The Feast of the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ “Here we are celebrating the Real Presence of our Lord Jesus Christ in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. “You know, I could take a sample of this congregation and probably 85 percent of the people in this congregation would say that they believe that Christ is really present in the Eucharist. “But belief and faith are not the same thing…belief is about accepting an idea as true; which doesn’t inconvenience you in any way, especially if you don’t tell anybody about it. You can say, ‘Why yes, I believe that Christ is really present in the Eucharist, and my brunch appointment is at 12:45.’ “Faith is about acting on your belief: doing something so that your life mirrors the ideas that you say you believe in. So the question is not, ‘Do we believe that Christ is really present in the Eucharist?’ but, ‘Do we have faith that Christ is really present in the Eucharist?’ Big difference.” Less

“The doctrine of the Trinity that is this convoluted, Hellenistic, philosophical thing where they fight about five words that all mean the same thing…it has something larger behind it than that, something more important than that. It is the church in the 3rd and the 4th centuries’ attempt to express the Christian experience of God, and to safeguard its integrity. So what this day is about is yours and mine, our, experience of God. “What our forebears in the faith had to say is that Yahweh God, the source of all that is, in whom we live and move and have our being, the primordial life force who became the god of the children of Israel, the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Sarah and Elizabeth and Rachel-that reality, whatever its cosmic, infinite, beyond our minds’ capacity to understand, reality-that thing which people fell on their faces and said ‘Holy, Holy, Holy,’ to—that God somehow was distinctively and decisively present in Jesus of Nazareth, who walked in the midst of human experience and human history, not as some third thing, but as one of us. That there was something distinct and unique about the way god was present in him, and which got extended to all of us. And it was decisive because now history could be divided up into all that went before him, and all that comes after: Anno Domini. “And even more exciting and more unbelievable is that this Yahweh God who was decisively and distinctively present in Jesus of Nazareth is present in you and me and in the community of faith in which we live, as Holy Spirit. “That experience, that incredible, intimate, Trinitarian experience, that hope that someday we will see what John of Patmos saw, not as a vision, not in a dream, but as reality, we will stand face to face with God and share the life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—that’s the Christian experience of God. Something mystical. Something cosmic. “Yes, Christianity is fundamentally a mystical religion. But we’ve turned it into an ethical religion. “I’ve always been amazed by that. If you find something that you have to fall down in front of and say ‘Holy, Holy, Holy,’ it’s going to change your ethics. But changing your ethics may never bring you face to face with something you’re willing to say ‘Holy, Holy, Holy,’ to.” Less

“The more you do the mission of Christ in the world the better your prayer life will get. It’ll become simpler, too: ‘Help!’” Less

“Do you want to live in a reality where death is not the end, but is a portal to life? do you want to live in a reality where evil does not have all the cards, God does? Do you want to live in a reality where love is the power that makes the universe go around? “It’s a choice. A choice not built upon some intellectual idea, or theological debate, or whether we think the Bible is literally true, or whether we think homosexuals ought to be bishops. It’s based on the fact that on the first day of the week, some women went to the tomb to embalm the body of the one that they loved who had been crucified…and he wasn’t there, because he had risen from the dead.” Less

Hunter Close performs a musical interpretation of Ezekiel 36:24-28 on the night of the Great Vigil. Hunter says that John Coltrane’s album “A Love Supreme” is one of his inspirations for this piece. Ezekiel 36:24-28 Say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God: I will take you from the nations, and gather you from all the countries, and bring you into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. Then you shall live in the land that I gave to your ancestors; and you shall be my people, and I will be your God. Less

