Sermons

Today is my last day as a seminarian intern here at Trinity Episcopal Church, and I want to express my deepest gratitude to all of you for having me this summer. I have had the opportunity to shadow Fr. John as he went about each day’s unique ministries and activities. We made hospital visits and brought the Eucharist to the home-bound, we planned all of music for 9:30 worship service all the way through Advent, we’ve been to vestry meetings and diocesan meetings, we have planned funeral liturgies, we pray the office and have Mass on feast days, and Bible studies on Monday evenings. We even give the occasional lesson on operating a smart phone! In all of these things, and in many more, I am very blessed to have had the opportunity to be with you through it all this summer.

In addition to all of those specific ministry experiences, I also got to have coffee and conversation with Fr. John every morning right after morning prayer. (Side note – Fr. John loves it when people are able to join him for morning prayer!) During or morning coffee I had the opportunity simply to talk with Fr. John about so many things, and there was ample time as we always had more than one cup! I had the chance to talk at length with Fr. John about the liturgy, theology, the teachings of the Episcopal Church. Our discussions were always freeflowing, and sometimes veered off into other equally important topics like why I haven’t watched or read The Lord of the Rings, and how it should be assigned reading. In any case, when I sat down to write this final sermon for Trinity Church, I decided to reflect back on one of our conversations over coffee in light of today’s reading from the letter to the Ephesians.

Perhaps you remember few weeks ago when Fr. John mentioned how every preacher has at least one hobby horse. Well we had a conversation where one of my hobby horses and one of his met. We were talking about how the culture of the Episcopal affects the way we see the mission of the church. (this is my hobby horse, and poor Fr. John and to endure hours of me bringing this topic up in various ways!).

We know that we are to serve the world in Christ’s name, but what work are we to be doing in exactly? What is our primary struggle? How do we, as a church, engage the world? On a societal level, there is a spectrum of belief as to how much the Church should be involved with issues of the state. One the one hand is the church’s complete disengagement from public life; the view that mixing religion and politics is bad for everyone. Religions faith is something completely personal, and then separate from that is the rational civic self, and this is the self that votes and has policy views. One the one extreme is a state church, where the church and the state are a single entity, and religious doctrine and secular law are one and the same. Whenever is a case of extremes, the tendency is always to veer too far in one direction or the other. Given our heritage as coming from the Church of England, the Episcopal Church has often seen itself as a quasi “established” Church of the United States. And although the privileged position the Episcopal Church once held in the country has waned over the past several decades, it seems that the cultural memory of it still leads are quite a few Episcopalians to see political activism as the primary “work” of the church. The mission of the church is racial reconciliation! Or the mission of the church is to end gun violence! Or the mission of the church is care for the environment! Our primary struggle is against racism, it’s against violence, or it’s against pollution! Those may all be good Christian causes, but none of this is THE mission of the church.

Luckily for us in this case, we do not need to rely solely on tradition and church teaching here, because it is laid out for us in today passage from the letter to the Ephesians: “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Our primary struggle as Christians are against the spiritual forces of darkness. (This, of course, is one of Fr. John’s hobby horses). As a Church culture, particularly as a Church that has historically been a state church, it is has been our tendency to talk the most, think the most, and pray the most about issues of the state, rather than issues of soul. “Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” There is evil in the world, and it’s something that as a culture we have a hard time grappling with. The devil need not be imagined as a man in a red jump suit with horns and a pitch fork. Evil is the unholy, the absence of God’s presence. God is the creator and life giver, and yet within the world there is a force which draws us toward division, to discord, and to undoing ourselves, either slowly, piece by piece, or all at once in the ultimate act of will to non-being. Part of this is psychology, and part of it is sociology. But science always has its limits. Cosmology tells us about the formation of galaxies and biology, how life evolved on this planet, but they can never explain why there is something rather than nothing. Ultimately God the Father stands behind all that is. Likewise, there is evil, whether personal or abstract, there is something we can call the “devil” that is active both in the world and in our hearts.

All of the secular causes that laid out earlier (anti-racism, environmentalism, an end to gun violence, etc.) are things that I believe the Christian church has an obligation to engage those issues AS THE CHURCH and in the name of Christ. But our primary struggle is against evil as such, just as there are many goods in the world, but God is the primary and first Good above all others. So let us work for good causes in order to care for our neighbor and for the stranger among us, but let us do so only after fervent prayer, seeking first to banish the darkness from our own hearts. For all of the beautiful work that Christians do for people across the country and around the world, we must never mistake the church as being primarily an organization for social services or political activism, even while we do engage in these activities in the name of our faith. The mission of the church is spelled out on pg. 855 in the prayer book:

Q: What is the mission of the Church?
A: The mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.

Promoting justice is part of what it means to restore all people to unity with each other, and there is overlap and cooperation in that work between the church and secular charities. But only the Church can restore people to unity with God in Christ, so let us not fail to remember our duty.

