Sermons

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I think we forget sometimes just how cruel the ancient world was. Infanticide, often by means of exposure, was a daily reality in antiquity, practiced by parents of unwanted or “imperfect” babies. Bloodsport was a common pastime. Slavery was nearly ubiquitous (it must be noted, our just having celebrated Juneteenth, that modern Europeans perfected the institution of slavery as a means of cruel debasement in the Americas, and it was in many respects far more brutal than the form slavery took in the ancient world, but it was more widespread in antiquity, every major Empire in Europe, Asia, and North Africa practicing it, with the singular exception of the Persians, though even they have an asterisk next to that in the record book of history).

Most shockingly of all, the very concept of qualities like mercy and generosity and loving-kindness beings goods in themselves–not simply means for gaining some advantage–was essentially unheard of before Judaism and organized charitable activity (not philanthropy meant to attach one’s name to a public building or service, but honest-to-God aid to the poor and marginalized) did not exist before the Christian Church.

All of this is to put into context something which might have struck you as odd in today’s Gospel reading. Jesus saves the man from the country of the Gerasenes from demonic possession. We know that this is not a Jewish community, but a pagan, Gentile one, both by virtue of being on the opposite side of the sea of Galilee (a largely culturally Greek region) and because somebody is keeping pigs there, which no Jewish community would have tolerated. Now, by contemporary standards or by ancient Jewish standards we might have expected this miracle to have been greeted with joy and awe by all, except perhaps the swineherd who lost his pigs. But how did the people of this city respond? They were afraid and they asked Jesus to leave.

Here is a naked man who lives in a cemetery. Mark’s version of the story tells us that this man would rant and rave and cut himself with stones. One would think seeing this man come to his senses would be a cause for celebration, but not so in the country of the Gerasenes.

It is hard to say precisely why this would be the case. There are various theories. The one I find most convincing is, believe or not, from somebody with whom I generally vehemently disagree, French philospher and critic René Girard. Like a lot of people who get fixated on a particular idea or theme to the point of trying to explain everything by reference to it, Girard developed a view of anthropology which held scapegoating as the primary mechanism by which human culture is established. This leads to some pretty outrageous claims from a Christian standpoint, particularly as it regards the meaning and purpose of Jesus’ crucifixion.

However, in at least this one instance we see the power of the theory to explain otherwise seemingly-inexplicable behavior. Why on earth would anybody want a person to undergo this horrible experience and be disappointed that he’s been healed? Presumably even the most heartless members of a community would at the very least want to be spared having to look at this horrible scene day after day. Because, sinners that we are, we might sometimes want to have a target for our collective guilt and loathing. Just so might we communally impute our problems onto one unlucky person–he must have sinned that this befell him, his sin is greater than mine, and so he bears my sin, too. Look, we don’t even need to stone this one; he’s doing it to himself.

Think this doesn’t happen today? We have seen all too clearly, all too recently with tragic effect what happens when an individual or a group of people convince themselves that their problems cannot possibly be blamed either on themselves or simple bad luck or even thorny systemic issues with no simple solution, but must, rather be blamed on an individual or a class of people. That person or group over there is entirely to be blamed and must be made to suffer, whether they be schoolchildren or the congregation of a church or synagogue beset by a crazed gunmen or elected officials (as happened in Minnesota last week) or entire sovereign nations. As an aside, considering the anxiety in the world today considering the ongoing fighting in the Middle East and elsewhere and the entry, yesterday, of our own military in the conflict with Iran, I am not going to take a position in the pulpit, not being an expert in global geopolitics. I am aware that some clergy will be leveling judgments one way or another this morning, and I can only assume that they have a perfectly clear view of the ethics of warfare in the current situation (that’s sarcasm), but I do not. I will only bid your prayers for a peaceful and just conclusion and for safety for our own armed forces and for civilians who may be caught up in the conflict. What I can say, I think, is that in the context of this complicated situation, there is certainly scapegoating borne of resentment, which goes both ways just as surely as the bombs.

In all events resentment can become and in many situations historically and today has become the primary mode of interacting with the world until that Other is made to suffer. This has been used by fascist dictators and Marxist revolutionaries alike to create untold suffering. There will never be a shortage of angry young men, and now they’ve all got internet-connected computers in their basements to make the scapegoating more efficient.

