Sermons

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

Trigger warning: I mention the existence of partisan politics in my sermon this morning. However, you will not be able to analyze the following text in such a way as to figure out where I am situated vis-á-vis American political parties. If you read between the lines, you may be able to figure out how I feel about another country’s politics, but it will get you no closer to being able to translate that into our own political system, so try not to speculate, because I really think it’s neither here nor there.

I think it is manifestly unwise to engage in what might be perceived as party politics in the pulpit. Note that I use the term “party politics”, rather than simply “politics”, because it is almost impossible to always avoid saying anything which might suggest some government policies might be more in keeping with the Gospel than others. Even then, though, I try to be circumspect, because I’ve heard enough sermons that technically don’t say something like “the Democrats are right” or “the Republicans are right”, but one need but scratch the surface to see that this is really the preacher’s point. When Paul said that he strove to be all things to all people he was speaking primarily with regard to Jews and Gentiles in the early church, but I think he set a good standard for today’s church, which should proclaim the Gospel in ways that all can hear, regardless of voting preference and party affiliation.

I was thinking about all this for a couple of reasons. For one, Independence Day, which we just observed, always reminds me that my Christian Responsibility and my civic duty are not coterminous, but the former certainly informs the latter, since (at least for me) my Christian commitment must inform every aspect of my life. Thank God that we do not have an established church and religious tests in this country. (I know that’s strange coming from an Anglican, since historically our church, not so much in America, but certainly in England, has been among the most brazen Church-State “integralists” in this regard!) However, one cannot and should not have two competing worldviews in one’s head to deploy in different spheres of life, as if one could be a Christian on a Sunday morning and a secular humanist on election day. I think religious tolerance and a hesitancy to impose uniquely Christian expectations can themselves be Christian values.

I was also thinking about this because–perhaps incongruously but I hope not unpatriotically–I stayed up later than I usually do on Independence Day night following the results of the UK parliamentary elections. For twenty years and more, since I lived in Britain, I’ve particularly followed the ups-and-downs of the Liberal Democratic party, whose very name may be confusing to Americans, since (though this is an oversimplification) they may be seen as the centrist party ideologically between the Tories and Labour. The Lib-Dems had a big night, going from 11 to 71 seats; it doesn’t appear (at least from the publications I read) as if our country’s mainstream press has picked up on this rather big story and its implications for British politics going forward.

Anyway it reminded me of a period during which this party was in a crisis, having faced electoral implosion in 2015, after a noble if politically misjudged decision to join the Conservatives in forming a coalition government. They named a new party leader, Tim Farron, who only lasted two years in that post, and his decision to resign was, to me at least, devastatingly sad. He explained that he could not see how he could remain both a political party leader and a committed, faithful Christian. How heartbreaking, especially considering that this was in a country which, unlike our own, is constitutionally Christian with an established church. We should not, I repeat, have religious tests to hold office in this country, but that is not to say that we cannot appreciate or desire faithful men and women who bring core Christian values–mercy and justice and hope and love–to bear on how they lead and govern.

I bring all this up, because both our Old Testament and our Gospel this morning point to the difficulties and dangers inherent in bringing God’s Word to bear on the body politic. Ezekiel is warned that his own people are a rebellious house, that the leadership which remained in Israel after the rise of the Babylonians may not accept his prophetic word, and that national disaster could follow, which indeed it did. Likewise, Jesus said that a prophet is not without honor accept among his own people, no doubt because that prophet has a word which challenges his people–how they live and move and have their being in a social and, dare I say, sometimes political sense.

