Sermon -- 10 June 2007

Proper 5 / 2nd after Pentecost — 10 June 2007
Trinity, Iowa City — 7:45 am
RCL: 1 Kings 17:8-24 Ps 146 Gal 1:11-24 Luke 7:11-17

(c) 2007 William S. J. Moorhead

He who once persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.

One of the things about St Paul which emerges both in St Luke’s tracing of his missionary work in the book of the Acts of the Apostles, and in the letters which Paul himself wrote as he went about that work, is Paul’s constant awareness that he had once been a persecutor of the Church of God. Paul was not some nobody who somehow rose to prominence in this new Christian movement. Paul (or Saul, to use the Hebrew name by which he was known in the land of Israel) was a brilliant young scholar, a person of note in religious and academic circles in Jerusalem, a rising star destined to take a place among the powerful in the religious establishment of Judaea. In his detestation of this new sect, this cult, that had the unimaginably blasphemous effrontery to claim that a crucified Galilean carpenter was God’s Messiah, Saul knew no equal. He held the jackets for those who killed one of the young Christian leaders, one Stephen, by battering him to death with stones. Saul not only rounded up all the known followers of this Jesus in Jerusalem, but he got extradition warrants to bring them back from as far as Damascus. Saul of Tarsus was gung ho.

What an incredible story it must have seemed at first when it got around that Saul — having had some sort of shattering vision while on the journey — had not arrested the Christians in Damascus, but had joined them. The great persecutor is now to become the great apostle.

And yet maybe it isn’t quite so surprising after all. I’m not sure that Paul’s conversion experience (which we heard about a few weeks ago, in the reading from Acts on the 3rd Sunday of Easter) hadn’t been brewing for a long time in the back of his mind—the realization that God’s grace is a free gift and not an earned reward. But on the Damascus Road it finally boiled over, when the risen Jesus confronted him: “Why do you keep kicking against the goads?” Still, this marked a reversal of the highest magnitude. The Christian Gospel’s greatest foe became its greatest advocate.

And yet that happens over and over again. How often is it that God takes the greatest saints, not from the nobodies, the genial wimps, but from the great sinners. Augustine of Hippo, an ambitious, worldly, self-indulgent professor and would-be politician who gave up the imperial courts for an obscure bishopric—and became the greatest theologian of the western Church. Thomas Becket, a career bureaucrat whose early loyalty to the King of England was exceeded only by his later loyalty to the Kingdom of God. Francis of Assisi, a dissolute young wastrel who became for God’s sake the poor brother of the whole world. John Newton, a successful slave-trader whose once-blind heart was opened by amazing grace to the service of God. God can do something with greatness, even if it first appears in the form of great pride, even great wickedness. What even God has trouble getting much out of is mediocrity.

The greatest evils of the world are notable for their stupefying banality. Hitler was a tawdry, petty, miserable little man. He was not great. And yet he caused so much evil. Yet that’s how evil is—often dull and petty — and that’s when it is most dangerous. Evil ultimately cares only about itself, and inevitably collapses in upon itself and destroys itself; but it can take much with it into its downward swirl into nothingness. Greatness, even perverse greatness, cares about something outside itself, and that’s the raw material of love. Saul of Tarsus really did love God, even when he did not yet understand Christ’s Gospel; and so when the light finally broke for him, he had the right stuff for heroic Christian sanctity.

We settle for so little. We’re willing to be so mediocre. That may be more dangerous than we realize. To most of us it does not fall to become famous, but that does not mean we cannot have a certain greatness of soul within our own worlds, if we will not cling fearfully to mediocrity, if we will take some risks for God’s Kingdom, if we will take a chance on love, if we will take the gamble that we may be closer to God when we’re passionately wrong than when we’re boringly safe.

Sermon -- 7 January 2007

EPIPHANY 1—7 January 2007
St. Mark’s, Maquoketa
BCP: Isa 421-9 Ps 8920-29 Ac 1034-38 Luke 315-16,21-22

(c) 2007 William S. J. Moorhead

John answered them all by saying, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming .… He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

Sally Mae had finally agreed to be baptized in her little rural baptist church, and so the whole congregation gathered by the river for the event, and the deacons plunged her into the water, and she came up sputtering, and the preacher said, “Sally Mae, do you believe?” “Yes,” she gasped, “I believe.” Again the deacons plunged her in, and again she managed to croak, “I believe.” A third time she went down, and as she came wheezing up out of the water the preacher asked, “Sally Mae, what do you believe?” And she sputtered, “I believe you people are trying to drown me!”