Is there good news here? Yes. In fact it is The Good News. Jesus can save us from this cycle of rage and recrimination. When the man formerly possessed of Legion is healed, he is given not only freedom but a job to do–namely telling the people of his own city that there is a better way to live. We don’t know for certain whether or not the Gerasenes eventually accepted this message, but I suspect so, because I suspect Jesus wouldn’t have set the man to this task unless he knew it was going to work.

It can work and it does work and it will work. The catch is that it requires our own conversion, our own turning away (every day, perhaps) from pettiness and the desire to see ourselves as more deserving of God’s love than the person with whom we have the least in common, with whom we are at most enmity. It requires us to recognize that even the one who is most unlovely to us is just as loveable to God. Because in Christ, the one who has the most to need for forgiveness can, when given the gift of grace, is the greatest messenger of the Lord’s universal love. Because the church’s greatest persecutor might well become her greatest Apostle, as of old Saint Paul was made worthy to be. Because in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female. For Christ came to save us all, and we must see each and every human heart as a fit place in which the Spirit of God might take up residence, to transform, and to be made and inheritor of the promises of the Gospel and a herald of the same.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Some of you know that I enjoy playing video games–not the shooty variety that require good reflexes and hand-eye coordination, but those which require strategy and planning and lateral thinking. Sometimes people assume that this is a generational quirk, but I was excited to learn last week that John Masterson liked to play the same sorts of games, and I’m disappointed now that I never got the chance to talk to him about them.

I also occasionally like to watch others play these games (both to learn more about the games and because those others often have entertaining personalities) on a platform called Twitch. This platform allows for interaction between the livestreamer and the audience, and I confess that I will sometimes leave a question or comment with an ulterior motive. You see, My username on Twitch is “Quicunque Vult”, the first two words and Latin title for what is traditionally called the Athanasian Creed. Occasionally I will leave a comment during a livestream, which invariably makes some poor professional videogamer try to pronounce Quicunque Vult when he or she is playing a challenging game in front of an audience of hundreds or sometimes thousands. I hope that this is not online trolling, but rather internet evangelization, and that they will look up the Athanasian Creed as soon as they’re finished with their livestreamed game session. Perhaps the chances of that are slim, but I live in hope.

Now, I realize that while its unlikely that any given professional gamer will have heard of the Athanasian Creed, it may (unfortunately) be similarly unlikely that even a life-long churchgoer will have been exposed to it either, unless they had a particularly pedantic priest teach their Confirmation class. In the old days, and still in the Church of England in places where they have retained the use of 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the faithful would have recited the Athanasian Creed instead of the Apostles’ Creed at Morning Prayer several times a year, including on Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, and Pentecost. Naturally, they’d also recite it on Trinity Sunday (the Feast we observe today), because it is an early expression of the fullness of our Trinitarian belief as Christians. It is in our prayerbooks on page 864, and while I am sore tempted to have us recite it in full this morning, I won’t for two reasons. First, it’s in remarkable small print in our prayerbook which, as somebody with premature presbyopia, I can understand would be a difficulty for some. Second, and more importantly, it would be breaking the rubrics of our current Book of Common Prayer, and I did make a vow to uphold the worship of the church.

The TLDR (“too long, didn’t read”) synopsis of the Creed is this: the Christian faith is defined dogmatically (that is to say in its essential doctrine, not in the pejorative sense we sometimes associate with the word “dogmatic” these days) by its understanding that God is three persons in one substance, or essential reality. If that sounds confusing, it’s because it is. It’s ultimately a mystery, but we do have some language given by God in Scripture to get close to the divine meaning. Each of these persons–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit–is equal in glory and majesty, in being eternal and uncreated, and in being almighty and ultimately incomprehensible.

The persons are distinguished not by rank or activity (it is not, as I’ve said in previous Trinity Sunday, sermons that there is a division of labor within the Godhead) but, rather, firstly by the fact that the second person of the Trinity (the Son) is eternally begotten of the Father–that the First Person of the Trinity is in some sense the origin or font of Deitas or “godhood” from whom the Son eternally received the same–and, secondly, that the Third Person of the Trinity (the Holy Spirit) proceeds from the First and Second Persons–that he is sent by the other two.

