This morning the lesson from the Acts of the Apostles is an excerpt from the speech Peter gives, when on the day of Pentecost, devout people have rushed together to observe the phenomenon of the Holy Spirit falling on the apostles, including the new apostle, Matthias. The people are amazed because all of them hear the apostles speaking in tongues in their own languages—the apostles are speaking Aramaic, with a vocabulary and accent contemporaries would recognize as making them Galileans.[1]

It is only in Matthew and in John’s gospels that the Risen Jesus speaks on the morning of the resurrection. In this year of the lectionary cycle, we heard Matthew last night and we hear John this morning.

My mother survived a car accident in which my stepfather Bill was killed on Valentine’s Day in 2007. She had Alzheimer’s disease. After being hospitalized for her serious injuries, she was in a memory care home near my sister and her family in Fairfax, Virginia, for the rest of her life. She would die there just over six years later.

I want to begin by thanking the Presiding Bishop for recording a sermon for us tonight. I’m sorry that we don’t have the equipment to screen it for you at this point in the liturgy. It’s a deeply pastoral sermon. I hope many will have the opportunity to hear his words and feel his presence and care for us. I know I am not the only person who has a hard time thinking of Holy Week and Easter Day without churches being open.

Saint Mary’s Lectionary Project was started by Father Matthew Mead, when he served here over a decade ago now. Monday through Friday, our congregations for the daily 12:10 Mass include many people who are on a break from their jobs. Very early on, we started to shorten appointed psalms and, when appropriate, appointed lessons. We marked the changes with an asterisk in the footer appointed scriptures were given.

The story of the anointing of Jesus’ feet is found in all four gospels. For Luke, you may recall, it is part of a story of a Pharisee named Simon who had invited Jesus to dinner.[1] This Simon became upset when Jesus allowed a woman who was a sinner to wash his feet with her tears, wipe them with her hair, and to kiss them. Jesus said to him, “I entered your house, you gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not ceased to kiss my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little.”[2] The woman’s sins were forgiven.

Yesterday morning, a parishioner from my Indiana days circulated an op-ed from Friday’s New York Times that a friend of hers, Simone Hannah-Clark, had written.[1] Simone is a nurse in an intensive care unit in New York City. She wrote about her life and work during this pandemic. The workdays are very long days; the work that she and her colleagues do is physically and emotionally draining. She cares for new arrivals. She cares for those who are starting to heal. She cares for the bodies of those who die.

Today’s appointed gospel lesson begins abruptly with these words, “The Jews took up stones again to stone [Jesus].[1] There’s a context for these words that we haven’t heard at the daily Eucharist this week. I’ll get to that and to today’s lesson, but first I want to remind you and me that the stories of Jesus’ visits to Jerusalem in John and are very different than in Mark, Matthew, and Luke. One might say, it is John’s Jesus who lives out the words to Mary and Joseph of Luke’s twelve-year-old Jesus, “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”[2]

I want to begin by mentioning the name of a priest who died on the Feast of Saint Simon and Saint Jude, Wednesday, October 31, 1981. I was in my second year of seminary at Nashotah House. Since it was a Major Feast day, the community’s weekly Solemn Mass was celebrated on Wednesday night that week. (The weekly community Solemn Mass was usually on Thursday nights. But we arranged our lives around the Church Calendar, as Saint Mary’s still does.)

Last November, when I was reviewing the lessons for the Daily Office in Advent, I realized for the first time, that though the we would be reading Luke in Year One in Advent, today’s gospel, which I’ve always thought as belonging to John, was appointed for Wednesday in the Week of 2 Advent.[1] I had never noticed when reading John or Luke in one of my annotated Bibles that there’s a note attached to this passage in both gospels. This is from the New Revised Standard Version:

The book of the Bible we know as the Wisdom of Solomon is a Jewish writing that has never been a part of the Jewish scriptures. It was accepted as scripture by important third-century Christian writers and became a part of the Bible in the Christian East and West.[1] At the English Reformation, it was placed apart from the books of the Old Testament which were known in the original Hebrew. These Greek-language pre-Christian texts in the Bible were called the Apocrypha—meaning “hidden things.” The Apocrypha was included as a separate group in all of the English language Bibles of the sixteenth century and in the King James Version at the beginning seventeenth century.[2]

