then paying attention to one’s own feelings to understand the mind of the group.
Leadership involves uncovering and articulating the adaptive challenge. A leader also needs to manage the anxiety of the group. People have to be concerned enough to want to act but not so afraid that they will give up in hopelessness. Because human beings tend to avoid hard challenges, a leader needs to keep the group focused on the problem not just on trying to relieve the stress the group is feeling. This involves giving the work back to people at a rate they can assimilate. He also points out how important it is to protect leaders who do not have authority so that they can contribute to the solution.8
3. Values. Heifetz taught us that the best leaders have such a deep feeling for their mission they will, if necessary, sacrifice themselves for the higher purpose. Heifetz refers to the leaders getting (metaphorically, mostly I hope) assassinated. This happens when the stress a leader generates in order to solve a problem becomes so great that the leader gets expelled. This is how I understand Jesus’ life. Jesus talks about this.
In today’s gospel the Greek the word kalos which we translate as good, as in Good Shepherd, probably means something more like real or genuine. Jesus says that the hired hand is there for the transaction, for the payment, but the real shepherd has the power (ezousian often translated as authority) to lay down his life (the Greek word is psuxēn or soul) for the sake of the sheep. Many leaders at some point have to decide whether to keep pushing for uncomfortable change even when they know it might mean they will be forced to leave.
Before closing I want to briefly tell you about a leader who shaped us, our first dean, J. Wilmer Gresham. Dean Gresham moved to San Jose California for health reasons. In 1910 at the age of 39 when he was asked to become the first Dean of Grace Cathedral he hesitated wondering if the damp cold of San Francisco would kill him. Almost immediately after moving here to this block, he discerned his adaptive challenges: to build this Cathedral and to begin a ministry of healing that involved organizing groups to gather for prayer that gradually became an national movement. He helped so many people privately, financially. Trusting God he gave all of himself.9
After serving almost 30 years Dean Gresham retired and a year later his wife Emily Cooke Graham died. Many evenings he would stand on the sidewalk in front of their old home weeping for her. He found so much comfort in Jesus, the Good Shepherd, that he gave a stained glass window in the South Transept in her memory. He did this so that we would know that like the sheep in the arms of Jesus we are loved by God.
At the end of our leadership course Ronald Heifetz reminded us that he had told us at the beginning that he would disappoint us. He talked about how at times the teaching staff too had felt that we were wandering in the desert, that some students might have felt hurt or misrepresented. But most of all he taught us how to say goodbye.
Heifetz promised that we could shed light in our life even when there is no light around us. He said that the God of the Greek philosopher Archimedes was called “the unmoved mover.” But Heifetz said that he believed much more in Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s idea of God as “the most moved mover.”
My dear ones, we are all called to lay down our lives for the sake of God’s realm. But we are not left without comfort. We have each other and we always have the Good Shepherd. Jesus teaches that God loves us the way that a faithful teacher loves her students or a father treasures his lost child.
1 His brother Daniel was a professional violinist. But none of these things can account for what made him so mysterious, so unique.
2 Ronald Heifetz, Course Notes from “Exercising Leadership: Mobilizing Group Resources,” PAL 101, The Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 29 October 1992.
3 If people don’t like what someone is saying, and have the power to do so, they may remove an authority figure.
4 “I define leadership as an activity, not as a set of personality characteristics. So what I’m interested in is developing people’s capacity to perform a particular activity, and I call this activity “leadership.” And the activity of leadership I define as the mobilization of the resources of a people or an organization to make progress on the difficult problems it faces.”
“Leadership Expert: Ronald Heifetz,” INC Magazine, October 1988.
5 Wouldn’t it be extraordinary to learn leadership in the same way at church on a Sunday morning? It would definitely be unsettling at times.
6 Ronald Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994) 71-3.
7 Reimaging church with courage, joy and wonder is our cathedral mission statement.
8 Ronald Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994) 128.
9 LaVonne Neff, “Introduction,” in J. Wilmer Gresham, Wings of Healing: On Faith for Daily Life (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2000).
My Dear Siblings,
I greet you on a spectacular spring day with the tides rising at Ocean Beach before the afternoon wind dissipates the morning surfers. The hills around our city are in motion with the spring grass; the mustard wildflowers are beginning their march down the hillsides. The cumulous clouds have been so magnificent this spring, haven’t they? It’s been one of the best years for clouds in recent memory.
On Sunday we baptized 7 more infants after baptizing and receiving 24 adults last week at the Easter Vigil. What a blessing it is to be with each of these people on their pilgrimage as Christians walking on the Anglican way that has sustained so many of us over the years.
Above all today I am grateful for you. It would be impossible for Grace Cathedral to function without scores of volunteers. Greeters, Singers, Coffee Hour chefs, Ushers, Sunday School leaders, Congregation Council Members, Trustees, our sewing and knitting volunteers, EfM Scholars, Small group participants, etc. Cathedral ministry is special and requires us all to hone our skills as hosts. I’m so grateful for all that you do here.
One very important way that you might serve here is as a docent. Please let me know if you are interested in learning more about this ministry.
This Sunday (April 15) at the 9:30 a.m. Forum and the 11:00 a.m. service we will be hearing from Rev’d Jim Wallis, probably one of the most famous Christians of our time. I’m looking forward to learning his perspective on what is happening now across this country as he visits various churches.
With the story of Thomas fresh in our minds from our Sunday Gospel reading, below is a poem by Denise Levertov.
Love,
Malcolm
Denise Levertov, “On Belief in the Physical Resurrection of Jesus”
It is for all
‘literalists of the imagination,’
poets or not,
that miracle
is possible,
possible and essential.
Are some intricate minds
nourished
on concept,
as epiphytes flourish
high in the canopy?
Can they
subsist on the light,
on the half
of metaphor that’s not
grounded in dust, grit,
heavy
carnal clay?
Do signs contain and utter,
for them
all the reality
that they need? Resurrection, for them,
an internal power, but not
a matter of flesh?
For the others,
of whom I am one,
miracles (ultimate need, bread
of life) are miracles just because
people so tuned
to the humdrum laws:
gravity, mortality —
can’t open
to symbol’s power
unless convinced of its ground,
its roots
in bone and blood.
We must feel
the pulse in the wound
to believe
that ‘with God
all things
are possible,’
taste
bread at Emmaus
that warm hands
broke and blessed.
“Living and true God, open our eyes to your mystery, open our hearts to your love. Amen.”
What do you love and why? At the midpoint of his life the poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), overcome by exhaustion, loses the true path and finds himself in a terrifying existential wilderness. Thus begins his journey through hell, purgatory and heaven to rediscover his true self. In paradise, the beauty and brightness of Jesus’ closest friend John is like the sun. It causes Dante to temporarily go blind. St. John gently asks that simple question. What do you love and why? My translation of the Italian says, “declare the aim on which your soul is set.”[i]
At Easter we step back from the busyness and distractions of our lives to rediscover and celebrate what is truly good, what we really love. This morning’s sermon has three chapters called worldview, resurrection and transformation.
1. Worldview. I love the German word for it – Weltanschauung, literally world-perception. It reminds us that our individual idiosyncrasies mean that we experience the same world in very different ways. Every week someone says, “you must be freezing riding your bike around here.” And I think to myself, “the air is so clear, the views so spectacular, that hundreds of people from around the world are renting bikes right now to experience what I get to do every day.”
Michael Guillen is the former ABC Science editor and has an interdisciplinary PhD in mathematics, physics and astronomy. For many years as a student he called himself an atheist because people he relied on seemed to believe that science and religion were at odds with each other. Like Dante perhaps, over time the question began to nag him.
He began to put together spreadsheets that compared scientific, atheistic and religious thought. He concluded that on questions like “Does absolute truth exist?” “Are their truths that cannot be proven?” and, “Is the universe designed for life?” a scientific view, with its value of wonder and open inquiry, far more closely matches a religious view than an atheistic one.[ii]
I don’t know if this is the case. I’m not sure that I would agree completely with his reasoning but the important thing that Guillen points out is that people hold vastly different worldviews and that these are crucially important to the quality of our life. What is a worldview? It is the answer to the question, what do you love and why. It is that deep subconscious self that determines how you see the world and how you react to it. Everyone has a worldview.
Guillen notes that you may see yourself as smart, sophisticated, modern. But do not think that this means that your worldview is based on logic. Your worldview, like everyone else’s, depends on what you believe to be true. It is based on faith. Atheists rely on faith, on assumptions that cannot be proved. Fundamentalist Christians rely on a faith that they may not really understand.[iii]
Guillen writes that many people especially young people today believe that opinions and feelings are more important than facts and that for them faith is dangerous. He connects this with today’s unprecedented levels of loneliness, suicide, addiction and despair. Guillen asserts that your worldview should be your most treasured possession because it is central to becoming fulfilled, to a meaningful life. Easter Sunday is an opportunity to tune up our worldview.
2. Resurrection. James Alison is one of my favorite theologians and will be preaching here on June 16. I find his ideas immensely helpful as I try to work on my own worldview. In the Forward to one of his books Archbishop Rowan Williams writes, “The resurrection of Jesus makes it impossible to take for granted that the world is nothing but a system of oppressors and victims, an endless cycle of reactive violence. We are free to understand ourselves and each other in a new way, as living in mutual gift not mutual threat…. [and this] sets in motion relations of forgiveness, equality and care.”[iv] How do we adopt this worldview and begin to be free?
Alison starts with a question that we sometimes hear, “Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?” This means something different to all of us. It might sound like its excluding you, or a kind of boasting. It might fill you with joy. But Alison points out that we do not have a relation to Jesus in the way that we do with ordinary people. He writes that thousands and maybe hundreds of thousands of indigenous Guatemalans have been murdered. At least one was likely to be a thirty-three year old man who we might call Francisco. Does anyone claim to have a personal relationship with Francisco? What is it that makes the way we talk about Jesus different?
