Sermons

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

I don’t think it speaks particularly well of human nature or our current discourse, that we seem to take such glee in seeing arrogant people hoisted with petards of their own hubris. Schadenfreude is not, as the youngsters say, a “good look.” I am not immune. I think this fault in our nature is particularly acute in our current political moment; one need only turn on cable news to get a little dopamine hit when the talking heads highlight some dumb thing some politician we don’t like did or said. Schopenhauer thought this was the worst trait in human nature, “an infallible sign,” he said, “of a thoroughly bad heart and profound moral worthlessness.” If you’re not a fan of Nineteenth Century German philosophers, I’m not either for what it’s worth, but you should be a fan of Scripture, which says essentially the same thing in Proverbs 24:17 and 18

Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth, lest the Lord see it, and it displeases him, and he turn away his wrath from him.

I say all this as a way to caution us as we consider Jesus’ rebuke of the disciples for their argument about who was greatest.

When we read Scripture, I think it is important to take note of whom we are identifying with. This is one of those questions that, at least in my day, ordinands were often asked by bishops and Commissions on Ministry and the like. “With whom do you particularly identify in the bible?” I suppose one is asked this question to weed out those whose God complex might be revealed by answering “Jesus, of course.” It’s worth asking ourselves, too. With whom did you identify in the Gospel lesson we just heard: Jesus, the petulant disciples, or the child whose simple faith is sufficient to inherit the Kingdom?

If our immediate response is “boy, I really loved how Jesus took those disciples down a peg!”, as it usually is for me, we’ve got to be really careful. I’ve got to be really careful, because probably most of the time I’m more like the haughty disciples than I’d like to admit. Most of the time, probably, I’m the one who needs to be taken down a peg or two.

We might not recognize the full force of this “take down” in today’s Gospel because of an important cultural difference between contemporary culture and that of the First Century. If you thought what I said in my sermon a couple weeks ago about dogs in ancient and contemporary non-Western cultures was shocking, hold on to your seats, because children didn’t fare much better in those days.

We tend, these days, to both romanticize and privilege childhood. We wish we could see the world through the curious eyes of children, and we appreciate that they need support to grow, and parents (I’ve been told) can spend a great deal of time, energy, and money curating the early years of their progeny. This is neither altogether good nor altogether bad, of course, but it is certainly very different from how a bunch of first century Palestinian Jewish dudes would have seen it.

To them, and to most people until relatively recently, children would have been seen as little adults who weren’t terribly good at being efficient members of the household; they might well die, so one shouldn’t get to attached, but eventually the kid might grow into a good farmer or fisherman or whatever. I’m not making a normative claim here; that’s just how it was. If I were to make a normative claim, I might suggest that there is a happy medium somewhere between the putatively benign neglect of the ancient world and the helicopter parenting of today, but not having children it is very easy to get dangerously out of my own lane here.

The point is that when Jesus pulls the child into the scene, his audience, the disciples, would not have been been put in mind of some idealized view of innocence and simplicity. Instead, they would have seen a figure whose place is society was considered rather marginal and who, at best, had merely the potential of being considered useful or important. And even that’s a long shot. It’s unfortunate that the image I decided to put on the bulletin cover this week depicts cherubic children gathering around Jesus. It might be more accurate to imagine the child in today’s Gospel as more of a street urchin.

What Jesus, I think, is saying is that this kid has so little social status that it wouldn’t occur to him to be arrogant or presumptuous. That’s what a citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven is like. A child recognizes his or her own dependence, the fact he or she cannot make it on his own, and that is what gives such a one a leg up on the haughty disciples.

You’ve all heard me say that it’s not our job to build the Kingdom of God; that presuming we can is like the hubris of the disciples. Even so, as a people set part, whose primary citizenship is in heaven, we are called to try to live a little bit like we’re already there, not by believing the world depends on us, but recognizing that we depend fully on God’s grace to get by. I think Jesus is telling us today that this means trying to live without hubris and the will to power and everything that makes us feel like we might somehow be greater or more important in the grand scheme of things than the least of our brothers or sisters. St. Gregory of Nyssa put it this way:

Let vanity be unknown among you. Let simplicity and harmony and a guileless attitude weld the community together. Let each remind himself that he is not only subordinate to the brother at his side, but to all. If he knows this, he will truly be a disciple of Christ.

+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.

