Sermons

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

This week I attended our annual diocesan clergy conference. I always enjoy the opportunity this provides to reconnect with friends and colleagues, though I’ve often found the programs to be lacking in depth and substance. Not this year. We had trainers from the College of Congregational Development, invited by Bishop Jolly, with the expectation that it would be a sort of preview for programming for clergy and lay-leaders in the upcoming years in this diocese. It was the best program we’ve had at clergy conference in my seven years in this diocese, and it is yet another way in which I’m excited about Bishop Jolly and the new staff she’s in the process of hiring shifting our focus back to the really important work of parish life and vitality, which (as far as I’m concerned) is the primary reasons to have a diocesan office and staff rather than just having a roving bishop who shows up to do confirmations and ordinations and nothing else.

As excellent as our program was this year, I am a little envious of a couple of my friends for their annual clergy conference. They are priests in the Church of England under the oversight of the Bishop Suffragan of Fulham. He took his clergy to Rome this year for their conference. That said, there was one element of their gathering I am grateful not to have been a part of. Namely, they caused a bit of an ecumenical incident. You see, they were given permission to celebrate the Eucharist at the Basilica of St. John Lateran, which serves as the Cathedral of the Diocese of Rome. St. Peter’s in the Vatican, for all its grandeur is not, in fact, technically a Cathedral. A Cathedral is, by definition, the church in which the Bishop of a Diocese has his or her official seat (called a cathedra). So, the Bishop of Rome’s church is St. John Lateran. The Bishop of Rome is the Pope. And here, a bunch of Anglicans came in and used it. When some of a more radically traditionalist Roman Catholic disposition got wind of this there was a bit of a flap about it; I saw some folks even suggesting that the space needed to be reconsecrated, having been desecrated by an Anglican Mass. The Archpriest of the Cathedral (equivalent to what we’d call a Cathedral Dean) had to come out and apologize, saying that there had been a breakdown in communication. Perhaps this was the case; maybe the language barrier played a role, and whoever approved the use of the space didn’t realize “Chiesa d’Inghilterra” meant “The Church of England” not “the Roman Catholic Church in England”, though I kind of doubt it.

In all events, this all reminds one of the sad situation in which we find the church, divided over the centuries into so many communions and denominations. It seems so unhappily in contradiction to Christ’s last prayer, his final request before his suffering and death, which we heard in this morning’s Gospel:

Holy Father, keep them in thy name, which thou hast given me, that they may be one, even as we are 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.

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. Later in the chapter from which we just heard, Jesus says the following:

I do not pray for these only, but also for those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast 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, certainly, 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 the highest levels of Church governance and among professional theologians. This is as it should be, the terms of such conversations revolve around weighty debates about what is essential to Christianity and what is not, issues which are delicate and may seem intractable. We can be charitable about the choices friends and loved ones may have made about being a part other churches, but the larger issues of church unity seem to be outside our sphere of influence.

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 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. I’m frequently guilty of this.

The most important thing to remember, though, is that 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, as he says in the final verse of the chapter from which our Gospel is taken:

I made known to them thy name, and I will make it known, that the love with which thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them

Through our love of Jesus we come to love one another, even those whose religion seems to us strange or over-the-top. Again, none of us is in a position to effect the institutional unity of the church to a great degree, but 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.

It will be no surprise to you that I’ve never been of the opinion that all religions were just paths up the same mountain, because I believe with all my heart that Jesus Christ is not only the fullest expression we’ve ever seen of godliness, but that he was and is none other than God (full stop). But Paul’s sermon to the Athenians strikes me as providing an important caveat to this view.

“Men of Athens,” he says, “I perceive that in every way you are very religious.” Of course, he could be speaking ironically, and no doubt “religious” meant something very different in Greek–and in English before the nineteenth century, for that matter–than it does today. Specifically, the definition of “religion” had to do with one’s practice of piety rather than any particular set of doctrines and practices which constitute distinct faiths; this is an important distinction.

But then Paul uses several Greek words which should give us pause. They’re all translated imprecisely in our English versions, a testament to the fact that the act of translation is always an act of interpretation. “[I] observed the objects of your worship” the RSV says, but in Greek it’s “I beheld your σεβεσματα” that is “devotions”. The RSV says “what therefore you worship as unknown”, in Greek is “what ignorantly you ευσεβειτε” or “are being devout to”. While the RSV gives a weak translation “served by human hands”, the Greek uses a word with stronger religious significance: “θεραπευται” meaning something like “attending to”.

Devotion and attendance. These are the actions of sincere worship. This is the language that would have been used for priests of God’s temple in Jerusalem, and they are still used (if, sadly, less often) to describe what we do in church. They are words implying a response of love and commitment and genuine conviction. I try, sometimes, to model a language of worship. It is not preciousness but precision; not meaningless grandiloquence (I hope) but appropriate care for that which is, I believe, sacred. So, we don’t just put on a church service, but we devote ourselves to prayer. We don’t just “serve Communion,” but we attend to the holy sacrifice.