The answer is the resurrection. “[S]tarting from a Sunday morning in the first century a group of people began to make extraordinary claims about someone who was killed the Friday before.”[v] We hear their testimony as they come to understand what happened to them, and to finally comprehend what Jesus taught them during his life. Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of Jesus, Salome, Peter, Thomas, Paul, Mark, etc. are not merely making the point that the resurrection happened. They also witness to the fact that it, “profoundly changed them… causing them to rethink the whole of their lives, their relationship with their homeland, their culture, its values…” their understanding of God, and in short their worldview.[vi]
Everyone agrees that no one saw the actual moment of resurrection. Also, it did not happen to people at random. Jesus appeared to particular people in a particular context. That is, these were mostly friends, with great hopes, many of them thought that he was going to overturn the occupying powers. They felt disillusioned. But even more than that they felt guilty about abandoning him. Their relationship with Jesus ended when he was crucified on Good Friday. You cannot have a mutual relationship with someone who is dead. There was no closure, just tragedy, confusion and guilt.
We might be tempted to think of Peter as the good disciple and Judas as the bad one, but both betrayed Jesus – Peter by letting him down when he promised to be steadfast and Judas by actively working with his enemies. The sin that destroyed Judas was not treachery but his inability to believe in the possibility of forgiveness.[vii]
The people who encountered Jesus began to see their lives from a completely new vantage point. Suddenly their worldview had to accommodate absolute grace. Alison calls this gratuity, a shocking gift that comes to us from completely outside the realm of our relationships. Those friends of Jesus received a gift totally independent and beyond what we deserve or can control or manipulate. It is something beyond what we are owed or can earn or pay back. It is forgiveness. In Rowan Williams’ words, we are being freed from our, “prison of self-absorbed, self-referential feelings beyond the reactive and repetitive world sustained by sin.” We no longer have to pass on or return the wounds that we have received.
3. Transformation. Our former Dean of Grace Cathedral Alan Jones was by nature a bit of a sceptic. And yet, the older he grew, the more strongly he came to believe in resurrection. He felt convinced, yet uncomfortable, because he knew it required him to change, to be transformed.[viii]
Alan tells a story about a dandelion growing in a forest clearing and asking nutrients from the soil if they want to become a dandelion. The nutrients shrug their shoulders, if nutrients can do that and ask “what does this involve?” The dandelion says, “I’ll draw you up into my roots and you will become a dandelion.” Since transformation is the name of the game they agree, and are drawn up by the roots and transformed into a lush thriving dandelion.[ix]
Then a rabbit comes hopping along (you probably were wondering when you’d eventually hear about a rabbit in an Easter sermon). The rabbit says to the dandelion, how would you like to become a rabbit? It says “what will that entail?” The rabbit answers, “if you let me eat you, you will become strong and fast.” And sure enough it agreed and the rabbit did.
Later along the forest path a hunter came along and said, “Rabbit, how would you like to be a human?” “What will that involve?” I’ll make you into a stew and you will become part of this great chain of transformation. The rabbit thinks about it for a bit but finally says, okay. The hunter eats the rabbit. Feeling refreshed and strong he goes walking in the forest. The story ends rather abruptly. A voice from heaven says, “Human being. How would you like to become God?” I guess that’s the reason Alan resists resurrection.
Alan’s point is that resurrection is not just about us being forgiven, it is about being changed. There are words about not judging others and forgiveness in the Bible like, “Let anyone who is without sin cast the first stone.” (Jn. 8:7), or “Blessed are the peacemakers” (Mt. 5:9), or, “Forgive others their trespasses” (Mt. 6:14). It is difficult but we can choose to let these words become part of us, part of our worldview.
A Quaker was with his friend at the store when the sales clerk treated him rudely. The Quaker responded with care and love. Afterwards the friend said, “that sales person was a jerk, why were you so nice to him?” The Quaker replied, “why should I allow his behavior to set the agenda and tone of my response to life?”[x]
What do you love and why? Whether you are in darkness dangerously losing the true path or are feeling almost blinded by the light of Christ, your worldview should be your most treasured possession. The resurrection offers us a gift outside the rewards and consequences of all our relationships. It offers us a chance to leave the prison of our self-absorption with its system of oppressors and victims, and to be transformed. We do not need to pass on or return the wounds that we have received.
This week in my memory I have been revisiting the most beautiful Easter Sundays of my life. I found myself imagining childhood in the backyard of my grandparents with my great aunts and uncles. And I have been remembering nine beautiful Easter Sundays here with you and so many others who have passed on. This is what I love – being with you as we give thanks to God.
Let me close with a few lines from Dante’s Paradiso that sum up my feelings. “Amazement overwhelming me, I – like / a child who always hurries back to find / that place he trusts the most – turned to my guide; / and like a mother quick to reassure / her pale and panting son with the same voice / that she has often used to comfort him, / she said, “Do you not know you are in Heaven…”[xi]
[i] “Then do begin; declare the aim on which your soul is set – and be assured of this: your vision, though confounded is not dead.” Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy tr. Allen Mandelbaum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) Inferno Canto I (2), Paradiso Cantos XXV-XXVI (222-228)
[ii] Michael Guillen, Believing Is Seeing: A Physicist Explains How Science Shattered His Atheism and Revealed the Necessity of Faith (Carol Stream, Illinois: Tyndale, 2021) 39.
[iii] Ibid., xvii-xviii.
[iv] James Alison, Knowing Jesus (London, The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1993), viii.
[v] Ibid., 5.
[vi] Ibid., 7.
[vii] Ibid., 9.
[viii] In a sermon long ago Alan described the human genome as a book with one billion words, that is as long as 800 Bibles. At the rate of one word per second for eight hours a day, it would take a century to read – all in the microscopic nucleus of a cell that fits easily on the head of a pin. It is the four billion year old story of dandelions, rabbits and every form of life that inhabited our planet.
Alan Jones, “The Road to Damascus,” Grace Cathedral.
[ix] Alan Jones, “The Road to Damascus,” Grace Cathedral.
[x] “But as W. H. Auden reminded us once, he said, we’re all by nature actors who cannot become something until they first pretended to be it. They are therefore to be divided, not into the hypocritical and the sincere, but into the sane who know they are acting and to the mad who don’t. You might act as if you’re a decent human being. Give it a try. It might be catching do it.” Alan Jones, “The Road to Damascus,” Grace Cathedral.
[xi] Dante Alighieri, Paradiso tr. Allen Mandelbaum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) 192.
“Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord” (Mk. 11)!
“[T]here is nothing that requires as gentle a treatment as the removal of an illusion.” We saw this in COVID misinformation and today in political speeches about “white replacement,” the “Deep State” and the “stolen election.” Directly confronting people who hold mistaken beliefs only makes them more defensive and resistant. It only strengthens their self-deception. The eighteenth century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) points out that, “It is not easy to correct a mistake that concerns a person’s entire existence.”[1]
What about the illusions that we hold? Is there hope that we might see the truth? For many years I resisted the impulse behind celebrating Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday in the same worship service. I rebelled against participating in the joyful palm procession, singing Hosanna in the highest on the same day that we walk with Jesus through his abandonment, suffering and death. For me these two moods could not reasonably occupy the same space at the same time.[2] Today I see that the purpose of Palm Sunday is to remove our illusions.
In our Cathedral’s north “Theological Reform Window” we have a delightful image of Kierkegaard sitting in his purple suit reading a book. He was born in 1813 and his biographer suggests that he was perhaps one of the first philosophers to write about “the experience of living in a recognizably modern world of newspapers, trains, [buses] window-shopping, amusement parks, and great stores of knowledge and information.”[3]
One more thing about Søren Kierkegaard is necessary to understanding him. For his whole life Kierkegaard was deeply in love with a woman named Regine. When they were young he used to read the local bishop’s sermons to her. They exchanged passionate love letters. He wrote, “Know that every time you repeat that you love me from the deepest recesses of your soul, it is as though I heard it for the first time, and just as a man who owned the whole world would need a lifetime to survey his splendors, so I also seem to need a lifetime to contemplate all the riches contained in your love.”[4]
But Kierkegaard worried that because of his own struggle with what he called “abysmal melancholia” Regine ultimately would not be happy being married to him. When he broke up with her, she pleaded saying that she would tell him she loved him every day of their life together and that he could keep her in a little cupboard.[5] Her prominent father begged him not to break the engagement.
Kierkegaard’s hero was the Greek philosopher Socrates who used irony to force his contemporaries to confront the question of how to be human. Socrates died to teach his fellow citizens how to be more human. In Kierkegaard’s time pretty much everyone was part of the state church and believed that being a Danish citizen was the same thing as being a Christian.
For Kierkegaard this way of existing had nothing to do with the Christianity of the New Testament. Even worse, it positively prevented people from seeking a deeper connection to God. Kierkegaard believed that there were three stages of life: the aesthetic stage was a way of existing just for pleasure and novelty, and the ethical stage involved being stuck in the way humans constantly evaluate ourselves and others.
But Kierkegaard taught that there is something beyond this, beyond just pleasure and judgment about excellence. He called this the religious stage. Human beings also belong a “sphere of infinite depth, which he called ‘inwardness,’ ‘the God-relationship,’ ‘eternity,” “the religious sphere,’ or simply ‘silence.’”[6] If people think that they are already Christians they cease to reach out for God. They are cut off from their deeper self, from the God who makes life worth living.
