First Miracles

Sermon for the Second Sunday after The Epiphany
RCL Lectionary, Year C
Isaiah 62:1-5 / Psalm 36:5-10 / 1 Corinthians 12:1-11 / John 2:1-11

January 17th, 2010
The Episcopal Church of Our Saviour
Mill Valley, California

Audio available here.

There is so much material to work with in today’s readings, it’s hard to know where to begin. We first might be tempted to talk about marriage – the theme of our Hebrew Scriptures lesson and the setting for Jesus’ first miracle. We might wonder if there is anything here to inform what is unfolding these days on the other side of the Golden Gate, as one of the most important religious, civil rights, and institutional debates of our time begins in federal court. Our tradition holds up the wedding in Cana in our marriage liturgy as a rare example of Jesus’ blessing on matrimony. But it is odd that we hold it up in this way. The story doesn’t have Jesus active at all in the marriage proper, and instead he is much more concerned about the party afterwards. Rather than counseling the bride and groom, he seems much more preoccupied with jars for water standing empty. Perhaps our seeming preoccupation with marriage and gender are not so much Christ’s concerns as our own.

No, there is something much deeper going on in today’s readings than an argument about marriage, who gets to wed, and who doesn’t. And that deeper something speaks to us more when we consider the shadow over us all this week. . . as horrific images and cries come from our sisters and brothers in Haiti following one of the worst natural disasters in recent years. The water of today’s gospel is much less about a wedding and much more about the thirst of those who have had no water for days; for the hunger for comfort in lives that are broken and lost; for the desperate men, women, and children seeking loved ones amongst the rubble of their homes.

At the heart of the devastation in Haiti is the age-old question of theodicy. . . the broad question of why God apparently allows, or even as some people sometimes claim, causes bad things to happen – even horrific things. It was a question that Isaiah is in the middle of addressing in today’s prophetic words composed for a people in exile – a people. . .God’s people even. . . who seem to have lost everything that made them God’s people: their homeland, their roots, their temple, the very heart of their heritage. It is also a question John’s early Christian community wrestled with as they were turned out of the synagogues and their roots and heritage in Judaism were profoundly questioned. It is a question these days on the streets of Port au Prince amidst incalculable and unspeakable thirst, hunger, and pain. What is left, and where is God? It is the first question of faith, a question we all hold as we gather together in God’s name; a hard question that must be lived most of all by those of us who claim a loving and gracious God.

We could resort to the widely declaimed Pat Robertson solution this week, which is to simply blame the people of Haiti for bringing God’s wrath on themselves for pagan ways past and present. It’s an argument beyond the odious, and – for my money – I frankly have far less use for a wrathful God than a negligent one. But there are subtle ways we still take up Robertson’s apparent theme, like the much more secular articles I read yesterday pointing to the shoddy construction and widespread corruption in Port-au-Prince as root causes for the disaster. These were cited as reasons that an earthquake roughly equivalent in power to the Loma Prieta quake can take tens of thousands of lives in Haiti rather than a few dozen as it did over twenty years ago in the Bay Area. Then there is the natural tendency to blame as I heard two people doing as they discussed the situation in Mill Valley’s downtown yesterday. . . to blame simply out of our frustration that decades of international aid and political support have not born the fruit we expect. But then, blame -- however justified -- is a favorite American pastime these days, and it does nothing to relieve the suffering, restore the lives, or salve the broken hearts of our sisters and brothers who face a nightmare at which most of us can only recoil. Blame is, quite frankly, an easy way out in the face of questions of theodicy, for it can let us off the hook for our shared responsibility, and it quickly forgets that our lives are profoundly interconnected. Blame is a manifestation of judgment. And as Jesus reminds us elsewhere in the Gospel, when we judge, we only judge ourselves. And Jesus has one command for us when it comes to that kind of judgment, whether we are widely known televangelists or lesser-known priests and parishioners at Church of Our Saviour: Don’t indulge in it.

