Sermons

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

“No longer do I call you servants… but I have called you friends.” Jesus says this to the apostles on the night before he was given over to suffering and death. He had washed their feet and shared supper with them, and finally, in the midst of his last discourse with them, he surprises them yet again with this wonderful affirmation of their relationship. But what did it mean for the disciples, and what does it mean to us?

In all honesty, this used to make me a bit uncomfortable. I’ve got plenty of friends. I don’t need another friend, I thought. I need a master, a Lord.

The problem here, though, was not that Jesus was turning a profound relationship into something frivolous. It was, rather, that I was minimizing the profundity of friendship. True friendship isn’t trivial. Christian friendship is a very weighty thing. It goes beyond “being buddies”. It is, at its heart, a serious commitment like all Christian relationships. Let’s look at a couple of those relationships as a means of understanding how Christian friendship is similar in intent and effect.

In prebaptismal and premarital counseling I always try to make it a point to say that the relationships which are realized in these sacraments are essentially reflections. They are reflections of God’s perfect love for all humanity and of the perfect love held within the Godhead through the mystery of the Holy Trinity. So, a marriage and its concurrent obligations as made explicit in the nuptial vows is a reflection of God’s love for us and of the love which defines God’s internal relationship. To paraphrase St. Augustine, the Father loves the Son, the Son loves the Father, and the Holy Spirit is the love they share. The Sacrament of marriage is, ideally, a mirror off of which the light if God’s love is broadcast to the world, or perhaps a window, into which we can peer and see God’s love.

Likewise, Baptism is not only about the objective regeneration and adoption of the child, whereby he or she is forgiven and made a child of God. It is also (at least in the case of infant Baptism, which is normative) a means by which parents and godparents commit themselves to a relationship with the child which reflects God’s love. A parent’s chief responsibility is to establish a relationship with the child in which God’s perfect love can be seen. It goes beyond the tangible support a parent gives his or her child – meeting basic needs – to include the intangible: spiritual and emotional support, a moral example, a home full of prayer and Christian education (which is, after all, primarily the responsibility of the family, not of the institutional church, which can only do so much to support them in it).

So, how is this like friendship? Well, it’s not if friendship is merely sharing common interests and indulging in leisure together. These are important aspects of a friendship, but they are not the defining qualities of a Christian friendship. Rather, it is openness and love and a willingness to sacrifice one’s own well-being for another. That’s how Jesus defines friendship in this morning’s Gospel anyway:

No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you… This I command you, to love one another… Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

Jesus embodies Christian friendship- he reveals his Father’s will, he deeply loves those whom he calls friends, and he quite literally lays down his life for them.

Our responsibility, then, is to do the same. We do the same for Christ, our friend, and we do the same for our brothers and sisters whom God has given us to be our friends. We open our hearts and our intentions to God, neither do we hide them from our friends. We love God by serving him, and we love our friends by doing the same. We are ready to sacrifice ourselves – our petty desires, our comfort, even our lives if it comes to that – for God and for those whom he has given us to love.

Are our friendships reflections of God’s love? For that matter are our relationships with spouses and children a reflection of God’s love? Are we open in those relationships? Do we behave lovingly? Are we prepared to sacrifice ourselves for those other people? These are questions we must prayerfully and dutifully ask ourselves all the time. And so, I leave you this week not with answers but with questions, which can be rather disappointing, but at least in this case potentially more profitable. May God give you the will to ask them and the grace, strength, and courage to commit yourselves again to those relationships, knowing that the hardest but most important thing we can do is to be mirrors for the light of God’s love.

+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.

Those of you who heard my Maundy Thursday sermon will know that I have a love-hate relationship with The New Yorker; its editorial assumptions about religion frequently irritate me, but like Jack Twist in Brokeback Mountain, I might as well say to the New Yorker “I wish I knew how to quit you.” Nota bene: while most people know that line from the film adaptation, “Brokeback Mountain” was originally an Annie Proulx short story published in … wait for it … the New Yorker!