Kierkegaard put it this way, “If there were no eternal consciousness in a human being [that is no connection to God], if underlying everything there were only a wild, fermenting force writhing in dark passions that produced everything great and insignificant, if a bottomless, insatiable emptiness lurked beneath everything, what would life be but despair? If there were no sacred bond that tied humankind together, if one generation after another rose like leaves in a forest… if the human race passed through the world as a ship through the sea, as the wind through the desert… then how empty and hopeless life would be!”[7]
So how do you convince people into trying to become Christian when they think that they already are? You have to trick them out of their illusions. Kierkegaard did this by making up characters and then writing startling and beautiful books using these fictional voices. Our problem today is a little different than what Kierkegaard faced. These days not everyone calls themselves Christian, but I do think in our time most people in our society, both those who believe and those who do not, think that they know what Christianity is. Perhaps this has been a little true in every age.
So what are we doing on Palm and Passion Sunday? We are removing a powerful illusion of what it means to be a Christian. That illusion is that a military messiah will save us rather than the God who is revealed in the self-emptying of Jesus. In short it is the illusion that having power over other people will resolve our problems, or that our life is chiefly about experiencing pleasure, or enjoying absolute safety. It is the illusion that we have the ability to save ourselves, that we do not need the God who Jesus teaches is like a good father to us.
Palm Sunday readings dispel this illusion in three ways. First, they force us to see what is real. Have any of you ever heard of the Victorian editions of William Shakespeare’s plays?[8] People had such a strong sense of moral optimism in the latter nineteenth century that Shakespeare’s plays offended them. And so they re-wrote the endings of Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet, etc.
That version of Romeo and Juliet described the two lovers recovering from being poisoned and stabbed. Not only that but they are reconciled. And their families are reconciled. And the local parson comes along to preside at their happily ever after wedding.[9] In contrast our readings today force us to see a violent truth about life in the suffering of Christ.
Second Palm Sunday helps us to become more like Jesus. My friend from seminary Matt Boulton says that ancient people regarded the Bible as something like an empty jacket that is tailored perfectly to fit us.[10] Scripture becomes fulfilled when we give these stories shape, when we put them on ourselves. We are not just passively watching Jesus. We are “putting on Christ,” in the way that the Apostle Paul encourages us. This is how we practice our reliance on God.[11] When we accompany Jesus we share his sorrows. We weep with him at the brokenness of what was meant to be whole.[12]
Finally, on Palm Sunday we love Jesus. Barbara Brown Taylor describes a woman who still high on drugs wandered into the Passion Sunday reading at their Episcopal Church, sitting quietly in the back row and then sobbing, “O my Lord no! Don’t kill my sweet Jesus! You’ve got to stop! You can’t kill my sweet Jesus! O Lord make them stop!” The well-meaning congregants tried to reassure and comfort her. One of the teenagers said, “I tried to tell her it wasn’t real but I realized that for her it was.”[13]
In the reading we are about to hear there is one kind act that will never be forgotten. A woman loves Jesus so much she anoints him with oil imported from India that costs a year’s wages (is that $40,000?). The disciples bitterly criticize her for the expense, but Jesus says she teaches us how to love extravagantly with our whole self. We can love Jesus like her.
As we embark on the holiest season of the year I cannot exactly say what illusions God is trying to dispel in your heart. I also could not say whether Kierkegaard’s conviction that he had to break his engagement with Regine was an illusion. I do know that for 14 years he thought of her every day and never heard her voice until one morning in mid-March of 1855. In the street near his house Regine walked purposely up to him and quietly said, “God bless you – may all go well for you.” Later that day she moved with her husband to his diplomatic post in the Caribbean. Kierkegaard never saw her again. But I think this helped him to become reconciled with what he had done.
In the first volume of Katherine Sonderegger’s Systematic Theology she writes. “And just this is… the good news we greet with joy. There is One who has looked into the abyss, who has examined the formless horror in its breadth and depth, who encompasses it, its sickness and malice, with the Wisdom that is good, and remains utterly sovereign and utterly undefiled by this sight. The gospel consoles us in our folly and in our fear with the truth that no evil and sin, no deformation and terror, no clawing guilt in the night watches or icy regret, no assaults of our enemies, can be outside the good Wisdom of Almighty God.”[14]
“[T]here is nothing that requires as gentle a treatment as the removal of an illusion.” It is hard to correct a mistake that concerns one’s entire existence. But there is more to life than just pleasure and judgment. We are more than the mistakes we have made. We belong to a sphere of infinite depth and stillness. Let us walk with Jesus. We have this lifetime to contemplate God’s love for us.
Let us pray: “Father in heaven! That which we in the company of other people, especially in the throng of humanity, have such difficulty learning, and which, if we have learned it elsewhere, is so easily forgotten in the company of other people – what it is to be a human being and what, from a godly standpoint, is the requirement for being a human being – would that we might learn it, or, if it has been forgotten, that we might learn it anew… would that we might learn it, if not all at once, then learn at least something of it, little by little – would that on this occasion we might… learn silence, obedience, joy!”[15]
Søren Kierkegaard’s Prayer
[1] “Either/Or was the first in a series of ‘aesthetic’ works, written for the kind of reader who ‘thinks he is a Christian and yet is living in purely aesthetic categories.’ This is the widespread ‘illusion’ of Christendom: in a culture so steeped in Christianity as nineteenth-century Denmark, it is possible to do all the things expected of a Christian and yet never embark on the task of faith that takes a lifetime – perhaps longer than a lifetime – to accomplish.
Before Kierkegaard began his authorship, he had learned from Socrates that ‘there is nothing that requires as gentle a treatment as the removal of an illusion’ – for a direct confrontation only makes people more defensive and resistant, and strengthens their self-deceptions. It is not easy to correct a mistake that concerns a person’s entire existence. As a Socratic missionary, he has tried to teach his readers ‘not to comprehend Christianity, but to comprehend that they cannot comprehend it’. And so he entered into their illusion in order to draw them out of it: ‘One does not begin directly with what one wishes to communicate, but begins by taking the other’s delusion at face value.
Thus one does not begin in this way: It is Christianity that I am pro-claiming, and you are living in purely aesthetic categories. No, one begins in this way: Let us talk about the aesthetic.”
Clare Carlisle, Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard (NY: Penguin Books, 2019) 132.
Quoting Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View, 43.
[2] Peter J. Gomes, “Beyond Tragedy,” Sermons: Biblical Wisdom for Daily Living (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1998) 68ff.
[3] Clare Carlisle, Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard (NY: Penguin Books, 2019) xv.
[4] Ibid., 24.
[5] Ibid., 28.
[6] Ibid., xviii.
[7] Søren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard’s Writings, VI, Volume 6: Fear and Trembling / Repetition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) 12.
[8] Peter J. Gomes, “Beyond Tragedy,” Sermons: Biblical Wisdom for Daily Living (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1998) 70.
[9] In case we are tempted to sympathize with Pontius Pilate or blame the crowds, we have other non-biblical descriptions of what he was like. The historian Josephus writes about how he ordered Romans to disguise themselves as Jews carrying clubs under their garments and then murdering people in the crowds.
“Two contemporary Jewish authors portray Pilate with characteristics that flatly contradict the equivalent ones in the Gospels. One is his method of dispensing justice, the other is his method of handling crowds.
The philosopher Philo’s On the Embassy to Gaius describes Pilate as “a man of a very inflexible disposition, and very merciless as well as very obstinate.” It speaks of “his corruption, and his acts of insolence, and his rapine, and his habit of insulting people, and his cruelty, and his continual murders of people untried and uncondemned, and his never ending, and gratuitous, and most grievous inhumanity.” Pilate was “exceedingly angry, and . . . at all times a man of most ferocious passions.” Pilate is Philo’s posterboy for a bad governor.
The historian Josephus records, in both The Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews, that an unarmed crowd came before Pilate’s tribunal at coastal Caesarea to demand that he remove from Jerusalem the pagan images on his military standards. He surrounded the crowd with soldiers “three deep,” and people were saved from slaughter only by a willingness for martyrdom. But the next time they tried the same nonviolent resistance, Pilate infiltrated them with soldiers dressed “in Jewish garments, under which they carried clubs,” and “many of them actually were slain on the spot, while some withdrew disabled by blows.”
Finally, according to Jewish Antiquities, the Syrian governor, Vitellius, removed Pilate from office and sent him back to defend himself before the emperor Tiberius in Rome. You can probably guess for what offense. His soldiers attacked a Samaritan crowd on Mount Garizim. The high priest Caiaphas, by the way, was removed from office at the same time, and that ended his ten-year collaboration with Pilate, a collaboration ultimately judged unwise even by Roman imperial interests.”
John Dominic Crossan, “Crowd Control: A Critique of The Passion of the Christ,” The Christian Century, 23 March 2004.
[10] Matthew Boulton, “Palms and Passion, SALT’s Commentary for Palm/Passion Sunday,” SALT 18 March 2024. https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2021/3/23/palms-and-passion-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-palmpassion-sunday
[11] Barbara Brown Taylor, “Worship” in The Preaching Life (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993) 63ff.
[12] Peter J. Gomes, “Beyond Tragedy,” Sermons: Biblical Wisdom for Daily Living (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1998).
[13] Barbara Brown Taylor, “Worship” in The Preaching Life (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993) 63ff.
[14] Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology, Volume 1, The Doctrine of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015) 357.
[15] “Father in heaven! That which we in the company of other people, especially in the throng of humanity, have such difficulty learning, and which, if we have learned it elsewhere, is so easily forgotten in the company of other people – what it is to be a human being and what, from a godly standpoint, is the requirement for being a human being – would that we might learn it, or, if it has been forgotten, that we might learn it anew from the lily and the bird; would that we might learn it, if not all at once, then learn at least something of it, little by little – would that on this occasion we might from the lily and the bird learn silence, obedience, joy!”
Søren Kierkegaard, “The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air,” Three Godly Discourses tr. Bruce H. Kirmmse cited in Clare Carlisle, Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard (NY: Penguin Books, 2019) 263.