Perhaps a better answer to this question of theodicy is tucked away in today’s gospel, and whispered in Isaiah and held close to Paul’s heart in his Letter to the Corinthians: and that answer is that we have a God who lives not on high, but right in the middle of our humanity. We don’t get a God who, like Superman, shields the faithful from our vulnerability or swoops in to fly us out of harm’s way. Nor do we get a God who deliberately shakes the earth and wields indiscriminate death like the angry spirits of old. Instead, we get our God in Christ, who embraces our suffering, who brings water to the thirsty and food to the hungry and calls us to do likewise; who blazes trails through our devastations to bring us the balm of compassion, who weeps with us on the streets of death and shows up even at our feasts when the wine has run out. A God far less interested in severing us from our heritage than rebuilding it. A God who weds us in baptism. A God who defangs death by rising again after accompanying us through the darkest valleys. A God who raises us up when we have fallen beneath the rubble of this life. A God who draws hope out of suffering and joy out of sorrow. A God who confronts every evil from without and within and transforms its consequences into grace.

When Jesus shows up at the wedding in Cana in Galilee, and performs his first miracle in the Gospel of John, he is not merely proving himself to his new disciples or saving the party. . .or conserving the institution of marriage for that matter, whether of the first century kind or the twenty-first century kind. Jesus, the living Word of God, instead is speaking through action to the very heart of who we are as a Christian community and as a human family. He is redefining not only marriage, but every other human relationship and institution, from our most intimate to those that are economic, political, national, and global.

The water, poured into the jars of purification, are for John’s gospel community and for us the water of baptism, which Jesus transforms into wine, the great Eucharistic symbol of his blood – and not just his blood, but our new blood, the blood of the new family of God, a blood that makes us one with one another and with our sisters and brothers suffering this day in Haiti and around the world. The new wine that is saved for last, the blood that ushers in new life in the face of all our suffering and death. The blood that binds us to one another in grace, and casts aside the divisions of judgment and blame and replaces them with the bonds of a shared heritage of justice, hope, and love.

Today, as we baptize Liberty Carter, we welcome her into this new family, this new family where Jesus, in our shared story this day, demonstrates to us that water indeed runs thicker than blood; that baptism resides at the very center of who he is and who we are now, and who we are in the process of becoming. Liberty is not guaranteed any more than the rest of us a life without challenge or suffering, but she will be endowed with the spiritual gifts that will see her through the hardest days: gifts of the baptismal life like those Paul discusses with the Corinthians today. . . uttered wisdom, knowledge, prophecy, healing, fidelity, discernment, and tongues that will permit Liberty to articulate the deep language of her heart and interpret the heart speech of others. The gifts of the Spirit that will fill her soul when the vulnerabilities of this life threaten to empty it, that will remind her of the abiding presence of Christ when all else fails. The gifts of the Spirit that give her a claim on us, her new family, every bit as much as we have a claim on her in God’s name. The gifts of the Spirit that will call her to compassion – to be Christ’s eyes and hands in the face of suffering. The gifts of the Spirit that will lead her to carry her cross and follow after the Holy One. The gifts of the Spirit that will allow her the freedom to look at death without succumbing to fear, and rise again with God in Christ.

This is the promise of our baptism, the promise of the water made into wine, the new blood of God’s new family, the first miracle of our journey with God in Christ Jesus, reflected in that first miracle at the wedding in Cana. And it’s first miracles like this one that we trust are happening now amidst the devastation of Haiti, as boots hit the ground and the aid arrives, as compassion unleashes not distant condemnation, but present, struggling generosity; as the Haitian people themselves usher in first miracles in which the thirsty taste the water of new life and begin to rise from the rubble to reclaim and rebuild their God-given heritage. For we know this story as the story of the Gospel, and we live it in Christ’s love no matter where we are. It is the story of our own transformation in the Word of the Living God, and it begins with that first miracle of baptism, and stretches all the way to the final miracle – the miracle of resurrection for the new family of God.

Where was God in the Earthquake?

by Craig David Uffman

I write with heavy heart, my mind assaulted by the images of devastation wrought by the cataclysmic earthquake that struck Haiti yesterday.

What are we to say to one another? What are we to say to our children whom we have pledged to teach to walk in the ways of the Lord? For, at such times, from the very depths of caring souls arises a groan, too deep for words, and, eventually, a haunting question: where was God in the earthquake?

There are those who speak at such times of the omnipotence of God. Some will see this and all such natural disasters as evidence against the God in whom we trust. They will portray the earthquake as 'Exhibit A' in their case against our claims of a good and loving God.

