Monday, January 13, 2020
Epiphany, January 6 , 2020 ~ St. Michael-and-All-Angels', Tucson
God
is the Lord, Who has shined upon
us
We have a lovely bird
in the canyons called Phainopepla ,
Its black coat is glossy and its name means
shining robe in Greek. Often,
in flight, it displays flashes of white at the end of its wings. The phaino
is Greek for shining. Same root is in epiphany,
which we usually translate as appearance, but it too has the connotation of a
flash or a sudden illumination. The literal meaning of epiphany is to shine upon
– just like a star.
That may be one
reason the Western Church decided to celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany as a
commemoration of the visit of the Wise Men, who were guided by a Star. We
remember Christ’s first appearance to gentiles.
The Wise Men represent all the non-Jewish people in the world. The same Western
tradition also came to identify these Wise Men as Kings.
We
three kings-a Vorien Tar. As a little kid, I wondered if vorien were a particular kind of tar,
maybe the kind they used on the roads in the summertime, and you had to be
careful not to get on your shoes! And I also wondered what it had to do with
Kings. Well, my early confusion is only a more childish version of
misconceptions that crept into our traditions about the Wise Men. The Gospel passage we have just heard says
nothing about either kings or the number of them. It mentions three gifts, but
there might have been more than three men. And they were only later thought to
be kings, partly because they were rich enough to make a long and dangerous
journey, and also because of the prophecy and psalm we just read we, referring
to kings bowing down and offering gifts to the Messiah, especially exotic kings from the East: Arabia and Saba – countries that are not
exactly east of Jerusalem, but south and east, along the Red sea.
The Gospel calls
these mysterious visitors not kings
but Wise Men, magoi, in the original text. That word is related to our word, magic, but the magi - as we often call them - were not wizards or sorcerers, they
were the scientists of their time. They were very well-educated, scholars who were
experrts in astronomy and in the interpretation of dreams. They mapped the
night skies and noted the movements of the “wandering stars,” or planets. Unlike our modern astronomers,
however, the ancient magi thought
there was a meaningful connection between the stars and human events. The
position and movements of the stars could signify earthly events. Nowadays, we
call that astrology. Not scientific
at all, but a pseudo-science that encourages a superstitious outlook. Well, the
ancient world had a different view of reality, and the magi were respected as highly learned and knowledgeable. By the
way, the fact that they also paid attention to their dreams may have saved them
from King Herod.
These traditions were
particularly well-developed in Persia – the modern Iran, so much in our news at
the moment – to the east of Israel. Seven
hundred years after Christ, the Arab conquest brought Islam to replace the old Persian
religion, known as Zoroastrianism, which had emphasized the struggle between
good and evil, symbolized by darkness and light. Fire was and is sacred to Zoroastrians,
who wanted to identify with the Light. That is why they were so interested in
the heavenly light of the stars. In Persia, the magi were religious authorities – priests – and they had to know
about the stars.
Biblical religion, both
Hebrew and Christian, takes a dim view of astrology, but it seems likely that
the Wise Men of the Gospel were representatives of this Oriental tradition.
They may not, however, have been Persian Zoroastrian priests. You see, a few
centuries before their visit to Bethlehem, Persia had conquered its neighbors
to the west, including the Babylonian empire, centered in modern-day Iraq. As
it happens, there was a large Jewish community living there at the time. The
upper classes had been dragged off from Jerusalem to exile and captivity about
a hundred years before. The Persian conquerors let them return to Jerusalem, but
many stayed on in Babylon, practicing their own religion, but at the same time absorbing
the wisdom of the Persians, no doubt including some elements of Persian
religion.
Some Persian
influence, for example, might be detected in the light symbolism in the passage
we read today, from the later chapters of Isaiah, which were probably written in Babylon:
Arise,
shine; for your light has come,
and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.
and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.
For darkness shall cover
the earth,
and thick darkness the peoples;
and thick darkness the peoples;
but the Lord will
arise upon you,
and his glory will appear over you.
and his glory will appear over you.
Nations shall come to your
light,
and kings to the brightness of your dawn.
and kings to the brightness of your dawn.
