St. Andrew's Church, Prineville, OR
In
the Name of Jesus. Amen.
Somebody
once said that saints are people that the light of Christ shines through. Our tour of the windows this summer has
showed us the great many ways the light shines through. These windows ask us to consider, What does
your window look like? How does the
light shine through you?
Luke
is our first window this week. He wrote
both the gospel and the Book of Acts. The two were intended as Volume One and Volume
Two of one work.
If
you read them one after the other, you notice, this is more than the story of
Jesus. Luke tells the story of the Holy
Spirit, from the Spirit’s first manifestation in Zechariah, the father of John
the Baptist, to person after person in the Book of Acts. Each outpouring is greater than the
last. In fact, everything that Jesus did
in the Gospel gets repeated and more so in the Book of Acts.
I
saw what you might call a theological reflection on Facebook the other day that
carries Luke’s theme one step further. It
said, Fueled by the Spirit, look what
Paul accomplished for the reign of God. Imagine
what we could do. We have the same Spirit
– and we have coffee, too! Maybe
there’ll be a coffee cup in my window. How
about yours?
Luke
was Paul’s traveling companion in the last years of his ministry. In the letter to the Colossians, Paul calls
Luke the beloved physician. That’s the inspiration for our window. He holds a staff entwined with snakes. Does it look familiar? In the US, it’s used as a symbol for the
medical profession. Evidently, the
person who chose it got his Greek gods mixed up. This is a caduceus, the symbol for Hermes, the
messenger.
Asclepios, the god of healing
has only one snake. His staff represents
medicine internationally. Anyway, the
snake, one or two, represents both medicine and poison, which some of us wish
we didn’t understand so well. Never mind. Either way, it works for Luke, physician and
messenger.
The
snake returns in John’s window, for poison this time. There is a legend that says John was once given
a poisoned chalice to drink. He blessed
it first, and the poison crawled out in the form of a snake. He then drank unharmed. Me, I like all these legends. We don’t have to take these saints and
ourselves so seriously, even if preserved in stained glass.
John’s
gospel is different. Matthew, Mark and
Luke tell a relatively straight forward sequence of events, punctuated by
memorable sayings and stories, easy to repeat and pass on, until the
evangelists collect them. But John’s
gospel has these full-fledged speeches.
They call them discourses on who the Christ is, and what he means in a
cosmic sense.
John
talks about the Spirit on the night before Jesus died. Jesus said, I have yet many things to say to
you, but you cannot bear them now. When
the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth. Luke’s narrative writings give examples of
how that worked. Time and again, the
disciples thought they knew what the Bible says. But then they had some experience of the
Spirit that led them into a deeper truth.
So they came to a deeper understanding about what the Bible says.
I
think John’s discourses express a different version of the same phenomenon. John was the Beloved Disciple. His relationship with Jesus was intimate, personal. Decades after Jesus’ death, John still writes
about him in the present tense, as though Jesus is right beside him, the Spirit
of Jesus, while John leans against him still, like at the Last Supper.
Do
you have somebody in your life like that?
Your mother, your spouse, who’s been gone for years. But you still hear him or her speaking to
you, not a memory of something once said, but what that person would be saying
right now. That’s what John’s Gospel is,
Jesus present to John right when he’s writing, and when we draw that close, right
now, leaning on the everlasting arms. We
read John at funerals. In our deepest
grief, that’s when we hear Jesus speaking to us, I am the resurrection and the life.
Those who believe in me, though they die, yet shall they live.
Really,
you couldn’t find anyone more different from John than Peter. No better argument against cookie cutter
Christians than these two, side by side, the beloved disciple and the
ya-never-know-what-he’s-gonna-say-next leader of the pack, going with John’s
brother James up that mountain to share that vision in today’s gospel.
Peter’s
window portrays his struggle, same struggle as many of us, as followers of
Jesus, in two symbols, one of his faith and one of his fear.
Peter
said, You are the Christ, the Son of the
Living God. And Jesus answered, You are Peter, and upon this rock I will
build my church, and the powers of hell shall not prevail against it. I give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Peter’s faith is that rock on which the
Church is founded. And his faith is the
key that opens the kingdom of heaven.
What
could prevail against the Church, built on the rock of faith? Not doubt – doubt does not destroy faith. Doubting Thomas is an example of a disciple
who used his God-given brain to ask reasonable questions. The faith of Thomas is strong because it is not
gullible.
But
the opposite of faith is fear. And there’s
that rooster, the one that crowed after Peter denied Jesus, because Peter – was
afraid. Fear is what brings down the
Church, fear to be different, fear to stand up and say, Well, that’s wrong. Or to say instead, This is what I believe. Fear is what denies the Christ.
The
Church is weaker today, because for so many centuries, we had nothing to
fear. We got flabby. Peter’s faith muscles were like rock, because
he faced his fear. He was afraid. But he pulled it together. He came back, stood up to it.
And
we can, too.
We
come to Andrew. No, Helen, he’s not
holding skis. Not golf clubs,
either. That’s his cross. He was crucified in Greece on a cross in that
shape. He is the patron of Scotland, and
that is why the Scottish flag is a white X on a blue field.
Andrew
was the first apostle, the very first. How
did this whole thing ever get going?
Jesus called Andrew, and Andrew brought Peter to Jesus. That’s what Andrew did. When they had 4000 people to feed, Andrew brought
the boy with the food to Jesus. When some
Gentiles wanted in, Andrew brought them to Jesus. That is what Andrew did.
There
is a group called the Brotherhood of St. Andrew. Their sole purpose is to bring people to the
deepest possible relationship with Jesus.
You
see, there are very few sprung-from-nothing Christians. We all got here because somebody made the
introduction. I’m not talking about the
person who hauled you off to Sunday School – though without that person, you
might not have met the next one. I mean
the one who made Jesus real to you, the person that the light of Christ shone
through, by their words, by their example, by their relationship with you.
That
is the heritage of Andrew. And if names
do anything to form character, then that is the heritage of the people of St.
Andrew’s, by your words, by your example, by your relationship, to introduce
others into a deeper relationship with Jesus.
The heritage of the people of St. Andrew’s is to be the windows that the
light of Christ shines through.
There
are other saints in these windows that I have yet to name. Maybe some of them were Andrew kind of
people, that the light of Christ shone through, so that others came to their
own relationship with this Jesus, and built this church. Let’s name them now.
James
P. Gillis is here, right under St. James.
Jan, who’s in the Matthew window? ….
I
have asked this question throughout the summer.
What does your window look like? Think
about that. The artist who created our
windows picked an item or two to represent each saint, their occupation, their
gift, their weakness, their witness, the way the light of Christ shone through
them. What does your window look like? Let’s talk about that later, while we hold
our coffee cups.
And
then, we will put our coffee cups down and go out that door, with the words of
the Epistle to the Hebrews.
Since we are
surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us run with perseverance the
race that is set before us, looking
to Jesus, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising
the shame, and is seated at the right hand of of God.
Amen.
Rod of Asclepius, in public domain
Engraving of The Last Supper by Albrecht Dürer, in public domain
Photos of windows from St. Andrew's Church, Prineville, Oregon, by author
http://www.coffeewithjesus.com/
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