There’s something so dainty about the way we get baptized in the Episcopal Church. I wonder if that may be a reflection of how dainty we are about the way we live our faith. “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” Do we, in our Christian lives, show much sign of having been baptized with the Holy Spirit and fire?” At least Sally Mae knew she had really been baptized!

John’s baptism was basically a sign of repentance—a symbol of turning back to God and allowing God to cleanse from sin. And there’s no reason why we should doubt that God’s forgiving grace was active in those who received the baptism of John, and that they were given remission of sin and the grace of amendment of life.

And for a long time—especially in Western Christendom, that is, the Christian traditions of Western Europe and subsequently the Americas—the washing away of sin was the primary focus of the way we talked about Christian baptism as well. Even the Nicene Creed itself, in which “we acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins,” encourages this focus; though I would submit that in the Creed “the forgiveness of sins” is an expression of the whole of the reality of the mystery of salvation; but that’s another sermon for another time. It’s a common question in Sunday School, “What’s the difference between John’s baptism and the Christian Sacrament of Baptism?” And even so noted a theologian as John Calvin ended up replying, well, not much, really. But Calvin was wrong here. As on a number of issues.

The washing away of sin is indeed part of the reality of Baptism, but it is not the whole of it. We might even say that the forgiveness of sins comes not in the first instance, but as a consequence of the whole new relationship with God, through Christ, which is established in baptism. Let us hear John the Baptist again: “I baptize you only with water—as a sign of cleansing from sin. But there is one coming after me—one stronger than I, and I am not even worthy to tie his shoelaces for him—and he will baptize you not only with the outward sign of water but with the inward reality of the grace and presence and power of the Holy Spirit, re-creating you, re-generating you, re-forging and re-tempering you, setting you ablaze with God’s love and God’s justice, firing you with zeal for the cause of the Reign of God.”

Our big problem is that we insist on settling for so little. We want to be decent and respectable. What God has in mind for us is to make us firebrands!

The theme of the Epiphany season is the manifestation, the showing forth, of Christ to the world. In the development of the Christian Year, it was not at first the visit of the wise men to Bethlehem that was seen as the primary epiphany or manifestation, but rather Jesus’ baptism—the beginning of his entry upon his adult ministry, the beginning of his mission. In any case, “mission” has become, very appropriately, a major Epiphany theme. And the celebration of the Baptism of Christ on this First Sunday after the Epiphany—and the restoration of the tradition of making this one of the major occasions for baptisms during the year—should help us see more clearly the direct connection between our own baptism into Jesus Christ and the mission in the world to which that baptism commissions us.

You don’t have to belong to the Church to be good; there are lots of good people outside the Church (and lots of stinkers inside, just in case you hadn’t noticed!). You don’t even have to belong to the Church here on earth in order to be saved. (Though if you really care about salvation it seems like it might be a good idea to hook up with that community to which the message of salvation has been primarily entrusted!) Belonging to the Church is being part of the mission force, the proclaimers and enacters of the Good News of God’s Reign. We are the ones to whom the Gospel has been entrusted, that we may enact it in the world, and invite the world into God’s Dominion of love and joy and peace and justice and wholeness. We are God’s firebrands, sent to set the world on fire with God’s burning love, a love which seeks to reconcile the world and heal it and give it new life. The power we bear is the power of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, into whom we are baptized, with whom we have died and in whom we have been raised. The baptism we acknowledge is baptism for the forgiveness of sins—but not just the pardoning of our own misdeeds but the purging and healing and raising-from-death of the world. As the Church, baptized into Christ, members of Christ’s Body, we are God’s agents, God’s presence in the world, Christened as God’s anointed ones. Me! And you! Sent into the world! That doesn’t mean we have to go overseas to some “mission field”—there’s plenty of “world,” plenty of “mission field” right here in Iowa. To be the Church—that’s what Jesus wants of us. Not just to go to Church, not just to belong to the Church, but to be the Church, to be his Church, to carry out his mission in the world. “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

Sermon -- 31 December 2006

1st Sunday after Christmas — 31 December 2006
Trinity, Iowa City — 11:00 a.m.
RCL: Isaiah 61:10-62:3 Psalm 147:13-21 Gal 3:23-25; 4:4-7 John 1:1-18

(c) 2006 William S. J. Moorhead

And the Word became flesh and lived among us.

