2ND OF EASTER — 19 April 2009
St. Paul’s, Durant — 9:00
Acts 3:12a, 13-15, 17-26 Ps 111 1John 5:1-6 John 20:19-31
Do not be faithless, but believing.
The Gospel on the Second Sunday of Easter is, every year, the account from St. John about Jesus’ appearances, first to the Ten (the Twelve, less Judas of course, and also with Thomas missing) on that first Sunday evening, and then a week later to the Eleven again, this time with Thomas present. Thomas, we are told, refused to believe that Jesus had been raised from the dead until he saw Jesus with his own eyes and touched Jesus’ wounds with his own hands. And hence poor Tom has been nicknamed “Doubting Thomas” ever since. And we’ve been reading this Gospel passage on this Sunday in the year almost ever since; and it gives us good occasion to talk about faith and doubt.
Faith and doubt are often seen as opposites, as incompatible with each other. If you experience doubtfulness about something - especially something “religious,” something the Bible says, something the Church says - then you obviously “don’t have enough faith,” and folks use this as a club to beat you over the head with. Maybe you even use it on yourself as a club to beat yourself over the head with.
I don’t think God expects us to give our assent to things blindly and uncritically. God does not expect us to hang our brains on the hat rack when we walk into church (although, God knows, plenty of us do just that!). On the contrary, I think genuine faithfulness includes a readiness to use our minds rigorously, to think critically, to judge on the basis of credible evidence, though always in a spirit that humbly seeks truth, rather than one that proudly seeks power.
But back to our story. There’s nothing in the Gospels that suggests that Thomas was a skeptic by temperament. On the contrary, he was fervently devoted to Jesus. When Jesus starts up to Jerusalem the last time, even though the disciples warn him that the establishment has it in for him, it is Thomas who convinces the others, “Let us go with him too, and die there with him!” Thomas doesn’t have any trouble believing in Jesus; he just has trouble with pious platitudes and wishful thinking.
St. John’s Gospel, we might note, comes out of an early Christian community which (among other things) was trying to deal with people who tried to be more spiritual than God. (Later on some of this kind of super-spiritual religion would take forms which we would later refer to as “Gnosticism” - sort of the “New Age” of the second century - very lofty, anti-materialist, anti-worldly, esoteric stuff.) One of the things which the Fourth Gospel is at some considerable pains to defend is precisely that in Jesus “the Word became flesh, and pitched his tent right here among us.”
And so in John’s Gospel, when Thomas hears that the rest of the disciples have seen the risen Jesus, he says, “I don’t want to hear a bunch of inspirational stuff about the triumph of life over death, I don’t want a meaningful experience, I don’t want to be uplifted, I want to know the truth! I want to see his body, nail-holes and all!”
And note that Jesus really doesn’t seem to have any big problem with this. Look at the Gospel story again. That first Sunday night he appears to the Ten, and they’re all scared blue (fair enough!). (Incidentally, have you ever noticed in the accounts of the resurrection appearances, that people normally don’t recognize the risen Jesus when they see him? The women don’t, until Jesus speaks to them; nor Mary Magdalene; nor the disciples, in Jerusalem, on the road to Emmaus, or in Galilee; nor Paul on the Damascus Road. We don’t find him; he discloses himself to us.) (Anyway.) Jesus appears to the Ten, and says, “Peace. Don’t be afraid.” And he shows them his hands and his side. “Look, it’s me.” Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. It’s okay that they should first experience the reality of his body. And it’s okay for Thomas, too, a week later. “Come and look,” Jesus says. “Come and touch. It’s really me. I’m really here. Do not be faithless - be faithful.” (That’s what the Greek says. It isn’t really talking about “doubt” in an intellectual or conceptual sense at all - it’s talking about personal commitment, personal trust, personal relationship.)
Thomas believed, Thomas placed his faith, Thomas let Jesus disclose himself to him. Because he saw.
“Blessed are those who believe, even though they don’t see,” Jesus says. Well, yes. He’s talking about us. Because we’re not going to see Jesus the way Thomas did (well, probably not.). We’re not going to, not exactly that way. The folks for whom and among whom St John’s Gospel was written weren’t going to see Jesus exactly that way either. That’s why the Gospel was written (and it says so, right there): “These things are written down so that you may believe.” Thomas needed some evidence, and that was okay. We need evidence too, and it’s still okay, and we’ve got some. The real crunch comes when we do meet Jesus, when Jesus does disclose himself to us through the people around us; do we recognize him then? Do we commit ourselves then? Are we faithful, rather than faithless?
Monday, April 20, 2009
Monday, April 6, 2009
Sermon -- 5 April 2009
PALM SUNDAY — 5 April 2009
Mark 11:1-11a Isaiah 45:21-25 Pa 22:1-11 Phil 2:5-11 Mark 15:1-39
At three o'clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
I’m told there is a common nightmare — though I haven’t had it so much as a dream during sleep as rather that sudden bolt of fear while wide awake in the case itself: driving too fast in the rain and dark on a narrow highway, and coming suddenly to the crest of a hill, only to discover that there is no other side. The bitter and empty chill of the abyss.
One of the things we're all looking for, and may come to church to find, is some kind of peace, a sense of fulfillment, the assurance that the road does go on, a connection with other people and the universe, a sense of God's presence in our lives. That's okay! We have this longing for God (let’s name it as that, because that’s what it is, even when we don’t always recognize it as such), we have this longing for God because God built it into us; “we come that way.” And we do, at least from time to time, experience the presence of God with us. Different ones of us in different ways; sometimes in overwhelming ways, sometimes in quiet ways; sometimes in the great events of life, sometimes in the midst of the thoroughly ordinary. Sometimes we experience God's presence when we most need God.
And sometimes when we most need God we do not experience God's presence with us.
“Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Of all the words of Jesus, these from the cross are for many Christians the most troubling. If ever there was anyone who, we assume, always felt the presence of God, surely it was Jesus himself. Was not Jesus God’s own Son? Is not Jesus the Incarnation, the humanization, of God’s own Self — the Word become flesh and living among us? And yet Jesus cries, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”
It's not enough to point out that what Jesus says is in fact a quotation of the first verse of the 22nd Psalm — a psalm which verse by verse foreshadows and resonates with the events of the crucifixion — a psalm which begins as a cry of distress but concludes thirty verses later in a song of faith and praise (though we didn’t read it that far this morning): “My soul shall live for him; my descendants shall serve him; they shall come and make known … the saving deeds that he has done.” Doubtless Jesus, steeped in the Hebrew Scriptures as he was, even in the depths of his agony, knew what psalm he was beginning to quote, and how that psalm ends. And yet there's more than that; that's too easy an answer. We must not so cheaply deny or so piously explain away Jesus’ experience of the absence of God. “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Oh, if only I were a better person, if only I had more faith, if only I prayed more, if only I read the Bible more, if only I were holier, then I would feel God’s presence all the time, I would know God is with me, I wouldn’t feel so cold and lonely and empty. Well, perhaps so. Or Not. It is especially to the holy that God risks stepping back into the shadows. It is the holy ones who really experience the Dark Night of the Soul. It turns out that one such was Mother Teresa of
God is never really absent, of course; but we know that by faith, not by evidence, and it doesn’t warm the chill very much when we don’t feel God's presence. But God is not Mr. Fixit rushing in to repair all our problems. God is not a control freak who makes everything turn out all right all the time. God is not a vending machine dispensing heavenly consolation for those with the right spiritual coins. Those who claim that God is always right there for them haven’t been to the cross yet.