Do not get me wrong. I am not saying that all politicians or preachers can or even should be prophets. When a preacher claims as much for himself or herself, it strikes me more often than not that they are engaging in party politics in a narrow sense rather than in encouraging and enabling those values which are central to the Kingdom of God. I’ve heard preachers do just this from both the right and the left in sometimes subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle ways. I have two basic rules of thumb in this regard. 1) If someone claims to be undertaking the prophetic vocation, he or she is probably not. 2) More controversially, prophets don’t have pensions, so if one has dedicated one’s whole ministry to such action, it may be wise to do so as something other than a full-time parish priest. That’s just my opinion, and there are notable exceptions–Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Oscar Romero come to mind–but note well, they lost more than their pensions as a result.

We are not all called to the prophetic task in the proper sense, I think (though some would disagree), because that vocation in its fullest expression is one which I believe God gives the “prophet proper” in a way which he or she cannot deny and cannot mistake for something else–whether than something else be a vague feeling or a political bias. Being a prophet is not, as the youngsters these days say, a “vibe.” I don’t doubt that God can still appoint men and women to this task, but as I already suggested, this often ends in literal martyrdom, not just losing an election or getting some parishioners mad at you for “preaching politics from the pulpit.”

However, we can and should all bring our Christian values to bear on all aspects of our lives–how we live and support each other in our families, how we do our jobs, what we choose to do with our leisure time, how we use the wealth we have beyond that which we need to live in modest comfort and security, and (yes) even how we interact with our communities and country with regard to public policy. We should interrogate where our values come from–do they come from the Gospel or from somewhere else. And, here is perhaps the most political thing I will say, though I don’t think it’s controversial and you may be diasppointed if you wanted me to get controversial, so sorry– There is not a single political party’s platform or manifesto, in this country or any other, that is in 100% agreement with the values of the Gospel.

There is a song I love, written by Woody Guthrie, but which he never set to music or recorded. I first heard it in a recording from British singer Billy Bragg accompanied by the American rock band Wilco. The first verse goes like this:

Let’s have Christ for President
Let us have him for our King
Cast your vote for the Carpenter
That they call the Nazarene

Would that this were an option, but I regret to inform you, that as strongly as you might feel about any candidate or party, Jesus himself is not on any ballot this election cycle. You picks your person and you takes your chances. The important thing is that we do so in a spirit of prayerful discernment and of charity to your neighbor, by whom I mean, among others, the person in this church who will have chosen differently from you, because I guarantee that person exists. And thank God that we can come together in this place, if nowhere else in our polarized society, to worship the only man who can govern our lives and hearts and the entire universe, whose principalities and powers are now in some sense under his governance and which will on the last day be conformed entire and whole and perfect under the reign of the King of Peace.

+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’m sure I’ve said this a dozen-or-more times from this pulpit, but I’ll keep repeating it, because it’s one of those hobby-horses I have: we live in a death-denying culture. We can shield ourselves from the reality of death to a certain degree, and we can even convince ourselves that we can avoid it. I wonder if all the exercise equipment and quasi-medical products we can see advertised and all of the elective plastic surgery so many of us undergo prey on our inability to accept the fact that, in the absolute best case scenario, we will all grow old and die.

Over the last few days I’ve been struck by the contrast between how those mature in the faith deal with death and how the broader culture does. Many of you know that I buried two of our beloved sisters in Christ this last week–Beverly McCoy and Leah Richardson. I was impressed with both of them and with their families, not just as the funerals were planned and undertaken, but the faith, hope, and spiritual maturity all involved had over the last several months in my regular visits with them. Here were two women and two whole groups of family and friends who seemed to “get it”, for which I remain grateful.

In stark contrast to this, Annie and I had the opportunity to see the Cincinnati Opera’s production of Verdi’s La Traviata on Friday evening. The opera concludes with a tragic death, tragic not because it was unexpected but because of the character’s inability to move beyond her dissolute moral life, even at the very end. That said, the director of this particular production either completely misunderstood or (more likely) intentionally contradicted the entire point of the opera through various production tricks, attempting to turn the story into a celebration of self-determination, “found family”, and solidarity in moral license. He turned a rather straightforward morality tale into a celebration of post-modern, egocentric, pseudo-spirituality, in order to both engage in death-denial, and in a rather self-contradictory fashion, to scrape up some meaning in death from the perspective of a post-modernity in which God no longer exists. What as shame that beautiful musical performances from both the cast and the orchestra was marred by such an unfortunate deconstruction.

