Sermons

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

Today’s Old Testament lesson came from the relatively short book of the Prophet Amos, which, along with the other so-called “lesser prophets”, gets a great deal less air time, as it were, than the more lengthy prophetic books like Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel. This is probably because the latter include more prophecies which we believe to have been accomplished or reinforced in the New Testament. Amos’ prophecy was a great deal more immediate. He predicted an earthquake and it happened about two years later.

Even so, there is much we can learn from this little book. Amos was probably the first prophet to have his prophecies written down. Biblical scholars have become surprisingly good at dating these things, and we are pretty sure that today’s Old Testament lesson was from a vision Amos had and preached about sometime between the autumn of 750 BC and that of 749 BC. Anyway, Amos would have been the first Old Testament prophet, an appropriate bookend to the figure usually reckoned the final prophet, John the Baptist, of whose demise we heard about in today’s Gospel.

Anyway, as the first prophet with a book, Amos set a program which other prophets would adopt, and this is specifically the practice of denouncing the unrighteousness of Israel. As the chosen people, the children of Israel would have been used to hearing prophets’ denunciations of their neighbors and approbations of Israel.

Now, Amos begins his prophecies in a manner which his contemporaries would have recognized. For the first two chapters of the book, we may read of the Lord’s wrath against the Edomites and the Moabites and the Philistines and so forth, and for about the first ten minutes of his sermon, Amos’ audience would have been quite comfortable. These were the familiar old denunciations which jingoistic pseudo-prophets would have given them before, and which would have served as pabulum for a people very much set in their ways.

But then would come the bit Amos’ audience wasn’t expecting. “Hear this word that the Lord has spoken against you, O people of Israel, against the whole family which I brought up out of the land of Egypt.” He had sounded so much like all the other prophets, his audience must have thought, and then he had to go and kick over the ant hill. He had to denounce Israel! It is little wonder that at the end of today’s reading, Amos is told in no uncertain terms that he had better just head back to the farm, away from God’s own native Israel. Perhaps a better end than John, who we learned was beheaded for much the same thing, but still a disappointing reception.

Amos’ audience must have been furious, because what he was doing was saying that the chosen people had the same sins as the Gentiles, that they were just as guilty and that, in a sense, they had lost their special status. They had become just like the pagan people who surrounded them, and thus were no better.

And what were the sins of Israel which made this the case? They were both moral and religious. On the one hand, though the birthright of the Israelites was a strong moral code which protected the helpless and the outsider, the people had begun to “oppress the poor” and “crush the needy”. They had become both greedy and, Amos pointed out, lazy.

But in addition to this moral bankruptcy, the Israelites had become religiously unfaithful. This is just under the surface of today’s reading, the story of the plumb line. God was to level out the land of Israel in a manner they might have found counterintuitive. God said, “the high places of Isaac shall be made desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste.” These were places which were erected to the glory of God, and in the time of Amos they had not been universally replaced by the Jerusalem temple as the locus of sacrifice, and thus they remained important places of prayer and devotion. It would have been analogous to God sending a prophet to Findlay and saying, “you’re a rotten lot of sinners, so I’m going to tear down Trinity Church and St. Michael’s and First Lutheran and on and on.” We would be justified in being confused and angered by such a prophet.

In fact, the places where Israel worshipped provided an all-too-simple means whereby they could overlook their own iniquity. This is a form of hypocrisy we might have noticed even today, and which from time to time I’ve noticed in myself. Now I’m the first to admit that religion is an important, powerful thing. It connects us to God. I’m not at all suggesting that being “spiritual but not religious”, as many contemporary people would say they are is preferable, and I personally don’t see how it’s ultimately tenable (but that’s the topic for another sermon). What I do mean to say is that sometimes our religion can be perverted to the point where it either justifies everything we’re already doing or it gives us an excuse to go out and be nasty people and still be self-righteous about going to church a lot. This was the point God was making through Amos by saying that he’d knock down all their temples. It was the point that a later prophet, Hosea, made even more explicitly when the Lord told him, “I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God, rather than burnt offerings.”

The prophets can get polemical and make their points in shocking ways, and a fulsome appreciation of prophetic literature as a whole suggests that sacrifice and worship were not seen as unbeneficial or any less necessary than they had been. Rather, the point is that without faithfulness to the moral laws of the Old Testament, the Israelites could not render an acceptable sacrifice. The “high places and sanctuaries” and even the Jerusalem temple were built in vain. The Christian analogue to this is that if we’re not prepared to live a life informed by the virtues, we’re not making it better by showing up at church. Both virtue and religion, both moral commitment and worship, must be held together for either to make any sense. This was the point Amos was making and Hosea and even John the Baptist who, we may recall, referred to the religious authorities of his day as a “brood of vipers”.