“But this isn’t what we were seeking. This doesn’t fulfill our longing. This isn’t the God we wanted.”
Jesus cries out in the words of the 22nd Psalm; the words of the same psalm, verse 8, are thrown back in his face: “He trusted in the Lord; let him deliver him; let him rescue him, if he delights in him.” But God didn't rescue Jesus. God let Jesus die. Oh, God raised him from death on the third day, but first God let him die. Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?
I don’t really know why Jesus experienced abandonment on the cross. I can talk about it, but I don’t really understand it. I do know this: Jesus shows us — in his life, in his teaching, in his death — Jesus shows us who God really is. Or, perhaps better, in Jesus, in his life, in his teaching, in his death, and, yes, indeed, in his resurrection, but only after “in his death,” God reveals who God really is.
For remember this: Given that this is what it takes to reconcile a broken humanity to its Creator, God did not find somebody else to do the job. “Love does not send others to suffer in its place. Love comes itself.”1 Whatever else we may want to say about the relationship between the humanity of Jesus of Nazareth and the divinity of God, that much is fundamental. And so we may even say: in Jesus on the cross, God tastes the bitterness of his own absence. And that says something about who God is, too.
God's presence with us is not a matter of our feeling; nor is it a matter of our deserving. Being better or holier may make us more keenly aware of God's presence, but on the other hand it may make us more keenly aware of God's absence. Our relationship with God is not, in the end, a matter of feeling anyway. It's a matter of decision, of response to a call. God calls us to faith, to commitment to the service of an eternal cause, a heavenly kingdom. But this is a call to a faith which trusts even when we do not feel God's presence; a faith which seeks not to use God to make us feel good but which seeks to be used by God to make the world holy; a faith which says Yes when everything around us and even within us cries No; a faith which seeks not to escape death but which trusts and knows that only through death can we be raised to true life.
1 John Austin Baker, The Foolishness of God (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1970), pp. 407-8
Monday, March 30, 2009
Sermon -- 29 March 2009
5TH IN LENT — 29 March 2009
St. Paul’s, Durant — 9:15 a.m.
Jer 31:31-34 Ps 51:1-13 Heb 5:5-10 John 12:20-33
Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.
The people of Jesus’ time, and for many generations before, had been waiting for deliverance. With great longing they yearned for the coming of the Messiah (the “Anointed One”), or The Prophet (like Moses, or Elijah returned), or the heavenly Son of Man. (The titles varied somewhat.) But they had their own ideas of how God ought to act, and what the Messiah, or Whoever, should do, and what deliverance and salvation meant. They assumed that they knew what the nature of reality was, and how the universe worked, and what they had a right to expect from God. Their ideas of deliverance were in terms of power, of glory in the sense of grandeur. They expected God to come and fix everything for them. They wanted the Messiah to come swooping in like Superman and make everything all right again. They wanted the Messiah to drive out the Roman occupation army and re-establish the kingdom of Israel like it had been in the good old days of David and Solomon. They thought that God’s Messiah would make them all righteous and prosperous and free, and so on and so on.
And how unlike all that Jesus is! “If you try to save your life you will lose it; you will only save your life if you lose it for my sake.” This saying recurs over and over in the Gospels—we heard it in Mark’s Gospel three Sundays ago—and it is right at the heart of Jesus’ teaching. Perhaps this above all is the scandal of Christ. And let’s be honest: If, upon reflection, in our heart of hearts, if we aren’t offended, scandalized, “tripped up” by Christ—at least sometimes—then we just aren’t paying serious attention. Jesus really means it when he says the first shall be last and the last first. In the Reign of God, everything really is (by our standards) topsy-turvy.
“Quit trying to accumulate things for yourselves,” Jesus says, “riches, or position, or security, or even honor, or even virtue. Stop trying to save your own lives! You can’t do it. If you want to live really, live fully, live eternally beginning right now, then you have to give your life away. Don’t try to run away from death—it is only through dying that you can begin to live. All those things in which you put your trust to find your security and happiness will betray you in the end and rob you of that which you seek.”
And that’s not what we were expecting! That isn’t what we had in mind at all! That’s an attack on everything we have ever held dear, all our traditional values! If these are God’s ways, they are strange indeed! Think about it! What an absurd Messiah! There he stands, not in Rome, the capital of the Empire, or in Alexandria, the Mediterranean world’s second city, but in the middle of Jerusalem, a backwater provincial not-much-more-than-a-county-seat-town, surrounded by a rag-tag mob of ne’er-do-wells who obviously have nothing better to do, proclaiming: “Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”
We thought we knew, in those days, how God ought to operate in God’s world. We still think we know how God ought to operate in the world. We think in terms like “merit” and “virtue” and “earning” and “deserving” and “worthiness” and “security” and “self-fulfillment” and “self-preservation.” We think that’s being Realistic. The scandal, the offense, of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that the Gospel claims that God does not operate in the world the way we think God ought to. The Gospel claims that what we assume is “realistic” isn’t realistic at all, isn’t real at all. God does not bring salvation and deliverance by power and the glory of grandeur, by lightning and thunder and armies of angels. God does not send us a king, as this world understands kings. God does not take us out of the world of pain and suffering and death—God leads us into pain and suffering and death, and through pain and suffering and death God brings us out into true and genuine life. God does not manipulate us, or compel us, or coerce us. God draws us—draws us by the divine love, draws us by the divine truth, draws us to the Cross.
And this is the mystery of the Cross, the mystery into which we enter more and more deeply as Holy Week approaches:
– The power and glory of God are known to us through suffering love;
– What our human lives are really all about is seen in the Crucified One;
– Only in letting go of everything can we really have anything at all;
– Love—unreserved, unconditional, unrestricted, unbounded love, love that holds back nothing, seeks nothing for itself, but gives all—this love is the most powerful reality, the only truly powerful reality, ultimately the only reality of all that is.