Dear Friends,
Many of us have fond memories of the Rev. Mark Stanger, who served with such passion and thoughtfulness at Grace Cathedral over two decades. Some of us have been blessed to join one of his pilgrimages to the Holy Land. Over the years, as Mark traveled to Israel, he formed special relationships with many people, including several families in Gaza.
This week Mark reached out to ask us to help one of these families to get out of Gaza in order to be resettled near relatives they have in Europe. Those of us who are close to Mark have heard him speak fondly of his friends Marwan Abdul Hamed and Razan M. Qudiah and their two very young daughters.
Razan owned a small pharmacy and dermatological clinic while Marwan did software and app development from their home office. Nearly everything they own has been destroyed through the war, and they need to act quickly to save their family.
I will be making a donation on our behalf from the Dean’s Discretionary fund, but I would like to invite you to give also.
Please be sure to join us this Sunday at the 11 am service as we celebrate the ministry of the Rev. Dr. Canon Greg Kimura. Greg has been at Grace Cathedral as Vice Dean for nearly two years and will be leaving to serve as Rector of St. James’ Episcopal Church in South Pasadena. We are very proud of Greg’s new appointment and looking forward to learning more about his ministry there.
Finally, in Bible Study this week, we talked a little about our journey through Lent and the way that we experience God’s presence especially as we are worshiping together during Holy Week. Wherever you are on this pilgrimage, I am praying for you as you travel. Every day I give thanks for the ministry we all do together through God’s grace.
Love,
Malcolm
“We are treated as imposters, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying and see – we are alive; as punished and not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything (2 Cor. 5).”
Why do I love Ash Wednesday so much? It is because of you. You are my Valentine. Although what happens here makes no sense to the people around us in San Francisco you came out on a cold, rainy night to be reminded that our life is passing away. You are here because of your faith.
So many different backgrounds and experiences shaped us, but we share in common a sense that Jesus is inviting us into a life-saving mystery. Tonight let me share a theological idea, a poem and a parable.
1. How well do the people in your life understand you? How does our yearning to be understood change the way that we act? Jesus addresses this question today.
Greek has different words for seeing.1 When we hear repeatedly, “Your Father who sees in secret will reward you,” the word is blepo. It refers to seeing physically, with one’s eyes. But at the very beginning of the passage Jesus uses a different word to warn us to, “beware of practicing your piety/your righteousness before others in order to be seen by them.”2 In this case the Greek word is theathēnai. It means seeing with understanding. It is related to our word for theory or to theorize, but also to that place where we see into various characters, the theater.
The preacher Sam Wells compares the religion of Israel to a great theater. Moses goes up to the peak of Mt. Sinai and emerges through the curtain of clouds carrying the law. King Solomon builds a great temple containing the holy of holies where, concealed by a curtain, the priest encounters God. Jesus takes this theater for granted. It is the theater of keeping the commandments, the theater of “thou shall not.”3
But there is more to faith than merely keeping the commandments and avoiding wrong doing. There is another theater beyond it. This is the theater of holy living. It is the world of “thou shall.” It is what we actually do, how we live as people of faith.
There is a danger in this. In Jesus’ time and now religion can become a theater of performance or appearance. For instance, it can be a way of being recognized for good deeds, such as our generosity in giving. Jesus talks about hypocrites sounding a trumpet before giving to the poor. He warns about praying publicly so that others admire us and seeking praise for make our fasting obvious.
We have a sense for the way that something good we put on social media becomes an effort to look good on social media. Jesus teaches that when religious life becomes a way that we impress others, something very important is lost. And so Jesus redefines the theater. Instead of being actors in front of an audience that is the world, he asks us to be disciples with God as our true audience. And so the locked room of prayer becomes our theater, the place we encounter God.
It is natural to want to be noticed, respected, admired. It makes sense to try to be the center of people’s attention. And that is one of our options. We choose our audience. It can be the crowd. Or it can be God. If it is God we receive a different kind of gift. It is the gift of a secret, a kind of intimacy with God that nothing can break.
The theater of the crowd and the theater of the locked room involve the suspension of disbelief. They have rules like other games. We call the players actors. Strangely enough the Greek word for actor is the same word that Jesus uses in this story. It is hypocrite. It means to pretend to be one thing when we are really another.
In this case there is no way around pretending. Either you pretend to give alms, pray, and fast in order to be seen by the theater of the crowd. Or you in a sense pretend not to give alms, pray and fast, because God is your real audience. This is about faith. In a sense Jesus asks us to live as if we were already part of the next world, as if we had already entered the realm of perfect love.
And to do this we have to be a kind of hypocrite. We have to seem as if we fully embrace this world when deep in our hearts we believe in the next. The follower of Jesus who can give without letting one’s right hand know what the left is doing, will have a unique freedom from material things. A Christian who can pray in secret, will grow closer to God’s way of seeing the world and will be free of the passing illusions of our time. And the person of faith who secretly fasts will soon learn a whole new spiritual landscape and realize that we are more than just our bodies.
2. The Christian farmer-poet Wendell Berry writes about this freedom from the world’s opinions in his poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.” Let me share an excerpt from it.4
“Love the quick profit, the annual raise, / vacation with pay. Want more /of everything ready-made. Be afraid / to know your neighbors and to die. /And you will have a window in your head. / Not even your future will be a mystery / any more. Your mind will be punched in a card / and shut away in a little drawer. / When they want you to buy something / they will call you. When they want you / to die for profit they will let you know. /”
“So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute. Love the Lord. /Love the world. Work for nothing. /Take all that you have and be poor. / Love someone who does not deserve it… / Ask the questions that have no answers.”
“Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. / Say that your main crop is the forest / that you did not plant, / that you will not live to harvest. / … and hear the faint chattering / of the songs that are to come. / Expect the end of the world. Laugh. / Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful / though you have considered all the facts….”
“As soon as the generals and the politicos / can predict the motions of your mind, / lose it. Leave it as a sign / to mark the false trail, the way / you didn’t go. Be like the fox / who makes more tracks than necessary, /some in the wrong direction. / Practice resurrection.”
3. Finally, there is an old Jewish parable that seems so perfect for Ash Wednesday. When God makes each of us we are given a garment to use in this world. In one pocket is ash to remind us that we come from the earth and will eventually return to it. In the other pocket is a letter from God. Addressed to each of us individually it says, “even if you were the only soul on the earth. I would have created everything that exists just for you.”5
Thank you for losing your mind a little with me tonight. Thank you for “seeing with understanding,” for choosing God in the secret theater of the locked room over the crowd. Thank you for living as if you are already part of the next world. Thank you for practicing resurrection every day.
1 Eido is to look with understanding, like when someone tells us a story and we say, “I see.” Blepo is to look with the eyes in a more physical kind of way. Optomai means to appear. Oraō means to see to it or look out for. It is the same word for theaomai. https://www.abarim-publications.com/DictionaryG/e/e-i-d-om.html https://www.billmounce.com/greek-dictionary/theaomai
2 Prose÷cete [de«] th\n dikaiosu/nhn uJmw◊n mh\ poiei√n e¶mprosqen tw◊n aÓnqrw¿pwn pro\ß to\ qeaqhvnai aujtoi√ß: ei˙ de« mh/ ge, misqo\n oujk e¶cete para» twˆ◊ patri« uJmw◊n twˆ◊ e˙n toi√ß oujranoi√ß. Matthew 6:1.
3 The entire first section of this sermon depends on: Sam Wells, “Holiness: Simplicity: Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21,” The Christian Century, 23 February 2000. https://www.christiancentury.org/article/holiness-simplicity?code=wi5dWLGrq0cgW0WFzyHA&utm_source=Christian+Century+Newsletter&utm_campaign=4f1520476d-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_SCP_2024-02-08&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-31c915c0b7-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D
4 “Love the quick profit, the annual raise, / vacation with pay. Want more /of everything ready-made. Be afraid / to know your neighbors and to die. /And you will have a window in your head. / Not even your future will be a mystery / any more. Your mind will be punched in a card / and shut away in a little drawer. / When they want you to buy something / they will call you. When they want you / to die for profit they will let you know. /”
“So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute. Love the Lord. /Love the world. Work for nothing. /Take all that you have and be poor. / Love someone who does not deserve it. / Denounce the government and embrace / the flag. Hope to live in that free / republic for which it stands. / Give your approval to all you cannot / understand. Praise ignorance, for what man / has not encountered he has not destroyed. /Ask the questions that have no answers.”
“Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. / Say that your main crop is the forest / that you did not plant, / that you will not live to harvest. / Say that the leaves are harvested / when they have rotted into the mold. / Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. / Put your faith in the two inches of humus / that will build under the trees / every thousand years. /”
“Listen to carrion—put your ear close, / and hear the faint chattering / of the songs that are to come. / Expect the end of the world. Laugh. / Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful / though you have considered all the facts. /”
“So long as women do not go cheap / for power, please women more than men. / Ask yourself: Will this satisfy / a woman satisfied to bear a child? / Will this disturb the sleep / of a woman near to giving birth? / Go with your love to the fields. / Lie easy in the shade. / Rest your head in her lap. Swear allegiance / to what is nighest your thoughts. /”
“As soon as the generals and the politicos / can predict the motions of your mind, / lose it. Leave it as a sign / to mark the false trail, the way / you didn’t go. Be like the fox / who makes more tracks than necessary, /some in the wrong direction. / Practice resurrection.” Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front,” Collected Poems 1957-1982 (San Francisco, CA: North Point Press, 1984) 151-2.
5 Melia Young told me this parable she learned in Mexico on Ash Wednesday Valentine’s Day.
“Come Holy Spirit. Heal and deepen and strengthen our hearts. Amen.”