Anyway, an essay in last week’s edition irked me a bit. The piece was written by the U.C., Davis anthropologist Manvir Singh, whose point seemed to be that those who believe in conspiracy theories and “fake news” by-and-large only believe these things in a “symbolic sense.” Basically, those who die in rocket ships trying to prove that the earth is flat or who raid purportedly pederastic pizza parlors do exist, but are a tiny minority compared to those who claim to believe such things. Where Singh makes a distinction between factual and symbolic beliefs, I’d argue that the more likely explanation is that there is no such distinction (or at least it’s not widespread), and the majority just lack the courage of their convictions–probably a good thing when said convictions are silly at best and malign at worst.

What got me a bit bent out of shape, though, is that he argues that this is how most people hold religious claims. While merely positing this to be the case with regard to beliefs he thinks are logically inconsistent (including the doctrine of the Trinity), he is only able to provide one piece of hard evidence, and that about a rather obscure belief held by a very small group of Christians–namely the Dorze people of southern Ethiopia, who number fewer than 30,000.

Like the majority of Ethiopians, the Dorze are Oriental Orthodox Christians, but they appear to have a belief unique to their small tribe–namely, that leopards are Christian animals and thus do not eat on church designated fasting days. Singh, quoting a report by the French philosopher and cognitive scientist Dan Sperber, then notes that the Dorze do still guard their livestock on fasting days. Singh claims that this is because the claims “leopards are Christians” and “leopards are always dangerous” are believed simultaneously on different levels–the symbolic and the factual. What seems not to have occurred to either Singh or Sperber, is that other species of predatory cats, wild dogs, and poachers are just as if not more common in Southern Ethiopia than are spotted leopards, and perhaps this is the reason they guard their livestock on fasting days. Maybe the best approach here is to believe people when they tell you what they believe until there is very good evidence to the contrary.

Now, I’m not here to try to convince anybody that leopards are Christian animals. I’m more interested in why such a belief might have been propagated, and I have a hunch. In the thirteenth chapter of Jeremiah, the prophet, railing against his people’s wickedness and predicting the punishment of destruction and exile, writes the following:

Can the Ethiopian change his skin

or the leopard his spots?

Then also can you do good

who are accustomed to do evil?

In addition to striking the modern ear as borderline racist, it should strike anybody as rather fatalistic. Much later in the book, the prophet expresses hope of a restored Israel and a new covenant, but for those found wicked before the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem, there seems to be no hope for repentance and salvation here. A leopard cannot change its spots.

But this is precisely the sort of fatalism which Christ overturns, and which would have been the best news that the Ethiopian eunuch in our lesson from Acts (and no doubt those Ethiopian Christians who were among the first, historically, to embrace Christianity as a nation) could have possibly heard. Indeed, a leopard could change its spots, just as a people could embrace the good news of salvation.

The man at the center of this great event, whose name the Bible doesn’t give us, but whom tradition identifies as Simeon Bachos, is, for all his wealth and responsibility, doubly marginal from the point of view of the Old Covenant. He was a foreigner, whom the Law certainly demanded be treated mercifully, but whose race would always make him something other than a Jew by the reckoning of the time. What’s more, being a eunuch he would forever be seen as ineligible for participation in the fullness of Temple worship. Even so, he is drawn (no doubt by the Holy Spirit) to worship in what ways he would have been allowed, within the so-called “court of the Gentiles”, the area set aside for those termed “God fearers”–non-Jews who nonetheless recognized the supremacy of the God of Israel.

I was trying to come up with a good analogy for this. It is equivalent, perhaps, to the experience of a Protestant on pilgrimage to Rome, though even if he or she were denied the Sacrament, that pilgrim would still be permitted into St. Peter’s Basilica. Maybe it would be more like an Orthodox woman who finds Mount Athos to be the highest expression of Christian devotion, and decides to travel to its border only to look across. The fact that a developed European country in the 21^st Century still has an autonomous region the size of some small countries which functions as a theocratic state in which no women are permitted to set foot, would likely offend you or me, as I think it should. But for Simeon Bachos, if “getting close” was the best he could manage, that’s what he’d do.