Only by being lifted up on the Cross does Jesus draw all of us to himself by his power and glory.
We heard Jeremiah speak today of a new covenant that God is making with us, written on our hearts. This new covenant is a covenant which calls us to die: to die to ourselves and our own ways, our self-assurance, our self-sufficiency, our false and illusory “realism,” our security, our “worthiness”—to die to all of this, so that we may be re-born, re-created, re-enlivened with the real life, the true life, the eternal life of the Crucified and Risen One.
St. Paul’s, Durant — 9:15 a.m.
Jer 31:31-34 Ps 51:1-13 Heb 5:5-10 John 12:20-33
Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.
The people of Jesus’ time, and for many generations before, had been waiting for deliverance. With great longing they yearned for the coming of the Messiah (the “Anointed One”), or The Prophet (like Moses, or Elijah returned), or the heavenly Son of Man. (The titles varied somewhat.) But they had their own ideas of how God ought to act, and what the Messiah, or Whoever, should do, and what deliverance and salvation meant. They assumed that they knew what the nature of reality was, and how the universe worked, and what they had a right to expect from God. Their ideas of deliverance were in terms of power, of glory in the sense of grandeur. They expected God to come and fix everything for them. They wanted the Messiah to come swooping in like Superman and make everything all right again. They wanted the Messiah to drive out the Roman occupation army and re-establish the kingdom of Israel like it had been in the good old days of David and Solomon. They thought that God’s Messiah would make them all righteous and prosperous and free, and so on and so on.
And how unlike all that Jesus is! “If you try to save your life you will lose it; you will only save your life if you lose it for my sake.” This saying recurs over and over in the Gospels—we heard it in Mark’s Gospel three Sundays ago—and it is right at the heart of Jesus’ teaching. Perhaps this above all is the scandal of Christ. And let’s be honest: If, upon reflection, in our heart of hearts, if we aren’t offended, scandalized, “tripped up” by Christ—at least sometimes—then we just aren’t paying serious attention. Jesus really means it when he says the first shall be last and the last first. In the Reign of God, everything really is (by our standards) topsy-turvy.
“Quit trying to accumulate things for yourselves,” Jesus says, “riches, or position, or security, or even honor, or even virtue. Stop trying to save your own lives! You can’t do it. If you want to live really, live fully, live eternally beginning right now, then you have to give your life away. Don’t try to run away from death—it is only through dying that you can begin to live. All those things in which you put your trust to find your security and happiness will betray you in the end and rob you of that which you seek.”
And that’s not what we were expecting! That isn’t what we had in mind at all! That’s an attack on everything we have ever held dear, all our traditional values! If these are God’s ways, they are strange indeed! Think about it! What an absurd Messiah! There he stands, not in Rome, the capital of the Empire, or in Alexandria, the Mediterranean world’s second city, but in the middle of Jerusalem, a backwater provincial not-much-more-than-a-county-seat-town, surrounded by a rag-tag mob of ne’er-do-wells who obviously have nothing better to do, proclaiming: “Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”
We thought we knew, in those days, how God ought to operate in God’s world. We still think we know how God ought to operate in the world. We think in terms like “merit” and “virtue” and “earning” and “deserving” and “worthiness” and “security” and “self-fulfillment” and “self-preservation.” We think that’s being Realistic. The scandal, the offense, of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that the Gospel claims that God does not operate in the world the way we think God ought to. The Gospel claims that what we assume is “realistic” isn’t realistic at all, isn’t real at all. God does not bring salvation and deliverance by power and the glory of grandeur, by lightning and thunder and armies of angels. God does not send us a king, as this world understands kings. God does not take us out of the world of pain and suffering and death—God leads us into pain and suffering and death, and through pain and suffering and death God brings us out into true and genuine life. God does not manipulate us, or compel us, or coerce us. God draws us—draws us by the divine love, draws us by the divine truth, draws us to the Cross.
And this is the mystery of the Cross, the mystery into which we enter more and more deeply as Holy Week approaches:
– The power and glory of God are known to us through suffering love;
– What our human lives are really all about is seen in the Crucified One;
– Only in letting go of everything can we really have anything at all;
– Love—unreserved, unconditional, unrestricted, unbounded love, love that holds back nothing, seeks nothing for itself, but gives all—this love is the most powerful reality, the only truly powerful reality, ultimately the only reality of all that is.
Only by being lifted up on the Cross does Jesus draw all of us to himself by his power and glory.
We heard Jeremiah speak today of a new covenant that God is making with us, written on our hearts. This new covenant is a covenant which calls us to die: to die to ourselves and our own ways, our self-assurance, our self-sufficiency, our false and illusory “realism,” our security, our “worthiness”—to die to all of this, so that we may be re-born, re-created, re-enlivened with the real life, the true life, the eternal life of the Crucified and Risen One.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Sermon -- 22 March 2009
4TH SUNDAY IN LENT — 22 March 2009
St. Mark’s, Maquoketa — 10:00 a.m.
Num 21:4-9 Ps 107:1-3,17-22 Eph 2:1-10 John 3:14-21
And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.
There are certain classic forms for that important literary genre, the joke. For instance, there are the jokes that begin, “A guy walks into a bar…” Or sometimes it’s a penguin that walks into the bar. Or a giraffe. Or maybe René Descartes (that’s a very philosophical joke).
Another classic form is the one that begins, “A man dies and goes to heaven, and St. Peter (or Jesus, or God) meets him at the pearly gates and says to him, ‘What have you done that entitles you to be admitted here?’” (Have I told you the one about the Baptist preacher and his wife, and the Lutheran pastor and his wife, and the Episcopal priest and his wife, who were going out to dinner together but they were in an automobile accident and were all killed, and when they appeared at the pearly gates…?) (If you don’t know that one, ask me at coffee hour. Or, if you’re smart, don’t.)
Well, anyway, this classic joke form depends upon a widely shared and commonly understood scenario of what our final judgment will be like. And in this scenario we appear before the divine tribunal, and our file is pulled and scrutinized, and all the wrong things we have done and right things we have failed to do are added up, and God says, “Hmmmm,” or perhaps “Hmmmm,” and depending on the tone of that “Hmmmm” we either get in or we don’t, we are either saved or damned. It’s a model rather like a human courtroom. Except that in a human courtroom we presumably have a defense attorney and can plead extenuating circumstances or something like that. But in our image of the last judgment — possibly influenced directly or indirectly by Michelangelo —we are guilty until proven innocent, the charges are inscrutable, and the sentence unappealable. It’s actually less like a court of law and more like an IRS audit.