This week my friend Taylor asked a difficult question. He’s about thirty and works in technology. Religion simply does not make sense for most people around him. Taylor has undertaken a tremendous challenge. He is reading 177 great books from Socrates to Heidegger. He said, “My faith is so new and fragile. It has completely transformed my life but I worry that something I read or learn might undo it.”1
Today we will consider this question in light of two of the most powerful religious experiences in recorded history. Some of you know that in one month I lost two of the most important spiritual friends and teachers of my life: my college chaplain Peter Haynes and our former dean Alan Jones. During one of the busiest weeks of December I went back to Orange County for Peter’s funeral. Our old church, St. Michael and All Angel’s in Corona del Mar, had hardly changed.
Since I arrived a few hours early I went walking around the U.C. Irvine campus. Winter holidays meant that I probably saw only three people. On that glorious day the sycamore trees were shining. Suddenly I found myself outside my old office and it all came rushing back to me.
My wife Heidi and I were barely acquainted when she met me at that reception desk for the first time. When she hugged me I had this overwhelming feeling that we were connected. Words really fail me here but it seemed like a part of her spirit came into my heart at that moment. I felt like someone who had been in the dark coming suddenly into bright light. No one else noticed. Heidi did not at all feel the same way. But thirty years later that place brought the moment back as if it had only happened an hour ago.
My point is that moments of transcendence come and go. Not even everyone who is present shares the same feeling about what is happening or even notices that something special has occurred. We want to hold onto it but life always sweeps us forward.2
1. Text. In the Second Book of Kings the prophet Elijah puts his mantle, his cloak on his student Elisha. Later, “the Lord [is] about to take Elijah up to heaven” (2 Kings 2). As he
walks along with Elisha, Elijah keeps repeating, “Stay here, for the Lord has sent me to…” and refers to each of several places (Bethel, Jericho, the Jordan). Elisha says, “As the Lord lives, and as you yourself live, I will not leave you.” Elisha goes to the end.
As God takes Elijah into heaven, Elisha cries out “Father, Father… when he [can] no longer see him, he [grasps] his own clothes and [tears] them to pieces.” Elisha loved his teacher so deeply. Maybe he also worried about becoming the teacher himself, about being alone without his mentor. Last week Cricket gave me Alan’s clothes, his cloaks. I have been wearing them and I have been wondering the same thing myself. We are always being challenged to grow in spiritual maturity even when we resist.
The second text comes from the exact midpoint of Mark’s Gospel. The first eight chapters are the ascent as Jesus offers healing and liberation to everyone he encounters. The last half follow him as his enemies gather strength and ultimately kill him. Just before this fulcrum however Jesus introduces the most difficult teaching of all. The greatest one does not amass earthly power or earn a kind of exemption from suffering. The Holy One and we who follow go into the darkness in order to serve.
In the dreamlike story of the transfiguration Jesus wears brilliantly shining clothes as he speaks to two prophets (who are also murderers). Some people see a connection to Jesus’ baptism and also to his death on a cross next to two criminals. For me what matters most is the mystical revelation that Jesus is God’s child. Seeing ourselves and other people as children of God is the most important spiritual realization of all.
2. Doctrine. For me, this is the central truth of faith. Let me talk about two other ideas related to this. This first part is a little hard to understand. The twentieth century theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) writes about what it means to experience the resurrected Jesus. He writes, “The apostles witnessed… Jesus… in a real encounter, themselves on one side, alive but moving forward to death, and He on the other, alive from the dead, alive no more to die, alive eternally even now in time… He made known to them this side of His (and their) death wholly in light of the other side, and therefore that He made known to them the other side, His (and their) life beyond, wholly in terms of this side.”3
The purpose of these stories is for us to see the reality of our life from the perspective of eternity and to see our home in eternity from the perspective of this life. This is another way of talking about being children of God. When we realize that we are children of God, that we are intimately connected to eternity, we experience what Alan Jones used to describe as “living from the heart.”
Alan used to quote Ibn ‘Arabi (1165-1240), a great Muslim mystic, who wrote, “the greatest sin is what brings about the death of the heart. It dies only by not knowing God. For the heart is the house that God has chosen for himself, but such a person has taken over the house, coming between it and its owner.” Alan goes on saying when we are separate from our heart we wrong ourselves. “[S]o many of us are experts at self-sabotage because we are not in touch with the heart.”4
3. Application. So how do we realize ourselves and others as children of God? How do we grow in consciousness of eternity? How do we live from the heart? Let me close with two examples. In his memoir Laurens van der Post (1906-1996) writes about two brothers who grew up in South Africa. They were six years apart in age. The older one was handsome, athletic, reliable, intelligent and a kind of natural leader. The younger one was also very capable but suffered from a terribly bent spine. He also had an incredible singing voice.5
Eventually the younger brother came to the boarding school where the older one was an admired leader. There were some embarrassing moments. One time a group of boys ganged up against the younger brother. Jeering at him they ripped off his shirt to expose his back. The older brother could hear this happening and did not go to rescue his younger brother. He could have intervened but he did nothing. And the younger brother was never the same again. He went back home to the farm and lived as a kind of recluse. And sadly, he never, never sang again.
Later the older brother was stationed in Palestine during World War II. Looking up at the night sky he woke up to what he had done. He knew he had to acknowledge what had happened and ask for forgiveness. He made the difficult wartime journey home. The two brothers talked long into the night with the older brother apologizing. They cried and embraced and the breach between them was healed.
After they both had gone to bed, deep in the night, the older brother was awakened by the sound of his brother singing – beautifully. That is what forgiving does. It enables us to find a voice for singing. Grace Cathedral is a place where we sing together. It is a place where we try to live from the heart.
From the children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit, let me share a conversation between an older toy and a younger one. “What is REAL?” asked Rabbit when they were lying side by side…, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?” “Real isn’t how you are made,” said Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you…””
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit. “Sometimes,” said Skin Horse… he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt… It doesn’t happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand… once you become Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.”6
If one could say what God is, that would not be God. God is not an idea or an argument, God is revealed to us in moments of transcendence. God is the meaning, the holiness that transfigures us when we are in touch with our hearts and the world.
Yesterday Taylor had more to say about how a Christian should respond to atheists. He writes, “I used to be so interested in “apologetics” – in finding the perfect, irrefutable response to any line of attack on my faith… but I think I’m coming to realize that the correct response to a staunch atheist is to show through my life what God has done for me, and to love them and see God even in their critique itself.”7
Encountering God is like falling in love with someone you do not yet know. It is being reconciled to your long lost brother. It is living from the heart and becoming real forever. May the fiery chariots of heaven, and the pure brightness of the prophets always guide you closer to our true home in God. Come Holy Spirit. Heal and deepen and strengthen our hearts. Amen.
1 He reads about atheists who argue that our religious impulses amount to no more than the misfiring of neurons in our brains. Conversation on Thursday 8 November 2024.
2 Today’s sermon follows the same structure that the old puritans used. We will start with the texts, then a doctrine that arises from them and then applications to consider what they might mean.
3 Karl Barth, “The Doctrine of Reconciliation,” Church Dogmatics Volume IV, tr. G.W. Bromiley (New York: T&T Clark, 2004) 352-3.
4 “And we are called to be a community of the heart first by affirming that God, Christ, the word is present in every human heart. And second, that God’s presence in every human heart is confirmed and strengthened and celebrated in our two great sacraments of baptism. And the Eucharist and the religion of the heart is simple and universal. And without heart we are nothing. A great Muslim mystic Ibi said, the greatest sin is what brings about the death of the heart. It dies only by not knowing God. For the heart is the house that God has chosen for himself, but such a person has taken over the house, coming between it and its owner.”
“A person like that is one who most wrongs himself. A person like that is the one who most wrongs himself. And it’s true that so many of us are experts at self-sabotage because we’re not in touch with the heart. And as a community of the heart, we know we have to learn to forgive each other and forgive ourselves. Just listen to the readings. For today, communities like ours tend to miss the point and betray their vision. And yet, and yet God still loves us and comes looking for us, there’s always room.” Alan Jones, “Living from the Heart,” Grace Cathedral Sermon transcript, September 2004.
5 “I read last week a memoir of Laurens van der Post who tells a story from South Africa. It’s a story about two brothers. The elder was handsome and athletic and bright and capable and out there and a natural leader. The younger by some six years was not very capable and was also deformed. He was a hunchback, said Laurens van der Post. But he did have a magnificent singing voice. When the younger brother, when the younger brother joined his elder at boarding school where the older brother was an admired leader, there were some embarrassing moments, particularly there was a cruel incident when a group of boys ganged up on the younger brother jeered at him, tore off his shirt to reveal his back and his brother, the older brother could hear this happening and he didn’t go and rescue his younger brother, he did nothing. He could have intervened and acknowledge his brother, but he decided to stay where he was.
He betrayed his brother and the younger brother was never the same again. He went home to the farm and became reclusive. And the sad thing is that he never, never sang again. Later, the older brother as a soldier in World War II was stationed in Palestine one night looking at the the night sky. He woke up to the fact of what he’d done. He knew he would never have peace in his heart until he went home and asked his brothers forgiveness. And amazing as it seems, he was able to make the incredibly difficult wartime journey from Palestine to South Africa. And he met his brother. The brothers talked long into the night, the elder brother confessing his guilt and remorse, they both cried, embraced, and the breach between them was healed. Later when they had both gone to bed, the older brother was woken up by the sound of singing.
It was his brother singing beautifully and in full voice. I think that’s what forgiving does. It enables others to find a voice for singing. And we are a community where every voice needs to be heard and sing out. Oh my God, it’s wonderful where a community active for justice because a community of the heart has to be. Robert Coles, the psychiatrist tells of a young man from Birmingham, Alabama speaking in 1965. He said, I don’t know why I put myself on the line. I don’t know why I said no to segregation. I’m just another white southerner. And I wasn’t brought up to love integration, but I was brought up to love Jesus Christ. And when I saw the police of this city use dogs on people, I asked myself what Jesus Christ would’ve thought and what he would’ve done. And that’s all I know about how I came to be here on the firing line.” Ibid.