The Lord will “arise upon you,” like a star rises, and “shine upon” us. Epiphany means “appearance” but it also means
“shining upon”, like a star. Anyway, the Magoi
who visited Jesus may well have been Jewish astrologers from Babylonia, who had
over the centuries absorbed some Zoroastrian influence, and who loved the light
– both the natural light of the stars and the Divine light called the Glory of
God.
That
was the view of the late Latvian-American astronomer, Karlis Kaufmanis, who
became famous in his adopted home, my native Minnesota, for his beloved annual lectures
on the Star of Bethlehem. [There are copies of it available in the back.] Prof.
Kaufmanis thought that the “Star” that guided these Magi was really a series of conjunctions of two bright planets,
Jupiter and Saturn, in the year 7bc.
Modern biblical scholars are used to thinking of the story of the Visit of the Magi as a lovely fantasy, included to identify
Jesus as the fulfillment of prophecies, but Prof. Kaufmanis showed that it
might actually have happened!
Before
getting into that, let’s review the question of the date of Jesus’ Birth. There
are various theories, but everybody agrees that He was not born in 1ad. We
now know for sure that Herod the Great died in 4bc,
so the Gospel itself rules out any divine birthday later than that. We
got our numbering of years in the Christian Era only five hundred year later,
when a Syrian monk calculated it. The wonder is that he got the date as close
to correct as he did! But it wasn’t 1ad. Astronomical evidence, on the other hand,
points to 7bc. At least if we are
willing to imagine some factual basis for the story of the Star of Bethlehem.
Modern
scholarship confirms that Jewish scholars, exiled in Babylon, learned about
Persian Astrology and adapted it to their own traditions, developing a system
that identified certain stars and constellations with their own concerns. For example, Jewish astrology identified
Jupiter with the King, and Saturn with the Messiah.
Pisces, or the House of the Fish, referred to Israel. In 7bc, there were several appearances of
Jupiter and Saturn together in Pisces. They were apparently spectacular,
because they are mentioned in Persian and even Chinese sources, where tablets
repeatedly record, Jupiter and Saturn in
Fish. Modern astronomy can calculate the exact dates of the conjunctions,
and they correspond to these records.
But
for Jewish astrologers, these displays would have been momentous. The King and
the Messiah, arising in the House of
the Hebrews. Karlis Kaufmanis argues that:
“There seems to be little doubt that the [Visitors] were Jewish astrologers from Babylonia who had followed the planetary
motions watching for the signs that would confirm the birth of the Messiah foretold
by the prophets. But they had to wait for
a long time. It was not until
April 12, 7 BC, that ….Jupiter and Saturn
[rose just before sunrise] in the House of the Hebrews. [As the Gospel quotes the Magi, “we have seen His star as it rose,
and have come to worship Him”] When the planets met for their first conjunction,
[very close to one another] on May 27th, [so close, possibly, as to appear as
a single super-bright star] there could not have been any further doubt: the long-awaited Messiah had been born in Palestine.”
Let me interrupt Prof, Kaufmanis to address another
misconception about “following the star”. There is no way that any star could
have literally shown the way from the East to Jerusalem. If the Wise Men “followed”
the star, it was in the sense that they were motivated by the meaning they saw
in an astrological omen: Jupiter and Saturn in the Sign of the Fish, King and Messiah in the House of the Hebrews.
That omen guided them in the sense that it prompted them to travel to Jerusalem
to find Him. They knew where Jerusalem was;
they didn’t need a star to guide them there. Kaufmanis continues:
“Since, however,
the month of May marked the beginning
of the hottest season in Palestine, it is likely that the astrologers postponed
their trip across the desert [from Babylon] until the cooler
months of fall. And when they had the second conjunction
- on October 5 - even more impressive than the first
one! -it must have encouraged them to leave immediately for Jerusalem.
“Having spent five to
six weeks on their journey,
the Wise Men could have reached Jerusalem
by the middle of November.
Their inquiries for the newborn
King of the Jews brought them eventually to Herod, who asked them about the time the star had appeared.