Others will feel it necessary to defend the righteousness of God. Well-meaning Christians will rise to declare this disaster to be God's majestic will, a will wholly impenetrable to us, and they will cite our story of Job to warn us against efforts to comprehend it. And, sadly, other Christians also will rise to declare this disaster to be God's will, but, forgetting Job and distorting our story tragically, they will tell us precisely which group among us brought about the earthquake as punishment for their unforgivable sins.

Each of these do us a service, for they force us to give an account of our faith in God and to remember carefully the truths about God we actually claim. For the same question that moves these groups haunts us, too, as we see the tears of anguished, hungry, and orphaned girls and boys reaching their hands out to us: where was God in the earthquake?

Theologian David Bentley Hart offers the best answer I know in his book The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami. He wrote it upon reflecting on the great tsunami that struck Asia in 2004. Hart reminds us that "we are to be guided by the full character of what is revealed of God in Christ. For, after all, if it is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil, and death, it would seem that he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity: sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God."

As we participate vicariously in the tormented tears of young girls, lost and alone in the Haitian darkness, as our hearts pour out tears for the thousands of sons and daughters and mothers and fathers who have died so suddenly and shockingly,and as we turn to our task of being the loving and living hands of Christ in response to this tragedy, let us never forget the urgent truth about God that it is our vocation to proclaim: God does not will our sickness or our death; God does not will that evil be done; God has conquered evil and death through the Cross. This is the meaning of the empty tomb. This is our Easter faith. . .

Read more at Metanoia.

A Thought about Covenants

Covenants that must be explained by what they are not are in deeply troubled waters - baptismal and otherwise.

(cf. The Archbishop of Canterbury defends the Anglican Covenant)

Christmas for the (Un)Closeted Christian

Sermon for Christmas

Isaiah 9:2-7 / Titus 2:11-14 / Luke 2:1-20 / Psalm 96

The Episcopal Church of Our Saviour
Mill Valley, California

Audio Here

I was sitting this morning with a friend, a Rabbi, as our sons played together on the plaza in downtown. It was a brief, last-minute Advent break for me – the last breath before the plunge into all the Christmas activities of this year. He asked me if I had my Christmas sermon all prepared, and I had to tell him no! I was still waiting for the right story, the right theme to emerge to go with the outline that was starting to form in my heart and head. I recounted with a nervous chuckle that I seem to be writing and preaching best these days under pressure of deadlines. Somehow, it comes together just in time.

That said, it’s a little unnerving, to say the least, on Christmas Eve morning to not have the Christmas sermon writ yet. But that in itself, for my walk at least, is part of the expectation of Christmas – the “not ready yet” nature of the season, the table not quite set, the gifts not all quite wrapped, the house not quite prepared. But now we are here – Christmas is upon us – and in the words of an Anglican prayer: “It is night after a long day. What has been done has been done; what has not been done has not been done; let it be.” (A New Zealand Prayer Book, pg. 184).

And my sermon is here, because sure enough, early this afternoon, I stumbled by grace across a reflection that appeared on Salon.com. It was a reflection that captured the essence of Christmas for me this year, and for where we are in our common life – a startlingly honest and insightful article by Ada Calhoun (H/T to Episcopal Café), who writes:

It was Sunday morning in my scruffy Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood, and I was wearing a dress. Walking to the subway, I ran into a friend heading home from yoga class. She wore sweats and carried her mat over her shoulder. "Where are you going so early all dressed up?" she asked, chuckling. "To church?" We shared a laugh at the absurdity of a liberal New Yorker heading off to worship.

The real joke? I totally was.

Inside the church, it's cool and quiet. I read the Collect of the day in the Book of Common Prayer, which urges us: "While we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure." My recent layoff no longer seems like the end of the world. I take Communion and exchange the peace and listen to the sermon. As I'm walking back up the aisle, I feel reoriented and calmer, the indignities of the week shift into perspective.

These moments are not only sacred; they are secret.

Outside, on the steps of the downtown Manhattan church, I think I see someone familiar coming down the sidewalk, and I bolt in the other direction.

Why am I so paranoid? I'm not cheating on my husband, committing crimes or doing drugs.

