Sermons

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

I have a confession to make. I have long appreciated well-crafted art with whose apparent or even explicit message and underlying worldview I fundamentally disagree. That is, so long as those pieces remain niche, so long as they don’t enter the mainstream. This is not me confessing to being a “hipster”–that is, the sort of person who defines himself by liking marginal culture so long as it remains marginal. It is a much more pernicious sin–probably a combination of intellectual elitism, cultural chauvinism, and paternalism.

So, for example, I appreciate the plays of Samuel Becket, the films of Joel and Ethan Coen, and the early novels of Haruki Murakami, but the idea of somebody consuming such literature without the tools to reject their ideological implications worries me. I was, thus, of two minds when Annie and I went to see the University of Findlay’s production of Jean Genet’s Les Bonnes last month. On the one hand I was impressed that folks in the rural Midwest would produce such a thematically difficult, edgy play. On the other hand, I was a little worried about what an unsuspecting theater-goer, out for some light Sunday afternoon entertainment, might have taken away from it.

The thing that worries me about so much of what has remained inaccessible art, then, is not that it will be misunderstood if made more accessible, but that they will be embraced without a compelling, intellectually serious counterargument. This is not to say that the so-called “cultured despisers of religion” are more intellectually serious than Christian critics of culture (I generally find them to be less so) but that the latter generally don’t get jobs at The New Yorker or The Paris Review.

To cut to the chase, one of the prevailing modes of highbrow art and literature over the last three-quarters-of-a-century, has been an embrace of absurdism, particularly riffing on Albert Camus’ philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus. The basic idea, to grossly oversimplify it, is that the universe is meaningless and that there are three options: religious faith, suicide, or a revolt against meaningless by making one’s own meaning and finding some “happiness” in the midst of existential nothingness, and the absurdists almost invariably take this last approach.

I said that I can appreciate art on its own terms so long as it’s well made, even if I disagree with it, so long as it doesn’t enter the broader zeitgeist; so long (to fall back into my paternalistic sin) as it doesn’t lead the little ones astray. So you can guess my reaction to the tremendous box office success of last year’s Everything, Everywhere, All At Once–a beautifully shot, well-written and produced movie with humane performances, which nonetheless had at its heart this nihilistic philosophy. When we went to the theater to watch it, I thought both “this is a beautiful movie” and “this movie’s point is abhorrent.” One can hold both of these responses in tension, and perhaps I should have more trust in the average movie-goer to make the same distinction, but it does give me pause.

My concern is that the assumptions of such absurdist works has already and may become more and more the neutral position of people who would be better served by recognizing what we believe to be the truth of the matter, namely, that the universe is full of meaning (we don’t need to make it up for ourselves) and the human condition is not existentially hopeless, because there is a God who created it and us and promises us a life full of immortality, to quote The Wisdom of Solomon.

If you’re not as concerned as I that the former is becoming an apparently viable worldview for many, I’d simply note that a couple of weeks ago the Courier ran an editorial written by the Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker. Parker claimed that we only live on after death so long as somebody remembers us, that she is making an effort to remember somebody who died without family or friends (itself an admirable thing to do), but that when she’s gone that person will be lost forever in the sands of time. Oh well. As often as the Courier runs letters to the editor written by cranks of various types I was certain that somebody would write in to take issue with this from a potentially embarrassing if at least putatively religious standpoint, but no. Radio silence. We can throw scripture grenades about all manner of hot-button social and political issues, but a vacuous op-ed leaves us gobsmacked.

Perhaps I should have written a letter to the editor about it, but I need to try to present myself as less of a crank than I may sometimes be. So, instead, the best response I can think of comes ready-made from this morning’s Old Testament Lesson, from the Book of Ecclesiasticus:

There are some of them who have left a name,
so that men declare their praise.
And there are some who have no memorial,
who have perished as though they had not lived;
they have become as though they had not been born,
and so have their children after them.
But these were men of mercy,
whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten.

Here is an apparent contradiction, which I contend is no contradiction at all. There are those who have died, whose descendants have died, and been entirely forgotten. Yet they are remembered. It is only a contradiction so long as the only people capable of remembering are mortal men, doomed to die. But there is another rememberer, whose memory is perfect. That is the Lord God, who remembers both the forgotten and his own mercy, and who promises eternal life.

