Sermons

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

The nature of marriage (on which this week’s Old Testament lesson and Gospel focus) serves as an important model for all Christians, whether married or single. In fact, the shape which the scripture says God intends for marriage is not only a model, but it is a sign and symbol of God’s grace. That is to say that the grace of marriage is a visible, tangible expression of God’s grace for all people.

We learn from the Old Testament reading that the bond of marriage actually goes beyond a relationship of mutual responsibility and interdependence. These may be the fruits of a good marriage, but the essential bond between people committed to a lifelong relationship is something even more profound. “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.” This language indicates something even more profound than mutual support and love. It suggests a total recasting of identity. Marriage is not something two people share as if it were a possession; it is a sacrament possessed by God himself which profoundly transforms those who enter into it, such that on some level they become a new creation, a different person, “one flesh”.

Then we learn in the Gospel that on some level, marriage is indissoluble. Here it gets very touchy. I’ve mentioned before that the lectionary gives us texts we might not choose to think about or preach on, and Jesus’ discussion of divorce, considering the reality of marriage in our society and even among our number, is perhaps more frightening for one to preach about than any other issue. But to ignore the Gospel because of its difficult would show a tremendous amount of cowardice, and it wouldn’t be fair to any of you to just leave it hanging there because of my own trepidation. So, here goes…

“They are no longer two, but one flesh,” Jesus says “what God hath put together, let no man put asunder.” Underneath this is the implication that a human attempt to break apart a divine institution is doomed to failure.

Certainly this is a point on which we might find some conflict between Jesus’ own expectations and our experience in the world of sinful people and dreadful realities. There are certainly situations in which one party seems clearly to be blameless in divorcing his or her spouse, and for which a faithful analysis of the teaching of scripture says as much, such as certain situations when there is infidelity or abuse or abandonment.

But in many cases, because of original sin, it seems that we are forced to choose between two less-than-ideal choices: remain in a marriage which is unhealthy and shows no hope of attaining health, potentially bringing harm to the couple and their children, or else dissolve something that God sacramentally established. It’s a catch-22. That’s what original sin does; it forces us to live in a world of moral difficulty. Jesus said “be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect,” but the reality is that we’ll not get to that point in this life.

So the response to this terrible reality must be one of humility. Just as in so many other difficult choices wrought with moral ambiguity, we must approach God, offer the seemingly impossible situation up to Him, choose and act, and then ask forgiveness in case we’ve chosen and acted wrongly. And then we move on, not flagellating ourselves, but confident that if forgiveness were needed it was granted.

In all events, we learn from today’s lessons that marriage is, at its core, an indissoluble transformation of identity. This is why (and here is the Good News for everyone, whatever his or her marital status) the relationship between Christ and the Church finds marriage as one of its chief metaphors. Christ’s marriage to the Church is indissoluble because of the eternal nature of Christ’s one sacrifice on the Cross, and countless men and women have been transformed such that they have become the very body of Christ. Just as the husband and wife become one flesh, so have Christ and his Church.

And it is not only the church which is transformed in her marriage to Christ, but each of her individual members. By virtue of each Christian’s baptism, he or she is given an eternal, indissoluble link with the Savior, a bond which transforms each of us into something we were not before. As St. Paul wrote in his second epistle to the Corinthians, “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.” Surely the soul’s bond with Christ is something like marriage, for the Old Testament prophets spoke of idolatry as either adultery or prostitution, and that beautiful biblical book of poems attributed to Solomon, the Song of Songs, depicts the life of faith as a love affair with God.

This is why the mystics spoke so much about spiritual marriage. St. Teresa of Avila said that Christ marries our souls, and St. Bernard of Clairvaux, referred to the human soul as “the Bride of the Word”. As strange as it sounds this is a truth in which we can take great comfort. Our souls have a spouse whose very nature is defined by fidelity and unconditional love. We have a partner who cannot but remain faithful despite the devices of our wandering hearts, who cannot but love us in spite of how unlovely we may sometimes think ourselves to be.

