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All posts by Howard Stringfellow III

Easter Day, 2017

Posted by Howard Stringfellow III on 16 Apr 17
Posted in: Easter Day, Homily, St John 20:1-18, Year A. Leave a comment

RCL A Easter Day
Acts 10:34-43, Psalm 118:1-2 and 14-24, Colossians 3:1-4, Saint John 20:1-18

If you think we were powerless on Good Friday, as Jesus suffers on the cross, we are doubly powerless today. With Mary Magdalene we see the stone rolled away from the tomb, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

Like a bird long-held and set free, we may not know what to do with our new-found freedom. Indeed, as the Psalmist says, “On this day the Lord has acted; * we will rejoice and be glad in it.”[1] It’s up to us to accept God’s gift and to live accordingly. How do we do that?

For quite a long time, I’ve thought that today’s Epistle is a sequel to a brief passage in the Epistle to the Romans: “We have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”[2] That idea, that by baptism we die and are raised with Christ, perfectly precedes in thought today’s Epistle addressed to the Colossians: “If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is.”[3] Since we have been raised with Christ, we leave death behind. We are free, completely free, to set our minds on the things that are above.

Our freedom extends from and is the result of God’s power. As I often say from the pulpit, God has done for us what we cannot do for ourselves. And by the instrument of raising Jesus, of the empty tomb, God has set us free from death. We are free to be the people God created us to be. We are free to set our minds on the things that are above. We are free to be in our lives and in our actions signs to those around us of Christ’s resurrection. Our old selves have died, and our life is hidden with Christ in God, as we heard in the Epistle.

As always, we have a choice between dying and living; and since we have already died, we may as well live.

I would put that choice to you in this way. We all know, in one endeavor or another, the fear of failure. But since we have died and have been raised, there is no fear of failure to intimidate us. We have, on the other hand, the fear of success. Each of us possesses what we need to have to do the hardest and most intimidating things. We have what it takes to forgive. We have what it takes to share. We have what it takes to tell someone how we have survived death. We have what it takes to write a happy ending to our own stories. We have been set free from all the things that hold us back.

Our journey has just begun. With eyes that have seen and known the Resurrection, we are on our way. At the end of today’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene announces to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord.”[4] And like her, we are likely to see nothing else except the Lord, except the opportunities given to us by the Lord, and except the good works the Lord gives us to walk in. For we have died, and our life is hidden with Christ in God.[5]

[1] Psalm 118:24.

[2] Romans 6:4.

[3] Colossians 3:1.

[4] Saint John 20:18.

[5] Colossians 3:3.

Good Friday, 2017

Posted by Howard Stringfellow III on 14 Apr 17
Posted in: Good Friday, Homily, St John 18:1--19:42. Leave a comment

RCL Good Friday
Isaiah 52:13–53:12, Psalm 22, Hebrews 10:16-25, Saint John 18:1–19:42

If you feel empty today, I would say that your sensibility is about right. There is no Day in the Church Year more difficult to contemplate or more hard to accept than today. Every sermon ever delivered on Good Friday fails to match today’s significance. We are constrained to think the unthinkable and to endure the unendurable.

Most people cannot take it. To understand this concretely, all you have to do is to compare today’s attendance with that of Easter Day on Sunday. Today is the “pain,” and Easter Day is the “gain.” There is no gain if there is no pain, as weightlifters often say.

Deeper than Pilate’s machinations, more troubling than the chief priests’ and Pharisees’ hypocrisy, and more horrifying than the crowd’s thirst for innocent blood is the inescapable truth that God has chosen all of these things, and others nearly as startling, to bring about Good. This, I think, remains the most difficult aspect of today. God could have designed the salvation and redemption of the world without all the passion, the agony, and the disheartening display of human limitation. It is well within God’s power to provide the “gain” without the “pain.” But God chose not to do it that way. God chose the “pain” as the way to provide the “gain.” That is the aspect that makes me want to flee the cross and all it represents.