At Christmas the passages of the Gospel of which we are most fond, I suspect, are the narratives of the events surrounding the birth of Jesus — St. Luke’s story of the Holy Family’s refuge in the stable of the inn in Bethlehem and the visit of the shepherds; and St. Matthew’s account of the visit of the mysterious Wise Men from the East and their extravagant and portentous gifts.

For many of us these are our favorite stories to tell, at least at this time of year; we love them, we know them, in fact we know more than is actually in the Scriptures themselves!

But also prominent among the Gospel passages for this season is another one, of a rather different character; one that is read on Christmas morning, and also on this following Sunday (this year coming a full six days later); one that also is familiar, and beloved of most of us I think; yet not exactly a narrative story of the birth of Jesus but more like the foundational presuppositions of the birth of Jesus: what we call the Prologue of the Gospel according to St. John. And I think it is crucial that as we celebrate God’s coming into the world in Jesus of Nazareth we hear, and read and mark and learn and inwardly digest these distinct, not to say different, “takes” on the incarnation of Christ.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.…And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory.…”

“The Word.” “The Word of God.” Not just “a word,” or a set of words, but something far profounder, God’s own self-expression, God’s own creativity, the self-giving in which God spoke the universe into being. And this Word became flesh — God became a human being.

Granted, this from St. John’s Gospel is pretty heady stuff (not just the prologue, but throughout the Gospel!). And so it’s important that as well as having the theoretical foundations, we also have the stories (though we do tend to pretty them up) — Jesus was really born, as a real human being. In fact, he was born in a barn, and almost immediately he became a political refugee. His childhood and young adulthood was obscure and mostly unknown; his public career was relatively short and came to a bad end.

And why should this have been? We know the story of Jesus well enough, and we read it and tell it over and over, together in church, in our families, in our own meditations. The question that I’m not sure we ask very often is, Why would God do such a thing?

Here’s the deal: God created the universe. By and by we came along in our own corner of the world, and, to put it bluntly, we screwed up. And we can’t fix ourselves by ourselves. God isn’t willing to abandon his creation project and throw us in the trash, so God will have to do the fixing.

Okay. So why doesn’t God just do it?

Why this incredibly convoluted plot? What’s all this about coming and being born in an obscure backwater and growing up as a nobody and having a brief flash of fame (or notoriety, depending on your point of view), and then being gotten rid of, crucified by the local imperial authorities? How does this constitute “fixing” humankind’s problems? This isn’t very efficient! What’s the point of “the Word becoming flesh” at all? Why doesn’t God just appear in the clouds of glory and shout to the world, “You people just behave yourselves!” That’s what we’d do!

Well.

God created us human beings in the divine image and likeness, in order that we might respond to God’s love and to share God’s love with one another. The necessary condition of our being able to love is that we are free — free to love but also free to refuse to love. God always offers us the divine grace to enable us to love, but God does not force grace upon us. To reconcile wayward and perverse humankind to God’s love requires that God win us, not command us.

Well, that sounds just fine, but the fact is that we would rapidly run out of patience. God does not run out of patience. And we get very impatient that God does not run out of patience. But God will not reduce us to puppets, God will not make us robots, God will preserve our freedom even as we use our freedom to destroy ourselves.

So God does not appear in the clouds of glory and shout to the world, “You people start behaving yourselves!” God came to be one of us. Really. Not just looking like one of us. Being one of us. The Word became flesh, and lived among us.

And so Jesus was born in a barn. He grew up in obscurity and relative poverty. And when the time came he began to teach about the Kingdom of God, to proclaim God’s Kingdom, to enact God’s Kingdom, to challenge all the forces of wickedness that rebel against God, the evil powers that corrupt and destroy God’s children, the selfishness and greed that draw us from God’s love. And so they killed him.

