Becoming the God We Worship

A Sermon Preached by the Reverend Peter De Franco at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church on July 29, 2007.

If you go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, you can behold images of the gods of the ancient world, imposing statues of warrior gods, threatening gods, gods that fill your heart with terror. Strapped to the belts of these gods are swords that are ready for battle. To these idols the people of the ancient world fell down in worship. They would offer sacrifices of animals to these statues to satisfy the desire of these gods for satisfaction of wrongs committed against them. And for the ancients, all the gods were warrior gods, ready to march against the enemy, engage in combat and carry home the booty of battle. It is little wonder that the ancient people were constantly at war with one another for they worshiped gods who constantly were at war with each other. As psalm 115 puts it: Those who make them are like them. Or in other words, we become like the God we worship. The ancient people worshiped warrior gods and became warriors.
What about us? But who is the God whom we worship? And are we becoming like that God?
For us Christians, we believe that our image of God is the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The God whom we worship in Christ Jesus is the God who is working in the world the work of reconciliation, restoring the brokenness of the world to order, bringing about our restoration. That restoration comes into the world through the work of forgiveness. God has forgiven all of us our offenses. God has taken away the guilt of our sin. God forgives us so that we in turn can forgive others. So that we can become like the God we worship. For that forgiveness we not only ask God to give to us, but to give us in the measure that we give that gift to others. Those words we pray whenever we say the Lord’s Prayer.
You probably noticed that the version of the Lord’s Prayer we heard today from the gospel according to Luke is somewhat shorter than the version we shall pray later in the Eucharist. Perhaps we might have wished that Luke would have forgotten that problematic phrase. Perhaps we might have desired that the biblical scholars would have said that the phrase was only included in some of the later texts of the gospel and we could delete it. But no such chance. We are called to that difficult task of forgiveness.
I wonder if Jesus invites us to be persistent in prayer because he knew how difficult it would be for us to let loose of the sins that others commit against us.
You know those hard things you have endured from others, the pain, the betrayals, the rejections, the times you were used by someone else, the times you were treated like a thing and not a person. And to those painful situations, Jesus asks that you go and forgive those who have offended you. Now if Jesus were Dr. Phil, he would say that you should forgive others so that the weight of holding on to those offenses would be lifted from you and that you can go on with your life free of that heavy burden. But no.
Not Jesus. He invites you to forgive so that you can be a part of his own work of forgiveness in the world.
If this work of forgiveness seems impossible, I would like you to hear the lesson from a girl made famous during the Vietnam war. Some of you might recall the Vietnam war and the horrible pictures that flashed on the nightly new of the horrors of that war.
I am sure that all of us here will recall the picture of a young Vietnamese girl running down the street, her clothing burned away by the napalm bomb dropped by an American plane on Saigon, the pain of her burning flesh and streaming down in her face in tears.
That young girl’s name is Kim Phuc. After the war, some Canadians brought her to Canada for reconstructive surgery and she still lives in Canada.
Another person is a part of that story and his name is John Plummer. John is an ordained minister in the Methodist church. He is also a Vietnam Veteran. He piloted the plane which dropped the napalm on Kim. When he saw that picture of a child so mutilated by his action, John became an alcoholic until he was able to find forgiveness from God for the deed he did. He met Kim at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. and asked for her forgiveness for the pain he caused her. Even though she still suffers from the pain of the scars of that attack, she found it in her heart to forgive John. She said to him: “Let us live in love.” She forgave John, not to ease the burden of her heart but to ease the pain in John’s heart.
That is the way God forgives. God forgives us to ease the burden of guilt only God can ease. We too are called to forgive others with the gift only we can bestow on them: the restoration of the hearts who have offended us.
I know that I am inviting you to a task that is hard and difficult, the very task that Jesus invites you to do. If you find this forgiveness too hard to do, then ask Jesus to help you to do it. Knock on the door of heaven constantly until you heart is moved to that forgiveness. As Jesus says to us: “Ask, and it will be given you, search and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds and for everyone who knocks the door will be opened.”
Pray that you might become the Christ you worship: the Christ who opened his heart on the cross for love of you.

For Freedom Christ Set Us Free

For Freedom, Christ Set Us Free.