But if God chose an instrument of shameful death to be the means of glorious life, we should learn its lesson, and we should accept that choice as providential and purposeful. And that is hard. And like the cross itself, it is worth it.

I can put it to you this way. All roads, all things, and everything that is lead to God. You can be on your way to God by heeding a strange firebrand wearing skins and eating insects. You can be on your way to God by accepting a difficulty or a seeming impossibility that is God’s will. You can be on your way to God by ministering to those with deadly sickness in Calcutta. You can be on your way to God by preparing a meal and serving it to schizophrenics. You can be on your way to God by choosing to take up arms against absolute dictators. You can be on your way to God by doing what we are doing today, thinking the unthinkable and enduring the unendurable. God has made these things so, so that God could be accessible—in everything for everyone—and so that we should be able to glimpse God’s glory in its contrasts, those things that seem so far from God’s perfect will. It is the way of God to demonstrate over and over again, even until even we catch on, that everything that is bears God’s own dignity in virtue of being God’s creature. God has made it so.

And so it is. An innocent man suffers. Justice foully miscarries. Religion denigrates itself and forfeits any claim on any value whatsoever. And, still, all the while, God’s will is done and is being brought to perfection. A cross is a crown dearer than any monarch’s crown however jeweled. Death’s door leads to life everlasting. Every last sinner has the means of grace and the hope of glory. God has done, God does, and God will do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. And, somehow, we cannot bear it. We would be all we need if we could only get away with it. With a dose of honesty, however, we know our need of God.

And God is right there for us, beneath every rock and every out-of-the-way place, on every page and in every kind of weather, wherever the truth can be, which is everywhere. But today, Jesus hangs from a cross in order to draw us to God. God’s will be done, and God’s truth be proclaimed today and throughout eternity, world without end. Amen.

Maundy Thursday, 2017

Posted by Howard Stringfellow III on 13 Apr 17
Posted in: Homily, Maundy Thursday, St John 13:1-17 and 31b-35. Leave a comment

RCL Maundy Thursday
Exodus 12:1-14, Psalm 116:1 and 10-17, 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, Saint John 13:1-17 and
31b-35

You heard it in the Passover Charter Narrative from Exodus: “Throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.”[1] But tonight for us Christians is a different night. We celebrate the Institution of the Blessed Sacrament given to us not as a “perpetual ordinance,” but as a “pledge of eternal life,”[2] according to the Collect of the Day.

For me, the difference is tremendous. The Passover looks back at a saving act of God, when the Almighty brought the children of Israel out of Egypt, out of the land of bondage, and set them free, actually and figuratively. The Passover is a perpetual ordinance remembering an act of liberation.

In the Eucharist, instituted by the Lord Jesus within a Passover meal, according to the Synoptic Gospels, we for all time look back to the Offering of the Lord on the Cross, the breaking of his Body and the shedding of his Blood, but also—and this is the tremendous difference—we look forward for all time to the promised gift of eternal life. Whenever we celebrate the Eucharist, we kneel at Calvary even as we look forward to eternal life given to us by the Lord in his self-offering of himself at Calvary. We look back to the gift of his self-offering, and we look forward to the inheritance we have eternally in virtue of that gift.

Of all people, dearly beloved, we are most blessed. We are given in the Eucharist the forgiveness of our sins, the strengthening of our union with Christ and one another, and the foretaste of the heavenly banquet which is our nourishment in eternal life.”[3]

I encourage you, therefore, to receive the Sacrament tonight, tomorrow, Sunday, and for the rest of your lives with thankfulness and with humility, that so great a gift has been given to us for the salvation of our souls. With the gift of the Eucharist, we are free to write our own stories, stories of life and of hope, of faith and of charity, and of thanksgiving to God, who became like us so that we might be like God. That freedom has been given to each of us, sealed in the never-ending Sacrament, for time and for eternity.

[1] Exodus 12:14.

[2] BCP, page 221.

[3] BCP, pages 859-860.