So, two points by way of concluding. As we do every year, we will in a few minutes remember by name the faithful departed who are near and dear to us. That is a good and appropriate thing. C.S. Lewis, in response to those who claimed that we ought not pray for the dead gives a perfect, pragmatic argument:

Of course I pray for the dead. The action is so spontaneous, so all but inevitable, that only the most compulsive theological case against it would deter me. And I hardly know how the rest of my prayers would survive if those for the dead were forbidden.

There are plenty who would quibble with this, no doubt. Just because something is intuitive doesn’t make it so, necessarily. It does, I think, mean the burden of proof rests squarely on those who suggest such a natural impulse is inappropriate, and lest I get too much into the weeds here, I’ll just say that I have not encountered a convincing repudiation of the practice.

In any event, we strive every year not to let names drop off this list. Many more names will be read than those which have been submitted over the last few weeks, and this is at least partly as a reminder that even after one has been “forgotten” to us, they are remembered by God, and the church strives to model that. But should a name inadvertently drop off through a typographic error (or should I be followed in several years by a Rector who cares more about liturgical brevity and efficiency) those names, those human beings marked with the seal of Baptism and claimed as Christ’s own forever, will indeed be remembered by the perfect rememberer, not just in some vague sense, but in the provision of eternal paradise.

Second, even before we get to the reading of the necrology, a new name will be entered into that greater and larger book, the Lamb’s Book of Life, when Lilly McConnell is baptized with water in the name of the Trinity and marked as Christ’s own for ever. This, too, is an act full of promise, the promise that as a member of Christ’s own household, she too will be remembered. Perhaps she will be among the famous men and women whom the writer of Ecclesiasticus praises, renowned for some great work or witness to the Kingdom of God as she grows (as we will promise to support her) into the full stature of Christ. Or perhaps she’ll turn out like the rest of us, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, always dependent on the love of God and his promise of salvation among the changes and chances and messiness of life in the midst of a fallen (if meaningful) universe. Either way, it doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as the fact that she will belong to God, like all of us, that she will never be forgotten in that most important sense.

We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, known and unknown. Because, as the hymnwriter Lesbia Scott just reminded us, the saints of God are just folk like me and you and Lilly and the people whose names we remember at the altar and thousand of thousands whom we may have forgotten but who nonetheless were marked as Christ’s own, and whose hope is full of immortality.

+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.

Last week for our sequence hymn we sang a difficult text written by G.K. Chesterton–“O God of Earth and Altar”–and by difficult I don’t mean conceptually it was conceptually difficult but that it required us to consider the degree to which the Kingdoms of this world, our own included, are very far gone from the ideals Kingdom God will establish on the last day. My favorite line from that hymn puts it rather directly: “smite us and save us all.” I learned this week that the hymn was actually covered by the heavy metal band Iron Maiden back in the eighties; I think (and I’ll just posit this now, and we can talk about what I mean at some later date) this is one among many examples of how orthodox Christianity is the most metal of religions.

Anyway, we can always rely of Chesterton for some hard truths. He once said of today’s Gospel, “Jesus here tells us to love our neighbors. Elsewhere the bible tells us we should love our enemies. This is because, generally speaking, they are the same people.” This may be even truer today than it was when he wrote it a hundred years ago. I think our current politicians could learn something from Chesterton.

Indeed, we all can and must, because it is none other than a mandate from Jesus himself:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.

We may respond to this by asking “well, then, who is my neighbor?” In St. Luke’s version of the story, the lawyer who asks the initial question and receives Jesus’ famous response, proceeds to ask the second question—Who is my neighbor?—in order to trick Jesus, and Jesus responds with the parable of the Good Samaritan.

You may remember how that one goes. The priest and the Levite—righteous men by Jewish religious standards—pass by the wounded traveler without offering any kind of assistance. The Samaritan, a member of a race and religion very much at odds with the Jews, rescues the traveler and pays his expenses during his convalescence. Who was the traveler’s neighbor? None other than a man whom circumstance had made his enemy.

We have a rather narrow definition of love, which I don’t think is unique to our time and place, but which is nonetheless misguided. We hear the word “love” and what do we think? We probably think of warm feelings for somebody because of some kinship or friendship or personal attraction. Warm feelings for somebody are well and good, but Christian charity is a much broader concept, and it seems to me to have little to do with those of whom we are predisposed to be fond.