As Christians we have a benefit, however, in that our liturgical life informs our moral life and gives it shape. I don’t just mean that my musings from the pulpit can occasionally encourage good behaviour, though I hope from time to time I might succeed in doing so, at least for myself, lest I fall into hypocrisy. No, our whole liturgical life is constructed in such a way that faithfulness in worship can help make us better Christians. We are exposed not only to theological truths but to moral teaching by our extensive use of scripture in worship. But even more than that, and in a way we cannot possibly understand or quantify, our regular, faithful reception of the Holy Communion slowly, mystically transforms us into the kind of people God intends us to be. Christ is not just made known to us symbolically in the breaking of the bread; he literally comes to dwell in us when we receive his Body. Thus, we truly do take these Holy Mysteries to our own health and salvation if we do so aright. We take them to the end of being transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit and conformed to the very body of Christ.

This takes some of the pressure off, because it means that it’s not all about what we do. It’s what God does in us. Yet we must remain open to the ways in which Christ in the Most Holy Sacrament is at work transforming us, or we can easily slip back into the hypocrisy and empty religiosity which Amos preached against. So, when you approach the altar this morning, and from now on, I encourage you to consider how the Sacrament is at work in your own transformation, how it is that it strengthens you to live in accordance with the virtues, and even how you might have stood in the way of that transformational work. In the end, the strength we need to be the kind of people God intends us to be is available at this very altar, and it is simply ours to be open to its power to change us.

+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 being Independence Day, and with my having just taught a citizenship merit badge class at scout camp last week, a couple of interesting facts about our Church’s history, strike me as significant. First, it is interesting that the majority of Anglicans in the eighteenth century were Tories, loyal to the British Crown. My one gripe about the musical Hamilton, which we finally saw after the filmed version came to Disney+ in December, is that it makes fun of poor Samuel Seabury, the first bishop in the American Episcopal Church. Anyway a result of this is that the Episcopal Church became much smaller than it would have been, because so many of our number (and especially priests) fled to Canada during the Revolutionary War. I must admit that we found ourselves on the losing side of that particular issue.

A second, more important fact is that our own Anglican heritage, the history of being started as an established state church, has always made the Episcopal Church a little bit less willing to buy in completely to the American institution of the separation of Church and State. Our own brand of Christianity, had grown used to being not only the dominant religious expression but the official state church, not only in England, but in places like Virginia and South Carolina until well into the nineteenth century, decades after the separation of Church and State was officially established in the First Amendment. This is an historic fact which is much overlooked, and tends to surprise people when they learn of it.

While eventually even the longest holdout, Virginia, completed disestablishment the Episcopal Church removing all legal preferential treatment in (get this!) 1840, our church maintained an unofficial status as the quasi-established church of our own country until well into the 1960s. This is why almost every president of the United States, despite his affiliation prior to taking office, has at least occasionally attended St. John’s, LaFayette Square- the Episcopal parish closest to the White House; this is why there are still a great many state funerals and semi-official national events which take place at the National Cathedral (technically, the Cathedral Church of Sts. Peter and Paul in the Episcopal Diocese of Washington); and this is why the Episcopal Church has historically sent more military chaplains around the world with our troops than any other religious body, despite our relatively small size.

All of this is by way of introducing a question, which I am not smart enough to answer, but which should give us food for thought. At risk of sounding like one of those eighteenth century Tories who had to run off to Canada, I would humbly pose the following question: Is there not some place where there ought to be interaction between the Church and the State? Is there a way in which citizenship and Christian commitment can be held together, such that we are not “religious creatures” at church and at home and “political creatures” on Election Day and in front of the daily news broadcast? Cannot the fact that we are Christians impinge upon the fact that we are Americans, and even inform how we behave as members of the body politic?

It seems that the Prophet Ezekiel thought so. God told the prophet “I am sending you to the people of Israel, to a nation of rebels who have rebelled against me.” A nation, a political body which had been chosen by God, required a voice of religious and moral truth to get it back on the straight and narrow. Though our own nation is not “chosen” in the same way as ancient Israel was, we are nonetheless, and for all our problems, blessed by God with a pretty great degree of freedom, prosperity, and peace. Is it so far beyond the realm of possibility that the Church might from time to time fulfill the prophetic role of speaking the truth in love to power, that the powers and principalities of the world might become more faithful to the will of God?