Ultimately, I think this come from a profound discomfort with death, which even Christians are not immune to. Secular reimaginings of opera aside, when it comes to those within or at least nominally friendly to the faith, this comes from a misunderstanding of the nature of death, and the Christian understanding that it is both bane and blessing, depending on how we understand God’s purpose for it.

On the one hand death was initially an aberration. It was not part of God’s original plan for humanity, and that means that we shouldn’t berate ourselves when we find it too much to handle. Listen again to what the writer of Wisdom said: “God did not make death and he does not delight in the death of the living…through the devil’s envy death entered the world.” In this sense, death is an evil, an effect of the fact that we live in a fallen world. As St. Paul says in his letter to the Romans, “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.” God’s will is for life, and not only for life but for life abundant, a life fully lived in His ways. Death came later, and fights against God’s plan to an extent.

And yet death is inescapable because of our condition, because of the reality of evil and of original sin. Death is not illusory; it’s not a trick to test our faith, to see if we really believe in the resurrection. I remember one day in seminary when our systematic theology professor said something which became scandalous to my classmates, I think because many of us weren’t really listening to what he was saying. He said, just this directly, “when you’re dead, you’re dead.” There was scandal because some of my classmates thought that our professor was denying the resurrection. Quite to the contrary, he was trying to help us understand how profound and wonderful the resurrection of the dead really is. There’s not something about us inherently which makes our souls immortal. The Christian view is not that we are essentially disembodied ghosts which after death keep on living just as before. That’s not actually the traditional Christian view, that was Plato’s view and it became popular much, much later in Church history. That view does ultimately deny the reality of death and turns it into an illusion.

Conversely, the traditional Christian view is that death is very real. That the whole of us—body, mind, and spirit—experiences death, and there’s nothing about the way we’ve been created which permits us to avoid that. Far from denying the resurrection, this makes its truth all the more wonderful. When we are dead it is not our own nature but God’s power and grace which brings us to new life. The resurrection is not something we do automatically, it is something which God brings about.

Today’s Gospel reading makes this point. Jairus’ daughter was dead. Not merely dead, but really most sincerely dead. Yet Jesus knew that because of the promise of God, death was like sleep for her. Jairus’ daughter was no less dead, but her death was a period of rest and expectation. It was not the expectation of an automatic transmigration of her soul to some different sphere of being, but that God in Christ would literally bring her to life. And this He did, and this is our own hope for ourselves and our loved ones. While the dead rest in peace, and while we too will enter into that sleep, we have assurance that Christ will bring us back to life fully, not as disembodied ghosts, but as whole, holy, incorruptible people, with minds, spirits, and bodies. When at morning prayer or baptisms or in our own private prayer lives we recite the Apostle’s Creed and proclaim “I believe…in the resurrection of the body” we’re not speaking in metaphors, as I remember I said on the Sunday after Easter. The Church really does teach that there will be a bodily, physical, literal resurrection, and this is so much more comforting than the idea of “pie in the sky when we die, by and bye.” It’s comforting and exciting. It means that the life of the world to come is not contingent on anything we do, but on the grace and creative power of God, or to use the language of Wisdom “the generative forces of the world [which] are wholesome” because God creates and controls them.

And so, knowing that death is real but not the end we can over time come to terms with it. We are called to embrace death in a sense. We are commanded to love our enemies, and death is an enemy we’re called to love, as strange and difficult as that might sound. We are called to love and embrace the reality of death because we do know that it is only through death that we are born to eternal life. For even the evil of this world, death being part of it, can be transformed in such a way that it accords with the ends God intends. All that we need to do is trust God, and keep alive a robust hope in the resurrection.