Well, I don’t think the image of judgment in the Gospel is like that at all. St. John’s Gospel actually says quite a lot about judgment, and takes it very seriously, and so should we. I think it’s a real mistake to make a modernist sentimentalist assumption that God is a real weenie when it comes to judgment. But judgment is not the imposition upon us of a sentence by someone else (even by God) —where the issue might arise in our minds as to whether we were being dealt with fairly, where we might claim, “Yes, but, you don’t really understand!” On the contrary, judgment is the utterly clear, utterly transparent, utterly truthful disclosure and revelation of who we really are, what we have really made of ourselves. It really isn’t a matter of balancing our sins against what good we have done — in any case we are not saved by the good deeds we have done. What we have done matters, but it matters because what we do is what makes us who we are.
And so the Gospel today:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.”
This is the judgment: face to face with the source and ground of the being of all that is, and seeing that That One is by very nature totally self-giving Love, who indeed so loves us that he came among us as one of us and shared our condition to its bitterest dregs in order to raise us to his condition in its utter glory — face to face with That Love, have we become persons who go to be embraced by That Love, or have we become persons who withdraw into our own sorry selves? (This is what “believing in the name of the only Son of God” is about — not subscribing to doctrinal propositions about Jesus, however important those may be in their place, but turning to the embracing arms of the Divine Love.) In the presence of the Light of the World, do we rejoice in that Light’s illumination, or do we flee to hide in the shadows? This is the judgment.
We are already being judged, by who we are becoming. And who we are becoming is a function of what we do. So the Lenten call to repentance (indeed, the call to repentance in every season) is critically important: we really do need to look at ourselves, be honest about what we have done and what we are doing, and understand who we are becoming. In some respects, at least, we’re going to realize that “this isn’t who I want to be!” So we had better do something about that, and turn around (which is what “repent” means) and become people who “do what is true” and therefore who in the judgment will “come to the light.”
St. Mark’s, Maquoketa — 10:00 a.m.
Num 21:4-9 Ps 107:1-3,17-22 Eph 2:1-10 John 3:14-21
And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.
There are certain classic forms for that important literary genre, the joke. For instance, there are the jokes that begin, “A guy walks into a bar…” Or sometimes it’s a penguin that walks into the bar. Or a giraffe. Or maybe René Descartes (that’s a very philosophical joke).
Another classic form is the one that begins, “A man dies and goes to heaven, and St. Peter (or Jesus, or God) meets him at the pearly gates and says to him, ‘What have you done that entitles you to be admitted here?’” (Have I told you the one about the Baptist preacher and his wife, and the Lutheran pastor and his wife, and the Episcopal priest and his wife, who were going out to dinner together but they were in an automobile accident and were all killed, and when they appeared at the pearly gates…?) (If you don’t know that one, ask me at coffee hour. Or, if you’re smart, don’t.)
Well, anyway, this classic joke form depends upon a widely shared and commonly understood scenario of what our final judgment will be like. And in this scenario we appear before the divine tribunal, and our file is pulled and scrutinized, and all the wrong things we have done and right things we have failed to do are added up, and God says, “Hmmmm,” or perhaps “Hmmmm,” and depending on the tone of that “Hmmmm” we either get in or we don’t, we are either saved or damned. It’s a model rather like a human courtroom. Except that in a human courtroom we presumably have a defense attorney and can plead extenuating circumstances or something like that. But in our image of the last judgment — possibly influenced directly or indirectly by Michelangelo —we are guilty until proven innocent, the charges are inscrutable, and the sentence unappealable. It’s actually less like a court of law and more like an IRS audit.
Well, I don’t think the image of judgment in the Gospel is like that at all. St. John’s Gospel actually says quite a lot about judgment, and takes it very seriously, and so should we. I think it’s a real mistake to make a modernist sentimentalist assumption that God is a real weenie when it comes to judgment. But judgment is not the imposition upon us of a sentence by someone else (even by God) —where the issue might arise in our minds as to whether we were being dealt with fairly, where we might claim, “Yes, but, you don’t really understand!” On the contrary, judgment is the utterly clear, utterly transparent, utterly truthful disclosure and revelation of who we really are, what we have really made of ourselves. It really isn’t a matter of balancing our sins against what good we have done — in any case we are not saved by the good deeds we have done. What we have done matters, but it matters because what we do is what makes us who we are.
And so the Gospel today:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.”
This is the judgment: face to face with the source and ground of the being of all that is, and seeing that That One is by very nature totally self-giving Love, who indeed so loves us that he came among us as one of us and shared our condition to its bitterest dregs in order to raise us to his condition in its utter glory — face to face with That Love, have we become persons who go to be embraced by That Love, or have we become persons who withdraw into our own sorry selves? (This is what “believing in the name of the only Son of God” is about — not subscribing to doctrinal propositions about Jesus, however important those may be in their place, but turning to the embracing arms of the Divine Love.) In the presence of the Light of the World, do we rejoice in that Light’s illumination, or do we flee to hide in the shadows? This is the judgment.
We are already being judged, by who we are becoming. And who we are becoming is a function of what we do. So the Lenten call to repentance (indeed, the call to repentance in every season) is critically important: we really do need to look at ourselves, be honest about what we have done and what we are doing, and understand who we are becoming. In some respects, at least, we’re going to realize that “this isn’t who I want to be!” So we had better do something about that, and turn around (which is what “repent” means) and become people who “do what is true” and therefore who in the judgment will “come to the light.”
Monday, March 16, 2009
Sermon -- 15 March 2006
3 LENT—15 March 2009
St. Mark’s, Maquoketa — 10:00
Ex 20:1-17 Psalm 19 1 Cor 1:18-25 John 2:13-22
I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.
The preacher was preaching on the Ten Commandments; and as he preached, a man sitting toward the back slunk lower and lower in the pew, commandment by commandment; but at the end of the sermon he suddenly straightened up, his face brightened visibly, and the usher heard him to say to himself, “Well, at least I have never made unto myself any graven image!”
The Old Testament lesson today is the narrative of God’s giving the Ten Commandments to Moses—the heart of the Torah, the Law of the old Covenant. The cornerstone of morality, we might say; and some do say. I’d like to think for a few minutes about morality and law.
There is a level at which we think about morality or goodness or righteousness in terms of obedience to laws. Virtue consists in keeping the laws; sin consists in breaking the laws. There’s a certain immediate simplicity to that; it makes moral issues fairly clear-cut, at least in principle. We know where we stand, roughly. Legalism can be attractive and appealing. But it’s not the basis of Christian morality. (Nor, for that matter, is it even the basis of classical philosophical ethics.)
St. Paul wrestled very hard with the issue of the Law. Paul was by upbringing, education, and natural inclination a Pharisee—a member of that party in Judaism which took very seriously the obligation to obey strictly the most minute prescriptions of the Law of Moses.