6 Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit, Illustrated by Monique Felix (Mankato, MN: Creative Editions, 1994) 10-11.
7 From Taylor: “I will leave you with a section of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, which I finished today. I thought of you and that you might agree with his words as much as I did.”
“I was only then
Contented when with bliss ineffable
I felt the sentiment of being, spread
O’er all that moves, and all that seemeth still;
O’er all that, lost beyond the reach of thought
And human knowledge, to the human eye
Invisible, yet liveth to the heart;
O’er all that leaps, and runs, and shouts, and sings,
Or beats the gladsome air; o’er all that glides
Beneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself
And mighty depth of waters. Wonder not
If such my transports were, for in all things
I saw one life, and felt that it was joy;
One song they sang, and it was audible-
Most audible then when the fleshly ear,
O’ercome by grosser prelude of that strain,
Forgot its functions and slept undisturbed.
If this be error, and another faith
Find easier access to the pious mind,
Yet were I grossly destitute of all
Those human sentiments which make this earth
So dear, if I should fail with grateful voice
To speak of you, ye mountains and ye lakes
And sounding cataracts, ye mists and winds
That dwell among the hills where I was born.
If in my youth I have been pure in heart,
If, mingling with the world, I am content
With my own modest pleasures, and have lived
With God and nature communing, removed
From little enmities and low desires,
The gift is yours – if in these times of fear,
This melancholy waste of hopes o’erthrown,
If, mid indifference and apathy
And wicked exultation, when good men
On every side fall off, we know not how,
To selfishness (disguised in gentle names
Of peace and quiet and domestic love,
Yet mingled, not unwillingly, with sneers
On visionary minds), if in this time
Of dereliction and dismay I yet
Despair not of our nature, but retain
A more than Roman confidence, a faith
That fails not, in all sorrow my support,
The blessing of my life, the gift is yours,
Ye mountains, thine o nature! Thou hast fed
My lofty speculations, and in thee
For this uneasy heart of ours I find
A never-failing principle of joy
And purest passion.”
“Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint” (Isa. 40).
For a moment imagine what it feels like to be Jesus. You go to visit your friends’ hometown and quietly heal their mother-in-law. Twenty minutes later, before you can finish eating dinner, the entire town has crowded around the door. You immediately get to work healing people. They look into your eyes with such gratitude as you bring peace to their tortured inner lives. They love you. You work late into the night. You can only get away to be by yourself at 3:00 a.m.
Over time because there are always more people to heal, you try to sleep less every night, maybe even spend less time eating or talking with friends. This gift of healing might begin to feel like a curse. Every moment could seem like it had been stolen from a sick person whose suffering is so much greater than the effort it takes you to make them whole. You think traffic is irritating now, imagine how it would be if you knew that by driving on the shoulder to the Civic Center exit you could save twenty people’s lives. It would be far easier to feel impatient with the people who you are supposed to love.[1]
I believe in demons. Even the greatest, holiest gift imaginable would raise up demons for me because I am not completely centered in God.
Although we believe in Jesus, the language of demon possession is even more foreign to most of us than the ancient Greek of the New Testament. No one in our ordinary life talks about demons. Usually we use the language of science for experiences that we used to call demonic. But sometimes we need this vocabulary.
For three years in college I worked as a Residence Advisor, an R.A. in the only all-male residence hall in the University of California system. We had two hundred young men who got into enough trouble for a year’s worth of sermon stories. I remember one freshman from Orange County named Todd. His parents gave him a red convertible sports car as a high school graduation gift. In October he drove it up to a Grateful Dead concert in Oregon.
Todd had never used drugs before, but that afternoon he tried LSD. The rational, reasonable, recognizable self that he had always been disappeared. This previously clean-cut, conservative-looking eighteen year old slipped into insanity. He abandoned his car and hitchhiked home, no doubt scaring everyone who stopped to help him.
When he returned to Bowles Hall, the demons completely controlled him. His roommates called me to help and I found him squatting on the top of a five-foot high chest of drawers next to an open sixth floor window. “I am the devil,” he yelled. “I must destroy the light!” He reached into a Costco-sized bucket of mayonnaise with his bare hand and ate it. He hissed, “I’m Jesus and I must destroy the darkness!” And proceeded to drink directly out of a half-liter coke bottle.
Somehow I managed to get him away from the open window and ultimately we had him committed to the psychiatric floor of a nearby hospital. I have two reasons for telling you about this. The first is that I am grateful we have trained scientific professionals who have experience with a broad range of psychological problems. They have helped me in countless ways.
I don’t think that Christians can dispense with the language of demon possession. There is something mysterious, unknown and unexplainable at the heart of our inner life. We shouldn’t dismiss demons as merely a primitive pre-scientific understanding of mental illness. Let’s talk about two pictures of reality, two worldviews.
1. The first is the modern scientific picture that comes naturally to all of us. Like the demonic picture, it teaches about unseen realities that influence our health. It refers to bacteria, brain chemistry, the glandular system and genetics to explain disease. Like Jesus it teaches that our suffering is not the result of sin. But a scientific view also does not have much room for grace, for unexpected help from God.
In the past the scientific worldview has not carefully studied the effect of our spiritual state on our physical well-being. If viruses or misfiring neurons cause bad health, it doesn’t make much sense to examine whether a person has given themselves over to hopelessness or despair. In the past the scientific picture often made a strong distinction between the physical world and the mental one. As a result it had a hard time understanding the health effect of our inner life.
The modern picture also implies an idea of what it means to be normal. It presumes that illness only afflicts a small number of us at any time. The rest of us are normal. According to this understanding there is no such thing as sin which afflicts everyone. There is only the dividing line between the healthy majority and those whom the doctors are trying to fix. This picture also has a pretty hard time with evil. Modern people understand the way that out of self-interest people cause others harm. But real evil makes no sense in this system at all.
Remember when I preached about that beautiful John Lennon song “Imagine?” “Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you can. No hell below us. Above us only sky. Imagine all the people living for the day…” Or have you ever been in an argument with someone who asserts that they can’t believe in religion because it causes so many wars? These sum up this picture of life that says the normal state is one of health and peace. This image sets us up to be surprised by politics, conflict and war. One thing I appreciate about the demonic picture is that it reminds us that we cannot even be at peace with ourselves.
2. As I said earlier, in medical emergencies, for eating disorders, addictions, and mental illness I depend heavily on experts who rely on scientific methods. At the same time however, I’ve already alluded to some problems with looking at the world exclusively in this way. Someone should write a book called “I’m Not Okay, You’re Not Okay” about the universality of sin.
This is one advantage of the demonic picture. In it there is no such thing as a normal person. Demons afflict all people but at varying levels of intensity at different times. This view also holds that often we cannot understand why we experience healing. It helps us to accept the feeling of freedom or relief coming from beyond us, from God.[2]
The first part of the sermon opened the possibility that you too might begin to believe in the demonic. Not so much in the extreme situations when you should be consulting a psychiatrist but in more ordinary moments as you make sense of the world.
This second part will help you to recognize demons. For me the demonic distorts or destroys the image of God in you or another person. These voices tell us to perceive ourselves or others as something less than God’s children.
In the fourth century Constantine (272-337) became the Roman emperor and after the Edict of Milan (313) Christianity was no longer illegal. Faith in Jesus went from being an outlaw religion to being useful for moving up the social ladder. Some Christians deplored this. They moved out into the Egyptian desert and started Christian monasticism as they tried to perfect themselves in holiness. People of the time called them ascetics or spiritual athletes and they dedicated themselves to fighting demons.
These desert fathers and mothers believed that demons act through our thoughts to arouse emotions that draw us away from God. Solitude helps us to identify these demons; prayer, self-observation and knowledge helps us to prevail against them.
Evagrius Ponticus (345-399) writes about this battle. “The demon of acedia (boredom, indifference) – also called the noonday demon – is one that causes the most serious trouble of all. He presses his attack upon the monk about the fourth hour and besieges the soul until the eight hour, First of all he makes it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all and that the day is fifty hours long… (etc.). Then too he inspires in the heart of the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his very life itself…”[3]
In the movie The Greatest Game Ever Played ghostly figures from the golfers’ troubled childhoods stand on the other side of the putting green. Our demons are like that. They say, “You can’t do this,” or “You deserve what is happening to you,” or “That teacher was right – you’ll never amount to much,” or “There’s no point in trying anything different,” or “She should be the one who apologizes to you!” To draw us away from God a demon could say something as simple as “I’m right.” We fight these demons in the way that Jesus does, by relying on prayer and by silencing these voices through acts of love.
This brings us to an answer for our opening problem. If Jesus has such power to heal why would he do anything else? When the disciples find him praying in a deserted place he tells them, I must move on to proclaim my message in neighboring towns. His work of healing and casting out demons seem secondary to teaching people that they are God’s children, that they can do this work themselves. The ministry of healing and casting out demons that one man inspired twenty centuries ago is what over 2.3 billion Christians do today.
The author Chaim Potok’s mother wanted him to be a surgeon. She reasoned with him that he could be well paid and save lives too. He replied, “I don’t want to keep people from dying. I want to show them how to live.” [4] In this time when demons of fear and uncertainty possess our country, and even sometimes our church, we as Christians must show people another way. This means talking about the God of love to people who see nothing more than a world with neither sin nor salvation.
