Sermons

+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.

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

When I was in college, I took several retreats at a Trappist monastery in upstate New York. Some of my more secular friends and even some of my pious Christian friends thought this a rather odd thing to do. If those monks wanted to remove themselves from the messy world, they thought, it was all well and good. But why would I want to. The vision they had of the monks were that they were perfect, almost spectral figures who were advanced enough in piety to leave “the world” and dwell in some ghostly alternative dimension. For all my adolescent grandiosity, my friends knew I was essentially a rather “down-to-earth” fellow and couldn’t see me floating around with these pious, spiritual people.

As I said in last week’s sermon, popular religion often holds a rather strange view of what it is to be “spiritual”: holy people floating about, profoundly detached from the material world. This is not the Christian view, however. The goal for the monks whom I liked to visit, and the lives of the saints, and God’s hope for all of us is not some sort of world-denying transcendence in this life. Certainly, piety and the virtues are important, but they are to be acted out in this world, because God has deemed this world, as strife-torn and sin-sick as it is, as being an appropriate place in which to become incarnate, in which he himself might abide.

Again, as I said last week, I think that our popular view of holiness might stem from a misconception about Jesus, a misconception which today’s Gospel means to dispel. When the risen Lord appeared to the disciples, he had them touch him in order to disabuse them from their initial fear that he was a ghost. It seems confusing that the disciples would react this way, since Luke tells us that they were talking about how Jesus had risen from the dead.

In fact, the passage appointed in our lectionary begins a couple of verses too late and thus we miss the transition which makes sense of this. The apostles had as yet not seen the risen Christ. They had only the empty tomb and the report of a man named Cleopas and his companion who had just met Jesus on a walk from Jerusalem to Emmaus. The apostles themselves only had the word of others on which to found their hope in the reality of the resurrection.

Thus, it is into a room filled not with joy but with confusion that Jesus entered and said “peace be with you.” This is why the apostles responded not by saying “and with thy spirit”, but by growing more confused and frightened. Was this a ghost, a figment of their imaginations brought about by wishful thinking? Was it a so-called “spiritual experience” in which the memory of Jesus was resurrected in their hearts, but wasn’t really there, as some contemporary theologians are want to argue?

No. Jesus has the apostles touch his very body and even make him something to eat. One cannot touch an imaginary friend. One cannot give breakfast to a sentiment. The disciples’ Lord had risen bodily, literally. He was still made of flesh and blood and bones just like them and just like us. And he still is, his incorruptible body just as much a real body as any other.

Christ’s body and the bodies of those Christians living in his risen life are certainly “spiritual bodies”, but they are no less physical bodies. I think some confusion has arisen from a false dichotomy between “spiritual” and “physical”. These two terms are not opposites. Rather, the opposite of “spiritual” is “profane” and the opposite of “physical” is “incorporeal”, or perhaps, to use the language of today’s Gospel, “ghostly”. The risen life can thus be both spiritual and physical, and it shouldn’t have to be any other way, for why else would God have given us these fleshy things called bodies (mine perhaps increasingly fleshy as I slump into middle age) in the first place. The prophet Joel prophesied about the day of Pentecost as the time when God would “pour [His] Spirit upon all flesh”, not that He would replace our flesh with spirits.

Something is spiritual by virtue of its being animated by a spirit, whether that be the Spirit of God, or the spirit of antichrist, which John mentions in his first epistle general, a little bit later in the letter from which we get today’s epistle. The point is that our bodies can be tools for glorifying their Creator, or as occasions for sin. Anyway, the Christian, by his or her baptism, is made a dwelling place for the right kind of spirit, that is the Holy Spirit.

And on the last day, when the dead shall be raised, they shall be raised with real, spirit-filled bodies. Christianity has never held that heaven is a ghost town. Rather we believe it will be a city filled with the real bodies of the faithful. As John says in today’s epistle, the precise nature of this body is as yet veiled in mystery, but “what we do know is this: when [God] is revealed we will be like Him, for we will see him as He is.”

So, what does all this mean for us now? Well, for starters, and as I mentioned last week, it means that our goal as faithful people is not to transcend the physical reality in which we find ourselves but to be God’s children in the midst of the created order. Just as God deigned it appropriate to come into this world with a real, tangible body and to remain for all eternity in such a body, albeit transformed, so we too are to be spiritual people in a real, physical world.

What’s more, to push it a bit further than I did last week, we are called to treat the created order as something good. Our bodies are not mere shells for our souls. They are, rather, gifts from God capable of being enlivened and transformed by the Holy Spirit. Despite what my college friends thought, this is something those monks in that abbey I went to knew very well. All of the sacrifice and austerity was not a means of denying the body, but of reminding one how the body was a gift from God, contingent on His provision of sustenance for it. Despite what we might think about the saints, all of the spiritual work and even corporal mortification which they underwent was not a means of subduing the body but of remembering to conform the body itself to Christ. So too must we reckon our bodies not as something keeping us from enjoying the divine life, but temples of the Holy Spirit to be treated with reverence and respect.

Likewise, the whole earth itself is not to be considered an impediment to the Christian life, but a gift from God to be treated with care and stewardship. Just like we humans fell into sin, so too did all creation fall after the sin of Adam, but in the Incarnation it was nonetheless deemed a place worthy of God’s own presence. As I suggested may be the case in my newsletter column this month, this was certainly my own experience Monday, taking in a natural wonder and being the more convinced of the wisdom and power of the one whom we claim set the stars in their courses–not from an unscientific “argument from design” but from a profoundly emotional sense in beholding something beautiful, explicable by human reason but not made the less wondrous for it.

So, Christ’s bodily nature after the resurrection should lead us to a certain respect for the created order and ourselves as a part of it. This naturally leads to some moral implications, the general principle being that what God has deemed good enough for himself should be honored by us, His people, and preserved for future generations.

There are also some implications here with regard to prayer. When we recognize the goodness of Creation and of our own “creatureliness”, our own embodiment, prayer becomes less a matter of transcending that reality and more a matter of inviting God’s transcendent glory and majesty, His Spirit, into our midst. Prayer is not escapism, not a means of downplaying our bodily existence or the difficulties that come along with it. Prayer is, rather, a means by which we ask God to fill that reality with His presence. The world and our individual existence within it are not illusory, not gnostic demiurgic emanations–they are God’s design and the reality in which God does His work. We cannot meditate our way out of this reality, nor should we. Rather we may and should always ask God to intercede in this Creation, which is His own possession, with the assurance that He will ultimately work his purposes out.

And finally, we should be ever mindful that God continues to enter this world and proclaim it His own, good possession. He continues to enter each of us and proclaim us as His children. This He does by His glorious, yet quotidian reappearing in the creatures of Bread and Wine. In these gifts, which we shall soon enjoy once more, Christ enters creation again; He enters common objects, that the Father might claim us, common earthbound men and women, as His own. May we be so aware of His bodily presence in this sacrament that we take it to our benefit and go out from here as resurrected people, given a foretaste of that city in which we shall one day dwell.

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