(The Pharisees, by the way, were not, on the whole, hypocrites in the sense of being phonies. They really did try very hard to live up to their ideals, and many of them succeeded, or came pretty close. One such was the young Saul of Tarsus, as he was known in Jerusalem—“Paulos” was his Greek name. But the Pharisees were rigorists, and rigorists are often intolerant, and they tended toward the notion that their strict observance of the Law earned them God’s special favor.)
(By “The Law,” we might also note, in St Paul’s letters, he normally means not “law” generally in the sense of the civil law, but very specifically “The Law” given by God to Moses and the people of Israel, the Jewish Law of the Old Testament as we would call it, the Torah. It would probably be helpful if in the translation of the Epistle, “Law” were capitalized when it refers to Torah.)
(Ancient Greek manuscripts don’t distinguish between upper- and lower-case letters, so capitalization in English versions is always an editorial decision of the translators.) (Are you taking notes on all this? There will be a quiz...)
Anyway!—The issue of the Law was a very important one for the first Christians. If you can gain salvation by keeping Torah, then what is the point of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ? If on the other hand salvation comes by God’s free gift, working through one’s faith in Jesus Christ, then keeping the Law—particularly things like the dietary and ceremonial regulations which apparently did not involve moral issues—is no longer necessary. As Christianity spread into the Gentile world, the question of the place of the Old Testament Law in Christian faith became crucial, and Paul, the great missionary to the Gentile world, had to struggle very hard with it, as we see especially in his letters to the Christians at Rome and to those in Galatia (west-central Anatolia, what we now know as Turkey).
The problem with the Law—or with any law—all by itself, is that it shows what is good and what is evil, but it gives no power to choose the good over the evil. The Greeks thought, and lots of folks today still think, that it’s just a problem of education: if we teach folks so they know what is right, then they’ll do it. The Greeks could be stupefyingly naïve! And so can we! Paul had a much more perceptive view of human being. “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” Moral law—whether Torah or any other—can educate us, it can show us what things are loving and what things are destructive, but law cannot save us. Law cannot make us good, it can only show us our sin.
In the Gospel today we see Jesus symbolically cleansing the Temple (he’s enacting a fulfillment of Malachi’s prophecy of the Messiah). And when he’s challenged about it, he replies very cryptically, “Destroy this temple [he means his own body, of course; well, maybe not “of course”; Jesus can be very enigmatic, especially in John’s Gospel!]—destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” The old order is coming to its fulfillment in the new creation which is breaking in.
Christian faith, and the ethical dimension of Christian faith, calls us beyond mere obedience to law, even to what we think is God’s Law. Rather, in Jesus Christ we are called into faithful relationship with a person. We are summoned to a discipleship that is far more than just following a set of rules. We are enlisted in a cause, Christ’s cause, to be heralds and agents of the Reign of God, pioneer and charter members of the redeemed community that shall in the end include all creation. For obedience is all that law can command; God claims our whole hearts.
St. Mark’s, Maquoketa — 10:00
Ex 20:1-17 Psalm 19 1 Cor 1:18-25 John 2:13-22
I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.
The preacher was preaching on the Ten Commandments; and as he preached, a man sitting toward the back slunk lower and lower in the pew, commandment by commandment; but at the end of the sermon he suddenly straightened up, his face brightened visibly, and the usher heard him to say to himself, “Well, at least I have never made unto myself any graven image!”
The Old Testament lesson today is the narrative of God’s giving the Ten Commandments to Moses—the heart of the Torah, the Law of the old Covenant. The cornerstone of morality, we might say; and some do say. I’d like to think for a few minutes about morality and law.
There is a level at which we think about morality or goodness or righteousness in terms of obedience to laws. Virtue consists in keeping the laws; sin consists in breaking the laws. There’s a certain immediate simplicity to that; it makes moral issues fairly clear-cut, at least in principle. We know where we stand, roughly. Legalism can be attractive and appealing. But it’s not the basis of Christian morality. (Nor, for that matter, is it even the basis of classical philosophical ethics.)
St. Paul wrestled very hard with the issue of the Law. Paul was by upbringing, education, and natural inclination a Pharisee—a member of that party in Judaism which took very seriously the obligation to obey strictly the most minute prescriptions of the Law of Moses.
(The Pharisees, by the way, were not, on the whole, hypocrites in the sense of being phonies. They really did try very hard to live up to their ideals, and many of them succeeded, or came pretty close. One such was the young Saul of Tarsus, as he was known in Jerusalem—“Paulos” was his Greek name. But the Pharisees were rigorists, and rigorists are often intolerant, and they tended toward the notion that their strict observance of the Law earned them God’s special favor.)
(By “The Law,” we might also note, in St Paul’s letters, he normally means not “law” generally in the sense of the civil law, but very specifically “The Law” given by God to Moses and the people of Israel, the Jewish Law of the Old Testament as we would call it, the Torah. It would probably be helpful if in the translation of the Epistle, “Law” were capitalized when it refers to Torah.)
(Ancient Greek manuscripts don’t distinguish between upper- and lower-case letters, so capitalization in English versions is always an editorial decision of the translators.) (Are you taking notes on all this? There will be a quiz...)
Anyway!—The issue of the Law was a very important one for the first Christians. If you can gain salvation by keeping Torah, then what is the point of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ? If on the other hand salvation comes by God’s free gift, working through one’s faith in Jesus Christ, then keeping the Law—particularly things like the dietary and ceremonial regulations which apparently did not involve moral issues—is no longer necessary. As Christianity spread into the Gentile world, the question of the place of the Old Testament Law in Christian faith became crucial, and Paul, the great missionary to the Gentile world, had to struggle very hard with it, as we see especially in his letters to the Christians at Rome and to those in Galatia (west-central Anatolia, what we now know as Turkey).
The problem with the Law—or with any law—all by itself, is that it shows what is good and what is evil, but it gives no power to choose the good over the evil. The Greeks thought, and lots of folks today still think, that it’s just a problem of education: if we teach folks so they know what is right, then they’ll do it. The Greeks could be stupefyingly naïve! And so can we! Paul had a much more perceptive view of human being. “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” Moral law—whether Torah or any other—can educate us, it can show us what things are loving and what things are destructive, but law cannot save us. Law cannot make us good, it can only show us our sin.
In the Gospel today we see Jesus symbolically cleansing the Temple (he’s enacting a fulfillment of Malachi’s prophecy of the Messiah). And when he’s challenged about it, he replies very cryptically, “Destroy this temple [he means his own body, of course; well, maybe not “of course”; Jesus can be very enigmatic, especially in John’s Gospel!]—destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” The old order is coming to its fulfillment in the new creation which is breaking in.