Alan Jones used to refer to what he called “the believer’s secret.” He calls this the lifelong process of exchanging, “our living death for God’s dying life.” It is “per crucem ad lucem and per angusta ad augusta: through the cross to the light and through the narrows to the heights.” “To know that one is a sinner, and at the same time, to know one is standing in the grace and love of God,” this leads to joy, “the joy that is the mark of the believer.”[5]
At Alan Jones’ funeral a week and a half ago we had a family reunion of a tribe of people who believe in a more generous picture of what it means to follow Jesus. We are this family and the world needs us. We have a consciousness of sin and a kind of joy, an appreciation for beauty, a confidence in God’s love that means that we do not need to always set everybody else straight. Pray for each of us as we use these gifts to cast out demons and bring healing to our world.
[1] 5 Epiphany (2-8-09) B. P5.
[2] In Roald Dahl’s children’s book The Witches the hero’s kindly grandmother tells him, “you won’t last long in this world if you don’t know how to spot a witch when you see one.”
Roald Dahl, The Witches (NY: Penguin, 1983), 14.
[3] “The demon of acedia (boredom, indifference) – also called the noonday demon – is one that causes the most serious trouble of all. He presses his attack upon the monk about the fourth hour and besieges the soul until the eighth hour, First of all he makes it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all, and that the day is fifty hours long. Then he constrains the monk to look constantly out the windows, to walk outside the cell, to gaze carefully at the sun to determine how far it stands from the ninth hour, to look now this way and now that to see if perhaps one of the brothers appears from his cell. Then too he inspires in the heart of the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his very life itself, a hatred for manual labor. He leads him to reflect that charity has departed from among the brethren, that there is no one to give encouragement. Should there be someone at this period that offends him in some way or other, this too the demon uses to further contribute to his hatred. This demon drives him along to desire other sites where he can more easily procure life’s necessities, more readily find work, and make a real success of himself. He goes on to suggest that, after all, it is not the place that is the basis for pleasing the Lord. God is to be adored everywhere. He joins to these reflections the memory of his dear ones and of his former way of life. He depicts life stretching out for a long period of time, and brings before the mind’s eye the toil of the ascetic struggle, and… leaves no stone unturned to induce the monk to forsake his cell and drop out of the fight.”
Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos 12, from Margaret R. Miles, The Word Made Flesh: A History of Christian Thought (Malden, MA:Blackwell Press, 2005), 87.
[4] Peter Haynes, “This is What I Came to Do” http://rockhay.tripod.com/sermons/2000/00-02-06.html
[5] “St. Simeon, the New Theologian, sees the true baptism of the Spirit as the baptism of tears — the great photismos — the illumination by which a person becomes all light. Tears are part of the process by which the believer is made anew in Jesus Christ through the gift of the Spirit. Tears are an antidote to the passions (by which is meant that shifting, unfree, unintegrated part of ourselves). And in this tradition, sadness is considered to be one of the enslaving passions. To know that one is a sinner and, at the same time, to know that one is standing in the grace and love of God is what the gift of tears is all about.
True penthos, therefore, guards against despair and discouragement. St. John Chrysostom writes in one of his letters: “Even in the case of our own faults, for which we will be held account-able, it is not necessary or prudent—it is even very harmful-to afflict ourselves excessively … Let no sinner despair, let no man trust in his virtue…” (p. 163). It is not a matter of repressing our emotions and feelings so much as one of winning them back. We ache for their restoration, not their destruction.
This is at the heart of what we might call “the believer’s secret,” which is the exchange of our living death for God’s dying life. This is one of the many ways in which the apparent contradiction of the Christian life is expressed. There is per crucem ad lucem and per angusta ad augusta: through the cross to the light and through the narrows to the heights. The end of it all is joy.
It was precisely for this that we were created. St. Irenaeus said that God made us in “order that he might have someone in whom to place his great gifts.”? Joy, always joy, is the mark of the believer. As St. Francis de Sales said, “A sad saint is a sorry saint.””
Alan Jones, Soul Making: The Desert Way of Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985) 104.
Dear Friends,
It was such a pleasure to see so many people at the Memorial Service we had for Alan Jones on Wednesday. People traveled thousands of miles to be here and the cathedral was full of his friends. It was the most powerful experience I remember ever having here, a true family reunion that included friends I had not visited with in decades. It made me feel so grateful for each of us and for this great cathedral that brings us together and to God whose spirit we see here.
This Sunday, Bishop Marc Andrus will be with us for his official visitation and our Annual Meeting (which starts at 9:30 am and will be in the Nave). This will be a chance for us to reflect on the ministry we do together as a congregation and to learn more about what the future might hold for us. The annual meeting will be in person but also broadcast online.
On Sunday afternoon, our new trustees will begin the first of two orientation sessions. They will be joined by our newest staff member, Louise Gregory. Louise will be doing the work that Katherine Thompson did as our Canon for Development.
Louise comes to us from her role as Executive Director of Development at the University Library at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was responsible for raising $150 million in 6 years for the University’s Light the Way campaign, which included $60 million for the renovation of the Moffitt Undergraduate Library into a new Center for Connected Learning.
Louise has a 30-year track record of development success in higher education and cultural organizations, and during her career, she has worked on five capital campaigns, at the Oakland Museum, California Academy of Sciences, the Exploratorium, the Berkeley Art Museum, and Pacific Film Archive, and at the University Library. She has extensive experience partnering with boards of trustees and staff colleagues to raise funds and visibility for the organizations she serves.
A native of Georgia, Louise has a B.A. in French and English from Hollins University and an M.A. in Museum Studies from San Francisco State University, and she lives in San Francisco with her husband, Joe Scanga. She has attended many events at Grace Cathedral over the years and looks forward to meeting everyone soon.
Louise’s official biography does not directly mention it, but she is a very lively person and will bring great skills and energy to our life together.
May God bless and keep you today and always!
Love,
Malcolm
The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young
Dean of Grace Cathedral
Alan William Jones (March 5, 1940 – January 14, 2024)
“Oh my God, you are here. Oh my God, I am here. Oh my God, we are here. Amen.”[1]
The next time you see a picture of destruction in Gaza think of Alan Jones. Alan’s first memories include the time when all the windows on his street were blown out by bombs during World War II. The war terrified Alan’s brother John who was nine years older, but Alan mostly remembers one time after the warning sirens when his mother read Rupert Bear to him under a table.
My mother and Alan grew up in England as exact contemporaries – they may have walked by each other in London at Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. Mom went through life in horror that the Germans had bombed children. Alan on the other hand recalled that during wartime people were cheerful, kinder and more supportive of each other.[1]
In a sermon preached here Alan referred to the psychiatrist R.D. Laing (1927-1989) who just before his death said that human beings are afraid of three things: 1. Other people, 2. “The noise in our own heads, in our own minds,” and of course, 3. Death. Alan said that although we pretend not to be afraid, we are. And this fear keeps us imprisoned “behind… a wall of indifference.”[2] He said we owe it to ourselves to wake up, to be aware of the fears in other people and ourselves.
Alan described his father as a “rough and ready” skilled laborer who had little time for the church. Although he died when Alan was twelve years old, Alan remembered him as a person of integrity, who loved the truth and had an earthy sense of humor.[3] When I think of Alan’s dad, a stonemason and bricklayer, I have a picture in my imagination of the burly native Hawaiians who move huge boulders in the river so that people can cross over when the waters inevitably rise.
Alan did something like this for us. As each of us makes our journey from one shore to the other, from fear to faith, we pass over the stones that Alan placed for us. He was a kind of contractor or architect of the inner life. Or to change the metaphor Alan preached, “When I think of how much time I waste on worry, I think of my life spent in the shopping mall of my imagination… One misses a bus or a plane. Have I missed my life?”[4] Alan was a conductor who made sure we didn’t miss our lives.
In his book Soul Making Alan writes, “My beliefs are not mine, they belong to all those who believe. I do, however, have my own way of believing, and while it is peculiar to me, it is by no means universal.”[5] This afternoon I am going to speak about Alan’s way of believing, three chapters on generosity, the school of love and our one family.
1. Generosity. Alan showed us that true faith is generous. He used the word constantly. It comes from the Greek word related to our words beget and generate.[6] Alan always said, “There are those for whom religion provides all the answers, and there are those for whom the answers, as important as they are, only lead to deeper and more disturbing questions.”[7] He was of the latter sort. He said, “it was not difficult for me to embrace contradictions.”[8] Alan was generous – generous to people of other faiths and no faith, to strangers, artists, the LGBTQ+ community, colleagues, friends and family.
The word “home” as a metaphor was difficult for Alan. He grew up in a tiny, cramped cold water flat and never wanted to go back. Although his parents regarded religion as something for middle and upper class people, they found it convenient to enroll Alan in an evangelical Sunday School during his grade school years. He began singing in a church choir and was famously present at Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in Westminster Abbey (a little over a month ago he sang parts of “Zadok the Priest” to me).
Alan speaks with awe about the first time he experienced an Anglo Catholic liturgy and always trusted in the unity of the flesh and spirit. Alan often repeated that, “In those days one could move through the whole ecumenical movement without leaving the Church of England.”[9] For Alan, “believing was a kind of moving target… Other religions and all honest questioning… are part of God’s plan…Beliefs are a kind of ladder. When we get to our destination, the ladder can be kicked away.”[10]
2. School for Love. Above all Alan called faith a romance, a love story, an experience of God calling us and our response. He frequently described our existence as “a school for love” and thanked his children in particular for what they taught him. In his mature years Alan wrote a book encouraging ordained people to rediscover their calling. “My vision of an ordained person is that of a lover in a mad love affair.”[11] Part of what Alan liked about this metaphor is the mystery involved in it. He believed that although we desire explanations, “a human being is deeply hurt when he or she is seen only as a set of problems and not as an unfathomable mystery.”[12]
Alan honestly writes, “I have always been a somewhat reluctant believer, partly out of embarrassment and snobbery with regard to my fellow believers and partly because of the daring enormity of our beliefs.”[13] At one point Alan described the calling he felt to be a priest from age 15 as like a persistent toothache, an attraction to a crucified savior that psychologists would regard as unhealthy. He often called it falling in love.