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

I’ve never understood why those free Bibles given out by the Gideons were incomplete. If you’ve ever seen one, you may have noticed it. I suppose printing cost keeps them from handing out whole bibles, the Old Testament taking up more than two-thirds of the text as we’ve received it, though it’s a pity since the New Testament can really only be understood in relation to the Old. The really odd thing to me, though, is that these little free bibles almost invariably (at least as far as I can tell) include not only the New Testament but also Psalms and Proverbs. If we’re supposed to understand the New Covenant why not include at least Exodus and Isaiah? The former recounts the revelation of the Old Covenant (the Law) and the latter is perhaps the greatest prophetic precursor to the New Covenant of Grace through Christ.

I guess I can understand the inclusion of the Psalms. Though many are rather nasty complaints asking God to smite one’s enemies, several of them are beautiful poetic prayers of supplication and thanksgiving and can be of great value as we learn to pray as we ought.

But Proverbs?! Forgive me if it sounds like I’m bordering on irreverence or if it’s an important text to some of you, but Proverbs is a rather a dull little book. Its intended audience doesn’t at first glance seem to be very broad. It’s addressed to a young man of wealth and privilege and far too much of it harps on about the dangers of sleeping around. It might have been profitably distributed to the gents in my freshman class at Colgate, mostly East Coast prep school boys who were for the first time surrounded by girls in a less controlled environment than the co-ed mixer with the ladies from the good old sister school two towns over. For most of us the book might seem a bit less apropos.

But while the specific advice which Proverbs offers might leave at least some of us cold, the book shines when its meta-narrative is made explicit. While most of the book pelts us with one pithy piece of advice after another, it occasionally leaves that tack to define wisdom and contrast it with folly in rather striking, beautiful terms. That’s precisely what we get in this morning’s Old Testament lesson and it gives us an important insight not just into how we ought to behave, but into the nature of God.

Listen again to those words we heard a few minutes ago:

Wisdom has built her house,
she has set up her seven pillars.
She has slaughtered her beasts, she has mixed her wine,
she has also set her table.
She has sent out her maids to call
from the highest places in the town,
“Whoever is simple, let him turn in here!”
To him who is without sense she says,
“Come, eat of my bread
and drink of the wine I have mixed.
Leave simpleness, and live,
and walk in the way of insight.”

Notice that wisdom is not here described as some kind of practical knowledge to be acquired by a lifetime of experience. Wisdom is not described as a brute to be vanquished nor as a race to be won. Wisdom personified is matronly and gracious. She has prepared a meal – a rather elegant one at that! – and sent her handmaids out to invite us into her estate. She is not austere; “leave simpleness” she demands of those who wish to partake of her meal and live.

Unfortunately our lectionary left out the saucy bit, Proverbs’ description of the opposite of wisdom, so here it is and pay attention, because I don’t want to get too explicit in my explication:

[Folly] is noisy;
she is wanton and knows no shame.
She sits at the door of her house,
she takes a seat on the high places of the town,
calling to those who pass by,
who are going straight on their way,
“Whoever is simple, let him turn in here!”
And to him who is without sense she says,
“Stolen water is sweet,
and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.”
But he does not know that the dead are there,
that her guests are in the depths of Sheol.

Did you catch that? Just like Wisdom, Folly is personified. She is a woman, but of a very different sort. What she has to offer is pleasure of a more vulgar variety. It might initially appear more appealing than Wisdom’s banquet. It seems an awful lot more fun. But it’ll cost you. It’ll cost you upfront and (they knew as well in ancient Israel as we do today) it may well cost an awful lot after the fact. Enough said.

This all seems awfully counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? Wisdom is easily acquired and it’s awfully pleasing. You’ve got to go out of your way to be a fool, and it doesn’t take long to experience how unpleasant its fruits can be. If this seems contrary to everything you’ve heard about wisdom and folly, it’s probably because it is. If it doesn’t make much sense, it’s probably because it doesn’t.

If you don’t much like paradoxes… well, sorry folks, that’s Christianity. There are a lot more apparently consistent worldviews out there. Atheism seems remarkably consistent. Too bad it’s false (but, then, I’m biased). Our whole faith is based on apparent inconsistency- “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” as St. Paul put it. Power is shown through condescension, True God becoming a feeble baby born in a filthy shed. Freedom is seen most powerfully in a man bound and brutally murdered by the State. An implement of gruesome pain and terrible shame is our easiest yoke, our lightest burden.

Wisdom, khok-mä, sophia, sapientia, that great illusive virtue, is as easy to take in as air is to breathe, because She is the Word by whom all things were made; because She is Christ Himself. She is as easy to feel as Water from that font. She is as easy to taste as Bread and Wine from that Table. We can try and try and try to gain the Wisdom by which we should order our lives and never find it. We can exhaust our reserves of time and energy and money and esteem and still be foolish and unconsoled. Or we can accept that simple invitation from Matronly Wisdom:

Whoever is simple, let him turn in here!
Come, eat of my bread
and drink of the wine I have mixed.
Leave simpleness, and live,
and walk in the way of insight.