“From Herod's conversation with his high priests
and the astrologers, we gather
that the star could not be
seen at this time. That agrees with the astronomical data, for by midNovember the planets were far away from each other. [This must have been a big disappointment to the Magi. All that investment of time and money leading
to a dead end. They probably didn’t feel like turning around and leaving right
away. They might have had relatives to visit in Jerusalem, and a couple of
weeks’ rest and reflection would have been welcome.] But while the Wise Men tarried in Jerusalem, the planets moved once more together, and on December
1st-
for the third time [that] year! - came to a conjunction. [This time] after sunset, the stars of the Messiah
and the King would be seen side by side south
of Jerusalem in the direction
of Bethlehem, which was only a few miles away.
[Only now, can we imagine the
Star literally guiding the Wise Men, indicating the direction they should go to
find the Child and] “If the Magi really did follow the star, in about two hours they would have reached a place where the road forked:
[one to the south east going up into the
hills, and the other to the] southwest. But by this time, the conjoined planets would have also turned
westward and gleamed magnificently over the roofs of Bethlehem. Thus, the astronomical calculations agree amazingly with the message
of the Gospel,"...and, lo, the star, which
they saw in the East, went before them, till it
came and stood over where the young Child was."
Kaufmanis
goes on to note that this final conjunction was joined by Mars. This was not a good omen, however, because Mars
represented the enemy of Israel. At the very least the “One Who is born King of
the Jews” might be expected to be in for some serious trouble.
I
feel a little sheepish about relating this suggestion that the Star and the
Wise Men is anything other than a lovely story someone made up in order to
illustrate a deeper truth, such as Jesus as the fulfillment of prophecy, or the
commendability of trusting in personal illuminations or intuitions of Light, or
the very important truth that God’s Act in Jesus was not for the Jews alone,
but for all nations. That is, after all, why the Western Church associates the
pagan kings with the Epiphany, the Feast of the appearance of Christ to the Gentiles.
[The Eastern Church, by the way, commemorates Epiphany as the Baptism in the
Jordan, and Christ’s first public appearance to the people of His own
nation.]
Still,
Prof. Kaufmanis’s observations invite us
to consider the Star itself. He was a
man of the old world – closer, perhaps, than we to the Hermetic sensibility
that contemplated a unity of science and theology, the acknowledgement
that “As it is above so shall it be
below,” the startling recognition that
there is a certain realism, something even more than symbolism and exalted poetry,
in our exclamation that
The
heavens declare the glory of God
And
the firmament showeth His handiwork!
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
Christian mantra ~ IAO
Hans Lietzmann mentions the use among gnostic Christians of
what appears to be a mantra: IAO. It seems to me likely that there was Indian
influence on popular religion in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Hindu and
Buddhist practice of repetition of a sacred word, probably for the purpose of
stilling discursive consciousness, found its way into Christian practice, especially
in monastic circles. IAO might have been
a Christian example.
Alpha and Omega, preceded by Iota (the smallest letter, close to the center of the alphabet)
could refer to the conclusion of the ancient “Lesser Doxology: now, and forever unto ages of ages. This
differs slightly from Eastern to Western use. The Western form adds a reference
to “the Beginning” (Sicut erat in principio…) But if forever in the Eastern form be taken to mean from the beginning of time, the order of IAO can be discerned: Now,
the Beginning, the End. As such, IAO could be an abbreviated form of
the Lesser Doxology. It could also be understood as a reference to all-encompassing
Divinity. IAO could also be interpreted
as the divine conquest of time, an invocation of Eternity.
Ultimate Being is also the meaning of the Hindu OM. In chant practice, this word sounds
like a-o-um (all vowels in their “long” sounding). Sometimes e-a-o-um. This
sound comes pretty close to IAO.
Saturday, July 22, 2017
Pentecost 7
Sermon for Pentecost 7
Proper 11 ~ Lectionary Year A
~ July 23, 2017
Holy Trinity & St.
Anskar
…creation itself will be set free from
its bondage to decay
and will obtain the freedom of the glory
of the children of God.
+In the Name of God, the Holy and
Undivided Trinity
Weeds and
wheat, Spirit and flesh and bodies, creation in labor. There is much to unpack
here. But let’s start with the Prophecy: There is only one God. There is no
other. The weeds in with the good grain are not due to some power or “enemy”
that can oppose God. God has no equal. The point is that the garden is a process
and the separation of the weeds from the grain is coming in the future.