But those are battles my cosmopolitan, progressive friends would understand. Many of them had to come out -- as gay, as alcoholics, as artists in places where art was not valued. To them, my situation is far more sinister: I am the bane of their youth, the boogeyman of their politics, the very thing they left their small towns to escape. I am a Christian.

It’s a passage that could have been written for us in the Bay Area, couldn’t it? And it sat for me in stark contrast to another reflection I read this morning google-listed as “The Meaning of Christmas,” a harsh one that seemed to be out of the fundamentalist play book about Jesus coming into the world because God was still angry with us – or at least holding us at his holy arm’s length – upset over what happened in the Garden of Eden or the contemporary findings of science, or what have you. . . That, in essence, the message of Christmas had something more to do with what we are against than what we are for. This was a message that to me that more readily captures the spirit of our age, but far less the true spirit or meaning of Christmas.

Ada Calhoun’s piece about being a secret Christian spoke to me and Christmas so much more deeply not simply because she attends an Episcopal Church, but because she talks in a profound sense to the central event of this night – this child born in our hearts and in our midst – almost in secret and off the beaten path – who even before he can speak transforms the very fabric of our lives. This child and his mother holding him, pondering all these things in her heart. . .

And how embarrassing it is – especially in a post-Christendom era like the one we live in; in a diverse and secular era where being Christian is becoming increasingly unusual and slightly odd – that we – conservative, liberal, and in the middle alike – gather together this evening and call this fragile, gurgling child “God,” revere him, give him every accolade we can imagine. And then we join the illiterate shepherds and the down-and-out to worship him, unnoticed, at first, by the powers and principalities of this or any age.

And how we as Christians walk with this faith every moment of every day somewhere at work in our lives, sometimes secretly shielding it from the harsh and cynical gaze of others, sometimes embarrassed by the militant clothing it receives from some of our sisters and brothers. We want to be courageous as a faithful people. Indeed, frequently, we ought to be. But our courage is not wrought on believing we are right and others are wrong. Nor is it wrought on a score-card of “saved” souls. It is instead born in this marginal way, out of the recognition that life is extraordinarily vulnerable, and that our God has not come to us with vengeance or anger or a cosmic balance sheet, but has instead simply and somewhat secretly come among us, as one of us. That our redemption belongs to this child who only knows right now that he is hungry, who needs the warmth and attention of his mother to survive, who needs to be swaddled and suckled and rocked gently by those who love him.

Christmas, a story of stories, is at once the story of the fragility of grace in our lives. Quite possibly it’s a sign of our times to consider the tender grace when there has been so much upheaval for so long around us – personal, financial, vocational. I’ve had people in my office at least once a week for several weeks now who have been wrestling with unemployment for many months – some over a year. People struggling to make ends meet, people in tears struggling with where God might be calling them next – when the most obvious and experiential answer feels like “nowhere.” Grace for them is fragile, maybe a bit embarrassing, like the Christ-Child, tender in the raw places of the soul worn down by the ups and downs of a capricious world.

Somehow, we expect a Super-God to swoop down and save us from the vagaries of history, the places we find ourselves – those places where we never intended to end up. But most of us learn sooner or later to stop pointing fingers and accept that we are often ending up in places in our lives – both difficult and easy, tough and wonderful – through no great fault of our own. Sooner or later our pretense at control over our lives gives way to a more realistic assessment that we are dependent and interdependent on countless others who came before us and who are around us. Most of our lives, quite frankly, are not within our control. The suffering and joys that we receive are rarely asked for, even more rarely bought or purchased. And so we struggle as our spiritual ancestors have done for generations with a desire for a God to rescue us, a powerful divinity to shore us up and hem us in. Or we have turned to our own devices and built economic or military juggernauts. But they cannot save us, as even they succumb to the slow erosion of time.

This night, we receive neither control over our own destinies, nor a God who guarantees the future. Instead, our redemption begins with this child, this fragile grace. The Christ-child who reminds me of the tender power of a smile or a gentle touch, the delicate beauty as we sing in one hymn this time of year of a rose, or a human heart revealed in a moment of honest humility. Of Mary pondering all these things deep in the secret places of her heart. These are the images of our God at this time. Not what we thought we needed. Not what the world tells us our God should be. And certainly not what we wanted at a vulnerable time! But this is the God we receive.