Now the problem with the Athenians was not that their love and commitment and conviction (their devotion and attendance) was insincere; rather, it was simply misplaced. They were devoted to objects unworthy of devotion; they attended to pagan idols rather than to the ministrations offered to the God of Israel. They are not being let off the hook. Nonetheless, Paul’s language acknowledges what might be fairly called heartfelt religion. We can see in the Athenians this nascent desire to reach out to what is greater and truer than their ordinary lives. In other words, they have an inherent disposition to religion, and it’s more a matter of directing that devotion and attendance to its rightful recipient. Paul even goes so far as to suggest that some have felt inklings of this truth before having heard the Christian Gospel: “Even some of your poets have said, ‘For we indeed are his offspring.’”

Critics of religious studies as a discipline with whom I became enamored as an undergraduate suggested that “religion” was not a category into which we could place the various paganisms outside Christendom, and this was the position I held for some time in my more callow youth. What Paul suggests, though, is that things are not so clear-cut. The seeds of faith, of true religion, may well be innate. We are disposed to worship the one true God who created us and to worship Him rightly; we just need to be told about the Way.

This is good news for we who are called to labor in the fields of the Lord. The fields are more ready for harvest than we might have imagined, because God has given all His children a keen disposition to seek Him out even before they know his name. When we, like Saint Paul, share the hope that is in us, when we point to the statue of the unnamed god and say “I know his name, it is the blessed name of Jesus, which has been exalted over every name”, then we may well be surprised to find an audience open to that very possibility. We may well find an audience that has been eagerly waiting for that Good News without even having realized 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.

There are about a half dozen home-bound people to whom I take Holy Communion each month and with whom I have a time of conversation. One of these people (and don’t ask me to give any identifying information or try to speculate who I’m talking about, because you’ll guess wrong) knowing that she’s not going to be in this world for too much longer has become increasingly concerned about how she’s not done enough to merit entrance into heaven. She says things like “I’m relying on you to put in a good word for me, Father John.” She has a relative who sends her bible readings or devotionals or something on a daily basis, and her take-away is something like “it’s telling me all the things I’m supposed to be doing, and I’m not doing them.” I want to say that either this can’t be the point of these things you’re getting or else it’s based on tremendously bad theology and should be ignored as much as possible, particularly at this point in her life.

It all reminds me that as much as one can say that the Gospel is about God’s free gift to us, our reconciliation to him by nothing more nor less than Jesus’ atoning sacrifice, enslavement to the Law and reliance on works-righteousness is a pernicious evil which even my most strident defenses of the sufficiency of Grace are hard-pressed to begin to dispel from the anxious soul of one being continually reminded that he or she must just “be good.” Whatever form our moralism takes, and whether it’s directed against others or creates anxiety and scrupulosity in our own souls, the message of Grace is offensive in the most wonderful, liberating way. Thus can St. Stephen pray with confidence that even the sin of those who martyred him would not be held against them.

This is the Good News we hear in today’s Gospel, taken from the fourteenth chapter of John. Jesus spoke these words at the Last Supper, the very night before he was himself to be killed and to pray with confidence to the Father that his own murderers would be forgiven. This is one of the options for the Gospel at funerals in this church, and perhaps the most popular for obvious reasons. Christ’s comforting command “let not your hearts be troubled” and his promise that he himself goes to prepare a place for us in his Father’s house are not, however, immediately understood.

Both Thomas and Philip seem to me to be caught up in the same anxiety as my friend I mentioned at the outset of the sermon. Show us the way. Show us the Father. We do not know the way. I think that these demands are a way of saying, “Lord, tell us what to do to be good enough to join you in heaven.” Give us a road map, give us step-by-step instructions on what good works we must do to merit a place in your Kingdom. How do we earn this?

Jesus rejects the premise of the question. Instead of a set of rules or a to-do list he gives them himself. “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life.” Yes, he promises that in coming to him, in believing in him, in being in relationship with him, the apostles and we would be empowered to do great works. But the way to the Father’s house would already be secured, and the works would not serve for self-justification but to display glory of God.

I want to ask you to think of a place that feels like home to you. It could be the town you grew up in. It could be a grandparent’s house. It could be your college campus. It could be a place you went on vacation and have fond memories of. It could be this church, and I hope it is for some of you. It could be anywhere. Does that place feel like home to you because the weather was pleasant or because it had nice amenities or because it was selected as top micropolitan area by Site Selection Magazine a thousand years in a row or whatever it is? I suspect not. I suspect it’s because of relationships with other people you had or have in that place. The city I grew up in was determined by a Gallup poll a few years ago to be “one of the eleven most miserable cities in the United States.” But it still feels “homey” to me because of the relationships I had with people there.

Why is heaven our home? We know precious little from scripture about what the life of the world to come will be like. One thing we do know, is that we will be there with each other and, most importantly, with Jesus for ever. He’s gone to prepare a place, not because we’ve earned the right to attend a graduation party or a retirement party or something. Why? “So that where I am you may be also.” Because he wants to be with us for eternity. Because he loves us, and because with what little love we have, we love him too. I’ve not earned that love. Frankly, I’ve not earned anyone’s love. That’s not how love works. That’s not why we’ve been given each of us to each other in this life. We have, rather, been created and redeemed simply to share unearned love with each other in reflection of the only one who ever earned it, in preparation for the fulsome experience of that love in eternity.

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