A Sermon Preached by the Rev’d Peter De Franco at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Clifton, New Jersey on July 1, 2007

On this Sunday closest to July 4th, many of us are probably planning something to do on Independence Day. Perhaps it will be a barbeque. Perhaps some of you will attend the Clifton City Picnic this afternoon and then attend the fireworks display in the stadium. I am sure that there is at least one or two among us who will venture into New York City to watch the Macy’s fireworks display.
For most of us, thoughts of July 4th spell out the words party, celebration, fireworks, and fun. Perhaps a few among us might recall the reason for this celebration is that on a hot and humid July 4th in 1776, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the declaration of independence was signed this day declaring that the thirteen colonies were free from the rule of the British monarch. Perhaps some of us might recall the words of some of our founding fathers. Among them stand out Patrick Henry’s famous words: Give me liberty or give me death. Perhaps some of us might know that those words, while they were delivered to the Second Virginia Convention urging them to commit the Virginia Troops to the cause of the Revolution, that those words come from a speech delivered in St. John’s Anglican Church in Richmond Virginia.
So on this weekend, it comes as a sort of blessing that our second reading from the letter to the Galatians lays out a theme close to the heart of many of us: Freedom.
Strange as it may seem, the word freedom does not occur once in the Declaration of Independence. Four times is the word free used but not once is the word freedom written.
Yet in today’s reading from Galatians, Paul proclaims: For Freedom Christ has set us free. In that word Freedom we find a link between the celebration of our nation and the celebration of our faith. When we recall the declaration of independence, we recall that the colonial leaders were declaring their freedom from the King. For all the wrongs committed by King George, the colonists declared “That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved.”
Many of us consider freedom as a release from some form of oppression. Just remember when you were a teenager, and for some of us that comes as a real effort of our imagination, but you can recall how you longed to be free from…. Free from the demands of your parents. Free from the rules of your teachers. Free from the restrictions that hemmed in your time, your friends, your activities.
Yet notice how Paul defines freedom in a radically different manner. The freedom that Paul presents for us is a freedom, not from others, but from self. Listen to what Paul says: do not gratify the desires of the flesh. And if we have any question as to what the desires of the flesh include Paul lets us know: Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, 20idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, 21envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these.
If you carefully examine this list of vices, you will see that at the root of them all lays an intense need to gratify our self. These are the needs of a superficial level of our ego so that if we live our lives gratifying these superficial needs, we will find ourselves living superficial lives. Lives trapped in the endless satisfaction of the needs of our superficial ego.
In contrast to this shallow life, Paul assures us that Christ came to set us free.
Free from the demands of a phony life. Free from an endless gratification of our infantile demands. Let us acknowledge that all of us are somehow trapped in gratification of these needs. Eating when we are looking for emotional comfort rather than satisfying our hunger. Making ourselves a doormat so that others can take advantage of us. Allowing ourselves to be caught in endless cycles of enabling others in their superficial needs. Trapped in the various forms of addictive behaviors be they patterns of anger, disorganization, pettiness, sexual addictions, the need to control. If we take a look at ourselves in these sad cycles in which we occasionally live, if we look at ourselves with the compassionate eyes of Christ Jesus, we can open ourselves to the grace of Christ which comes to us to set our hearts free. To set our hearts free, from the patterns that oppress us. To set our hearts free, from the behaviors the restrict us. To set our hearts free, from the smallness that limits us.
As we continue with the Eucharist, let us confess to Christ those patterns that keep us living life on the surface. Let us ask Christ for the liberty to live life in the depths. Once day in 1775, Patrick Henry said, Give me liberty or give me death.
Let us ask our great and loving Christ Jesus to give us freedom, to give us liberty, for without the freedom that comes from Christ, we are already dead.
Let us pray.
O Gracious Lord Christ, open our eyes to look with courage at those places where our lives are limited, where our patterns are addicted, where our freedom is restricted.
Open our eyes to hear your word and our hearts to feel your love, for your word convicts us of our sinfulness and your love assures us of our loveableness. Set us free this day. As we receive your Body and Blood this day in the Eucharist, may we taste not only your love, may we taste our own freedom. And freed from a shallow life, open our hearts to love and serve others. We make our prayer for your love’s sake. Amen.