When Alan asked an Irish Churchman if he should attend seminary with the monks in Mirfield or at more secular Oxford, that advisor told him that if he went to Oxford he could be a bishop, but if he went to Mirfield he might become a saint. Alan says, “being somewhat naïve and arrogant I opted for sainthood but [that didn’t go] too well.”[14] Alan’s point is that he was swept away by the romance. From the beginning he was more interested in falling in love than gaining power.
3. One Human Family. Thousands of times Alan said we are all part of one human family, that God loves everyone without exception. At Mirfield the monks taught him, “to believe in God as a means of saving me from believing in everything else… [from] giving my ultimate allegiance to anything else – to science, political ideology, instinct.”[15]
Alan defines decadence as “the state of believing that futility and absurdity are normal.” He writes that the way out of this is, “to recover the life of the imagination and to see the religious impulse as natural to us.”[16] Alan loves the joke about the messenger arriving at the Vatican who says, the Good News is that Jesus is coming! The bad news is that he’s coming to Salt Lake City. Alan says the real, “good news is that we are lovable and we are loved… The bad news is that we neither know nor believe it.”[17]
Maybe one of the things we love the most about Alan is his vulnerability. He was very open about his own personal failures. He wrote about how he felt that the world began to slip away from him sometime in the eighties and how he never fully recovered.[18]
A similar thing happened to him in seminary. During a crisis of faith the dean of Alan’s seminary would take him for afternoon walks along the moors. Alan said, “I received nothing but receptivity and love… It was as if he could see into my deepest self. He was able to show me that God loved me all the way through. He was the bearer of the miracle that I mattered… my struggle with other aspects of Christian belief are insignificant with the difficulty I have in accepting that I am loved.”[19]
Alan has always found that, “our resistance to the delight at the heart of all things” is dissipated by our connection to other people.[20] And that is how Alan found his way again when he became lost. He found his way through the love of the people in his family, his school of love, and through the care of this community. Your love showed Alan that in Ernest Hemmingway’s words, “life breaks all of us, but some grow. Some people grow at the broken places.”[21]
I have not even mentioned Alan’s love of theater and the arts, all that he did to build up everything that we see here, his friendship with Bill Swing and other colleagues here. I didn’t mention that he was my mentor even as we waited in the hallway for him to be admitted into the emergency room.
Thank you Alan for gathering us together, for placing the stones that we pass over in our pilgrimage from fear to faith. Thank you for showing us how to be generous, that this world is a school for love, that we are one human family.
No one knows what happens when you die, but I can imagine it being like walking through the moors and then into Alan’s warm study with books stacked everywhere. He looks up from his writing desk with a smile and says, “I’m so glad you are here.”
We started with just the first half of the prayer Alan intended to be used for people who are dying. I guess that means it is for each of us.
Alan said, “I will leave you with a prayer that one of the Franciscans left with me. “Oh my God, you are here. Oh my God, I am here. Oh my God, we are here and always, always, always you love us and always, always you love us. May the angels of God watch over you. May Mary and all the saints pray for you and the blessing of God be with you always.”
[1] “Dean Alan Jones of Grace Cathedral: Oral History,” Interview transcript with Michael Lampen, Grace Cathedral Archives.
[2] “What makes us then fall asleep in the comfort of our freedom? What keeps us imprisoned behind the wall of indifference? What inhibits our going deeper? The psychiatrist R.D. Laing declared just before his death that we are all afraid of three things, other people, the noise in our own heads, our own minds, and of course death. We owe it to each other, you see? And we owe it to these babies. We owe it to each other to be awake and aware and to be awake and aware in these three areas of other people, not seeing them as enemies of being aware of what goes in our on, in our heads and our own certain death.”
Alan Jones, “To Deepen and Be Deepened,” Sermon transcript ed. Niall Battson.
[3] Alan Jones, Soul Making: The Desert Way of Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985) xi.
[4] “When I think of how much time I waste on worry I, I think of my life spent in the shopping mall of my imagination. And how much of my time is wasted on worrying and fretting? I wonder if it’s possible to miss one’s life in much the same way. One misses a bus or a plane. Have I missed my life? How much of my life has slipped away? Slipped by how much I have? I courted death while I was looking for life. And now and now by the grace of God. The story of the secret of life comes by one more time. Listen again to the description of another kind of community. They love one another. They never fail to help widows. They save orphans from those who would hurt them. And if they have something, they freely give to the one who has nothing.
Alan Jones, “Life Breaks All of Us, But Some Grow. Some Grow at the Broken Places,” Sermon transcript ed. Niall Battson.
[5] Alan Jones, Soul Making: The Desert Way of Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985) 5.
[6] In the Prologue to the Gospel of John ginomai and gennao appear. Making and begetting are connected to generosity.
[7] Alan Jones, Sacrifice and Delight: Spirituality for Ministry (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1992) 6.
[8] Alan Jones, Reimagining Christianity: Reconnect Your Spirit without Disconnecting Your Mind (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2005) xv.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Alan Jones, Reimagining Christianity: Reconnect Your Spirit without Disconnecting Your Mind (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2005) xvii.
[11] Alan Jones, Sacrifice and Delight: Spirituality for Ministry (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1992) 1.
[12] Ibid., 3.
[13] Ibid., 4-5.
[14] “Dean Alan Jones of Grace Cathedral: Oral History,” Interview transcript with Michael Lampen, Grace Cathedral Archives.
[15] Alan Jones, Reimagining Christianity: Reconnect Your Spirit without Disconnecting Your Mind (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2005) xvii.
[16] Ibid., xxiv.
[17] Alan Jones, Soul Making: The Desert Way of Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985) 2.
[18] Alan Jones, Reimagining Christianity: Reconnect Your Spirit without Disconnecting Your Mind (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2005) xix.
[19] Alan Jones, Exploring Spiritual Direction: An Essay on Christian Friendship (Minneapolis, MN: Seabury Press, 1982) 6.
[20] Alan Jones, Sacrifice and Delight: Spirituality for Ministry (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1992) x.
[21] “Ernest Hemingway wrote, life Breaks all of us. Life breaks all of us, but some people grow at the broken places. And the good news is for broken people. And this is God’s mysterious work among us. This is the work of Lent. The biblical writers thought of this mending, this growing at the broken places in terms of restoring the covenant, the relationship we have with God, putting the world to rights by a God who suffers the passion of God and God’s passion for us.” Alan Jones, “Life Breaks All of Us, But Some Grow. Some Grow at the Broken Places,” Sermon transcript ed. Niall Battson.
Dear Cathedral Family,
Our Dean Emeritus Alan Jones’ death this week is such a loss for us. I just came out of our weekly clergy meeting. We feel his absence so profoundly. I’m very grateful for all the people who reached out to the cathedral by email and through social media, sharing stories about his life.
Alan’s funeral will be at 2 pm on Wednesday, January 24, 2024.
For a few of you, Alan’s death seemed very sudden. Since mid-August, Alan’s health has been declining, and over the last few weeks, he has grown uncharacteristically silent. Alan has been very ill over the last five months, although we have also had some profound conversations during that time. I’m very grateful for the way Cricket took care of Alan over these last years. She had such a tender way with him every day as she helped him manage ordinary concerns and spiritual ones too.
Every night this week, I have been up late reading Alan’s books and articles, and listening to his old recordings. Alan profoundly understood our shortcomings as human beings. And yet he also constantly reminded us that our life is a work of art, that we are a mystery and the work of God’s hand. We do not need to justify ourselves or deny our fragility or mortality.
Alan taught us that we need to wake up to who we are. That when we look in the mirror, we should see someone who is unique and unrepeatable, someone who is remarkable and loved by God.
During this time, more than ever, I am grateful for the Grace Cathedral community, which Alan nourished for a quarter of a century. Below you will find a poem Alan particularly appreciated by Derek Walcott, and information about our upcoming
Love,
Malcolm
“Love After Love”
Derek Walcott
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread, Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Join the Annual Meeting and Cast Your Votes!
January 28, at 9:30 am
Join us next Sunday morning at the Annual Meeting in person in the Nave or online from 9:30 to 10:30 am to participate in this important annual expression of the cathedral’s essential work, dreams, and joys. All pledging members are eligible to vote. Your vote matters, so please make your 2024 pledge today!
Dean Emeritus, The Very Rev. Alan William Jones
March 5, 1940 – January 14, 2024
Dear Cathedral Friends,
I am writing with sad news. Dean Emeritus, The Very Rev. Alan William Jones, died peacefully on Sunday morning in his room at a retirement community in San Francisco. His wife, Cricket, spent the morning with him and stepped out of the room to visit with a friend. When she came back to his bedside, she discovered that his spirit had just departed. Early in the afternoon, we anointed Alan with oil and prayed for him.
Alan participated in various staff gatherings and faithfully attended services at the cathedral for many years until his health declined precipitously at the end of last summer. During our visits over the last few weeks, he stopped talking and became more withdrawn.
For nearly a quarter of a century, Alan served as Dean of Grace Cathedral. He was one of the most powerful preachers of his generation and helped make the cathedral one of the global centers of Christianity. During his tenure, we constructed Chapter House, the Great Steps, and our parking garage. With Lauren Artress, Alan helped to make walking the labyrinth into a religious practice observed by millions of people. Alan inaugurated our Forum series and represented the cathedral admirably in the community.
We feel deeply grateful to Cricket for the wise and compassionate care she provided Alan, especially as his health worsened.
Alan Jones was deeply steeped in Benedictine spirituality. We will never forget his generous vision for reimagining the church and for a Christianity whose primary message is that God loves everyone without exception.
Love,
Malcolm
The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young
Dean of Grace Cathedral