But that wasn’t the end of it. It still isn’t the end of it. It’s just the beginning.

"The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”

Sermon -- 24 December 2006

4th Sunday of Advent — 24 December 2006
Trinity, Iowa City — 7:30 & 10:00 am
RCL: Micah 2–5a Canticle 15 Hebrews 10:5-10 Luke 1:39-45

(c) 2006 William S. J. Moorhead

In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth.

Despite the radio stations and the shopping malls and the office parties for the last few weeks, here on the Fourth Sunday of Advent we are finally actually getting around to close-to-Christmas. This year, really close-to-Christmas: hardly are we done this morning than we start getting ready to start the Christmas celebration itself this afternoon. And we need to get with it: a little later (in a little bit) we will proceed to the Hanging of the Greens. (I’m not sure we really ought to use that phrase — when a parish has a family named “Green,” and a great many do, they get a little fidgety when we announce the Hanging of the.…)

Anyway: on the Fourth Sunday of Advent our theme is the Annunciation of the coming birth of the Messiah Jesus: In the first year, St. Matthew’s story of the angel’s announcement to Joseph; in the second year, the story from Luke about the angel’s prior announcement to Mary; and in this third year, the story, also from Luke, about Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth. (“Cousin” perhaps loosely; they may not have been first cousins, but some degree of relative. Bear in mind that Elizabeth was probably old enough to be Mary’s grandmother, and since Mary may have been like fifteen, Elizabeth may have been as ancient as, oh, perhaps even fifty.)

So anyway, what’s this trip up from Nazareth to the hill country of Judea all about? Why does Mary want to go up there? (Well, of course, we who are in on the bigger story, and read the previous page, know that Elizabeth is carrying the soon-to-be-born John who will grow up to be called The Baptist.)

Think about the just-previous story, after Elizabeth conceives her son — the story we heard last year, the familiar story of the Annunciation to Mary. The angel Gabriel comes and tells Mary that she is going to bear a son who will be the Son of the Most High and will be given the throne of his ancestor David, and furthermore her old Aunt Elizabeth is six months pregnant, ha ha, that’s the same trick God played on Sarah and Abraham two thousand years ago. And Mary says, in Latin translation, “Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum,” or in the original Aramaic, “O‑kay…” And the Gospel goes on to say, “Then the angel departed from her.” Leaving Mary saying, “Uh, excuse me.…”

Now what? What does poor little Mary do now? “What’s this about Aunt Elizabeth? And what am I going to tell Mom?”

Well, we are obviously wandering off into the range of the amiably fantastic here, but, oh well! Mary goes back into the house and says, “What do I say now? That I’ve seen the angel Gabriel? And that he told me that I’m going to…that I’m having…I don’t think so!” So she says, “Mom? Can I go visit Aunt Elizabeth?” And St. Anne, being a good mother who fears the Lord, says, “Yes, dear.” Mary says to herself, “Well, I don’t know what’s going on around here, but it sounds like Aunt Elizabeth may be in on it, and besides, she’s a priest’s wife and she’ll know what this is all about! (No point in asking Uncle Zechariah, he never says anything.)”

So Mary goes up to the Judean hills to visit Elizabeth. And when Mary walked in Elizabeth said, “My goodness, this kid just gave me a kick! Blessed are you — and blessed is your child, the Lord whom you carry!” Mary said, “You do know what’s going on here, don’t you?” And Elizabeth said, “Yes, dear, I do.” And Mary began to sing, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant!”

I think there are a couple of things to be drawn from this story, things which I’m not sure we usually notice given the relative familiarity of the narrative. First of all, this was not a solitary experience for Mary. We don’t know what she told her parents — presumably at some point she did tell them! But we don’t know what she told them. In fact, in the Gospels there is nothing whatever about Mary’s parents. All we traditionally say about them, including even their names (Joachim and Anne), comes from a legend, an apocryphal gospel, dating from the second century. And we need to understand, despite our neatly melded account of the events surrounding our Lord’s Nativity, that the authors of the birth narratives in the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke do not know each other. (They share the common core traditional material, of course, but Matthew has never read Luke nor has Luke read Matthew.) Thus we do need to be careful about trying to sequence Joseph into the Lukan story. Nevertheless on its face it seems to be the case that Mary never told Joseph, at least not directly; in Matthew’s Gospel, Joseph only finds out what’s going on from an angel in a dream. But Mary did not keep it all secret. all by herself: she went to a person whom she knew she could trust and from whom she could seek counsel, her older relative Elizabeth, who herself was also evidently a player in God’s plan of intervention in the world for its redemption. God does not work through lone rangers, God works through the community of God’s people. (Even when God starts with just two or three.)