Now that’s a lot of theological hair-splitting, which is among my favorite pastimes, but you may well ask what the point is. The point, I think, is that the Holy Trinity is defined not by the way we human beings typically, sadly define our relationships in a transactional way–whose job is this or that; who’s in charge of whom–but rather by preëxistent, equitable relationships of perfect love and by mutual mission (sending) to accomplish the divine will. Thus, the mystery of the Trinity is the heart of the Christian community as God intends it to function. That is to say that the mission of God, the Trinitarian Mission, is the model for the Church’s mission.

We are all one body, individually members of it, and equally redeemed and worthy. Love is the only principle by which our relationships within that body should be defined. And this love naturally leads to mission, to sending. Just as the Father’s love necessitated the sending of the Son to redeem the world and the love they shared, which is the Holy Spirit, inevitably led to that same Spirit’s being poured out upon all flesh that the Good News might be spread to the ends of the earth, so should our unity in love inevitably lead to apostleship, to going out to be heralds of the Gospel in a world for whom that Good News is its only hope.

What is the alternative? Church history, I contend, shows us that treating the revealed truth of God’s Triune nature as a matter for merely rational debate, for deconstruction, naturally leads to a worldview in which the individual is entirely on his own to save himself, and anybody with a robust sense of one’s own sin-nature and status as redeemed by Christ alone, knows this to be an exercise in futility. We have seen this transition before over the course of just a few hundred years, a relatively short period in the context of the Church’s history, and you’ll forgive my somewhat unecumenical tone here, which I hope you know I only take when the issue at stake is essential to Christian belief and practice.

Both in England and in this country, the Puritans began by attempting to purge our church of its Catholic content, including, eventually, the dogmatic statements of the Church Fathers, Creeds included. Having purged their version of the church of its universal birthright, some took theological expurgation as the primary mode of religious discourse. Thus they attempted to cast off revealed truth as a whole, in favor of only that which could stand up to the assumptions of Enlightenment-era reason. The first thing to go was the Doctrine of the Trinity, and one was left with Unitarianism (our famous 18^th Century American Deists being, for all intents and purposes, a subset of the same). Eventually, the great majority of these Unitarians came to the logically-necessary end of this project of theological-sloughing, and “purified” the church of the “presumption” of making any claim whatsoever about the truth or falsity of any theological proposition, adopting “Universalism”, which is really a euphemism for claiming that religion must merely be a personal aesthetic choice rather than any kind of consistent, commonly held belief system.

Now, I’ve known some Unitarian Universalists over the years, and they’ve mostly been perfectly nice people attempting to live moral lives. But, it seems to me an awfully lonely way to live, to believe the point of religion is to make some kind of meaning for myself–just for myself lest I presume to push it on somebody else–in a seemingly meaningless world, without recourse to saying “this is true (or false)” without adding the codicil “for me.” This strikes me as making the statement meaningless at best, and probably of making the whole endeavor of finding meaning itself inherently, ironically meaningless. All of this is to make the claim that the road to theological perdition begins with the rejection of the Trinity and ends with being incapable of saying anything meaningful about religion at all.

So, today, we give thanks for, of all things, a theological concept. Lest we be tempted by the spirit of the age to claim that a theological claim is neither here nor there, that it is an entirely private matter, we can set our hope on the proposition that there are at least a few that change everything about how we live our lives and how we find meaning and purpose as individuals and as a community. God made everything and called it good. God came among us and died for us and rose again. God enlightens and inspires and strengthens us to live in love and to spread that love to all. These claims are either true or false, not just “for me” but for the whole world. Believing them to be true changes everything for the better in this life and gives us the assurance of even greater things in the next.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I’ve always been interested in language, as those of you who’ve been subjected to my little Greek and Latin lessons over the years will know all too well. In my undergraduate work I focused a great deal on the philosophy of language, and my thesis was on the subject of the metaphysical nature of proper nouns, so if you’re really a glutton for punishment, I could dig out a copy of that paper for you. I suppose this interest probably stems from a desire to understand and be understood in a more general sense, which is a human impulse I suspect most of us share. Our inability to do so has led to all manner of suffering, which is probably why the author of our Old Testament lesson from Genesis, the story of the Tower of Babel, was keen on trying to explain how sin led to the confusion of tongues–the beginning of a vicious cycle of misunderstanding.

How appropriate, then, that the miracle of the first Pentecost was the Holy Spirit’s provision of understanding. “And they were amazed and wondered, saying, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language?’”