+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.

We are presented in both our Old Testament lesson in Job and in our Gospel lesson from Mark with that question which has haunted theology, both Christian and Jewish, for millennia–namely “how do we account for evil”? Here I mean both moral evil (our tendency to harm rather than shield the innocent) and natural evil (why even without apparent human agency, the innocent are besieged and killed by diseases and disasters at least presumably governed entirely by natural laws). You may remember me saying when these readings came up in previous years (our lessons, if you didn’t know, are on a cycle that repeat every three years), that this is what we call theodicy, it’s the trickiest question in theology, and the response to it in Job is essentially “you’re not God, so you can’t understand.” This may or may not be satisfying to you, but the older I get the more comfortable I am with the proposition that I don’t need to understand everything. A dear friend of mine, who is a scholar of one of the great Christian writers of the Twentieth Century, Flannery O’Conner, gave me a framed picture of one of O’Connor’s most famous quotes which sits above my desk, and which serves as a constant reminder and encouragment to me: “Evil is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be endured.” O’Connor “got it”, just like Job finally “got it”, and as I hope some day I’ll get closer to “getting it.”

So, this time around I want to focus on a particular question which may not be obvious if you’re not reading the Gospel in the original Greek. Jesus is asleep in the midst of the storm, not as the disciples feared because he didn’t care, but (this is just my wild suspicion) because sometimes getting obviously agitated over the presence of evil, which is ubiquitous, just gives it more air (how appropriate a lesson when evil takes the form of a windstorm!), and a calm and measured approach is likely to be more effective. Anyway, the disciples were in no state to get that message, if it were Jesus’ intention, so they wake him up, he rebukes the storm and it abates. A reader of the Greek will recognize that the verb translated “rebuke” here is epitimao, which is the same word used whenever Jesus casts out demons, and it’s famously the verb we find when Jesus calls Peter “Satan” for trying to tempt him to avoid the crucifixion; in that account, then Jesus quite literally demonizes Peter. Anyway, the point is that this is no ordinary storm. We are meant to understand that it is of supernatural and literally demonic origin.

So what do we do with this? We’re about to get into some spooky stuff here, about which I’m of two minds, as will become clear. On the one hand we need to grapple with the fact that despite our modern aversion to conversations about the angelic and the demonic, perhaps because we don’t want to be accused of superstition, this is a theme in scripture we need to take seriously. On the other hand, I think we need to avoid giving too much air to speculation about these matters, potentially opening ourselves up to things best ignored as if we were Jesus sleeping in the boat. So, I’m going to attempt to tread carefully here.

I worry sometimes that I fail to thread a needle in some matters, because of my natural aversion to what I take to be intellectual extremism and spiritual enthusiasm from both directions. There is a fine line, I think, between care and sobriety in theological reflection on the one hand and “wishy-washiness” on the other. The matter in which I’m most prone to this difficulty is when considering and called to comment on the nature of evil. On the one hand, I’m firmly convinced by scripture, church tradition, and experience that evil is a supernatural force, that it is not simply reducible to psychological and sociological factors. On the other hand, I admit that I find it at least creepy and at worst quite dangerous when some of our coreligionists reduce every difficulty one may experience in life to a demonic force.

Two recent experiences have highlighted this tension for me. First, I was speaking with a colleague whom I consider to be my best priest friend in this diocese. He and I are on opposite ends of the spectrum with regard to the old churchmanship divides that used to (and, thank God, mostly no longer) lead to partisanship within the church–he is firmly within the evangelical/low-church camp and I am firmly within the Anglo-Catholic/high-church camp, but we’re both orthodox and we both love Jesus, so that doesn’t matter to us. Anyway, we were discussing some challenges he’d been having in his parish and he said something like “they say the devil works harder to tear you down the more faithful you’re trying to be, but you know I’m an evangelical, so I would say that.” To this I responded, “I don’t think you have to be an evangelical to recognize that reality, only a Christian, and I’ve experienced that, too.”