And secondly, once Mary has confirmed with Elizabeth that she is not having pious delusions but that God really is at work in the world in her, she immediately recognized God for what God was doing: namely, God is overturning the very order of the world, as indeed the prophets of Israel had said for centuries (including such faithful women as Hannah, the mother of Samuel and the model for Mary’s song). God is overthrowing the powerful and raising the lowly; God is feeding the hungry and sending away the rich.

Christmas has become, as well all know and as we all say probably ad nauseum, a commercial glorification of greed. More dangerous is the deformation of Christmas into a simply a pious religious festival. What we must see, and live out, is that the Incarnation of the Word of God, of which Christmas is a central moment of celebration, is no less than the revolution, the utter overturning, of the human world. And at the center of it are a young Jewish girl and her old aunt.

Sermon (Evensong) -- 3 December 2006

1st Sunday of Advent — 3 December 2006
Trinity, Iowa City — 5:00 p.m. Evensong
Psalm 18 Amos 1:1-5,13–2:8 Luke 21:5-9

For three transgressions of Judah, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment; because they have rejected the law of the Lord, and have not kept his statues, but they have been led astray by the same lies after which their ancestors walked.

And a Merry Christmas to you, too, ho ho ho!

One of the things that we all have begun fussing about in recent years is the growing custom on the local radio stations of playing Christmas music starting immediately after Halloween. Not just us stuffy old Anglicans, but even regular people were shaking their heads a month ago: “Can you believe they’re playing Christmas music already — 24/7?!” Although I noticed, on those rare occasions when I wasn’t listening to KSUI, that these stations were actually playing “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer,” and I don’t consider that those count as Christmas carols. And if they have to be played at all, I suppose November is as good a time as any.

But this brings us around to a time to reflect on the meaning of Christmas; and as a run-up, on the meaning of Advent. As I suggested a moment ago, in the Anglican tradition we make rather a Big Deal of observing Advent, and not keeping Christmas until Christmas, and everyone else thinks we’re a little loony, we and the Roman Catholics and the Lutherans. Ironically, there was a time when we got it from the other direction: the Puritans got after us for celebrating Christmas at all; they considered it a Papist and pagan festival, not fit for Bible-believing Christians. Oh well.

I am inclined to think that we ought to keep Advent with a little more intentionality than we usually do. We understand Advent as a preparation for Christmas, and it is. But we understand Christmas as a warm and fuzzy festival, and so Advent also becomes warm and fuzzy, and we get a bit off track. Christmas certainly has its moments of profound joy, but it really isn’t warm and fuzzy. (I am reminded of the race car driver Ricky Bobby in the movie Talladega Nights, who when he says grace before dinner always prays to the Baby Jesus; he doesn’t care very much for the adult Christ Crucified.) Christmas, despite its genuine joy, also has its dark side. And part of the Advent preparation is to call our attention to the dark side of Christmas. We say, or at least we have taken to saying, that “Advent isn’t like Lent.” Well, in a sense that’s so; but in a sense Advent is like Lent. At least one stream of the origin of Advent was to be a season of fasting and penitence in preparation for the Epiphany baptisms. And one of the major themes of Advent, especially this first week, is judgment.

In the first reading we hear from the prophet Amos, who was active in Israel and Judah in the middle of the eighth century bce. He begins by denouncing the surrounding pagan nations for their sins and proclaiming God’s condemnation: Damascus, and then the selection tonight leaves out Gaza and Tyre and Edom to reduce the tedium a little, and then the Ammonites and Moab. That pretty well boxes the compass: Syria, the Philistines on the Mediterranean coast, what is now Lebanon, what is now Jordan. (“For three transgressions and for four” is a Hebrew rhetorical figure that means “for a whole lot of transgressions.”) So much for all those sinful Gentiles! But then Amos turns his sights on Judah and on Israel. Oops. Being the chosen people is no assurance against coming under judgment.

