Today, we at Good Shepherd are celebrating the 138th anniversary of this congregation. Here in California, it seems like a quite an advanced age for a church, though some of our fellow Christians in Asia, Africa, and Europe—or even on the East Coast—might still place us in the category of youngsters.
Of course, as is the way with living communities, we are both old and young. Some of us go back four decades and more and many of us have been a part of this congregation for less than ten years. So it’s worthwhile to retell a bit of the story,
138 years ago, the city of Berkeley was just coming into being. The older settlement of Ocean View (now known as West Berkeley) was being combined with a newer one, near the College of California (now the university) plus a lot of empty land between the two. People over here wanted an Episcopal Church, perhaps partly to help consolidate their local identity. The women of the congregation had spent several years raising money for this building with bake sales and ice cream socials (back in a day when there were few commercial entertainments available), and they persuaded a San Francisco architect to donate the plans for this beautiful space.
Since then, an ever-changing array of faithful people persevered here through thick and thin (some of it very thin) and major demographic changes, often pioneering new ways of serving the local community. More recently, this building, as you know, was badly damaged by fire and the congregation rallied to rebuild it. We crowded our life together into our already busy and somewhat decrepit parish hall, and still found the energy to expand our ministries in the neighborhood, feeding the hungry and opposing gun violence.
It’s a story worth celebrating—a story of faithful people who have given much, over almost fourteen decades, to sustain our life together here. It’s also a story about the love of God, who has supplied people here with trust and hope and love when we didn’t have much left in our own reserves. This is a time for thanksgiving and for taking stock, a time for renewing our hopes for the future and our commitment to God and to one another.
Now, I don’t want to take anything away from all this celebratory spirit. But I do sort of have to ask, “Those readings from scripture today—what sort of birthday greeting was that?” Now, of course, they weren’t chosen for this occasion. They’re just the readings assigned for this Sunday in the lectionary. But, at first hearing anyway, they all sounded like real downers.
We have Jesus saying, “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” Now, we can’t take that to mean that Jesus wanted division. He said too much about love and forgiveness for us to read the passage as a command to pick quarrels with one another.
But as prophecy, these words have been right on target. Jesus was saying that his teaching—the teaching about God’s love—would touch an unwelcome nerve in our humanity, would wind up provoking people to division and even violence. He was proven right in the early years of Christianity when outsiders came to hate Christians enough to kill them. In fact, some of that has come back to the world in our own day. But we have to admit, too, that the same effect shows up even among us, even in churches. Christianity, in our day, is full of division—we seem at times to delight in divisiveness. There is even a history, still alive today, of Christians persecuting one another as well as outsiders we dislike.
And I can’t think of all this on this occasion without being reminded, of how, some years ago, an interim vicar took a serious look at our history at Good Shepherd—right back to the beginnings—and said to us, “You know, you have a history of internal conflict in this congregation.” It’s only one part of our history. But, as with pretty much every human community, it’s there and we do well to remember that and watch out for it.
But, you know, leave it to Jesus to tell the truth. He would do that. I think it’s partly because he didn’t want it to take us by surprise. He wanted to let us know, right off the bat, that we aren’t delivered from human weakness and sinfulness—our own or anybody else’s—just by being faithful church-goers. He wants us to know that we are a community of love in the making, not yet in complete fulfillment. We have further to go, more to understand, more growing to do.
What’s more, we need one another, even in our disagreements, if we want to learn and grow in love. We had two readings this morning that centered on the image of The Vine, of Israel as God’s vine or vineyard. Christians have always applied that image to the church, too. I don’t know how obvious it was, as they zipped past, but they’re basically saying opposite things about that image. Isaiah says, “God planted you and is sick and tired of your producing nothing but sour grapes. He’s out of here. You’re toast.” The Psalm takes the other side, saying to God, “Hey, wait a minute. We’ve done nothing all that bad, but you’ve left us wide open to the deer and the wild boar and every passerby. If you expect a harvest, we need some help here!” It’s the age-old argument between the gardener and the garden, each blaming the other for the current mess. Is the gardener right or the garden? The only possible answer is “Yes.” Both need each other in order for the garden to bear fruit.
We sometimes forget that the Bible contains such fierce internal arguments. But that’s what it’s for. It contains our internal tensions, the ones that will keep coming back to us again and again. It doesn’t paper them over. It supplies all the different voices and invites us into the conversation—the only way to begin understanding what God is doing in and with and for us.
All of this gives us some hint of our future at Good Shepherd, for us and for our successors who may one day celebrate its 237th birthday. It tells us there will be divisions. It tells us that our life together will make sense only as we are challenging and being challenged by God and by one another. The conversation will be life-giving if we let it.
And the passage we heard from Hebrews adds another part of the picture—the power that sustains faithful people through difficult times. There is a long celebration of faith in Hebrews; we read the first half last week and this week we concluded it, hearing the message that God’s people have always faced challenges and difficulties and even disasters. But they have come through it all by virtue of faith.