Just as last week’s sower, the evangelist considers it
necessary to add an interpretation to the parable. Unfortunately, like all
interpretations these tend to narrow the meaning. Parables can have more than
one meaning. The notion that the weeds are evildoers destined for punishment is
not the only possibility. Reading the parable next to Paul’s letter to the
Romans may stimulate our imagination in another direction.
I consider that the sufferings of this present time
are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the
creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God… in
hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and
will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of
God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until
now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of
the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our
bodies.
So
maybe the weeds symbolize what Paul calls the “bondage to decay” to which the
whole material creation seems to be subject. At the end of time, the holy angels
will destroy not individual human evildoers but a certain incompleteness in
creation. It is not just individual righteous human creatures who are to be set
free, but creation itself. Creation is groaning as if in labor to bring forth
something completely new. Inseparable from creation, humanity too is groaning
in expectation, as we wait for what Paul calls “the redemption of our bodies.”
Paul mentions the body
twice: we have to put away the deeds
of the body, but then we are to await the redemption
of the body. He never speaks of the redemption of the flesh, but of the redemption of the body. This bodily redemption is part of the liberation of the whole
creation from bondage to decay. To redeem is, literally, to “buy back” as in a
pawn shop we redeem something borrowed against. Slaves could be redeemed – bought back – and set free. The bondage Paul speaks of is the whole
creation’s slavery to decay and death, in which we also participate. But God
has come in the Person of the Son to set us free from this slavery – and not
only us, but all creation. The Son is
one of us. And we are like him – children of God by adoption and grace, if not
by nature, because He has taught us to call God Papa — Abba — as He does. The consciousness that we are, together,
the children of God is the Spirit. The Spirit is never opposed to the body, but it is opposed to the flesh and there is a difference. Our
bodies are to be redeemed — together. In fact, we already experience the
firstfruits of this Redemption. The Spirit is the consciousness of
intercommunion among apparently separate bodies. The flesh,
destined for destruction, like weeds in the garden, is the insistence on
individual separation. In fact, maybe as
the weeds represent the flesh, so the good grain represents material existence
in the body: living and material intercommunion in the Spirit.
What we hope for is not a disembodied or immaterial
redemption. The opposition of flesh
and spirit is not an opposition between matter
and spirit. It is the opposition of communion and separation. The flesh is our will to go our own way and
to imagine that we can be by
ourselves. That tendency is to be destroyed — the orientation toward death is
to be destroyed, the destruction of destruction. But our bodies are to be
redeemed. Matter is to be redeemed. I take this to mean that matter is to
become what God always intended creation to be: the expression of divine love
and beauty.
Our current view about material reality is friendly toward
this Pauline view. The Word of creation is "Let there be light." As
far as I understand it, our modern creation narrative is that light is all
there is: light organized in various ways. And all connected. The shape and
behavior of space and galaxies on the unimaginably large scale of the
observable universe is found to be uncannily similar to the shape and behavior
of energy and matter in the infinitesimal first moments of the Big Bang. The
pattern is repeated from the infinitesimal to the virtually infinite.
The Chinese just experimentally demonstrated the theory of
quantum physics: some particles of light — photons — are “entangled” with one
another, and they behave in a way that shows their connection, even at great
distances. The Chinese have just managed to do this in outer space. What
happens to one photon here on earth happens to its entangled sister in the
satellite. There is some kind of sympathy, even though there is no apparent
connection and the photons are separated by great distances. Changes imposed on
the terrestrial photon happen also to the celestial one — simultaneously. Yet
there is no possibility for the transmission of information from one to the
other, by any means known to us. This strikes me as another way of saying that
everything is connected to everything else, in ways we do not yet understand: like
the mysterious connection Paul calls Spirit. In fact Einstein even called it “spooky action at a distance.” And it made him pretty uncomfortable.
St. Augustine would not have been uncomfortable, because he speculated
that the Holy Spirit is precisely the connection between Father and Son. Spirit
Is Connection, Life. Flesh Is separation, sin and death — all of which are
excluded from the Being of God, whose children we are invited to become by
adoption. Whatever matter is, whatever the cosmos is, everything is connected
to everything else, eagerly longing for the revealing
of the children of God — that is for
creation’s own consciousness, ourselves — to realize
the fulness of “the freedom of the glory of the children of God…
[and]our adoption, the redemption of our
bodies.”