Jesus is with his disciples in Jerusalem, after his prophecy-fulfilling entrance into the city, driving the moneychangers out of the temple, and tangling verbally with the religious establishment. The disciples are rubbernecking at the Big City, and the Temple — a magnificent structure built by Herod to try to curry favor with the Jews — most of them are Galileans and some of them may never have been to Jerusalem before — and they are terribly impressed. Jesus quickly deflates their balloon and warns them that although “Beautiful and lofty, the joy of all the earth, is the hill of Zion, the very center of the world and the city of the great King,” [Psalm 48] it is still not immune to judgment, any more in the first century AD than it was in the eighth century BC.

And neither are we. Advent, and the initial Advent theme of judgment, reminds up how utterly serious the whole enterprise of the Incarnation of God the Word in Jesus of Nazareth really is, and at what cost comes the redemption that we shall in three more weeks celebrate with such joy.



© 2006 William S. J. Moorhead

Sermon -- 10 September 2006

Proper 18 / 14th Pentecost — 10 September 2006
40th Anniversary of Ordination to the Priesthood
Trinity, Iowa City — 7;45, 8:45, 11:00

Prov 22:1-2,8-9,22-23 Ps 125 James 2:1-17 Mark 7:24-37

“It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

Actually, I have a supplementary text for this morning also, and it comes from a few verses earlier, from last Sunday’s Gospel, if you may remember;

“Whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer.” (Thus he declared all foods clean.)

Well, actually, you probably don’t remember, because as it happens this verse was excised out of the passage appointed for the Gospel last week, and we didn’t hear it. It turns out that the Episcopal Lectionary Gnomes who appointed the Prayer Book readings are close cousins of the Ecumenical Lectionary Gnomes who appointed the Revised Common Lectionary; they both leave this verse out. You may have noticed in the lessons insert last week that there were a couple of elisions (…) in the printed text. Well, one of them was this. At least the RCL admits that we weren’t getting our full money’s worth.

(In the interests of full disclosure, I must say that I picked this point up this week from SimonSurmises,[1] a blog by Fr. Simon Mein, retired chaplain of St. Andrew’s School in Middletown, Delaware: a very good piece entitled “Whatever Happened to Mark 7:19?” But I digress.)

As some of you may be aware, this Sunday is the 40th Anniversary of my ordination to the Priesthood. (How time flies when you’re having fun!) It’s not my plan to recite a retrospective of my life in ordained ministry; in any case a lot of it would be reminiscent of some of the points Fr. Hulme made in his sermon last Sunday, and the rest of it would be kind of boring. On the other hand, I have been around the Episcopal Church for a long time. Not as long as some of you, but longer than a lot of you; I was raised in the Episcopal Church in an active church family; was an acolyte from a young age, at the age of ten I used to stand in the narthex after Mass selling copies of The Living Church, I regularly participated in youth events, and I was generally pretty savvy about what was going on in the Church. Those were the good old days of the High-Church/Low-Church wars, and my view of the Episcopal Church was definitely not through rose-colored glasses. Throughout my ordained ministry, and throughout all the years leading up to my ministry, this ol’ Episcopal Church has been through a lot, and a lot of it not very pretty, a lot of it mistaken, a lot of it infuriating. Funny thing, though: somehow or other the grace of God keeps shining through. Somehow or other we keep discovering — and being found by — the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

But I said I wasn’t going to get just into a retrospective of my own ministry. By instinct and temperament (possibly by talent, but I’ll let others make that judgment!) I am a historian, with some focus on historical theology. So my retrospective tends to go back a bit more like two thousand years. (Or even four thousand, if we want to go back to Abraham.) And one of the things I have known for a very long time — and I think we’ve tried to tell you, though I’m not sure we’ve been very successful, because a lot of people seem not to know it and to be greatly dismayed when they find it out — is that this whole ol’ Church has been through a lot for two thousand years (and the People of God for two thousand before that), and a lot of it not very pretty, a lot of it mistaken, a lot of it infuriating, a lot of it profoundly corrupt, a lot of it simply evil. Funny thing, though: somehow or other the grace of God keeps shining through. Somehow or other we keep discovering — and being found by — the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