This is a great comfort, but it is also a tremendous responsibility. Our relationship with Christ is a primary relationship, just like a relationship to a spouse. In our Baptisms we, or those presenting us when we were infants, made promises just as profound as wedding vows, and in our Confirmations we have reaffirmed those vows, making a mature promise to live by them. We have promised not only an abiding belief in the truths of the Creed, but in the actions which flow from those truths: continuing in prayer and fellowship, perseverance in resisting evil, proclaiming the Gospel in word and example, and serving others in the name of Christ.

After church, I would encourage you to go back and look at your prayerbooks at the order for Holy Baptism, starting at page 299, and at the order for Confirmation on page 413. Find there your vows. They present a tall order, as it were, and all of us have at some point or another fallen short. But thanks be to God that every time we stumble, the Lord remains faithful, providing forgiveness to the soul he has taken has his spouse, and giving each of us opportunity to hold up our end of the relationship.

+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.

Back when I was in college I became a big fan (one might even say, an acolyte) of a theological movement known as “Radical Orthodoxy”–an approach pioneered mostly by English theologians beginning in the 1990s. These theologians set out to answer the challenges of modernity by returning to pre-Enlightenment epistemology and metaphysics rather than embracing either modernist assumptions about the nature of truth or post-modern nihilism. These theologians claimed that this approach was both a more radical and a more intellectually rigorous response to contemporary problems than the alternatives, and while I’ve moderated in the last two decades I think they’re still mostly right about that.

I’ll spare you a deep dive into the worldview of Radical Orthodoxy. I’m happy in some other context to go on ad nauseam about it if you want. I bring it up because one of its most important proponents, John Milbank, made a statement in a radio interview that I heard back in those days and that has stuck with me and which I think had a pretty large effect on how I approach the teaching aspect of my vocation as a priest. Dr. Milbank–whose wife is a priest but who is himself a layman–recounted attending a meeting in preparation for an educational offering in the diocese in which he resided which was to be on the topic of angels and demons. (This would have been around the time the Dan Brown novel of the same name came out, so I guess it was probably to capitalize on that interest.) It became apparent that none of the clergy around the table were prepared to present or serve on a panel for this offering, however, as none of them really spent any time thinking about angels and demons. Milbank in the interview, perhaps uncharitably, assumed that none of them really believed in such spiritual beings. Maybe that was unfair of him, because there are plenty of folks who do believe in their existence and just fail to see the relevance or else don’t want to come across as spooky. In any event, his response was that he didn’t believe anybody should be ordained if he or she doesn’t have a robust view of the angelic and the demonic, and I don’t disagree. The larger point, I think, and why this statement has stuck with me, is that whether it be a lack of faith or just the embarrassment of potentially being seen as superstitious, we’ve been seriously derelict in our duties as preachers and teachers if all you hear from the pulpit is a sort of moralism which might appeal to one with a materialist worldview as much as to one with a Christian worldview.

So, today we celebrate the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, and I think it’s important to say that scripture makes plain the fact that there are spiritual entities which we commonly call angels and demons–beings without bodies but with reason and agency. This should not be that difficult for a Christian (or really any Theist) to get on board with, because we surely believe in one such being–namely God himself.

Perhaps a legitimate concern which both Christians and Jews have always had is in not understanding such beings as gods themselves, as we might understand polytheistic religions as doing and which sometimes even the language of the Old Testament (which in some translations will say things like “the Lord is great in the council of the gods”) will make obscure. This concern, however, is easily allayed when we recognize that there is only one perfect in being and love–God himself–that these other beings are creatures (that is, they are created) just like us, and that they are just as capable as we are of choosing to act for or against God’s perfect plan–hence we have the Holy Angels (the goodies, who remained faithful to God) and those who rebelled against him (the baddies whom we sometimes call demons).

