Sermons

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

I’ve been asked by more than one person what I think a new pope means for Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogue. One remains hopeful, particularly as we ever pray for God to heal our unhappy divisions. That said, I have no idea what the future holds on the ecumenical front. I don’t know whether those barriers to visible unity between all Christians will continue to obscure the invisible unity we all hold as baptized daughters and sons of God this side of eternity or not. I do know that on the other side, those dividing walls will be forever demolished, and if we’re trying to reflect a bit of that perfect world, we’ll do our level best to realize Christ’s final prayer.

You see, the situation in which we find ourselves seems so unhappily in contradiction to Christ’s last prayer, his final request before his suffering and death:

The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be completely one.

I would humbly suggest that Christ’s prayer went beyond sentiment. That the unity, the one-ness, to which we as the body of Christ are called, is not about some vague, half-hearted acknowledgement of each other’s existence. You’ve heard that hand-waving excuse from people, you’ve said it yourself, and you’ve probably heard me say something like it: “Well, different strokes for different folks, we’re all praying to the same God, and all that.” I’ve increasingly come to believe that this is an excuse. We are excusing ourselves from what is a horrible sin perpetrated through the centuries: the breaking of Christ’s body.

And the really sad thing is not that we happen to go to different buildings on a Sunday morning. The really sad thing is that our divisions impair our witness:

As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.

Church unity is not an end in itself, but a means by which others are brought into the fold. In a world of political and cultural division, the unity of Christ’s Church could be a powerful sign of the Gospel’s reconciling power. We’ve done pretty well at welcoming people of other Christian backgrounds into our parish, people who are curious about the way Episcopalians practice the faith. This is a good thing. But how many once totally uninterested people have come and said, let me check out this Christianity thing? Some, but not as many, and I think that part of the reason is because divisions in the church are a scandal. The Gospel is compelling, but if we’re not living it, nobody will know that it is.

All of this can seem awfully discouraging. There appears to be little for us to do individually, as real, tangible church unity is a matter discussed at higher levels than ours, among popes and bishops and officials of various Christian bodies. The terms of such conversations revolve around weighty debates about what is essential to Christianity and what is not, issues which sometimes seem intractable.

Even so, there is one thing we can do, and which I myself need to do as difficult as it sometimes is. We need a change of heart. We can say “we’re all in the same business” a thousand times without really believing it. I can state my own appreciation of the work of other churches until I’m out of breath, while still secretly, subconsciously seeing those other churches as “the competition”. We can in one moment give lip service to ecumenism, and in the next moment be snide about how weird and out of touch those other Christians seem to be.

But Christ’s prayer for unity was not about being politique or delicate with those with whom we think we have so little in common. Christ’s prayer for unity has its basis in genuine love:

The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

Through our love of Jesus we come to love one another, even those whose religion seems to us strange or over-the-top. While none of us is in a position to effect the institutional unity of the church, we all have a part to play in bringing about its unity in love. Ultimately, that sort of unity is a necessary precursor to the other. Unless we truly love our brothers and sisters, unless we have that invisible bond of unity, visible unity can never exist. Far from being a matter for only the highest levels of church leadership, church unity must begin with each of us, setting aside our discomfort, and “living in love as Christ loved us.” This is easier said than done, but it is our charge. May we be given the charity to accomplish 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.

As a consequence of both having poor eyesight and being a rather clumsy person, I’ve never much enjoyed the dark. I dislike that feeling of waking up in the middle of the night and stumbling around to find my glasses, perhaps tripping over a cat or the shoes I left in the wrong place or whatever. I’m lucky to live in the developed world in the twenty-first century where electric lighting is ubiquitous.

In the ancient world, and for that matter in the modern world until about a century ago, the world would have literally been a much darker place.

Imagine, then, how surprising the imagery in this morning’s reading from Revelation would have been to people living in a literally much darker world:

And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light shall the nations walk; and the kings of the earth shall bring their glory into it, and its gates shall never be shut by day–and there shall be no night there … And night shall be no more; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they shall reign for ever and ever.

Light and dark imagery is seen throughout scripture, and I suspect it would have been more striking to these ancient people for whom the dark was a very dangerous reality. Bandits and predators struck in the dark. At nightfall you’d lock the gates to the city, and you’d probably stay in your house unless you were looking to get into some mischief.

And as dangerous as the literal darkness would have been, the metaphorical darkness in which the early church operated was a necessary evil. The church was being persecuted, and the best way to avoid death was to act like the bandits- move in secret, don’t get found out, worship God in locked rooms and catacombs.

How heartening, then, was this message of daylight! No longer would Christians need to scurry about in the dark, hiding from their torch-bearing persecutors. Finally, the true light which came to enlighten humanity could shine for all the world to see! The glory of God and of the Lamb would shine into every corner, bringing the righteous into a new and everlasting day and showing the designs of the wicked to be but vanity.

And now for the really interesting question, the question which makes the book of Revelation such a difficult text: Has this taken place? Are we, God’s faithful people, enjoying the light or is it an as-yet dim but growing hope.

I think it’s both. On the one hand, the majority of Christians can now be pretty open about their religion. Since Constantine, the Church has enjoyed a privileged place in Western society, even if it no longer has the authority it once had in the day-to-day lives of adherents and the larger culture. The Church continues to grow in foreign lands, many of which had until fairly recently seen the church persecuted just like in the bad old days of the Roman Empire. Things are by no means perfect, but they’ve getten better, at least in some parts of the world.

But we’ve not yet reached that perfect state of light. Sin and death are still with us. The vision of Revelation is not just about Christians escaping outright persecution (though that was the prevailing issue when the book was written). It’s also about all things being made subject to the reign of Christ. We’ve not yet seen “the kings of the earth bringing their glory into [the city of God].” It may have seemed like that for about a millennium, between Constantine and the Reformation, but the story was and remains a great deal more complex than that.