The lesson and the psalm go together. Moses has gone up on Mount Sinai. He has been there with the Lord for forty days and forty nights. Exodus tells us, “When God finished speaking with Moses on Mount Sinai, he gave him the two tablets of the covenant, tablets of stone, written with the finger of God.”[1]

I have never had the privilege of doing a careful study of the Book of Isaiah or of the Revelation to John. I hear the familiar, beautiful words of today’s lesson from the last section of Isaiah, chapters 56 to the end, and think not of the restored Jerusalem after the exile but of the visions and emotions of heaven that we read in Revelation:

When I began attending Saint Paul’s Church in Charlottesville during my college years, there were very small Prayer Books and a copy of Services for Trial Use[1] in the pews. The latter was known as “The Green Book” because of its cover’s color. I wasn’t really paying too much attention; I wasn’t very regular. But I liked going there, sometimes with friends, sometimes by myself. Looking back now, one can say that the biggest change in our church’s worship since the English Reformation had already begun: the revision of the Lectionary.

Today’s gospel lesson can give the impression that Nicodemus went in the darkness of the night to Jesus, the Light of the world and just disappeared.[1] Nicodemus asked three questions. Jesus responds at some length. Then, Jesus and his disciples are off to Judea. Only later in John’s gospel will we learn what this encounter with Jesus meant for Nicodemus.

The story of Jesus’ baptism is found in Mark, Matthew, and Luke.[1] In all three gospels, the Spirit drives, or leads, Jesus into the wilderness for forty days. Moses received the tables of the law on Mount Sinai after being there for forty days. When he came down with the tables in his hands and saw the golden calf, he threw them down and they broke. Moses would go up a second time, and this second time he fasted from food and water before he received the tablets of the law. Unlike Mark, Matthew and Luke include an account, from what we call the Sayings Source, of Jesus’ testing or temptation—take your pick[2]—in the wilderness.

At the end of my second year in seminary, my classmate, John McCausland, whose family had a cabin in northern Wisconsin, invited me and another classmate, Jim Nutter, to join him there for a few days just to get away. I remember a couple of things from that weekend. After a run, when we jumped into the lake, it was really cold—the snow had melted only a couple weeks earlier—and Jim, a guy from Maine, stayed in that very cold water the longest.

You may remember our Sunday lectionary is on a three-year cycle—and this is the year when most Sundays the gospel lesson is from Matthew. Saint Augustine of Hippo is credited with calling the first and longest of Jesus’ five discourses in Matthew, from which today’s gospel lesson is taken, the “Sermon on the Mount.”[1] New Testament scholar Ulrich Luz calls it “a happy choice” because it reminds us of Moses going up to Mount Sinai and receiving the tablets of the law[2]—and since we are talking about the Sermon on the Mount, it’s worth noting that Luz is among the scholars who think the Greek word usually translated as “blessed” is better, but not perfectly, translated as “happy.”[3]

The text of today’s appointed gospel lesson, in Greek and in English, begins with the second person plural pronoun, you—or in my childhood in Virginia with a Georgia grandmother, you-all. If February 2, the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple, had not taken precedence over the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, we would have heard the beginning of what we call the Sermon on the Mount.[1]

When I was 6 years old, soon after the birth of my sister, I went with my mother to the local parish, The Church of Our Merciful Saviour, where the rector read the office, The Churching of Women. I think she was required to undergo it to resume service on the Altar Guild. In 1954, women were permitted behind the altar rail only to clean it. That liturgy was rooted in the reason Mary is going to the temple today. The Churching of Women assumed that childbirth, among other things, made women ritually unclean, and they had to have a special ceremony to become clean and be readmitted to the church. Fortunately, this liturgy does not occur in the current BCP. Giving birth and any number of other conditions do not make women ritually unclean. But they did in the first century and as recently as my childhood.