And this is a better God than we might have asked for or imagined. This is a God who understands intimately our plight and misery, our vulnerability and sorrows, the fragility of our happiness and the sweetness of our joy. Not an aloof God, nor a God in armor – spiritual or otherwise – but a God open and humble as we truly are when we remember where we came from and where we are going. When we pause from our collective hubris and realize the tender, fleeting grace that we call life. There is simply only one way to redeem this embarrassingly fleeting life for the Creator of all that is, and that is to enter it fully and take on every aspect of our humanity. To bundle up all our sorrows and joys, our disappointments and victories; to bundle everything that is us up in swaddling clothes and rock it gently in a primordial love that is eternal.

And that is good news as the shepherds gather and the angels sing, even here on the seeming margins of all that is powerful and potent in a post-Christendom world – just as it was in a little Judean village at the edge of an empire all those years ago. A bit embarrassing, perhaps, but nonetheless moving. Because now we know we are not alone. Now we know it is not simply that our redemption has drawn near, but our God has entered our lives, body and soul. And we are touched by that divine grace and love. . .and we will never be the same.

Picking Up Sticks

Sermon for the Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost
 Proper 27

RCL Lectionary, Year B

1 Kings 17:8-16 / Psalm 146 / Hebrews 9:24-28 / Mark 12:38-44

November 8, 2009


The Episcopal Church of Our Saviour

Mill Valley, California

Picking up Sticks and Offerings
by The Rev. Richard E. Helmer

Audio available here.

As we prepare to wrap up our 2010 stewardship pledge campaign at Church of Our Saviour, it is tempting to take a well-trod road with today’s readings and talk about the widow’s mite. . .for me to offer some kind of final exhortation to each of you to aspire to her generosity as she put everything she had into the Temple treasury. It’s tempting, because it would avoid the more humbling and, in some ways more frightening implications of today’s gospel.

Today’s gospel is humbling because all Jesus’ harsh words about the Scribes give me great pause. Truth be told, there’s definitely a side to me that likes to walk around in long robes, who likes being greeted with respect at Mill Valley Market. 
I get the best seat in the house during worship. And, when I visit people at home in my service as Rector, I am often given a seat at the head of the table! I hope the prayers I offer publicly are not for the sake of appearance, and I pray even more to Almighty God that I do not devour widows’ houses. Yet we all know that this parish has relied on the generosity of numerous widows over the past century to sustain our community and, yes, that includes the clergy salaries. Words to give me pause indeed!

In short, I feel a dangerous kinship with the Scribes, who were the keepers of the legal, religious, and economic apparatus of the first-century Temple in Jerusalem; and they were among Jesus’ harshest critics. You see, Jesus’ point about the widow’s mite in today’s Gospel is not so much about our financial stewardship, but about the unspeakably awful economic injustice that sat right at the heart of institutional religion of the day – in God’s name, no less. The Scribes were so wound up with the rotten core of the Temple system that they scarcely noticed the hardship they were putting on the poorest of the poor and the marginalized, widows among the most vulnerable among them. And the Scribes’ spiritual downfall is always knocking at our door. We constantly run the risk of behaving like them. Moreover, our claiming God does not automatically inoculate us against the pitfalls of grasping greed or the ignorance of real need that our drive to sustain an institution like a parish - or a home, or a business - can sometimes engender.

In today’s readings, I am most struck by the image of the widow of Zarephath picking up sticks for the final meal. Her words to Elijah, “I am now gathering a couple of sticks, so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it, and die,” I hear not said with self-pity or sarcasm; but with a matter-of-factness that is both ironic and profound. Picking up the sticks presents a fidelity to the final meal, of looking into the face of dissolution and death with a kind of dignity that we might aspire to when we inevitably meet the end of the road; of accepting the vulnerability of our true powerlessness in a world where we cannot ultimately put our trust in any ruler or child of earth, for no matter what we or others do – sooner or later – we return to dust from which we were made.