So, what relevance does this have for us? I think the lessons appointed for the day, as evocative as they are don’t necessarily make it as clear as I’d like, but such is the reality when we only get three readings and we only really delve into this once a year (and, for that matter, since this is not a movable feast, only one out of every seven years on a Sunday)! We might have heard those readings and thought, Jacob sees some angels and Nathanael is told he will see some and St. Michael is waging a war in which we do not at first appear to be active combatants, but this is all happening on some higher plane than the one on which I exist.

Well, yes and no! Elsewhere in scripture, the angels are seen ministering to human beings in various ways. Most notably they serve as God’s messenger’s. This is the literal meaning of the Greek ανγελος and the Hebrew מאלאד. So, it’s the Archangel Gabriel who announces the Incarnation the the Blessed Virgin Mary and it is a pair of angels who announce the Resurrection to Mary Magdalene. They do other things as well to support humanity, though. Angels protect Lot and his family from a violent gang in Sodom. The Archangel Michael battles the forces of evil on God’s behalf and ours. Those of you who were really on the ball and did your “homework” from our last adult Sunday School class and read the book of Tobit will know that the Archangel Raphael plays a huge role in guiding Tobias on his adventure. The activities of the Holy Angels are manifold.

The one thing that all their activities have in common, though, is that they are engaged in serving humanity in our attempts to grow closer to God. It is significant that of all the angels in scripture only three (or maybe four) of them have names. I already mentioned the Archangels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. If Second Esdras should be in the Bible (which the Ethiopan Orthodox believe, but the rest of us are a bit ambivalent about that) we can add to their number the Archangel Uriel. But aside from them, we don’t know their names. This may get back to that historic ambivalence which Christians and Jews share about acknowledging the spiritual realm but being careful to avoid treating its inhabitants as gods to be worshiped.

While we don’t know their names, we know a great deal from scripture about the hierarchy in which they function–from top to bottom: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels, Angels. There will not be a pop quiz, I promise. Fun fact, the very word hierarchy was coined by the church father, Dionysius the Areopagite specifically to talk about the Holy Angels. The important thing here is that I might have misspoke right before I gave you that ranked order list of types of angels. I said top to bottom, but perhaps I should have said bottom to top, because what defines this hierarchy is a greater degree of service to those in the putatively “lower” levels. The seraphim serve with greater power and zeal the cherubim, for example, and their place at “the top” is defined by this greater responsibility. The pantheons of the pagans, and indeed the secular authorities modeled after them go the other way. The chief god–whether it be Zeus or El and Asherah or Brahman or whomever–lords it over the other gods, who are subject to their capricious whims. Likewise, the kings and emperors and maharajahs of such societies were merely fulfilling their expected role when behaving in like manner. While we’ve historically done a bad job of it, the secular rulers of Christendom whether in monarchies or republics, and the religious leaders of the same (bishops and archbishops and the rest) have been judged by history on how well they have emulated the heavenly hierarchy, by ministering like the angels in service of all. The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them, but I tell you, you must be a servant of all. I pray that what little bit of authority I have has been expressed in this manner, I am grateful to have now a bishop who clearly sees her role in this light and lives that out (confirmed just this week by the fact that I know her to be personally praying, at my request, for the community of Findlay and for those who may be in danger of being made to feel that they are less than welcome in it, let the listener understand). Those of you who have been placed in positions of leadership–at work, in the community, in the church, wherever–will have discovered that treating that responsibility primarily as a call to greater and humbler service will have found your roles in those places more effective and gratifying and (most importantly) life giving than the alternative. I know many of you know that well. In doing this you are in a real sense on the side of the angels.