For some years now, there has been an unfortunate suspicion of expertise in the broader culture. Lest we think that evidence and reason have only recently given way to “vibes” in how we reach conclusions, the historian Richard Hofstadter noted the deep-seated nature of this approach sixty years ago in his important book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. No doubt things have grown worse recently, with social media propagating bad faith claims to truth. Hofstadter was not without fault–indeed, those of political persuasions not his own could be forgiven for considering him a pompous jerk–I think he highlighted a reality about how our distrust of expertise and academic consensus has for a long time led us astray.

Well, as much as virologists and climatologists and the rest may have come in for especial scrutiny in recent years, I think those in my own line of work have experienced this reality for a bit longer. Whether it was the radical reformation which gave us the Anabaptist and Pietiest movements within Protestantism, the nineteenth century “Great Awakenings” which brought modern evangelicalism and a host of new, peculiarly American religions, or just our own seemingly primordial national inheritance of reliance on self, theological and biblical expertise have been sometimes suspect.

We may lament this, and I do, but even then, it is the reality in which we live. It does, however, make more acute the dangers posed by a tongue-unbridled, as James calls it. I think we can appreciate the many ways in which the tongue can “set the world ablaze” to use James’ evocative metaphor, whether it be through harsh words or gossip or the spreading of falsehood generally. But here the apostle speaks in particular about those who would teach the faith, the “tongue of a teacher” drawing on the image from today’s Old Testament lesson from Isaiah. While the prophet rightly celebrates the gift God has given him, the Apostle provides the needed, concomitant warning–not many should be teachers, because getting it wrong can lead many astray.

This is a responsibility I take seriously. I know many colleagues who feel the same way, but what I said about expertise at the beginning notwithstanding, just because somebody is “in the business” as it were, or had the right kind of theological education or whatever, doesn’t mean he or she is always as attentive to this as is desirable, which is why you’ll sometimes hear what I called “bad hot takes” in last week’s sermon from pulpits from time to time. I hope this isn’t the case, but you may even hear them from this pulpit, because even as hard as I try, I’m sure I get it wrong sometimes.

I think, though, that one can’t get it too wrong if he or she is led primarily by the Gospel itself. As complicated as the finer points of theological reflection and biblical criticism can be, the central message–that of God’s Grace–is pretty simple. The bit which controls the horse and the rudder which controls the ship are simple devices which control something larger and more complicated and more dangerous if out of control. So too is the central message of the Good News a simple message that should and can serve to keep the whole church moving in the right direction.

I lost a friend this week, a priest named Everett who served in Oklahoma. He was only forty-eight years old and leaves behind his wife Kristen and three children–Maggie, Cate, and Conrad–so I’d ask you, of your charity to pray for all of them. It was quite a shock to all of us, he’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just sixteen days prior to his death, and while he rejoices in the nearer presence of the Lord, for which we are thankful, his absence will certainly leave a void.

Anyway, Fr. Everett got a bit of attention in both church and secular press for being the Rector of the fastest growing church in the country (Christ Church, Tulsa) which had grown from 40 to 400 in its weekly Sunday attendance. So he got interviewed by a lot of outlets, and it was always heartening to read in those interviews that while he was of course working diligently and allowing programs to pop up as the Holy Spirit led in that parish, there wasn’t anything gimicky or even particularly “creative” about what he was doing there. He was just preaching and teaching the Gospel of God’s Grace.

So he’s going to be an inspiration to me, as have been so many others who cut through all the extraneous stuff to get to the heart of the matter, knowing that operating under the direction of the Holy Spirit, being led by the heart of the Gospel instead of all the concerns we may array around it to try to complicate it, cannot lead us astray. And what’s more, as Isaiah tells us, this simple truth, when on the tongue of a teacher, can sustain the weary with just a word.

+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’s sometimes hard for many twenty-first century Westerners to appreciate the taboos of other cultures past and present, and perhaps one of the most strange to some would be how we regard the creature we call “man’s best friend.” Perhaps this is less common in Findlay, but I’ve spent a fair amount of time in cities in both North America and Europe, where it is nothing to see somebody’s dog in a cafe or shop. I attended a wedding a few months ago in which the couple’s dog was present which, call me a stick-in-the-mud, I thought was a bit much, but In suspect it wouldn’t have occurred as odd to about ninety-percent of those gathered.