So, as much progress as has been made over the last two-thousand years, there is still darkness. There are still corners into which the saving light of God has not shone. The nations have not been fully healed. Not all have the name of the lamb inscribed on their foreheads and in their hearts.

So, the image of the City of God, the New Jerusalem, is still a hope. It is a hope for which we’ve been given a foretaste in the Church and Her Sacraments, but all is not yet accomplished.

And so we pray for the Kingdom, in the sure and certain hope that it is our birthright in Baptism. We don’t just wait around waiting for “pie in the sky when we die, by and by”, because the vision of the Holy City is a vision of the coming reality of this world, too. Rather, we light a candle here and there, causing the gloom to take flight, and one day, perhaps when we least expect it, the world will be so full of the light of Grace that the darkness will have no bastion remaining, and all things everywhere will be transformed into just what God intends for them.

+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.

What does it mean that we are made in the image and likeness of God? There have been multiple theories over the centuries. Some can, I think, be easily rejected. It doesn’t mean, for example, that God has ten fingers and ten toes and internal organs. Much less does he have a bushy, gray beard as much as our desire to anthropomorphize the Almighty has led us to depict him in particular ways in art over the centuries.

Other theories have their good points. Some have claimed that our being made in the image of God has primarily to do with our function as masters of creation. There is some merit to this idea, particularly considering the fact that God did give Adam dominion over all creatures. Even so, such a view leaves something to be desired. During the period which many of you know to be my personal bête noir–namely, that of the Nineteenth Century liberal protestant ascendancy, when anything and everything for the uplift of humanity seemed possible– the idea was in ascendancy, but that this is how humanity can be seen as the image of God goes back at least to the time of the Reformation. The failure of human progress, seen particularly in man’s inhumanity to man, seems a sufficient argument against this. So too, I would argue, does its logical implication for those who clearly have no control over themselves, much less the ability to be “masters of the universe.”

The view which I used to find most compelling is the Augustinian one, which holds that the human being’s capacity for memory, reason, and free will is what makes him like God. I’ve always liked it, of course, because I have a pretty good memory, I have a capacity for reason honed by the advanced study of philosophy, and I know I can be willful. But what of those who lack one or more of these? What of the merely forgetful or the properly demented? What of those whose natural abilities make them less able or even entirely incapable of rational inquiry? What of those who, because of being incapacitated in any of a number of ways cannot choose for themselves which path to take? Are they somehow less human? Are they a less elegant creation? Are they not quite made in the image of God?

The more I consider it, the more I believe that it is in nothing corporeal, nor authoritative, nor cognitive which defines our likeness to the Creator, but simply in our capacity to love as we have been loved. In John’s Gospel, Jesus goes round and round about what it means to abide in him, who himself abides in God, and thus for we ourselves to be identified with the Father. Sometimes he discusses it in terms of personal identification and sometimes, as in today’s Gospel, he discusses in terms of being his disciples, but invariably the point he makes is that the Father and the Son are one and we are also one with them so long as we allow him to imbue us with a single virtue. That virtue is love. Love for God and for our fellows. Thus, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and our Baptism into his body enables us to live into what it means to be human beings made in the image of God, to recapture the defining quality of humanity lost in the Fall–to be defined by the love we show as a reflection of God’s own love.

St. Gregory of Nyssa expresses this beautifully in likening the Creation of humanity to a canvas on which God at the first painted himself as love. He writes:

As then painters transfer human forms to their pictured by means of certain colors, laying on their copy the proper and corresponding tints so that the beauty of the original may be accurately transferred to the likeness, so I would have you understand that our Maker also, painting the portrait to resemble his own beauty, as it were with colors, shows in us his own sovereignty… God is love and the fount of love: for this the great John declares that “love is of God” and “God is love,” the Fasioner of our nature has made this to be our feature too. For “in this,” he says, “shall all know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” And so, if love is absent, the whole stamp of the likeness is transformed.

As you’ve heard me say countless times, love in this sense (that is, in reflection of God’s love) is not primarily affective. It is not about warm, fuzzy feelings. It is, rather, the virtue which enables us to behave in certain ways toward each other: unselfishly, self-sacrificially, gently.

This capacity, this virtue, is the thing which the Fall took away. The fancy theological term for our condition, concupiscence, has unfortunately been equated by many with sexual immorality specifically, but it is in fact disordered affection understood more broadly–the lack of love or its misdirection, toward self-satisfaction, whatever form that takes.

The new morality, in contradiction of Christian morality, is a perfect example of this. We are increasingly told by the world that happiness and virtue are to be found in total self-determination, the pursuit of whatever we want so long as it doesn’t obviously harm others (and even that caveat sometimes seems more-and-more negotiable). A week or so ago, Annie and I went to see a film that’s been getting a lot of praise: Sinners, which is about blues music and vampires. It was a beautiful movie in every way except for its moral message, and it might be worth seeing (if you can handle the violence) if only to get an idea of what many believe, either implicitly or explicitly, makes for the good life. Long story short, the most important thing according to this view seems to be following one’s desires, getting what one wants, whatever scolds might tell us. I think most of us have known folks who have lived this way, but I wonder if any of us knows one who ended up happy or fulfilled at the end of the day.

Jesus gives us a better way, a way which has been proved over and over again to lead to a good life: love one another just as he loved us. Emulate, insofar as God has given us the power, the kind of love which is willing even to lay down one’s life for one’s brother or sister. This is the way to joy and peace, and it is a reflection, however dim, of the sort of love which we’ll enjoy in the life of the world to come.

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