Note well, that this was not just a miracle to show the power of God, though this was a secondary benefit. The primary concern (if I might be so bold as to speculate regarding the intentions of God) was with the communication of salutary knowledge. You might not have noticed that, because our lesson concludes after Peter’s explanation of the miracle but before he proceeds to the content of his sermon. I understand why they did this, because it would have been an extra long reading, but I think we’d be remiss to just skip over it. So, picking up at verse 22, Peter continues:

Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs which God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know — this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. But God raised him up, having loosed the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it.For David says concerning him,
`I saw the Lord always before me,
for he is at my right hand that I may not be shaken;
therefore my heart was glad, and my tongue rejoiced;
moreover my flesh will dwell in hope.
For thou wilt not abandon my soul to Hades,
nor let thy Holy One see corruption.
Thou hast made known to me the ways of life;
thou wilt make me full of gladness with thy presence.’
Brethren, I may say to you confidently of the patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Being therefore a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants upon his throne, he foresaw and spoke of the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption. This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this which you see and hear. For David did not ascend into the heavens; but he himself says, `The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, till I make thy enemies a stool for thy feet.’ Let all the house of Israel therefore know assuredly that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.

And what came of this brief sermon which the crowd miraculously heard in their own languages? We are told that over three thousand were immediately baptized and that those new converts devoted themselves to the Apostles’ teaching, to the breaking of bread, and to the prayers.

I bring all this up, because I worry sometimes that we might have a misguided understanding of the action of the Holy Spirit. We might think of the Spirit as the provider of what increasingly folks these days refer to as “vibes.” We might think of him as a force rather than as a person and as merely an affective stirring of one’s soul rather than as the one who prepares us for and then provides us with wisdom and knowledge leading to a saving faith. But the church has always held and scripture has always supported the latter proposition rather than the former. It’s worth noting that while the New Testament seems to talk about two different sorts of activities we might call “speaking in tongues”–both the clear communication of the Gospel we see in Acts and a more ecstatic sort of experience called “glossolalia” practiced in some of Paul’s churches–the former is the first and I’d argue normative thing, and the latter is carefully regulated by the Apostle, lest the “vibes” get in the way of edification and sound doctrine. We’ll leave discussion of whether this latter experience still happens in some times and places today for another time–that is a complicated question, I don’t know precisely what I think about it myself, and it’s probably not as relevant to most of you as the general point, which is that the “m.o.” of the Spirit, while he absolutely comforts and encourages us, is typically less extreme and ecstatic and more in the realm of the gentle confirmation of the deposit of faith into which we’ve been brought.

I believe all this is really important, though, because sometimes we might be tempted to put the cart of “religious experience” before the horse of simple faithfulness and the acquisition of foundational Christian knowledge. There is a person very dear to me whom I often think about with some concern along these lines.(She is not a member of this parish, but I’ll still avoid any identifying details, because who knows who might be watching the livestream!) I hasten to add that she is a faithful, practicing Christian; I’m not worried about her immortal soul, just her continued growth as a believer. She’s very aesthetically inclined, and while I worry sometimes that she might have made art and idol, she reads a great deal of material that are good in themselves–particularly, poetry and prose pertaining to the more mystical tradition within Christianity. I don’t consider myself a mystic of any description, though I do value the contributions of that stream of Christian practice. There is one important caveat, however, a caveat I’ve shared with this person, though I’m not sure I did so in a way the Holy Spirit might have made as clear as he did Peter’s Pentecost sermon. That caveat is as follows– The mystics have often shared experiences and ideas which might challenge our ordinary understanding of Christianity, sometimes even creeping up to the edge of heterodoxy. They have earned the right to do so, because they’ve spent decades in intense ascetical practice within monastic communities (even those who live as solitaries do so after years in community and return to those communities for prayer and Mass). Those of us who have not done so (and I am among that number) must be extremely careful about how we integrate those insights into our own spiritual lives. When in doubt, it’s safer to just say one’s prayers and read one’s bible and maybe supplement that with a good middle-of-the-road devotional or work of theology.

There is nothing in the world wrong with being an ordinary faithful, prayerful Christian, because that seems to be what the Holy Spirit effected on the first Pentecost. Yes, no doubt there was the miracle mediated by Peter and the eleven. But perhaps the greater miracle was the three thousand baptized that day, and who knows how many hundreds of thousands whose lives they touched afterward, in their simple faithfulness in devoting themselves to the Apostles’ teaching, to the breaking of bread, and to the prayers.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.