Conversely, I’ve also spent time in places where dog-owners were at least a bit apologetic and sometimes properly secretive about having a pet dog. These were mostly Christians in Muslim countries, which may not be surprising. Islam, as I understand it, generally holds that dogs may be necessary evils if they’re used for guarding livestock or hunting, but keeping them indoors and treating them like part of the family is largely considered illicit. So the Pakistanis and Palestinians and Turks whom I’ve known to keep dogs as pets are generally seen as being too Christianized or Westernized, hence covert canine companionship is the order of the day. This isn’t unique to Islam, though. Folks in Sub-Saharan Africa, the non-Muslim parts of the Subcontinent, and East Asia (excluding Japan) are, at least as I understand it, generally not places where normal folks would keep a dog for anything other than practical purposes.

(As a side note, I am pleased to say as a cat-person, that felines are generally more acceptable in a lot of these cultures. This is not, however, universal. I remember a few years ago I hired an Amish man down in Kenton to repair our dining room table. I was waiting outside with one of his sons when I saw a cat and asked, “Oh, what is your cat’s name?” to which the child said something like, “it doesn’t have a name, English. It’s a cat.”)

Anyway, in at least some of these cultures the primary objection to dogs as pets revolves around ideas of cleanliness and purity. Dogs can be found in junk yards and roaming around the outskirts of villages, eating whatever they come upon and lying in whatever hole they find. Who would want to introduce their filth into a home!? They are outsiders, outcasts, ritually unclean and their taint is a danger to a sort of primal human urge to see the impure as dangerous.

No doubt this was the general opinion of first-century Jews, which gives some context to the exchange that Jesus has with the Syrophoenician woman in this morning’s Gospel, in which the latter is likened to a dog. We must be circumspect in how we interpret this passage. I may have seen more bad “hot takes” on this incident in sermons and commentaries than I have in regard to any other Gospel passage. Jesus is not being a racist here. Jesus is not committing that sin and being corrected by his interlocutor. This isn’t to say that Jesus did not grow in his understanding of his mission; he is fully human as well as fully divine, and an aspect of that humanity is certainly growth through prayer and discernment. But he did not sin, and if you pull at that Christological string, the whole tapestry unravels.

Rather, I believe that in this exchange, Jesus was intentionally parroting an argument he knew would be in the minds of the bystanders in order to give the Syrophoenician woman the opportunity to say what he almost certainly already believed–namely that his grace and power were gifts for those outside the fold of the people of Israel. The prevailing wisdom would have been that like a junkyard dog, a gentile was ritually polluted and polluting, that merely being in her company was dangerous. We know from the beginning of the pericope that Jesus did not want to be seen going into her house, perhaps because he wanted to get in, cast the demon out of her daughter, and get out without causing too much fuss, his time not having yet come to reveal the entire truth of his identity and mission. Being foiled in his attempt at secrecy, though, an object lesson was at hand.

To push this a bit further, I wonder if Jesus’ audience here fully understood what I think he was trying to teach. I think the implication is a great deal more radical than saying that the ritually unclean outsider should be given some consolation. Rather, I think what Jesus might be trying to imply (particularly when we understand this episode in light of everything else he said and did), is that the Syrophoenician woman understood something about herself that others could not recognize about themselves–namely, that whatever their privileges by right of birth into God’s people, they weren’t any different.

We aren’t any different, either. Whatever pride we might take in any accident of the estate in which we find ourselves–I’m a proud American, I’m a cradle Episcopalian born to countless generations of Episcopalians, I’m a pillar of the community, whatever–we are born unclean by virtue of the stain of original sin, and even with the mystical laver of Holy Baptism, we are still in constant need of God’s grace. The only difference is that those without the benefit of being in the “in-crowd” can more easily see their need for the Savior.

It’s always dangerous to say that you wish Jesus had said or did something he didn’t, so I say the following with as much humility as I can muster. I wish Jesus had punctuated this encounter by turning around to those who had seen this exchange and said, “do you think you’re better than her, then?” In all events, I think we are best served by asking ourselves that question, and I hope we can all say, “no, not really. I need Jesus just as much. I’m just as much like the dog under the table, needing crumbs of grace and mercy to get on in life.”

To return at last to dogs, considering how I opened this sermon, isn’t it fascinating that keeping them as pets, recasting them from dangerous, dirty beasts to man’s best friend, seems almost uniquely a practice endemic to those parts of the world we would once have called Christendom. Just maybe it’s because deep down, maybe unconsciously we recognize that we were once unworthy even to gather up the crumbs under God’s table, but we have been made Jesus’ best friend. Don’t tell the rectory carts but it almost makes me want to be a dog person.

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