The weeds are the illusion of separation. from which we suffer,
just as the good grain has to grow — for a time — with the weeds. But at the
end of time — that is when time has fulfilled its
purpose — in what scripture calls the fulness of time – separation will
disappear into its essential nothingness. As the Communion of the Holy Spirit
is revealed to encompasses all creation — ta
panta — in glory, then the righteous
will shine like the sun in the Kingdom of their Father.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS
Pentecost 6
Sermon for Pentecost 6
Proper 10 ~ Lectionary Year A
~ July 16, 2017
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
To set the mind
on the flesh is death,
but to set the
mind on the Spirit is life and peace.
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
At the end of the
nineteenth century, a fascinating controversy went on between two well-known
intellectuals, Sir Thomas Huxley and Prince Peter Alexeyevich Kropotkin, over
the meaning of Darwin and evolution. It illustrates a difference in
what we have come to call paradigms.
From
the point of view of the moralist, the animal world is on about the same level
as the gladiator's show. … Life was a continuous free fight, and beyond the limited
and temporary relations of the family, the Hobbesian war of each against all
was the normal state of existence
So wrote Thomas Huxley in 1888. He developed his view of
“nature” into a theory that has come to be known as Social Darwinism,
according to which, since nature’s law is a law of competition, weeding out the
unfit, it will not do to help the weak and unfit survive to reproduce. That is
a recipe for the “degeneration” of the human race.
Kropotkin disagreed, to put it mildly. Here
is the opening paragraph of his great work in response to Huxley,
entitled Mutual Aid:
Two
aspects of animal life impressed me most during the journeys which I made in my
youth in Eastern Siberia and Northern Manchuria. One of them was the
extreme severity of the struggle for existence which most species of animals
have to carry on against an inclement Nature; the enormous destruction of life
which periodically results from natural agencies; and the consequent paucity of
life over the vast territory which fell under my observation. And the other
was, that even in those few spots where animal life teemed in abundance, I
failed to find – although I was eagerly looking for it – that bitter struggle
for the means of existence among animals belonging to the same species, which
was considered by most Darwinists (though not always by Darwin himself) as the
dominant characteristic of struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution.
“Don't compete!”
Kropotkin concluded. “That is the watchword which comes to us from the
bush, the forest, the river, the ocean. Therefore combine—practice mutual aid!”
Faced with the same data, the two scientists
arrived at different conclusions. This illustrates how paradigms work.
Stephen Jay Gould, in a recent article rehabilitating Kropotkin from his
caricature as an anarchist crank, would say that the difference in paradigm
included a difference of data, because Kropotkin studied
sparsely-populated Siberia, while Huxley and the British concentrated on
the crowded tropics. But Gould points out that Kropotkin was anything but
idiosyncratic: he represents the mainstream of Russian evolutionary thought,
which remains untranslated and almost unknown in the West. Prince
Kropotkin seems singular to us only because he is the only such thinker who
wrote in English.
Now this difference in paradigms
~ the lens through which we agree to look at the world ~ is what Paul
is talking about, I believe, in his Spirit / Flesh dichotomy.
The Huxley-Kropotkin controversy may serve as an analogy of the difference. It
is very important not to misunderstand Paul. Spirit vs. flesh is
not material vs. immaterial. Although many have
interpreted it that way, such a dichotomy is, in fact heresy. Material
creation is what the bible says God pronounced it to be: Very Good.
The heresy that holds that what is wrong
with human beings is our material bodies and our lives in the world is NOT what
Paul is talking about. He is talking about two different ways of
viewing human life ~ two different paradigms, and the very
different ways of life that proceed from each view of
life. The flesh , rather like Sir Thomas Huxley, sees the
human person as in competition with everybody else: the “war of each against
all.” Therefore, my job is to advance my own interests, and get as much wealth
as I can. The Spirit, rather like Prince Kropotkin, sees the human
person as part of a great whole characterized by mutual aid.