This is dangerous territory, not only because it makes the separation of Church and State murky, but because there are plenty of good, faithful Christians whose political ideologies are significantly different my own. I suspect that if a poll on hot button political issues were to be taken in our own parish there would be a great deal of diversity and disagreement on most issues. So, I want to avoid suggesting that there is a clear Christian imperative which should make the Church’s stance on every policy and piece of legislation obvious. There are those that believe that such clarity is always possible and obvious, and that’s fine, but I’m not one of them. As it happens, I receive much more pushback due to not commenting on every political issue that arises than on preaching from a political stance with which one might disagree. I take it as a point of pride, though others may not see it this way, because I try to recognize that in the great majority of issues du’jour, I truly believe that Christians of good conscience can, in fact, disagree.

What I do want to suggest, though, is that none of us can possibly entirely divorce himself or herself from Christian principles when he or she exercises civic rights and responsibilities. The founding fathers of our own country established a system where an official national church would be impossible, but most of them (with the exception of the most rank Deists like Jefferson) also believed that the Hand of Divine Providence, the Will of God, had some role to play in our common purpose as a nation. In truth, they probably didn’t see as strong a distinction between the life of the soul and political life as we sometimes think they did. The biblical worldview, epitomized by Ezekiel and the other prophets—who spoke the Word of God to the kings of the nations, including their own nation, Israel—saw no such distinction.

For most of us this means that we don’t need to set aside our Christian principles when we enter the ballot box or the public square. We have a valid perspective to contribute to the commonwealth, to the governance of the land we share with so many people of various creeds.

For others this might mean a task somewhat more in the mode of Ezekiel’s, namely the prophetic task of calling a nation back to God or to His Will on a given issue. Often, and most fruitfully, this is accomplished when there is some degree of consensus among Christians on said issue. Even when this is the case, though, it can lead to rejection. God said as much to Ezekiel, and I think that Jesus was getting at the same phenomenon when he told his apostles that a prophet is without honor in his hometown. This danger was more apparent in the days of the Roman Empire and even today under more severe regimes in certain parts of the world. It can happen here at home as well, though, and Martin Luther King was as good an example as any of a prophet who had to undergo rejection and dishonor and even death.

Ultimately, the prophetic task, if it truly be prophetic, will be toward the end of establishing the principles of the Kingdom of God: the sick are healed, the poor are given Good News, life is affirmed rather than death, and brethren live together in unity. These are neither conservative nor liberal principles, they’re Christian principles.

In any event, I think that what we learn from the prophetic gift of Ezekiel and others is that there is not so strong a distinction between being a fellow-countryman and a coreligionist. We need not be sometimes Christian and sometimes American. Rather, the former and primary identity helps shape the latter. It is, in the final analysis, impossible to distance ourselves from the values which Christ and His Church instill in us in order to be secular patriots or something like that. We need not hesitate to pray for our country, and sometimes, like Ezekiel, we need to recognize when it has gone astray.

It’s probably good that we are free from the complications of having a state church, and it might even be good that the Episcopal Church’s de facto status as the quasi-State Church has eroded over the last half century.

Granted, it does make some things harder; when I was at Walsingham a couple years ago, one of the priests with whom I shared a table in the refectory said “I do not envy you American priests, because you have to raise your own money for the church.” As much as I’d love a £9 Billion Endowment for operations and salaries and tax money for building upkeep, not having that might actually give us more moral authority and the ability to speak the truth when it becomes necessary. Even so, let us remember on this Independence Day that as Christians we have not only the right but the responsibility to let our values and our status as Children of God bear upon every aspect of our lives, including the solemn task of citizenship. We must take on this task without the kind of hubris which claims that any of us knows God’s will any better than our sister or brother, but rather with the humility that accompanies the recognition that each is, in his or her own way, trying to live faithfully in service to the Will of God as he or she understands 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.

Many of you know that we don’t have cable television, and one of the things I don’t miss about the ability to stay glued to the 24 hour news cycle on cable is seeing the constant, sometimes indelicate coverage whenever a celebrity dies. It’s one thing when somebody elderly dies of natural causes, like Prince Philip earlier this year, but it’s often especially ghoulish when somebody goes before his or her time, whatever that means. I suspect this was the case last year with the deaths of Kobe Bryant and Chadwick Boseman; like I said, we don’t have a traditional television setup, but the online sources I follow bore this out. Anyway, it’s fascinating how much attention the media pays ferreting out all the gory details, and this exercise strikes me as a particularly important window into our hangups as a society. Part of me would affirm that death happens and it’s often of little consequence precisely how. Yet another part of me is just as curious as those in the media and, presumably, their target audience.