Now, the Good News which Philip preaches to Simeon in helping him understand the Prophet Isaiah is first and foremost that of Christ’s universal sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins. I don’t want to be understood to say that he’s giving a lecture about identity politics, here. However, the necessary implication of this Good News, which Simeon no doubt grasped, was that the fullness of this Gospel must apply to all, and full participation in the life of Christ’s Church is equally available to all, regardless of the accidents of race or gender or class or background. This ought, I hope to strike us as obvious, but the church has had a spotty record in living this out, to say the least.

If it helps one understand this overarching message, it’s no skin off my teeth if you want to believe that the leopard is a Christian animal who observes the fast. Maybe it’s even true; I doubt it, but I’m not prepared to argue against it by positing a metaphysically complicated, multivalent definition of the word “truth.” I think it is both more charitable and more evangelically tactical to respond to a genuine desire to be united to Christ to simply respond by saying, “here (at this font) there is water. What is to prevent it.”

+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.

One of the most peculiar things I experienced during the eclipse a couple weeks ago was how it affected the wildlife. I knew to expect this, but it was still surprising. At one point I saw what I thought to be a bird flying past after all the others had gone quiet and hidden, but looking closer it was obviously a bat. We saw a rabbit emerge from a bush who became very confused once the sun came out. And most dramatically, a transformer exploded nearby and we later learned that a presumably confused bird had flown into it. Since Aristotle, we’ve said that the distinguishing element of humanity is that we are so-called “rational animals.” While scholars of comparative cognition will tell us, quite rightly, that we’ve underestimated the capacity of some beasts to be more adept at reasoning than they’ve historically been given credit for, complex (and especially moral) reasoning seems largely the domain of our species alone.

Thus it might have struck the disciples as somewhat rude to be compared with an animal often reckoned a rather silly, irrational creature – the humble sheep. This is an animal prone to going astray, wandering into danger, bred to be easily herded, but at a loss when shepherd-less.

Jesus may have seemed to be speaking in a manner not wholly complimentary when he referred to his disciples as sheep, but to get hung up on our assumption that sheep are just dumb creatures is both to miss the point and, perhaps, to give ourselves too much credit. We, like sheep find that we do not have the wisdom and self-control to keep ourselves on the narrow path. Like the bat and the rabbit and the kamikaze bird I mentioned, we too are prone to following appetite rather than reason. We have something to learn from sheep, though. As irrational as they may seem, they know that their well-being is dependent on the shepherd. They are hard-wired, through their evolutionary history, to follow the leader. They “know” (insofar as an animal can be said to “know” at thing) that their safety is dependent on doing so.

We human beings have more trouble with this. Thanks to sin, we believe that we have everything we need within ourselves. Our own culture has exacerbated this fault of our nature. We believe in rugged individualism. We’ve learned to help ourselves, and seeking direction from someone or something outside of ourselves is reckoned a weakness.

Too often, religion (or at least certain types of religion) is little help. Too often, we get the message that the path to health and salvation, the pathway which leads us by green pastures and still waters where our souls are restored, are our own to navigate. It’s rarely said so explicitly, but religion can become all about being perfect or saying a certain prayer with somebody on television who has given us six steps to salvation. This might all be well and good, but if that’s all there is to faith, then it’s still about me doing my own private thing to chart my own path to salvation, a path which is ultimately more about myself than about God.

It is far more difficult for us to follow. On one level the sheep and the cows might have it more together than we do, because they know when they aren’t on the right path; that’s why they run around like they’re crazy and get into trouble. We humans are so smart that we can convince ourselves that we’re going the right way when we aren’t. We tell ourselves that on the path of life there’s no need to pull over to the gas station to ask for directions or to turn on the GPS device in our car, because we’re smarter than that, by gosh.

All of this is to say that the Christian life requires remarkable humility. The Good Shepherd is always ready to lead our unruly hearts, but we must be humble enough to receive his direction. Christ is ready to bring us to the heavenly banquet, his rod correcting us and his staff comforting us along the way, but we can’t be haughty or we’ll strike out on our own, thinking our own directions better. We already find ourselves in the flock, which is Christ’s Church, and the shepherd is leading us as we hear and experience his direction in scripture and prayer and in the breaking of bread. If, then, we are modest enough to listen, to listen carefully to the voice of the Shepherd, we may rest assured that we will be led to the springs of the water of life and will dwell with God in eternity.

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