Christ on the Loose

A Sermon Preached by the Rev’d Peter De Franco
at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church on Easter, 2007

If you ever take a close look a really close look at the bible, you must come away with the impression that God must be a gardener. If you remember back to the first book of the Bible, you will remember that when God make Adam and Eve, he placed them in a garden. The garden of God was planted as a place of ultimate harmony, of a peaceful co-existence between creatures, of delightful contemplation of the beauty of landscapes, of pleasurable participation in the waters of streams and rivers, of that soul satisfying delight of walking with God in the cool of the evening.
Even though they were expelled from that garden, I imagine Adam and Eve always felt a deep longing in to return to that garden, to the perfect harmony of the place, the scents of the flowers and the plants and vegetables God prepared for them. A longing for the beautiful rivers in the garden in which they would bath and drink and behold water in its beauty.
I sometimes think that we all inherited from Adam and Eve that deep longing to return to the garden. Those of us who are gardeners know that pleasure of digging the spring earth, cleaning away the debris of the winter, tilling the soil, preparing it for the new plants. Those of us with less than green thumbs know the pleasure of beholding the beauty of a garden, be it our neighbor’s garden or the vast expanse of a manicured garden estate. Little wonder then that God started it all over again in a garden.
When the body of Jesus was taken down from the cross, his friends completed a hasty burial in a tomb, a cave in which a tomb was newly carved. But let’s not forget that they found that cave in a garden. To that garden Mary hastened on Easter morning to go as mourners go to the place where the body of the beloved lies buried. Perhaps many of us know that feeling, of going back to the place where we buried our loved ones, finding there some comfort as we weep and mourn their passing from us. Perhaps that is why so many cemeteries are festooned with flowers and plants. My own nieces and nephews called my fathers’ grave Grandpa’s garden since we always decorated his grave with flowers.
Yes, God drew on that deep instinct to return to the garden to start the world over again when God raised Jesus from the dead. God drew on that deep desire for us to return to a place of harmony and beauty, of delight and comfort, of joy and abiding peace. God drew on that deep desire in God’s own heart to replant the garden of paradise and the first seed God planted in that garden was the body of his own son. For in God’s garden of the resurrection, God plants all the worse that humanity could devise against Jesus and transforms it as gardeners do.
As gardeners take old leaves and transform them into mulch, God took what the world considered so useless in the life of Jesus that the world crucified Jesus on a tree and transformed Jesus into the beginning of a new humanity. As gardeners take cast off bricks and transform them into garden paths, so Jesus took the disciples starting with Mary Magdalene, and transformed them into paths on which we could walk to God. As gardeners takes a bulb from here and a plant from there and arranges them in a new design of beauty so Christ has taken us the mismatched of the world and changes us into the new pattern of beauty in this church, Christ’s new creation in Clifton.
God has set Christ loose in the world through the power of the resurrection. God has set Christ loose in the world to transform the world beginning with you and with me.
God is working in the world to change the world, one heart at a time. This work of transformation begins for each of us with our baptism, the moment when God grafts us onto the vine who is Christ, the moment when God washes us in Baptism’s waters, the moment when Christ gives us new birth from the opening in his heart’s flow of water and blood, even as our mothers give us birth in water and blood. God transforms us in our baptism not only that we can profess our faith in this hidden gardener who is creating the world anew. God transforms us that we might be the faithful people who acknowledge God’s presence by our prayer and our faithfulness to this Christian fellowship. God transforms us that we might be the people who with God resist evil in the world even when those around us conspire against the forces of life and liberty. God transforms us that we might be a people whose lives and words proclaim with God the reality of the resurrection. God transfigures our eyes that we might see Christ in the countless forms and faces of people and not only see Christ but serve Christ. God transfigures each of us that we might struggle with God in the world to be instruments of justice where the world deprives people of their fair share, to be soldiers of peace in a world torn by strife and war, to be envoys of respect helping one another discover anew the dignity that God bestows on each of us.
Look out and beware. For Christ is on the loose in the power of the resurrection.
You can be sure of one thing. Christ will not leave you unchanged.