So that’s maybe too much about what we do and not enough about what the angels do for us (too much Law, not enough Gospel, as I like to say) so what of the support we get from them? I already said that the angels serve in myriad ways to draw us closer to God, but I think there is one important mode of their activity which applies to each and every one of us, and this is an insight recognized early in the life of the Church. If you’re ever looking for some good spiritual reading to supplement your reading of scripture (which I, at least, think should be primary), I would commend to you the Conferences of the Church Father St. John Cassian. Cassian was a monk in the late fourth and early fifth centuries and the Conferences are essentially a collection of interviews with monks living in the Egyptian desert. Over and over again these monks had run-ins with both the angelic and the demonic, and there was one thing that seemed to run through all their experiences. The demons always through various means tried to distract them from prayer and the angels always encouraged and supported them in prayer. Sometimes it is the desire for some great sin which the enemy uses to distract, but more often it is the quotidian–concerns about ordinary things, thoughts which distract from God, minor squabbles with ones brothers and sisters. If Cassian were writing today, it might be TikTok and Twitter which the enemy was particularly known for using as his tools to distract us from the spiritual disciplines (which is not to say those things are inherently evil, though sometimes I wonder, but that overindulgence in them like anything can be spiritually deleterious). My favorite, which is to say my least favorite because of being most prone to him, is Acedia–the noonday demon, whom St. Evagrius Ponticus named the most troublesome demon of all. His tools are boredom, listlesness, and apathy. St. John Cassian in the Conferences wrote this of Acedia:

He looks away anxiously this way and that, and sighs that none of the brethren come to see him, and often goes in and out of his cell, and frequently gazes at the sun, as if it was too slow in setting, and so a kind of unreasonable confusion of mind takes possession of him like some foul darkness.

You might have experienced the same thing I did as a child, particularly during school breaks. You’ve already read as much as you think you can for the day. There’s nothing on television (we had four stations and no such thing as YouTube in those days, by the way) and you’re just kind of wandering around the house, moaning about being bored, and your mother says “well do something useful, or at least go outside”, and maybe you go outside but you just listlessly wander around and stare at the sun like one of those old monks, waiting for the sun to set so you can go in and eat dinner (or at least until 4 p.m. when they rerun an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation… this might have just become a little too confessional!)

I can’t say I’ve entirely grown out of that, which is why for my sanctification I deleted those two previously mentioned apps (TikTok and Twitter) from my phone, as they can be a great deal less wholesome than wandering around waiting for the sun to set. I think the best response, though, is to take a hint from John Cassian and Evagrius Ponticus and, for that matter from the Psalmist who I think is getting at the same thing in Psalm 35 when he writes “let the angel of the Lord drive them away.” Maybe the best response is to address one’s guardian angel. The existence of personal guardian angels isn’t enjoined on us by scripture, but it is in concert with scripture and it is commended as a wholesome belief by folks like St. Jerome and St. Thomas Aquinas, so that’s good enough for me. Anyway, maybe when I’d be better served by saying my prayers or by reading the Bible or something else spiritually edifying or even “doing something useful”, like my mother said, particularly if it is in service to another, I can say something like this, and maybe you can consider something like it as well. These are my own words, yours can be simpler or more elaborate, doesn’t matter, but I think the sentiment may be about right for me, at least:

My guardian angel, help me to pray. Pray with me to God the Father. Let us together give praise to Jesus Christ, true God and true man. Let us together be surrounded by the inspiring light of the Holy Ghost. Join me in prayer and in the study of sacred scripture. We are promised that when the faithful gather around the altar, we are transported to heaven; we join the heavenly host in singing “holy, holy, holy” not in a manner of speaking but truly, body and soul, and I believe that you are part of that angelic choir singing throughout the ages. So come to me now, as well. Help me to pray. Lead me to the throne of God, at whose right hand sits my Lord who saved me, and let us ask him together to preserve me unto life everlasting. Amen.