There’s a myth — no, not a myth, because I prefer to reserve the word “myth” for a more technical and more positive meaning — a delusion that the Church of Christ has been this shining, pristine religious institution throughout the ages, up until about a week ago last Thursday, when all of a sudden it went to hell in a handbasket. Folks who subscribe to this delusion often appeal to “Catholic Tradition.” This of course is utter nonsense. (There are some more self-proclaimed-evangelical folks who prefer not to appeal to Catholic Tradition but to “Biblical Christianity.” This also is utter nonsense.) Oh, I think there is such a thing as Catholic Tradition, and such a thing as Biblical Christianity, but I have my doubts as to whether the folks who like to use these phrases really understand what they mean. An awful lot of what we regard as “traditional” (as in, “we’ve always done it that way before”) is profoundly faithless to the Gospel. Those who view with such alarm the current consternations of the Church seem not to be aware of past, to say nothing of current, corruptions of power, racism, sexism, oppression, justification of abusiveness, complicity in war, exploitation of the poor, persecutions, crusades — these folks need to chill out!

Funny thing, though: somehow or other the grace of God keeps shining through. Somehow or other we keep discovering — and being found by, and being delivered by — the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Last week in the Gospel reading Jesus was running afoul of the Pharisees over the food laws (and the Lectionary Gnomes allowed us to dodge Mark’s narrative sledgehammer in 7:19, “Thus he declared all foods clean”). In today’s reading we get the ethnic and religious purity issue. (Ew! Syrophoenician!) (I trust you do realize that at the beginning of this episode Jesus has his tongue stuck very firmly in his cheek, Irony Mode On, as is clear from the way he plays it out.)

About the time I was being ordained forty years ago a lot of us were just discovering the German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhöffer, and something he wrote in one of his letters from the Tegel prison in Berlin has stuck with me ever since, at least in my better moments: “Christ is no longer an object of religion, but something completely different, truly the Lord of the world.”[2]

The Church has done some dreadful things in the past; whatever the infallibility or indefectibility of the Church might mean, we can’t deny the truth about our past. We don’t know what great mistakes we may (or may not) be making in the present, or what new follies we may commit in the future. Funny thing, though: somehow or other the grace of God keeps shining through. Somehow or other we keep discovering — and being found by, and being delivered by — the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Jesus did not say, “I have come that you may have religion, and have it more abundantly.” When they said of Jesus, “He has done everything well,” it wasn’t because he increased their piety. It was because “he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak,” the lame to walk, the hungry to be fed, the grieving to rejoice, the dead to live.


[1] http://simonsurmises.blogspot.com/
[2] “Christus ist dann nicht mehr Gegenstand der Religion, sondern etwas ganz anderes, wirklich Herr der Welt.” 30 April 1944.


© 2006 William S. J. Moorhead

Sermon -- 13 August 2006

PROPER 14 / 10th after Pentecost—13 August 2006
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls — 9:00
Deut 8:1-10 Ps 34:1-8 Eph 4:25-5:2 John 6:37-51

This is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day.

There’s a song of John Lennon’s — the chief wordsmith of the Beatles (back lo these many years ago now) that has always kind of hooked me, despite my distinctly ambivalent feelings about what it says. Part of the lyric goes:

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky.…
Nothing to kill or die for
and no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

Now it’s very easy for religious folk — especially the conventionally religious — to get all tied up in knots about this. And, frankly, there’s a good bit of simplistic sentimental superficiality in this lyric. But let’s not write it off too easily. As a critique of much of Christian religiosity, it’s a damning enough indictment, and not altogether off-target. It expresses a widespread perception in the world, unfortunately one that is all too often in fact the case, that religion serves to divide people one from another, to exclude Them from Us, to exalt to arrogant heights Us who are In and to cast down to contempt and condemnation Them who are Out. I drop a couple of words into the pot: “Crusade.” “Jihad.” And if the pot looks like it is full of blood, that’s not wrong. “We have the light of truth, you are stumbling in the darkness of error. We are saved, you are damned. We’re OK, you’re pond scum.” Imagine no religion — all the people living life in peace! (Yeah, right.)