Christian faith, and the ethical dimension of Christian faith, calls us beyond mere obedience to law, even to what we think is God’s Law. Rather, in Jesus Christ we are called into faithful relationship with a person. We are summoned to a discipleship that is far more than just following a set of rules. We are enlisted in a cause, Christ’s cause, to be heralds and agents of the Reign of God, pioneer and charter members of the redeemed community that shall in the end include all creation. For obedience is all that law can command; God claims our whole hearts.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Sermon -- 8 Feb 2009 (Ordination)
5th SUN AFTER EPIPHANY — 8 Feb 2009
The Ordination of Judith Crossett to the Diaconate
Trinity Church — 3:00 p.m.
Jer 1:4-9; Ps 84; Acts 6:1-7; Luke 22:24-27
Well, not exactly.
Despite the fact that this passage from Acts has been one of the readings at the ordination of deacons since 1549 (well, actually, 1550), and it has often been seen as the Scriptural warrant for the diaconate as an order of ministry in the church, it’s really not that simple. For one thing, the Seven upon whom the apostles lay their hands with prayer are nowhere called “deacons.” It’s true that their initial task is the “deaconing,” the serving, of tables (that is, the distribution of food to the poor); but that is so the twelve can devote themselves to prayer and the “deaconing,” the serving, of the word. For another thing, who says that the twelve are the only ones to devote themselves to prayer? And for yet another thing, according to what follows in the Acts of the Apostles, “waiting on tables” is not what the seven actually do! Well, five of them, we don’t know what they do; we never hear of them by name again! But two of them: Stephen, full of grace and power, goes out and proclaims the Gospel with great effect, is arrested and dragged before the Sanhedrin, to whom he recounts God’s acts of salvation in Israel culminating with the death and resurrection of Jesus, and he is sentenced to death by stoning, thus becoming the first Christian martyr. The other of them, Philip, goes down to the city of Samaria and proclaims Christ to them with great success, and then he travels down the road to Gaza where he encounters an Ethiopian eunuch traveling in his chariot, and Philip converts and baptizes him. Philip then settles in the city of Caesarea on the coast. We hear of him once more, a number of years later, when he is described as an evangelist, who has four daughters who have the gift of prophecy, and who is host to St. Paul as he comes through Caesarea on the way to his last visit to Jerusalem. In other words, Stephen and Philip apparently devoted themselves to the service of the Word!
So much for waiting on tables. Good help is hard to find.
The Book of the Acts of the Apostles was written something like fifty or sixty years after these early events, and St. Luke wasn’t there. So this story, circulating in and from the Christian community in Jerusalem (who by the time of the writing of Acts had been driven out of, or escaped from, Jerusalem), may not have all its ecclesiastical details right. But there are some basic aspects that I think this story does have right: one, that the Twelve very early on recognized that they needed assistance in their ministry; and two, specifically, they needed help with the ministry to the diaspora Jewish families — Greek speaking — who had joined the community in Jerusalem. Although it is unlikely that the Twelve did not speak any Greek — particularly since they were Galileans — they may not have been very fluent in it. They needed assistants who spoke Greek well and who could minister particularly to the poor widows in the community. Keep in mind that the locals, on the whole, had extended families upon whom their widows could rely. The “Hellenist” immigrant women, if they were widowed, had no local family and thus no resources. So it was not so much a matter of the Twelve doing the cool stuff, like preaching the Gospel and running the Church, and the Seven doing the scut work. It was a matter of a needed ministry of service being identified, and people selected for it who could do that ministry better than the Twelve could, apparently including preaching the Gospel in Greek.
Note that St. Luke, the author of this account in Acts, does understand about the ministry of service. In Luke’s Gospel this afternoon we heard Jesus tell his disciples, “The greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like one who serves. For who is greater, the one who sits at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one who sits at the table? But I am among you as one who serves.” We’ve been reading that passage with regular frequency for over nineteen hundred years. Most of the time we seem not to have paid any attention to it at all.
Christian ministry is not about power, in anything like our usual human sense of the word. Power for us means control, it means the authority to command, it means the ability to impose our own will. The temptation to exercise earthly power is the besetting sin of the Church — all the Church, Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, Pentecostal — going back to and even before the time of the Emperor Constantine — and we don’t resist that temptation very well.
That’s why it is very important that in the past couple of generations the Church has again ordained persons to the order of Deacons — vocational Deacons, not just transient new clergy on their way to another ministry. (Yet it is also vital, as I have said before, that we Priests and yes, even Bishops, my lord! should first be Deacons, because that is the essence of the ministry of Christ in the world. “I am among you as one who serves.”)
Of course Judith has been in servant ministry for many years. She is a physician, a psychiatrist, ministering to the healing of mind and soul as well as body. More recently she has been serving those who for whatever reason find themselves homeless, through the work of Shelter House and the Consultation of Religious Communities. As a Deacon, Judith, you will continue not only in servant ministry but as a model of Christian ministry to the rest of us in the Church. And it is a ministry that includes, as did that of Stephen and Philip, the proclaiming of the Gospel by word as well as by action in service. This is why Bishop Alan, after he lays hands on your head with prayer, will also give you a Bible.
Let us all be reminded that Christ whom we call our Lord did indeed come not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for all.
The Ordination of Judith Crossett to the Diaconate
Trinity Church — 3:00 p.m.
Jer 1:4-9; Ps 84; Acts 6:1-7; Luke 22:24-27
From the Second Reading this afternoon, from the Book of Acts:Well, now, what’s that all about? At first glance, it looks like the apostles are saying, “Hey, we’re busy doing the cool stuff like preaching the Gospel, we need some other people to do the scut work for us.” And that’s where the Order of Deacons comes from!
Now during those days, when the disciples were increasing in number, the Hellenists [that is, the Greek-speaking Jewish Christians, who had come into Jerusalem from the diaspora] complained against the Hebrews [the Aramaic-speaking Jewish Christians, who were the locals] because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of food. And the twelve called together the whole community of the disciples and said, “It is not right that we should neglect the word of God in order to wait on tables.”
Well, not exactly.