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

I don’t think it speaks particularly well of human nature or our current discourse, that we seem to take such glee in seeing arrogant people hoisted with petards of their own hubris. Schadenfreude is not, as the youngsters say, a “good look.” I am not immune. I think this fault in our nature is particularly acute in our current political moment; one need only turn on cable news to get a little dopamine hit when the talking heads highlight some dumb thing some politician we don’t like did or said. Schopenhauer thought this was the worst trait in human nature, “an infallible sign,” he said, “of a thoroughly bad heart and profound moral worthlessness.” If you’re not a fan of Nineteenth Century German philosophers, I’m not either for what it’s worth, but you should be a fan of Scripture, which says essentially the same thing in Proverbs 24:17 and 18

Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth, lest the Lord see it, and it displeases him, and he turn away his wrath from him.

I say all this as a way to caution us as we consider Jesus’ rebuke of the disciples for their argument about who was greatest.

When we read Scripture, I think it is important to take note of whom we are identifying with. This is one of those questions that, at least in my day, ordinands were often asked by bishops and Commissions on Ministry and the like. “With whom do you particularly identify in the bible?” I suppose one is asked this question to weed out those whose God complex might be revealed by answering “Jesus, of course.” It’s worth asking ourselves, too. With whom did you identify in the Gospel lesson we just heard: Jesus, the petulant disciples, or the child whose simple faith is sufficient to inherit the Kingdom?

If our immediate response is “boy, I really loved how Jesus took those disciples down a peg!”, as it usually is for me, we’ve got to be really careful. I’ve got to be really careful, because probably most of the time I’m more like the haughty disciples than I’d like to admit. Most of the time, probably, I’m the one who needs to be taken down a peg or two.

We might not recognize the full force of this “take down” in today’s Gospel because of an important cultural difference between contemporary culture and that of the First Century. If you thought what I said in my sermon a couple weeks ago about dogs in ancient and contemporary non-Western cultures was shocking, hold on to your seats, because children didn’t fare much better in those days.

We tend, these days, to both romanticize and privilege childhood. We wish we could see the world through the curious eyes of children, and we appreciate that they need support to grow, and parents (I’ve been told) can spend a great deal of time, energy, and money curating the early years of their progeny. This is neither altogether good nor altogether bad, of course, but it is certainly very different from how a bunch of first century Palestinian Jewish dudes would have seen it.

To them, and to most people until relatively recently, children would have been seen as little adults who weren’t terribly good at being efficient members of the household; they might well die, so one shouldn’t get to attached, but eventually the kid might grow into a good farmer or fisherman or whatever. I’m not making a normative claim here; that’s just how it was. If I were to make a normative claim, I might suggest that there is a happy medium somewhere between the putatively benign neglect of the ancient world and the helicopter parenting of today, but not having children it is very easy to get dangerously out of my own lane here.

The point is that when Jesus pulls the child into the scene, his audience, the disciples, would not have been been put in mind of some idealized view of innocence and simplicity. Instead, they would have seen a figure whose place is society was considered rather marginal and who, at best, had merely the potential of being considered useful or important. And even that’s a long shot. It’s unfortunate that the image I decided to put on the bulletin cover this week depicts cherubic children gathering around Jesus. It might be more accurate to imagine the child in today’s Gospel as more of a street urchin.

What Jesus, I think, is saying is that this kid has so little social status that it wouldn’t occur to him to be arrogant or presumptuous. That’s what a citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven is like. A child recognizes his or her own dependence, the fact he or she cannot make it on his own, and that is what gives such a one a leg up on the haughty disciples.

You’ve all heard me say that it’s not our job to build the Kingdom of God; that presuming we can is like the hubris of the disciples. Even so, as a people set part, whose primary citizenship is in heaven, we are called to try to live a little bit like we’re already there, not by believing the world depends on us, but recognizing that we depend fully on God’s grace to get by. I think Jesus is telling us today that this means trying to live without hubris and the will to power and everything that makes us feel like we might somehow be greater or more important in the grand scheme of things than the least of our brothers or sisters. St. Gregory of Nyssa put it this way:

Let vanity be unknown among you. Let simplicity and harmony and a guileless attitude weld the community together. Let each remind himself that he is not only subordinate to the brother at his side, but to all. If he knows this, he will truly be a disciple of Christ.

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