+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.

You might have heard the old cliché, “you should disagree without being disagreeable.” It seems like good advice, but perhaps not as strong as it could be, considering how such an approach has been known to lead people into false friendliness and even duplicity, rather than a frank and charitable conversation about differences of opinion.

It seems to me that Paul has something to say about this in today’s epistle? “Putting away all falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors.” Hatefulness, with a saccharin candy-coating of sweetness is not the Christian response to discord, because it doesn’t take into account that, as Christians, “we are members of one another.” We’re in this together, whether we like each other or not. We’re part of the same family, but not just of the same family, but of the same body, and the only way for a body to function is organically, each member in harmony with the other.

And yet, we don’t do this. We are told by the Apostle only to do and say “what is useful for building up [the body]” yet the histories of Church and society are riddled with stories of discord and political intrigue and schism. Things seem to be getting better from an ecclesiastical standpoint, at least insofar as our own branch of Christendom. We’ve gotten better since the culture wars over human sexuality at setting a tone in which faithful people seemed to be able agree to disagree and stay in fellowship. That said, we still have trouble as a society getting over grudges and loving our neighbor, whether we respond aggressively or passive-aggressively. We all have tremendous trouble following Paul’s very practical advice: “Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil.”

“Do not leave room for the devil.” There is nothing more diabolical, more devilish, than division in Christ’s Church. That is precisely the work that sin does; it tears brothers and sisters apart from each other, and ultimately it attempts to break apart the very body Christ. We can hide the effects of such evil by being disingenuously sweet to our brother or sister, but that only means that the diabolical program of division is the more insidious.

Now, I have to temper all of this scary stuff with a fact which has been a great encouragement to me and I hope to you who care deeply about the life of the Church. While the story on the national and international levels may be one of division between between political ideologies and religions and races and classes, and while this spirit of divisiveness can and often does infect the church as much as the larger society, I have been so impressed by what I’ve experienced in a handful of congregations I’ve been a part of including this parish. The degree of mutual love and regard with which the members of this parish seem to treat each other is remarkable. The work that we are able to accomplish and the healthiness of our church here is a real gift, it’s more rare than you might think, and it’s largely because there are so many mature people here that seem to genuinely love each other. I don’t think this is a naïve assessment, because I’ve also seen plenty of churches with profound dysfunction. Of course, no group of fallible people is without its internal squabbles, and my spectacles aren’t so rose-tinted that I don’t recognize where some of those are, even among us. Even so, I feel truly blessed to be a part of a congregation that has in many ways already learned to “put away falsehood”, to “be angry but not sin”, to “live in love as Christ loved us.” In a world where people can’t seem to conscientiously disagree with each other but retain mutual respect and appreciation of each other, the church has, believe it or not, been doing a better job of modeling Christian unity to the larger culture than it has in past years and that we can be the most powerful witness of reconciliation in the world precisely because of our disagreements.

But if I just said “keep up the good work”, that would not be a very compelling charge with which to end a sermon, and it wouldn’t be entirely honest, because each of us has moments in which we need to work at truly loving our neighbor. Many of us have trouble with anger, and do let the sun set on it. Paul said “Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you,” but O how much more easily is this said than done. C.S. Lewis said that the way to get there, to start truly loving one’s neighbor, is to act as if one does.

It seems to me that the solution is more difficult and requires more reflection, though. I think we need to meditate more carefully and more intentionally on the fact that we have all been baptized into one body, that we are all one family whether we like it or not. Just like a family, our life together as fellow Christians means that we get close enough to see each others’ blemishes; but just like a family we are called to recognize that God has put us all together for a reason. God has thrown us together because God is known in relationship.

In fact, in a sense, God is relationship. God is not a lone person, but three persons living in unity. And even though God has a profound, mystical relationship within the Godhead, God has expanded his love such that we can be in relationship with him too. And even more than that, God has given us gifts like the Sacrament of Marriage so that two people can create a community of love like that between the persons of the Godhead. And even more than that, God has given us the Church, so that all people everywhere may have the opportunity to live in that same love.

Ultimately, the Church is not a tool for self-improvement, but a means by which God’s love can be shared. It is a gift, and like any gift it must be cherished. And in recognizing what a great gift it is, I think we can ultimately come to realize our own responsibility in nurturing the life of the Church by truly, genuinely loving each of our brothers and sisters and then leading lives which express that love. In doing so, Paul tells, we become “imitators of God”. God is love, and a godly life is one lived in love. In doing so, in becoming more grateful, faithful, loving people we may like Christ himself, present our own lives as “a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”

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