Wade Rockett presents a creative interpretation of Israel’s deliverance through the Red Sea on the night of the Great Vigil. Download the PDF file here. “Moshe’s Lament” By Wade Rockett Exodus 14:10-15:1 Water. It had to be water. The Lord God could have said, “Moses: Lift up your staff and I will dig a tunnel to the Promised Land.” I have no problem with tunnels. A spelunking expedition out of Egypt? I’m in. But no. He says to me, “Moses: Lift up your staff and stretch out your hand over the sea and divide it, that the Israelites might go into the sea on dry ground.” Look, I can handle small, manageable, amounts of water. Drinking amounts. Bathing amounts. But several metric tons of water on either side of me, held back by wind? Not so much. When I was a baby, my mother put me in a basket and shoved it out onto a river. That may be the source of my anxiety about drowning. I’m no therapist. I’m just saying here. It’s like this all the time with me and the Lord God. Whenever I hear, “Moses, lift up your staff,” I get this little twitch in my right eye. It started when we first met. I was presenting what I thought were very reasonable concerns about the plan He was proposing, and in the middle of it, He turns my staff into a snake. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. The next thing I know, I’m having these audiences with Pharaoh – the most powerful man in the world – where I get to tell him what the Lord God is going to do to his kingdom next. Pharaoh says, “What now, Moses?” “Plague of frogs,” I say. “Let my people go?” You can imagine how that went over. But he did let us go, eventually. He let us go right up to the edge of the Red Sea before he sent his army out to kill us. There I was, with soldiers behind me and the sea in front of me, and everyone looking at me with terror in their eyes. So I pushed away the pictures in my head, of water closing over my head, pouring into my lungs, dragging me down into the darkness with my robes swirling around me. I lifted my staff and stretched out my hand, just as the Lord God said, and I hoped it wouldn’t turn into a snake. After a few seconds, we could feel the wind starting to pick up. In a few minutes it was tearing at our clothes, throwing sand and seaspray into the air. The only light was this weird flickering from the cloud of fire and smoke behind us. I could see the wind driving the water back, opening a path in front of us. And everybody looked at me as if to say, “You first, Moses.” A situation like that, all you can do is move forward. So I stepped out onto the seafloor and started walking, and the children of Israel came after me. At first we were walking on damp sand, but then as we got deeper we were sinking up to our ankles in deep muck. The wind was roaring in my ears but I could hear people shouting, crying, laughing. It was crazy. It was like walking in a dream. All the time I’m staring straight ahead; but out of the corners of my eyes I see the water on either side, churning and thrashing, the wind holding it back. I see that we’re only halfway through, and part of me just wants to curl up in a ball and close my eyes, and maybe when I open them again I’ll be back at my father-in-law’s, tending sheep. Then I feel this tug on my sleeve. I look over. It’s my sister Miriam. “Hey, Moshe,” she says. “What?” I say. “Knock knock.” Unbelievable. “Who’s there?” I say. “Faith,” she says. “Faith who?” “Faith forward or you might thlip on the rockth.” “That is the stupidest joke I’ve ever heard,” I said. She said, “Yeah, but it made you laugh.” Which I guess is true. And soon we were up out of the water and on the other side. When the sun came up the wind died down, and the water came rushing back, sweeping Pharaoh’s army away. Now we’re camped out on the Red Sea shore. People are dancing and singing. Miriam, I should point out, sings a lot better than she tells jokes. It was a rough time getting to this point, a hard, strange, scary time. But I imagine the worst is over. These directions I got before we left Egypt say that the Promised Land is pretty close by; so things ought to go pretty smoothly from here on out. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Less

