Sermons

+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.

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

The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself.

Would that that were so with anything I try to grow!

I must admit, I’m no expert in the ways of horticulture, but it’s that time of year where everything seems just to miraculously pop up. Driving around the fields of rural Ohio, I find myself more and more out of my depth with regard to the agricultural imagery in scripture. “Weren’t these parables meant to speak to our own experiences in ways with which we could relate?,” I thought. Well, I have a hard time relating.

We are meant to relate to these stories, and Jesus and his apostles used all sorts of metaphors to appeal to different sorts of audiences. For urban audiences Jesus and the apostles used urban imagery for the Kingdom of God- “the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem” of which the writer of Hebrews speaks and which serves as the dominant metaphor in Revelation as well as in Luke’s Gospel.

On the other hand we findeven more agricultural imagery for the Kingdom of God in the scriptures. This is especially so in Mark. The kingdom of God is like a mustard plant or a fig tree or a vineyard. Anyway, we see both types of imagery, both metaphors, throughout the New Testament, and it was probably because, just as the Church does (or ought to do) today, wherever Jesus or his disciples happened to be they were attempting to make their point in contextually appropriate ways. A farmer in some far-flung corner of first century Palestine probably wouldn’t have any way to conceptualize golden streets and the like, or at least it wouldn’t have meant as much to him as some other metaphor. A merchant in Jerusalem or Rome, or a twenty-first century priest who knows next to nothing about farming, on the other hand, might be lost if he were confronted with metaphors dependent on knowing the particularities of planting and reaping crops.

All that said, I don’t know if a modern farmer would relate to the metaphor or not, whether this experience of apparently automatic growth rings true or if the he must baby his crops along during the growing season. I do know, however, that a great deal is out of his hands in that process, dependent on rain and temperature and other factors he must simply accept. Thanks to modern science, I suspect farmers today probably basically know more about how the crop gets from a little seedling to a plant large enough to harvest than did a first-century farmer, but I wonder if that makes it any less amazing when it happens. Despite knowing the physical processes by which this growth takes place, the phenomenon itself can be breathtaking and even mysterious. The farmer planted the field and it just seemed to grow. Day after day, the crop kept getting bigger and he didn’t know how it happened, or even if he did, it was still pretty amazing.

So it is with the Kingdom of God. There’s little we can do to make it happen. In fact, the best thing to do, in some sense, is to get out of the way and let it happen. Like the seed which the farmer spread the Kingdom of God undergoes a mysterious growth. “The earth produces of itself” Jesus said. The Kingdom of God comes about of its own volition, not ours.

This may seem simple enough, but in fact there was a group in the Church during its early years which held precisely the opposite view. These people were called Pelagians, because their leader was the fourth century British monk Pelagius. The Pelagians believed that humankind was so free that it was ultimately capable of saving itself. The Kingdom of God, for Pelagians, was something which the Church was meant to build.

Lest we think we are a lot smarter than those benighted heretics of the fourth century, this very same idea has been extremely popular in modern times. I know this is one of my hobby horses, so I’ll spare you yet another harangue about the mistakes of nineteenth century liberal protestantism. The point is that the same mistake is made by many contemporary believers, and even theologians, who place more emphasis on what we do than what God does, and this is dangerous territory.

This does not, however, mean that we’re off the hook entirely. While on the one hand the seed sprouted and grew he knew not how and the earth produced of itself, it is important to note that the farmer spread the seed to begin with. While we cannot take responsibility for building the Kingdom of God, while it is sheer hubris to take credit for that which only God can do, we nonetheless have a role to play. The fact that God alone brings about our salvation, that He alone is the efficient cause of the Kingdom, does not get us off the hook and permit sloth or quietism.

Hear what St. Paul says in his first letter to the Corinthians:

I planted, Apol’los watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are equal, and each shall receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, God’s building.

Paul does not degrade his own efforts or those of his fellow apostle and assumed rival Apollos. Rather, he puts those efforts into the proper context. He does not say that human efforts at building up the Church are in vain, but that those efforts are used by God to His ends. There is a strong sense of cooperation in Paul’s account of human effort: “We are God’s fellow workers”, he says.

It seems that this is the case because even though sin disables us, even though it means we cannot do anything without God, we were in some sense made to cooperate with God. The creation story in Genesis tells us that we was made in the image of God. One way of understanding this is that we were made with the same creative capacity as God. God is the Creator, and we, His creation, are also given the ability to be creative. We may work alongside God in His continual, creative effort to make all things new in Christ Jesus. Whether any given one of us is more suited to planting or watering, to serve God through teaching or leading or evangelizing or any of the other gifts which the HolyoHoly Spirit might give us, our precise role in God’s plan is a matter for discernment. What is sure, though, is that we are simultaneously called to cooperate in some way with God and to recognize that God alone gives the growth.

And whether any of us is terribly good at planting or watering or whatever, we can take comfort in the fact that God’s Providence will give the growth in miraculous ways. Like the farmer who just spread seeds and waited or the mustard seed which became a great plant, what God accomplishes will amaze us when on the last day we behold it. For now, let us be content to do a little, put one seed into the ground or dig one hole for the Kingdom, knowing that nothing good that we do, though it be dwarfed by what God Himself does, will be lost for eternity, but will remain in the life of the world to come. For these good works are not really ours, but they are the effect of God working in us infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.

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