Perhaps it’s because death is such a mystery to us these days. We avoid thinking about it for the most part, and then when a death particularly unsettles us for some reason we try to explain it away. If we can make sense of the mechanics of a particular death, we think we can finally put to rest the notion of death entirely. It can become a problem which our modern, scientific minds have solved, and we won’t have to think about it anymore. That’s what we think, anyway, but then the next shocking death presents the whole issue anew. We might have figured out the mechanics, but so many of us lack a theology of death which helps us put it into perspective.

It seems to me that this problem might stem from the fact that we live in such a death-denying culture, as some of you have heard me say before from this pulpit. We can shield ourselves from the reality of death to a certain point, and we can even convince ourselves that we can avoid it. I wonder if all the exercise equipment and quasi-medical products we can see advertised and all of the elective plastic surgery so many of us undergo prey on our inability to accept the fact that we will all grow old and die (at least one hopes).

Even in our Christian discourse we don’t often acknowledge the reality and profundity of death. We Christians sometimes seem to operate on this notion that “there’ll be pie in the sky when we die, by and bye.” And then when the death of a loved-one occurs we might not understand why it rattles us so much. Maybe some of us chalk it up to a lack of faith. Perhaps others lose faith.

Ultimately, I think this internal, emotional roller-coaster, comes from a misunderstanding of the nature of death. Listen again to what the writer of Wisdom said: “God did not make death and he does not delight in the death of the living…through the devil’s envy death entered the world.” Death, he is saying, is an aberration. It was not part of God’s initial plan for humanity, and that means that we shouldn’t berate ourselves when we find it too much to handle. Death is an effect of the fact that we live in a fallen world. As St. Paul says in his letter to the Romans, “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.” God’s will is for life, and not only for life but for life abundant, a life fully lived in His ways. Death came later, and fights against God’s plan to a certain extent.

And yet death is inescapable because of our condition, because of the reality of evil and of original sin. Death is not illusory; it’s not a trick to test our faith, to see if we really believe in the resurrection.

I remember one day in seminary when our systematic theology professor said something which became scandalous to my classmates, I think because many of us weren’t really listening to what he was saying. He said, just this directly, “when you’re dead, you’re dead.” There was scandal because some of my classmates thought that our professor was denying the resurrection. Quite to the contrary, he was trying to help us understand how profound and wonderful the resurrection of the dead really is. What I’m about to say might sound controversial, but I promise that it is, in fact, the traditional Christian understanding of death and resurrection, so bear with me. There’s not something about us inherently which makes our souls immortal. The Christian view is not that we are essentially disembodied ghosts which after death keep on living just as before. That’s not actually the traditional Christian view, that was Plato’s view and it became popular much, much later in Church history. That view does ultimately deny the reality of death and turns it into an illusion.

Conversely, the traditional Christian view is that death is very real. That the whole of us—body, mind, and spirit—experiences death, and there’s nothing about the way we’ve been created which permits us to avoid that. Far from denying the resurrection, this makes its truth all the more wonderful. When we are dead it is not our own nature but God’s power and grace which brings us to new life. The resurrection is not something we do automatically, it is something which God brings about.

Today’s Gospel reading makes this point. Jairus’ daughter was dead, really dead. Yet Jesus knew that because of the promise of God, death was like sleep. Jairus’ daughter was no less dead, but her death was a period of rest and expectation. It was not the expectation of an automatic transmigration of her soul to some different sphere of being, but that God in Christ would literally bring her to life. And this He did, and this is our own hope for ourselves and our loved ones. While the dead rest in peace, and while we too will enter into that sleep, we have assurance that Christ will bring us back to life fully, not as disembodied ghosts, but as whole, holy, incorruptible people, with minds, spirits, and bodies. When at morning prayer or baptisms or funerals in our own private prayer lives we recite the Apostle’s Creed and proclaim “I believe…in the resurrection of the body” we’re not speaking in metaphors. The Church really does teach that there will be a bodily, physical, literal resurrection, and this is so much more comforting than the idea of “pie in the sky when we die, by and bye.” It’s comforting and esciting. It means that the life of the world to come is not contingent on anything we do, but on the grace and creative power of God, or to use the language of Wisdom “the generative forces of the world [which] are wholesome” because God creates and controls them.

And so, knowing that death is real but not the end we can over time come to terms with it. We needn’t wait for the next shocking celebrity death to broach the topic for us once again, and we certainly don’t need to run from it or deny its reality. Rather, we are called to embrace death in a sense. We are commanded to love our enemies, and death is an enemy we’re called to love, as strange and difficult as that might sound. We are called to love and embrace the reality of death because we do know that it is only through death that we are born to eternal life. For even the evil of this world, death being part of it, can be transformed in such a way that it accords with the ends God intends. All that we need to do is trust God, and keep alive a robust hope in the resurrection.

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