Back to the Garden

Sermon preached at St. Margaret's Anglican on August 21, 2022. Appointed readings:  Jer 1:4-10; Ps 71:1-6; Heb 12:18-29 Introduction If you have a Bible with you this evening, it may be helpful to have it handy as this will be one of those sermons that a friend of mine once described as “A Bible in one hand and more Bible in the other.” Now, I am far from a Greek scholar as my seminary transcripts can attest to, and I generally have a rule against appealing to biblical languages in the pulpit. But, just this once, I want to draw your attention to a little bit of text criticism as our way into our epistle reading this evening.   Our lesson from Hebrews begins “You have not come to something that can be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest… etc.” But what is this “something” that is being referred to? The Book of Hebrews, true to its name, sets out to explicate the gospel of Jesus Christ by way of a close reading of the Hebrew scriptures. With that in mind,

  Introduction Today is the Octave Sunday of Easter, sometimes referred to as Low Sunday. It’s been a week since we stood witness in this place and heard the good news definitively declared that Christ is Risen and death is defeated. As John Chrysostom’s paschal homily so poignantly proclaims: “Hades was embittered.” The world is heavy with death. The world is at war. Covid rages on into a 6 th wave. It is increasingly clear that runaway climate change is inevitable. Yet even leaving aside the catastrophe that is our present moment in history, death is always quite close to us in our every day lives. People get sick, accidents happen, life expires. Our one certainty in life is death. But last week we did something preposterous. We stood in this place and bore witness to the Risen Christ in our midst. We became, even if just for a moment, contemporaries of the disciples as witnesses to the Resurrected One. So, while we may have come here grieving, and may have left here only to f