Despite the fact that this passage from Acts has been one of the readings at the ordination of deacons since 1549 (well, actually, 1550), and it has often been seen as the Scriptural warrant for the diaconate as an order of ministry in the church, it’s really not that simple. For one thing, the Seven upon whom the apostles lay their hands with prayer are nowhere called “deacons.” It’s true that their initial task is the “deaconing,” the serving, of tables (that is, the distribution of food to the poor); but that is so the twelve can devote themselves to prayer and the “deaconing,” the serving, of the word. For another thing, who says that the twelve are the only ones to devote themselves to prayer? And for yet another thing, according to what follows in the Acts of the Apostles, “waiting on tables” is not what the seven actually do! Well, five of them, we don’t know what they do; we never hear of them by name again! But two of them: Stephen, full of grace and power, goes out and proclaims the Gospel with great effect, is arrested and dragged before the Sanhedrin, to whom he recounts God’s acts of salvation in Israel culminating with the death and resurrection of Jesus, and he is sentenced to death by stoning, thus becoming the first Christian martyr. The other of them, Philip, goes down to the city of Samaria and proclaims Christ to them with great success, and then he travels down the road to Gaza where he encounters an Ethiopian eunuch traveling in his chariot, and Philip converts and baptizes him. Philip then settles in the city of Caesarea on the coast. We hear of him once more, a number of years later, when he is described as an evangelist, who has four daughters who have the gift of prophecy, and who is host to St. Paul as he comes through Caesarea on the way to his last visit to Jerusalem. In other words, Stephen and Philip apparently devoted themselves to the service of the Word!
So much for waiting on tables. Good help is hard to find.
The Book of the Acts of the Apostles was written something like fifty or sixty years after these early events, and St. Luke wasn’t there. So this story, circulating in and from the Christian community in Jerusalem (who by the time of the writing of Acts had been driven out of, or escaped from, Jerusalem), may not have all its ecclesiastical details right. But there are some basic aspects that I think this story does have right: one, that the Twelve very early on recognized that they needed assistance in their ministry; and two, specifically, they needed help with the ministry to the diaspora Jewish families — Greek speaking — who had joined the community in Jerusalem. Although it is unlikely that the Twelve did not speak any Greek — particularly since they were Galileans — they may not have been very fluent in it. They needed assistants who spoke Greek well and who could minister particularly to the poor widows in the community. Keep in mind that the locals, on the whole, had extended families upon whom their widows could rely. The “Hellenist” immigrant women, if they were widowed, had no local family and thus no resources. So it was not so much a matter of the Twelve doing the cool stuff, like preaching the Gospel and running the Church, and the Seven doing the scut work. It was a matter of a needed ministry of service being identified, and people selected for it who could do that ministry better than the Twelve could, apparently including preaching the Gospel in Greek.
Note that St. Luke, the author of this account in Acts, does understand about the ministry of service. In Luke’s Gospel this afternoon we heard Jesus tell his disciples, “The greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like one who serves. For who is greater, the one who sits at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one who sits at the table? But I am among you as one who serves.” We’ve been reading that passage with regular frequency for over nineteen hundred years. Most of the time we seem not to have paid any attention to it at all.
Christian ministry is not about power, in anything like our usual human sense of the word. Power for us means control, it means the authority to command, it means the ability to impose our own will. The temptation to exercise earthly power is the besetting sin of the Church — all the Church, Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, Pentecostal — going back to and even before the time of the Emperor Constantine — and we don’t resist that temptation very well.
That’s why it is very important that in the past couple of generations the Church has again ordained persons to the order of Deacons — vocational Deacons, not just transient new clergy on their way to another ministry. (Yet it is also vital, as I have said before, that we Priests and yes, even Bishops, my lord! should first be Deacons, because that is the essence of the ministry of Christ in the world. “I am among you as one who serves.”)
Of course Judith has been in servant ministry for many years. She is a physician, a psychiatrist, ministering to the healing of mind and soul as well as body. More recently she has been serving those who for whatever reason find themselves homeless, through the work of Shelter House and the Consultation of Religious Communities. As a Deacon, Judith, you will continue not only in servant ministry but as a model of Christian ministry to the rest of us in the Church. And it is a ministry that includes, as did that of Stephen and Philip, the proclaiming of the Gospel by word as well as by action in service. This is why Bishop Alan, after he lays hands on your head with prayer, will also give you a Bible.
Let us all be reminded that Christ whom we call our Lord did indeed come not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for all.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Sermon -- 1 February 2009
4th after EPIPHANY — 1 February 2009
St. Mark’s, Maquoketa — 10:00
Deut 18:15-20; Ps 111; 1Cor 8:1b-13; Mark 1:21-28
Therefore, if food is a cause of their falling, I will never eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall.
In the Epistle today, St Paul is writing to the Corinthians about the matter of eating food which has been sacrificed to pagan idols. I suspect, that you were all thinking, as the Epistle was being read, “What is this all about?!” If ever there was an issue that on the surface seems to have nothing to do with life in eastern Iowa in the early 21st Century, eating meat which has been sacrificed to idols has got to be it! (As far as I know, there are no statues of the god Baal in the back room at the Hy-Vee supermarket!) However:
Corinth, where the new Christian community to whom Paul is writing was located, was a major seaport in Greece, a transshipment point for cargo between Asia Minor to the east and Rome to the west. It was a highly cosmopolitan city, with a thoroughly international, multiethnic population, and there were temples to just about every god and goddess on the face of the earth. And with all these temples, there was a lot of animal sacrificing going on, since that’s what you did in many of these pagan cults in those days. And in most animal sacrifices, only a small part of the animal’s carcass was actually wholly burned up as an offering to the god. So there was a lot of leftover meat around. And what the priests of the pagan temples did with all that meat was, (1) they ate it themselves, (2) they ran restaurants in the temple precincts, and (3) they wholesaled it to the city meat markets. So if you strolled down to the market to pick up a couple of lamb chops for supper, it was very likely that the meat came from an animal which had been offered in sacrifice in the temple of a pagan god.
And so the issue arose for the Christians: is it right for us, who worship the one true God and who are witnesses to God and God’s mighty acts for our salvation through God’s Son Jesus Christ — is it right for us to eat this meat which has presumably been used as the focal point of the worship of a false god? A fair question, and a real one, for this tiny band of Christians struggling to live and witness to their faith in a pagan world.
St Paul’s response is that in itself this is a trivial issue — since the pagan “gods” have no real existence anyway, there can’t be anything wrong with the meat, and there’s no inherent reason why it shouldn’t be eaten. However, there are other factors involved: if, for instance, seeing you eat meat which has been sacrificed to pagan gods should cause another member of the Church, a new convert perhaps, to lose faith, thinking that “well, I guess nothing really matters, and we can do whatever we want,” then by all means don’t eat the meat—it isn’t worth your brother’s or your sister’s soul.
The meat-offered-to-idols issue isn’t very real for us any more, but some similar things do arise for us. For instance, how complicit are we in the evils and injustices of the world? Do we know, or even care, whether or not our running shoes or our tee shirts are made by children in third world sweatshops? If we have investments, or at least if we participate in a pension fund that has investments, do we pay much attention to where that money is invested? Perhaps in companies that piously diversify into cookies in the United States, but aggressively market their tobacco overseas? Or who are clear-cutting the Amazon rainforest, or old growth hardwood forests in this country? Or dumping toxic industrial waste into somebody’s water supply?