This is a difference, which I have called a
difference in paradigm, might also be called a difference in spiritual
temperament. And what one perceives as reality depends greatly on one’s
spiritual temperament; whether one sees reality as the dance of Cosmic Love or
as gladiatorial combat ~ “a tale told by an idiot, signifying
nothing”. Remember who uttered those words: the murderous Macbeth, his soul
deformed by his own ambition, one of the most frightening depictions of
Pauline flesh in all of literature.
Prof. Gould rightly warns us against the
trap of reading our own political preferences into nature, as both Huxley and
Kropotkin most certainly do. But from the perspective of religious
history, I think one may also conclude that Huxley’s fleshly conclusions
naturally proceed from a prior inclination to view the world as competition.
Kropotkin, on the other hand, grew up as a nobleman in feudal times, for the
rural Russia of his youth was entirely feudal. It was also entirely
Christian, and whatever Kropotkin’s conscious atheism, there is no doubt about
the influence that Orthodoxy had on his consciousness ~ it was part
of the paradigm by which he experienced the world. That is, it
was spiritual in the Pauline sense.
For all its pain
and death, the material world is beautiful, and human beings are
the image of God, however distorted. And as his great compatriot,
Dostoevsky, wrote: “the tragedy of humanity is that a paradise of beauty
blooms around us and we fail to see it.” That failure to see is flesh.
That is what brings death. The Spirit is the divine gift of
seeing the Beauty and Love that in fact rule the world ~ what our Lord called
the Kingdom of God. Anyone who has that gift is led by
the Spirit, in Paul’s terminology. Like Prince Kropotkin, they may not be
aware of it, but nevertheless, they are children of God, and if
children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS
Saturday, July 08, 2017
Pentecost 5
Sermon for Pentecost 5
Sermon for Pentecost 5
Proper 9, Year A July 9 , 2017
|
|
Holy
Trinity & St. Anskar
+ In
the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
Thus St. Augustine
summarized Christian ethics in a remark that serves as a charter for what is
called the sovereignty of conscience. It is, in a way, a paraphrase of our Lord’s
own Summary of the Law, to which today’s Collect refers, saying that God has
taught us to fulfill the whole law by loving God and our neighbor. If we love
God, we cannot help but love our neighbor, because our neighbor is like God.
And yet we all fall short of this simple standard. It may be
simple but it’s not easy. Because loving God with our whole heart, soul, mind,
and strength means not only refraining from the worst kinds of outward
offenses, but it also means never thinking about anything but God, which means
forgetting ourselves entirely. Like Paul, in his famous lament and to the
Romans, we find that we cannot do that, however much we may wish to:
The good that I would that I do not,
and the evil that I would not that I do!
Whenever I
read this passage, I remember the great Krister Stendhal, the Dean of Harvard
Divinity school and later the Bishop of Stockholm, who came to our Episcopal clergy
conference here in Minnesota in the early 70s. He had a terrific sense of humor
even though, as he explained, he had been prepared for confirmation by Ingmar
Bergman’s father! Stendhal was a noted Pauline scholar and he argued that this
passage we heard today is not really the anguished cry of a tormented soul, but
a rhetorical trope of the kind commonly found in classical literature. “There
is no way out of my conundrum, but look! Surprise! There is a way out after
all.”
This form may also be detected in today’s Gospel – a kind of
bad news/good news joke. What we heard today was a series of sayings of Jesus —
so-called “unattached logoi”, or
sayings that seem to have been collected individually and piled up on the
evangelist’s desk, and then selected seemingly at random, to be tacked on wherever
there was room:
I piped in you did not dance &c,
John came fasting and you said he had a demon, I
came eating and drinking and you said I was a glutton, there’s no pleasing you!
Thank God that all this is hidden from the wisdom
of this world, and revealed to the simple. The Father is unknown to all but the
Son, and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal the Father.
My yoke is easy and my burden is light.
It is a
challenge to find any common theme here, but I’ll try! Maybe a key to
interpretation can be found in Paul’s diatribe about feeling trapped, and the Collect’s
reference to the Summary of the Law, which Augustine paraphrased as “love God
and do as you please.” At first glance, Augustine’s advice seems to contradict
St. Paul’s. Even with the best of will, Paul finds that his propensity to
forget God is always close at hand — ready to pounce, as it were. Krister
Stendhal’s studies led him to observe that Western European Christians are way
too quick to identify this kind of expression with Luther and his famous
spiritual struggles.