Karl Oles presents a creative interpretation of the Creation story on the night of the Great Vigil. Download the PDF file here. Reading for Easter Vigil 2007 By Karl Oles Adapted from R. F. Capon, The Third Peacock (1971) En arche epoiesen ho theos ton ouranon kai ten gen… Genesis 1:1 Let me tell you why God made the world. One afternoon, before anything was made, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit were sitting around in Flo Anna’s Restaurant drinking coffee and sharing a Greek salad, and discussing one of the Father’s fixations. From all eternity, it seems he had had this thing about being. He would keep thinking up all kinds of unnecessary things – new ways of being and new kinds of beings to be. And as they talked, God the Son suddenly said, “Really, this is absolutely great stuff. Why don’t I go out and mix us up a batch?” And God the Holy Spirit said, “Terrific, I’ll help you.” So they got to work, and when evening came the Son and the Holy Spirit put on this tremendous show of being for the Father. It was full of water and light and frogs; pine cones kept dropping all over the place, crazy fish swam around in the water glasses and neutrinos shot right through everything. There were volcanoes and violets, salmon and stars – and men and women everywhere to wonder at them, to taste them, to juggle them, and to love them. And God the Father looked at the whole wild party and he said, “Wonderful! Just what I had in mind! Good! Good! Good!” And all God the Son and God the Holy Spirit could think of to say was the same thing, “Good! Good! Good!” So they shouted together, “Very good!” and they laughed for ages and ages, saying things like how great it was for beings to be, and how clever of the Father to think of the idea, and how kind of the Son to go to all that trouble putting it together, and how considerate of the Spirit to spend so much time directing and choreographing. And they told old jokes and drank their coffee, and they all threw olives and feta cheese at each other in ages of ages. Amen. This is, I grant you, a crass analogy; but crass analogies are the safest. Everybody knows that God is not three men throwing feta cheese at each other. Not everybody knows equally clearly that God is not a remote and punishing judge, or a bright light that appears only to people having near death experiences. Accordingly, I give you the central truth that creation is the result of a Trinitarian bash, and leave the details of the analogy to sort themselves out as best they can. We need one slight refinement, however. It is very easy, when talking about creation, to think of God’s part in it as simply getting the ball rolling – as if he were a kind of divine pinball player, after which the Laws of Nature took over and excused him from further involvement. But that won’t work. This world is fundamentally unnecessary. Nothing has to be. It needs a creator, not only for its beginning, but for every moment of its existence. Accordingly, the Trinitarian bash doesn’t really come before creation; what actually happens is that all of creation, from start to finish, occurs within the bash. The divine party is simultaneous with the universe. Which is where the refinement in the analogy comes in. What happens is not that the Trinity manufactures the first duck and then the ducks take over the duck business for themselves. Every duck, down at the roots of its being, is a response to the creative act of God. In terms of the analogy, it means that God the Father thinks up duck #47307 for the north end of Lake Washington in the month of April 2007, that God the Spirit rushes over to the edge of the formless void and, with unutterable groanings, broods duck #47307, and that over his brooding, God the Son, the eternal Word, triumphantly shouts, “Duck #47307!” And presto! You have a duck. Not one, you will note, tossed off in response to some mindless duck quota. The world is not God’s surplus inventory of artifacts; it is a whole barrelful of the apples of his eye, constantly juggled, relished, and exchanged by the persons of the Trinity like a baseball flying around the bases in a perfect double play of delight. And that, incidentally, is why baseball proves we are made in the image of God. Less

“Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity, is kind of a weird phenomenon. It’s not far removed from shaman kind of stuff. ...If you’re a Navajo and get sick, really sick, what they do is take you into the hogan and plunk you down on the floor, and the medicine man does a sand painting of the history of the people. Because the assumption is that the reason why you’re sick is that you’ve lost your identity. So you have to be reconnected with it. “That’s really, in kind of a basic way, what Holy Week is about.” - Fr. John Fergueson Less

“I have always said that if I had one story of Jesus’s to explain to people what Christianity and the Paschal mystery is all about, it would be this story: the Prodigal Son. Scrape away all of the other stuff about judgment, and right behavior, and who’s gonna be in and who’s gonna be out, and who we hate now and who we love now, and just tell this story. You wouldn’t have to say much else, would you?” - Fr. John Fergueson Less

Fr. John Fergueson preaches on the journey of Lent. He describes the artwork hung in the church for the season – a sackcloth banner hung on the wall, torn in places to reveal royal purple beneath, and a gnarled tree placed by the altar. The tree, he explains, was placed there by Angela, the artist who designed the Lenten artwork, to evoke a reading by Theodore of Studios. Theodore used the image of a tree to describe the history of salvation. So Fr. John names the tree at Redeemer “Ted’s Tree.” Less