This is a peculiar kind of faith that both the nameless widows in our readings today possess: a faith of embracing reality, however hard it might be, with a trust and an acceptance that are unnerving to the Scribes within all of us. This trust and acceptance are unnerving, because the reality of picking up sticks for the final meal or parting with the final pennies in one’s possession, as we hear about the widow at the Temple treasury, points to the radical poverty that is the truest reality of all our lives. It’s a reality that cuts through all the hypocrisy and vain grasping that can consume us. Truly, we own and ultimately control nothing. The pretense of the scribes is only a fantasy in which so many of us spend a great deal of time – too much time – a fantasy of control over our own destiny and material possessions. Honestly, it is a fantasy in which many of us are tempted to play God. And we must forever be wary that our religiosity and spiritual practices – the fancy robes and well-endowed furnishings – do not lead us down this road.

The widows point to the trust that rests at the foundation of true faith – a radical trust in God – and it is this kind of trust that God honors. For the widow in Zarephath, Elijah comes at the moment of greatest scarcity bringing God’s power to sustain her and her son through the famine. For the widow outside the temple, though we hear nothing about her faith, God in Christ sees her in all of her humble authenticity a faithful contrast to an unspeakably harsh injustice: one wrapped up into a social-religious-economic juggernaut presided over by the spiritually impoverished Scribes.

The irony of this contrast would probably not have been lost on the early Christian community that first heard the story in this form from Mark’s Gospel. You see the Temple was destroyed by the Romans in the year 70, and the fantasy of the Scribes was destroyed along with it. In fact, the Scribes as Jesus knew them were all but lost to history after 70 – their class, wealth, influence, and way of life, inexorably intertwined with the Temple cultus, would barely survive the resulting upheaval in Judaism – and what did survive evolved into something remarkably different in later Rabbinical Judaism. But the widows pressed on, and they even became of critical importance to the early Christian community, where they were tended and empowered, and some even offered essential hospitality to the small communities gathering in the late first century and after in Jesus’ name.

The widow of Zarephath became legendary – not only because of her faith and relationship with the great prophet Elijah – but also because she was an outsider, a foreigner. Everything was against her, and yet it was she who curried God’s favor. Her offering to God by hosting Elijah, even in the face of complete destitution, is turned by grace into sustainable abundance. Once again, God sees the world entirely upside-down from our point-of-view. The least among us are noticed and nourished. The nameless receive blessing. The outsiders become insiders. The first are last, and the last are first. It is yet another teaching for all of the time we spend grasping for ourselves that the truth of faith is not found in what we crave and or in what we hold, but in what we offer. That it is only empty hands and open hearts – jugs of oil and jars of meal sometimes running almost empty – that God can fill.

It’s this spiritual teaching that we are likely to find the most frightening, because it contradicts everything the world tells us about the way reality works. We are taught to believe that only those who help themselves succeed, that “up” means having more, that our objective is always something greater than what we have and where we are now. But this is the trap of the Scribes – a trap where we devour the house of Creation to the point that she now groans in crisis, where we forget too easily that one in six of our sisters and brothers worldwide remain uncertain where their next meal is coming from, where we are insulated from the naked reality of our reliance, and indeed the reliance of all the world upon our God.

A seminarian classmate who came from a village in West Africa once remarked to me that we don’t know how much we depend upon God until we are uncertain how we are going to get food for our family in the coming week; of facing famine with no clear solution. That is the spiritual and physical reality of the widows giving of their last, picking up sticks for a final meal and offering it to God. And it is this reality of offering, service, and reliance upon God’s grace that these long robes, our parish family, and our beautiful space and our prayers and practice of coming to the table with outstretched hands are all meant to serve. Any other purpose or meaning for our common life as a Christian community is probably just dangerous fantasy.

But the good news for us is when we take these stories of widows into our hearts and recognize our own poverty – even amidst our material abundance – we are living again into our real vulnerability before our God. A vulnerability that, when we offer it to Christ and to those in most in need in the day-to-day and even moment-to-moment of our lives, God will embrace. And we may indeed discover that our jugs of oil and jars of meal are replenished each day, not so much because of our grasping and endeavors, but because of God’s grace at work around and within us. A grace we can learn to trust as we pick up the sticks for each final meal offered to God and our sisters and brothers. A grace we can count on in all the chances and changes of this life this day and always. A grace that will, if we let it, get us and the most vulnerable among us through any famine, and sustain us with an abundant love prepared for all the world from before time.