But there is little evidence that Paul’s temperament was much
like Luther’s. The famous passage we heard today is not a cry of existential, Teutonic
anguish, but a rather cheerful and humorous thanksgiving for liberation from
this kind of pagan trap. When he wrote this, Paul was most likely smiling, not
beating his breast! Sure, our condition is absurd, but thanks be to God,
because of Jesus Christ there is humor in that condition, instead of despair.
So, we are like the little children: on the one hand, there
is no pleasing us —
We played the flute for you, and you did not
dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.
While
on the other hand, the Good News is hidden from the sophisticated, and revealed
to us infants. The Good News is that in Christ, God has overcome sin, and freed
us from its death-house. Our decrepit will to do the right thing is not our
only weapon in this struggle: thanks be to God who gives us the victory through
Jesus Christ.
The “body of death” in which we are imprisoned is
not our physical body, but rather the sense of separation in our individual
consciousness. This is the “law of sin in my members" which Paul laments,
and ridicules. But Jesus Christ has overcome that separation — Thanks be to
God. He has overcome it for everyone, although He had revealed the fact, for
now, only to a few: to us whom He has commissioned to spread the Good News. No
one knows the Father except the Son, and those to whom the Son chooses to
reveal Him.
This open secret, which we now shout from the
rooftops, is hard to hear. Even public proclamation doesn’t necessarily reveal
the secret. People can hear the words and not get it. Part of the secret is
that the “yoke is easy and the burden is light.” Just the opposite of the
anguish that Paul ridiculed. God knows that He is calling those who are weary
and heavy laden. All God asks is that we love Him. God also knows that His adorability
is infinitely greater than our capacity for love.
“Don’t worry about that,” He says, for I am
gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. In
other words, do your best to love Me. I will gradually increase your capacity
to love. My easy burden and light yoke will gradually form your conscience —
the secret place within your inner consciousness where you know Me and I know
you. As for everything else, as My servant, Bishop Augustine of Hippo, put it: do
as you please!
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS
Saturday, July 01, 2017
Holy Apostles
Sermon for Pentecost 4
(Sunday within the octave of
the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul)
Year A July 2 , 2017
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
Anyone
who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me.
+In
the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
The feast of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, June 29, commemorates
the traditional day the Empire killed them. Tradition also reveres them as the
apostolic founders of the Church in Rome. These two Jews, very different in
background and social position, brought the Gospel to the Imperial capital.
There’s lots of symbolic meaning here. Ancient Hebrew monotheism transcends its
ethnic roots, extending to all nations, and polytheistic paganism embraces
monotheism. Peter, the rough working-class Apostle, is joined by Paul, the
Roman citizen of the Diaspora — not even from Palestine but from Asia minor,
who spoke Greek as well as he spoke Aramaic possibly better, the disciple of
the most noted rabbi of the time, Gamaliel. Peter and Paul represent the
universality of the Church — They are the Catholic Apostles, par excellence.
The Sunday after the feast of the Holy Apostles
Peter and Paul often falls around the time of our national holiday which makes
it a good time to reflect on the relationship of church and state. I mean that
in a broad sense, not in our usual legal, constitutional sense. All our
scriptures make it clear that human political arrangements are temporary and
instrumental. That is, when they promote God’s purpose of peace and justice
among creatures, God may bless them, but when they work against those purposes,
God shows them no favor. Among the worst kinds of idolatry, also among the most
prevalent, is the identification of one’s own society, culture, or nation with
the Kingdom of God.
One reason the Hebrew Scriptures seem authentic
is the criticism they often level against the People whom God has chosen to be
His own. The basic message is that the status of chosen people is not something
any nation can claim, but only receive as the gift of God, and the chosen status
can turn into judgment if the people ignore God’s commandments.
Today’s Collect identifies the Apostle and
Prophets as twofold foundation of the Church. The prophets leave no doubt that
God insists on our obedience to commandments: not so much commandments about
ritual purity and religious observance, but commandments of social justice. If
this is true of the descendants of Abraham by blood, how much more is it true
of any other country or nation that thinks of itself as specially favored?