Please understand: I’m not recruiting for a bandwagon for boycotting any certain product, or divesting of any particular corporate stock. A few comments about that: first of all, sometimes this works. It did with South Africa. (It took a while, and there were lots of other factors too, but basically the boycotts and divestitures ultimately worked.) But it doesn’t always have as much effect as we’d like. And sometimes boycotts and divestments are just a salve to our own guilty consciences. The fact of the matter is, we are deeply complicit in much of the world’s injustice and oppression (whether we own stocks or not!) and we don’t want to face that, and we don’t want to face the fact that there isn’t always a lot we can do to avoid it. Noncomplicity comes neither cheaply nor easily for human beings. Complicity in the world’s evil — even unwittingly — is part of what we as Christians mean by “original sin.”
So it becomes very easy for us to dismiss these things as trivial issues. I mean, it’s not always clear what real difference it actually makes to anyone but myself whether I own a few shares of stock in this or that corporation, or whether I buy this or that brand of sneakers. I’m just one person — does it really matter if I buy this brand, or if my pension fund owns stock in that corporation?
But before we too easily dismiss something as trivial, and blithely assume we can please ourselves regarding it, we need to stop and think about how our actions will affect other people, and how they will even affect ourselves. There are indirect as well as direct effects of what we do, and we are responsible for those effects. We do not have an absolute and unrestricted moral right to do whatever seems good or convenient to ourselves. We are responsible for the witness we make by the way we live in the world, as well as for the immediate consequences of our actions. The well-being of other human beings is never a trivial matter. It is never “not our problem”; it is never “none of our business.”
That doesn’t give us any quick answers to very complex and difficult moral questions. We have to struggle with these things, and people of good faith and good conscience may come to different conclusions. But we must all remember, as St Paul has been reminding the Corinthians and us, as we heard in the epistle reading a couple of weeks ago: “You are not your own. You were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.”
(1 Cor. 6:19-20)
St. Mark’s, Maquoketa — 10:00
Deut 18:15-20; Ps 111; 1Cor 8:1b-13; Mark 1:21-28
Therefore, if food is a cause of their falling, I will never eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall.
In the Epistle today, St Paul is writing to the Corinthians about the matter of eating food which has been sacrificed to pagan idols. I suspect, that you were all thinking, as the Epistle was being read, “What is this all about?!” If ever there was an issue that on the surface seems to have nothing to do with life in eastern Iowa in the early 21st Century, eating meat which has been sacrificed to idols has got to be it! (As far as I know, there are no statues of the god Baal in the back room at the Hy-Vee supermarket!) However:
Corinth, where the new Christian community to whom Paul is writing was located, was a major seaport in Greece, a transshipment point for cargo between Asia Minor to the east and Rome to the west. It was a highly cosmopolitan city, with a thoroughly international, multiethnic population, and there were temples to just about every god and goddess on the face of the earth. And with all these temples, there was a lot of animal sacrificing going on, since that’s what you did in many of these pagan cults in those days. And in most animal sacrifices, only a small part of the animal’s carcass was actually wholly burned up as an offering to the god. So there was a lot of leftover meat around. And what the priests of the pagan temples did with all that meat was, (1) they ate it themselves, (2) they ran restaurants in the temple precincts, and (3) they wholesaled it to the city meat markets. So if you strolled down to the market to pick up a couple of lamb chops for supper, it was very likely that the meat came from an animal which had been offered in sacrifice in the temple of a pagan god.
And so the issue arose for the Christians: is it right for us, who worship the one true God and who are witnesses to God and God’s mighty acts for our salvation through God’s Son Jesus Christ — is it right for us to eat this meat which has presumably been used as the focal point of the worship of a false god? A fair question, and a real one, for this tiny band of Christians struggling to live and witness to their faith in a pagan world.
St Paul’s response is that in itself this is a trivial issue — since the pagan “gods” have no real existence anyway, there can’t be anything wrong with the meat, and there’s no inherent reason why it shouldn’t be eaten. However, there are other factors involved: if, for instance, seeing you eat meat which has been sacrificed to pagan gods should cause another member of the Church, a new convert perhaps, to lose faith, thinking that “well, I guess nothing really matters, and we can do whatever we want,” then by all means don’t eat the meat—it isn’t worth your brother’s or your sister’s soul.
The meat-offered-to-idols issue isn’t very real for us any more, but some similar things do arise for us. For instance, how complicit are we in the evils and injustices of the world? Do we know, or even care, whether or not our running shoes or our tee shirts are made by children in third world sweatshops? If we have investments, or at least if we participate in a pension fund that has investments, do we pay much attention to where that money is invested? Perhaps in companies that piously diversify into cookies in the United States, but aggressively market their tobacco overseas? Or who are clear-cutting the Amazon rainforest, or old growth hardwood forests in this country? Or dumping toxic industrial waste into somebody’s water supply?
Please understand: I’m not recruiting for a bandwagon for boycotting any certain product, or divesting of any particular corporate stock. A few comments about that: first of all, sometimes this works. It did with South Africa. (It took a while, and there were lots of other factors too, but basically the boycotts and divestitures ultimately worked.) But it doesn’t always have as much effect as we’d like. And sometimes boycotts and divestments are just a salve to our own guilty consciences. The fact of the matter is, we are deeply complicit in much of the world’s injustice and oppression (whether we own stocks or not!) and we don’t want to face that, and we don’t want to face the fact that there isn’t always a lot we can do to avoid it. Noncomplicity comes neither cheaply nor easily for human beings. Complicity in the world’s evil — even unwittingly — is part of what we as Christians mean by “original sin.”
So it becomes very easy for us to dismiss these things as trivial issues. I mean, it’s not always clear what real difference it actually makes to anyone but myself whether I own a few shares of stock in this or that corporation, or whether I buy this or that brand of sneakers. I’m just one person — does it really matter if I buy this brand, or if my pension fund owns stock in that corporation?
But before we too easily dismiss something as trivial, and blithely assume we can please ourselves regarding it, we need to stop and think about how our actions will affect other people, and how they will even affect ourselves. There are indirect as well as direct effects of what we do, and we are responsible for those effects. We do not have an absolute and unrestricted moral right to do whatever seems good or convenient to ourselves. We are responsible for the witness we make by the way we live in the world, as well as for the immediate consequences of our actions. The well-being of other human beings is never a trivial matter. It is never “not our problem”; it is never “none of our business.”
That doesn’t give us any quick answers to very complex and difficult moral questions. We have to struggle with these things, and people of good faith and good conscience may come to different conclusions. But we must all remember, as St Paul has been reminding the Corinthians and us, as we heard in the epistle reading a couple of weeks ago: “You are not your own. You were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.”
(1 Cor. 6:19-20)
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