On the other hand, many of you know that Annie and I frequent the weekly bible study at the county jail, which sometimes I lead and sometimes somebody else does. There are a couple of the other leaders who seem always to fall back to claims about Satan and spiritual warfare. The most uncomfortable for me, though I kept my peace for fear of not being asked to lead bible studies in the future should if I got into an argument in front of the inmates, was from a local pastor of a rather charismatic congregation. He claimed that he had performed several exorcisms, that the bible had given license to all Christians to do the same without any special education or training, and he implied that all issues a believer might have were at least potentially a result of demonic possession, the facts of the particular case being ascertainable by him after a conversation with him. If I could have responded in the moment, I would have tried to warn him and those listening to him that this approach is very dangerous, opening the way to nothing less than spiritual and emotional abuse. Just because there are supernatural forces which try to frustrate God’s designs does not mean that there aren’t also natural phenomena, including psychiatric conditions, which may be the root cause of the majority of the cases in which he is riding in, half-cocked and hell-bent for leather.

I’m grateful to be part of a tradition within Christianity that can hold these two perfectly cotenable proposition–that there are both explicable natural phenomena and inexplicable supernatural phenomena–together in such a way as to care for the whole person, body and soul, and avoid the equal risks posed by both a cold materialism and wild-eyed superstition. The truth is not always found “in the middle” but I think this is one case where it almost certainly is.

I belabor this point because I think different church bodies and different individual Christians have a tendency to err in one direction or the other–either toward scientism or superstition. The local charismatic pastor and jail bible study leader erred in one direction, but I suspect most of us within the so-called “mainline” of American Protestant Christianity err in the other direction. This, I think, was implicit in my friend’s almost apologetic tone in blaming his evangelical churchmanship for even positing the possible existence of Satan.

We would be convicted of this error, though, if we simply took the Gospel accounts seriously. It is fashionable in some quarters to try to say that all of the accounts of apparently supernatural dangers and bondage in the bible are a product of a benighted age, and if the wisdom of modern science and modern medicine were only available the issues in these stories would have been resolved by therapeutic means (in the case of accounts of possession) or accepted as naturally determined and irreparable (in the case of the purportedly demonic storm at sea).

This assumption raises a question, though, which the proponents of such a view must answer-namely, “Do you claim that Jesus was a charlatan, then, or merely that he was ignorant and superstitious?” Since I cannot believe Jesus to be either of these things, I think I am compelled by reason to say that in addition to synapses and neurotrasmitters and sociological models and meteorological patterns (Galilean or otherwise), none of which do I deny, there are also spiritual forces which seek to frustrate God’s will for us and for the world and which Jesus came to defeat, to free us, and to usher us into a more perfect life now as well as an entirely perfect life in the world to come.

And there is a second question, like unto the first. What shall we make of the fact that Jesus is said to have succeeded in freeing people from their demons, in rebuking the demonic storm, or for that matter in healing the sick without access to modern medicine, of feeding multitudes with a few meager loaves and fish, &c., &c., &c.? What of rising from the dead? Either this was all made up, and twelve dudes from an historically marginal culture and background managed to pull off the greatest con-job in human history and (stupidly) decided to be killed rather than spill the beans, or else it’s true, miracles happen, supernatural evil exists, the tide was turned by a man who also happened to be God, and despite the fact we are still assailed by powers we cannot understand, much less combat by ourselves, the final victory is very much at hand, and God in Christ will save us to enjoy him along with all the saints and all that we love with the love of God for all eternity. I think you know where I stand on that question. And (not to sound anti-intellectual, one of the very few faults I’ve never been accused of!) if it means that some things on earth are not problems to be solved but mysteries to be endured, if it means I don’t have the pithy answer to every question that’s ever occurred to one in moments of doubt and confusion, I’m a-ok with that!

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