From the beginning, we Americans have thought of
ourselves that way. Some even went so far as to dream that we could rebuild a
whole new society here, free of Original Sin. A new secular order, as our motto on the Great Seal — found in the back of the dollar bill — proclaims. Deep in
our national DNA is the notion of American exceptionalism: we are new and
different. We are specially favored by God. Even as we killed indigenous people
and enslaved Africans. But this is in fact a kind of apostasy, a blasphemy, a
form of idolatry because it places the nation on the throne in place of God.
That is not to say that the United States — or
any nation — may never be used by
God. But it is a warning against the kind of national pride that easily turns
into idolatry. Scripture threatens unpleasant consequences for that! As long as
we — or any other nation —genuinely try to advance the cause of peace and
justice on earth, we may have God’s favor. But whenever we begin to think that
God favors us and so we can do whatever we want, we are in for a big surprise.
I’m afraid that surprise may now be upon us.
I think of our present time as a “slow-motion
crisis.” We have elected an incompetent, infantile man to be president. A Hebrew
prophet would take this as the judgment of God, which we have called down upon
ourselves. Of course the ancient Hebrews were not individualists: they did not
think in terms of individual rights or deserts. It’s fine to quote H.L. Mencken
and say that “democracy is the form of government in which the people get
exactly what they deserve”, but what about all of us who didn’t vote for that
nincompoop? Well, modern human rights law may take a dim view of collective
punishment, but the Hebrew Scriptures didn’t. When the nation departs from the
way of the righteous, everybody suffers –
even the individually innocent.
All of this is important to remember in conjunction
with our national holiday. I do not intend to turn it into a day of mourning by
reciting our innumerable transgressions. I just want to observe that human
empires sometimes serve God, and sometimes they don’t. The Roman Empire served
to help spread the Gospel throughout the entire known world (at least that part
of the known world mattered to anyone in
that culture), and then having served that purpose, it declined and fell — or
at least changed into something very different.
We remember Peter and Paul as the founders of the
Church in Rome. According to tradition, both died there on the same day — one
crucified, the other beheaded as a Roman citizen. Although the Empire may be an
instrument, it is never the friend of the Church. The Gospel would spread under
the protection of the Empire, and eventually conquer it, even though it killed
the first apostles.
One important, underlying message of all this is
that parochial or ethnocentric religion — religion too closely identified with
one ethnic group — must become universal.
Anyone who loves father or mother more
than Me is not worthy of Me.
These difficult words we heard last week could well apply here: if you
think God favors you particularly because of your nationality, if you love your
own ancestry, your own blood more than you love Jesus, then you are not worthy
of Jesus. The Gospel is for everybody, not for any particular bloodline.
The Roman Empire was universal, and the Good News
that Peter and Paul brought to Rome was salvation for everybody, not only for the
blood descendants of Abraham. As the Empire was universal, so would be the New
Israel, the Catholic Church. All human classifications, all divisions, all
categories would be transcended and abolished. Just as there was one Emperor,
there would be one Lord and Savior of all peoples. Once that was firmly
established, the Empire had served its purpose. The Empire became Christian,
and more or less continued in Constantinople and Moscow right up into the last
century (remember that Tsar means Cæsar.) But these Imperial tools
eventually outlived their usefulness and disappeared. While the universal
Church continued to prosper.
As our own nation and our own world Empire
declines, dramatically, let us not be amazed. We cannot predict the future: it
may be that the United States of America has served whatever purpose God
intended for it — and we can all guess what that might be. [For my part, I
think it has something to do with the promotion of universal human rights.] But
then it may also be that God will repent, turn back our decline, cleanse us,
and lead us in the paths of righteousness for His Name’s sake.
It is possible, but don’t count on it. In the end,
the Gospel is opposed to Empire. Sooner or later, the Empire will attack the
messengers of the Gospel, crucify and behead them as Rome did to Peter and
Paul. But the Holy Apostles will have the last word.
ALLELUIA
THE LORD IS GLORIOUS
IN THE SAINTS
COME LET US ADORE
ALLELUIA