Love in the Christian sense includes a commitment to act on behalf of those with whom we have little in common and even those with whom we are at enmity. Look back at that reading from Leviticus. Unfortunately it skipped several verses which are germane to our discussion of love. In the verses we heard, the Israelites are commanded to avoid prejudice and partiality, to avoid slander, to shun hatred, and to divest themselves of resentment and grudges. In the twelve verses our lectionary skipped, the children of Israel are also commanded not to steal, not to put off paying an employee even one day, not to be cruel to those who cannot defend themselves, and even not to harvest all of one’s land so that the poor might take the produce around the borders of one’s farm. All of these commandments are summed up in that elegant but seemingly impossible commandment: love thy neighbor as thyself.

You’ve heard me say it before from this pulpit and here it is again, perhaps my most often repeated comment on the Christian life: love is about commitment and sacrifice. If one is committed to loving one’s spouse, he must sacrifice his own selfish concerns for the good of the relationship. If one is committed to loving one’s children, he must sacrifice getting what he wants and doing what he wants to a great extent in order to be present and to support the child. If one is committed to loving the poor, she’s got to do something about it at her own expense. If one is committed to loving the Christ’s Church and those who do not yet believe, she must give sacrificially of her time, talent, and treasure to support the Church’s mission of reconciling all people everywhere to God and each other.

And the really hard part is that we cannot show partiality. We cannot choose to love only those whom we like. We must commit to sacrificing ourselves for those whom we don’t particularly like:

Love your enemies [Jesus says] and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

This seems an impossible task, but in truth we already have the greatest example: Jesus Christ who laid down his life not only for the people with whom he had mutual fondness, but for those who hated him, those who spat at him, those who scourged him and nailed him to the Cross. We are commanded to take up our own cross, to sacrifice ourselves for the good of others as Christ had done.

+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.

There has been a TikTok trend which has not only taken social media by storm in recent weeks but which has received some coverage in traditional media, with articles in the New York Times and the the Washington Post. Women have been asking men in their lives (husbands, boyfriends, brothers, &c.) how frequently they think about the Roman Empire, and the answer is usually “every day.” Now I think this trend, funny as it may be, unnecessarily plays into gender stereotypes. Perhaps because I am married to a classics major, but I think there are plenty of women who think about the Roman Empire just as frequently as men. What’s more, if you asked me the question, I would give the following answer: I think about the Roman Empire pretty frequently. But I think about the Achaemenid Empire even more frequently.

As it happens, our lessons this morning have made us consider both of these Empires. It is the Caesar, the Roman Emperor (namely Tiberius), who would have been on the coin with which the pharisees are trying to trap Jesus and this event, while proving that Jesus was very clever, might leave us with more questions than answers about the nature of the state, the secular authority, in terms of our obligations and God’s provision of a different sort of Kingdom.

That said, perhaps because of what I said earlier, I find the question raised by this morning’s Old Testament lesson even more fascinating, as it makes us think about the Achaemenid Empire of ancient Persia and its founding emperor, Cyrus the Great. For one thing, and to oversimplify to some extent, biblical history while generally seeing the Romans as “the baddies” (St. Paul’s insistence that all authority is established by God and that the church should pray for the emperor, notwithstanding), the Persians are generally seen as the “good guys” in the biblical story. I think I might have said from this pupit before that the Achaemenid Empire should get more credit in both history classes and pop culture, particularly the latter, in response to the very stupid film about the Battle of Thermopylae–Three Hundred–which got the baddies and the goodies flipped.

Anywayn Isaiah’s prophecy in this morning’s lesson comes at the climax of a fascinating period of history which I think interesting to enough to rehearse briefly, because it makes this morning’s Old Testament lesson all the more surprising. So, on with a bit of a history lesson, and apologies if it seems dry to some. I for one find it to be a really enthralling story.

If you follow the daily office lectionary, you’ve been hearing a great deal of the background of this morning’s Old Testament over the past couple of weeks in morning prayer. To bring you up to speed, the last great king of Judah, Josiah, had done what none of his predecessors had managed- namely, large scale religious and political reform. Though Judah was a client state of Assyria, Josiah managed to tear down the altars of foreign gods and encourage the worship of Israel’s god alone. He used tax revenue not to underwrite the monarchy’s expenses but to undertake a significant renovation of the Temple. Sadly, when Josiah died in the year 609 B.C. a whole series of bad kings followed. Josiah’s son, Jehoahaz, ignored his father’s reforms and was captured only three months into his reign after an ill-advised war with Egypt. Jehoahaz’s brother Jehoiakim was installed in his place by the Egyptian conquerors, but his eleven year reign was defined by his apparently constantly shifting allegiance between Egypt and Babylon who were at war with each other, and, worst of all, after facing criticism by the prophet Jeremiah, he undertook a policy of burning the prophet’s writings. Finally, Jehoiakim’s son, Jeconiah, only managed to rule for three months and ten days before he allowed Jerusalem to fall to the Babylonians and the best and brightest of Judah to be sent into exile throughout the Babylonian Empire on 16 March in the year 597 B.C.