The Gospel today, from the 6th chapter of St. John, is very familiar to the clergy and perhaps to many of you; perhaps not quite as familiar to others of you. The reason it’s so familiar to the clergy is that it’s one of the Gospel readings appointed by the Prayer Book for funerals, as it has been since 1549: “Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away. . . . This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day.” A fairly obvious text for a funeral service, full of consolation, assuring all the family that probably Grandpa isn’t going to hell after all.

(I suspect that going to hell is harder than we usually assume. And easier. It is possible to go to hell; and if anyone actually does it, there are probably more than a few very religious folks among them. Hell is what we get when we persist to the end in choosing ourselves instead of God. This is probably good news for a lot of people who may not have been too “religious” but who cared a lot about truth and justice and other people. It may not be such good news for a lot of us who are real pious and respectable and put our trust in our own piety and respectability. But I digress.)

The larger context of the Gospel reading today, I hope you still recall, is the Feeding of the Five Thousand. In Year B of the Lectionary cycle, we spend six weeks on this: two weeks (three Sundays ago and two Sundays ago) reading the story of the Feeding and its follow-up (Jesus walking on the water), from St Mark’s Gospel (where we’ve been spending most of this year). Then follow four weeks of readings from the Discourse on the Bread of Life, which follows the feeding of the multitude in the sixth chapter of John. We would have started this last week, except it was the Feast of the Transfiguration, which took precedence over the usual Sunday readings. Today we’re back to it, and have a couple more weeks to go with the Bread of Life theme.

And all of this should inform our understanding of God’s purpose for the creation. It has to do with God’s fundamental attitude toward God’s people.

A colleague many years ago once gave me a little card which read, “The Lord is coming soon—and he’s really ticked off!” (Actually, that’s not exactly what the card said!) There are people, including Christians, who seem to have the notion that God is real real mad and is just looking for some excuse, any excuse, to cast us all into the flames. Very few folks will be saved, according to this scenario, so if you want to be one of them you’d better get your ducks in a row. “Oh, well, yes, God loves everybody—but…!”

This plays out in a couple of ways. One has to do with righteousness. “Have I done enough good? I’ve tried the best I could all my life, I haven’t really done too many bad things...” This is the notion that we overcome God’s fundamental dislike of us and earn God’s favor by our good works. St. Paul tried to drum this notion out of our heads; the Reformation tried to drum this notion out of our heads. It didn’t work; it still hasn’t worked. We still can’t let go of it. And it’s still false. First, none of us has done enough good. And second, that doesn’t matter.

The other way this plays out has to do with faith. We aren’t saved by our works, it goes, we’re saved by our faith. So I’ve got to have enough faith (as if “faith” were some sort of supercharged emotional experience that I’ve got to conjure up “enough” of). Or I’ve got to be sufficiently religious. (This is not what St. Paul, or Martin Luther, meant by “justification by faith.”) Or, I’ve got to have the right kind of faith. This fairly easily translates into: I have to believe the right things, my theology has to be orthodox. (And thereupon often morphs into “You have to believe the right things; your theology has to be orthodox, that is, just like mine.”) Christological error eventuates in eschatological catastrophe! (“If you say the creed wrong you’ll go to hell.”) None of this has anything really to do with faith—it’s all still works righteousness in sheep’s clothing. “Am I saved?” is just a way of contemplating my own navel. It’s the wrong question.

“This is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day.” God’s will is that we, and all humankind, should have life, and have it to the full, eternally. It is God’s will that we be saved, now, and forever. We need to accept that and get on with it—to trust God and live in the power of God’s love, come what may (that’s what faith is really about). That doesn’t mean we can be smug—it is possible to choose damnation—to choose our own self-sufficiency over God’s love—but that’s not God’s problem, that’s ours. God doesn’t have to be wheedled into accepting us. Our concern should not be with getting “saved” (that’s God’s doing; let God do it!) but with responding to God’s love and carrying out the mission and ministry which God gives us through Christ for the reconciling and healing of the world.

"This is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day."


© 2006 William S. J. Moorhead