SERMON, TRINITY CHURCH, STAUNTON, May 2, 2010
By Roger Bowen – [with help from Fed Buechner, Lauren Stanley and Krista Tippet}

The first half of this morning’s Gospel - "Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once.”

That reminds me of a chant we sang here a couple of years ago. Do you remember?

Sing - In our hearts Lord, be glorified….

My seminary professor, the one with the flaring, prophetic eyebrows and the long, boney fingers, might have pointed to that phrase in John’s Gospel and said…. “Periphrastic circumlocution!!! It occurs 9 times in the Johanine literature!”
We nervous seminarians were scribbling notes -
“What? Periphrastic what? What’d he say? Circumcision?”
No, circumlocution.
OK then….and we’d all write that down furiously.

This glory, glory, glory part of today’s Gospel, might be an example of that. Repeating, then circling around and repeating again. And maybe again. You read it a second and third time to get the gist.

The point is, it’s important , when John does that. The glory of God. That’s important

And…Glory. What IS that? What is glory??

One of my school heroes, Fred Buechner – a school chaplain up at Exeter a while back… says Glory is to God what style is to an artist. A painting by Vermeer, a sonnet by Donne, a Mozart aria – each of those is so rich with the style of the one who made it … that to the real connoisseur, it couldn’t have been made by anybody else, and the effect is staggering. The style of an artist brings you as close to the sound in his voice and the light in his eye as it is possible to get … this side of shaking hands with him.

Today’s psalm invoked the praise of God from everything that God has made…sun, moon, fire, hail, water, fruit trees, birds. Because, as another psalm, the 19th Psalm reminds us …“the heavens are telling the glory of God.”

It is the same thing. To the connoisseur, not just sunsets and starry nights – but rain forests and garter snakes and dust storms and the human face – are all unmistakenly the work of a single hand for those who have eyes to see. Glory is the outward manifestation of that hand in its handiwork - just as holiness is the inward. To have a glimpse of God’s glory, to sense his style, is the closest you can get to God this side of paradise.

Glory is what God looks like - when for the time being all you have to look at him with - is your eyes.
worshipful praise….. honor…. and thanksgiving …giving glory to God

A number of years ago when I served as chaplain at the National Cathedral School for Boys, St. Albans, Desmond Tutu came to preach at the National Cathedral when I was serving as the deacon at the main service. I was sure I’d get bumped, but I didn’t

You would say – at that time - that Bp. Tutu had received a lot of glory … he was a hero for what he had worked for…and what he had accomplished in South Africa. And after all, he had just received the Nobel Peace Prize.
But that Sunday morning in Washington he side-stepped temptation and reminded us of where the glory really is….

He is a short man, almost impish in his demeanor…. I think they set a box for him to stand on in the 10-foot high Canterbury pulpit so that we could see him…and he peered down at a congregation of probably 2000 and said -
“I want you to pray for me.
And my wife, she wants you to pray or me too.
Because with all these neat things happening to me, sometimes I think I’m a pretty neat guy!”
He talked about his path to political resistance — his realization at some point that
"if these white people had intended keeping us under them , they shouldn't have given us the Bible."
He speaks of preaching and speaking with mature women who were generically called "Annie" by their white employers and grown men forever called "boy" —
and handing them the "dynamite" of the Bible as they headed out of church and back into the world.
“When someone asks you who you are, he told them, you can say, "I am a God-carrier. I am carrying the story of the Glory of God! “

This kind of inner-liberation, one life at a time, yielded eventually to an outer upheaval of one of the most entrenched governments of social brutality in modern memory.
What a man!

Shunning glory…. And yet…the glory of God shining through him.

I think Desmond Tutu is the embodiment of some of the qualities of God he preaches: a fierce love of justice, divine patience, compassion, a capacity to surprise, and a wicked sense of humor.
"At the center of this existence is a heart beating with love," he says.
"You and I, and all of us, are incredible … we are, as a matter of fact, made for goodness."

And so, he lives out the second half of today’s Gospel.

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.
By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."

I have just returned from Haiti. It's been nearly four months since the earthquake. There has been some progress; I saw some buildings going up… some of which do not look safe at all, again. I saw many more buildings that still have to be razed. There are hundreds workers hired by the government easily identified by their bright yellow T-shirts -- removing rubble, clearing streets, often with their bare hands still, trying hard to improve things.

But it’s very slow in coming. I didn't know how complete this devastation is until I saw it. Anderson Cooper was right – the camera lens is not big enough to take all of this in! Some of the priests had every single one of their churches was destroyed in the earthquake. Every single one. …that means 6 or 10. For some of them. They need tarps and tents -- as do many others just for shelter -- in order to have a place for worship, so that the people don't have to stand in the hot sun or get drenched by the rains, because now it’s rainy season. There are still many, many buildings that are pancaked, there are still buildings that are leaning precariously, and you still have to maneuver around rubble in the streets….and places where folks have set up tarp shelters.

And there are still hundreds of thousands of people who are homeless. They live in tents, sometimes in camps, sometimes on their own property.

And more than before even, walking the streets, you are hit by the smells -- of food being cooked on the sidewalks, of unwashed people, of no sanitation. The tents are right on top of each other ... people have a "living space" of maybe two square feet per person, if that. It is incredible that this many weeks later, and just two hours from gleaming Miami, people still have no place to live.

And yet…and yet in the midst of all that. In the midst of sights, smells and sounds I have never even imagined…. Where nearly 300,000 perished. That’d be like 5 million folks dying in the USA, proportionately.

And yet, and yet, Our priests and Haitian brothers and sisters pray this prayer –
Lord, if we are alive today despite hurricanes, hunger and sickness, we ought to say “Thank you, Jesus we are apparently here for a purpose!”

And, as YOU – Trinity Church - have been known by your love and generosities toward them… they too are loving and caring for each other - the clergy and lay leaders of that diocese have the glory of God shining through them.
Our priests there are exhausted to the point that the Church Pension Fund is insisting – paying for them and and their spouses take 4 days of R and R in the Dominican Republic in June for a spiritual retreat - a CREDO. And then, they will return…to love and to serve. We must not forget them, my friends.

I give you this new commandment, that you should love one another.
And, the glory of the Lord will shine through you.
[Sing] In our hearts, Lord…