Now, skip forward almost sixty years. Jerusalem had fallen, leaving only a puppet monarchy and the poorest of the poor remaining in Judah. Educated and wealthy Jews had established communities throughout Babylon, leading to an increased nationalistic and religious fervor which the Empire had sought to quash by its program of forced exile. This was a period in which the Jews learned how to maintain their Judaism, their connection to the God of Israel, outside the land given to their forefathers and without the benefit of temple worship. For the common Jew, this meant an increased attention to kashrut, faithfulness in observing the laws of purity and morality found in the Torah. For scholars, it meant not only an increased attention to studying the Law (the beginnings of modern, Rabbinical Judaism) but also an explosion of creativity. It is not in Israel but in Babylon that much of what we call the Old Testament was finally written down.

It should be noted that the Jews were unique in the ancient world in being able to maintain their culture and religion and stave off assimilation after deportation. Ancient empires did this frequently because it always worked, except for this one exception. The northern kingdom of Samaria had experienced the same thing a hundred and fifty years earlier than Judah (in Samaria’s case, at the hands of the Assyrian Empire) and despite what conspiracy theorists and Mormons might tell you, the ten lost tribes of Israel were actually lost, assimilating into the empire of their conquerors. The Babylonian Jews, then, remain the one notable exception, and I’m perfectly comfortable in attributing this to Divine Providence.

More and more, while in Babylon, the Jews realized that they could only follow the God of Israel in the manner they desired by returning to the land and rebuilding the temple. The only problem was, they had no army and a couple generations of life in exile had made repatriation seem little more than wishful thinking.

But then, something unexpected happened. The Word of the Lord came not just to the prophet but to one identified in this morning’s lesson as God’s “anointed”. Indeed, considering that Isaiah himself was holed up in Babylon, we might assume that this prophecy was not even mediated through the prophet to this “anointed one” but went directly from God to him, 500 miles away from Babylon in the Persian city of Susa.

And who was this “anointed one”? Cyrus, the Zoroastrian king of Persia. God says to Cyrus that He has “called [him] by name. I surname you,” God says, “though you do not know me… I gird you, though you do not know me.” God chose not one of His own chosen people, but a king following a foreign religion (though, arguably the only monotheistic religion at the time aside from Judaism) to bring deliverance to the Jews.

We Christians often miss this part of the story because we read Isaiah on one level when there are at least two levels on which the prophecies function. Isaiah most certainly points to Jesus Himself as his people’s redeemer, but on another level he also point’s to King Cyrus. It’s not a matter of figuring out when the prophet speaks about one or the other; he can be understood as speaking of both in the same breath, a difficult thing for us literal-thinking modern people to get our minds around.

Anyhow, there is more in this than a history lesson with a twist at the end, because I think the twist-ending itself gives us an important lesson about who God is. We talk so much about coming to know God more fully, but we miss what is arguably more important- namely, that God knows us fully. To Cyrus, the God of Israel, if he had even heard of him, would have been a minor tribal god. He probably wouldn’t have seen this strange religion of displaced Jews as being particularly interesting. But God knew Cyrus, just as he knows each of us: completely. Because God knew Cyrus before Cyrus knew Him, this foreign king was made an instrument of the one true God.

The fact is we can never fully know God. We project all sorts of cultural and personal biases onto Him, and getting an even slightly clearer image of Him is a life’s work. I believe that even those who reject God most vociferously are often rejecting not God Himself but some inaccurate image which they’ve conjured up in their minds or which has been created by poor catechesis—some white-bearded chap who lives in the clouds who has less to do with the God of Israel and of Jesus than it does with our own hang-ups.

That being the case, the Good News is that however skewed our image of God is, God’s image of us is perfect. God knows us fully and can employ the greater angels of our nature, made perfect in Christ Jesus, to do His Will even when we don’t realize He’s doing it. It is a great God who can take some pagan Persian king to be a channel of his peace and deliverance. It is a great God who can take us, confused and sinful as we are, to be instruments of the Gospel in our old world. May our ignorance of God be overshadowed by God’s perfect knowledge of us, and may His perfect love find a home in the hearts who as yet do not know Him at all.

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