Or, to choose a better term, trust. “Faith” can be a problematic word in English: it too easily evokes connotations of creeds and confessions or maybe “faith”-healing. Sometimes it sounds like denial: “Everything will be fine!” Sometimes it sounds like abdication: “Well, God will have to take care of it.” We think of faith in terms of “faith that“: faith that God will do things the way we want.
But, as Susan Mills pointed out in her sermon last week, Abram didn’t have any very clear notion of what, exactly, he was expecting from God. Rather, he trusted God, trusted God’s ongoing commitment to him and to their friendship. It was trust that sustained these other saints listed in Hebrews through all their troubles. What will sustain us, too, through all our times, through division and peace alike, is trust in God’s , whose good purpose toward us never fails.
We come here week after week for a variety of reasons. Of course. That’s how human beings work. We come perhaps to spend time with friends, perhaps for the chance to sing, perhaps sometimes out of habit, perhaps looking for a way to minister to the world around us, perhaps hoping to find some solace and strength in distress. All this is good, all of it is welcome. But the central reason we come—what pulls all the rest of it together—is the opportunity to be in the presence of God, to worship, to give thanks, to share with God our sense of need, to receive whatever grace from God we are capable of handling at this moment in our lives.
We come, in other words, for the chance to renew our trust in God. We know that life isn’t going to become instantly easy. We know we won’t always agree with one another. But together, we are learning trust in God’s good purpose.
And we are aided in all this by this beautiful church, created 178 years ago and recreated by the efforts of the faithful here today. We are aided by the liturgy with its beautiful order and words. By the word of scripture, even perhaps when it is a bit off-putting as this morning. By the music. By the sacrament we are about to celebrate, this tangible and yet utterly mysterious sign of God’s love.
And for all this we give thanks: to God, to our forebears in this place, to one another.
The Borrowed Garden, on the berm across the street from our house, has been doing well this summer. The wood chips we spread over the past couple of years have suppressed most of the weeds. The volunteer palm is growing new fronds. The baby octopus agaves and transplanted aloes are beginning to make a statement on the upper slopes. And a good many acorns planted last year by squirrels or jays have sent up tiny oak seedlings, some of which seem to be surviving the dry summer.
Then, to our great surprise, a tree trimmer dumped a truckload of chips right on top of our most developed area. Why? It seemed obvious to us that the garden didn’t need more chips, and that this particular spot would even be damaged by them. But perhaps the driver of the dump truck was not thinking much at all beyond how to shorten a trip to the dump. In any case, there was now a mountain of wood chips to be dealt with and, somewhere under it, a small palm and an uncertain number of succulents.
The first necessity was to get the lower end of the pile off the narrow walkway used by people making their way to the BART station. Ah! There’s another question: why choose a 12-inch wide, broken asphalt path, beset with thistles and foxtails for much of its length, when there is a regular sidewalk on the other side of the street? But, in this case, I think I do understand. Most pedestrians prefer what looks like the most direct route—even if it entails a little overland pioneering—to the officially designated one that might be five or six steps longer. Law-abiding citizen though I aspire to be, I’ve done it myself.
Jon took care of clearing the track on Friday, the day the mountain landed. The next afternoon, the first order of business was to try to prevent any repetition of the incident, and Jon created three signs saying, in large letters “No more chips” and set them up along the central segment of the Borrowed Garden. Then he attacked the mountain and made major headway before I got free from whatever work was occupying me and joined him. The two of us worked together for several hours, but we had to quit early because of a dinner engagement. Finally, on Sunday afternoon, we finished the task of distributing the chips, some of it by raking or pitching them onto nearby open spots, but mostly by filling the wheelbarrow and ferrying them to other parts of the garden.
Not till late on Sunday did we get down to the buried plants. I wasn’t surprised that the tough little aloes had come through more or less unscathed. But young octopus agave leaves can be rather fragile and tend to snap if mishandled. Happily they had mostly come through, though I injured one or two myself in the process of excavating them.
It was interesting to observe the passing traffic while all this was going on. Our street has residences on one side, but only the BART station and a stretch of poorly maintained highway department property—and the Borrowed Garden—on the other. Drivers take that as license to exceed the posted speed limit, sometimes more than doubling it. Indeed, many of them get quite irate at those who obey the speed limit. The whole thing is a constant source of irritation for residents on the street.
That Sunday, we had our share of cars speeding past, some with glaring drivers—just as expected. What surprised me was how little provision most drivers seemed to make for their own safety and well-being. I think that, had I been driving up the street that afternoon, I would have exercised some caution at the sight of an old guy on a fairly steep incline turning an old, rusty wheelbarrow around on a twelve-inch wide path—the path itself being right at the curb. He could slip! He could lose his grip! He could have a heart attack from over-exertion! He could have a stroke and then the wheelbarrow—obviously one of those old, heavy metal ones—will be in the street right in my path!
Now, the street is one-way and wide enough for two lanes of traffic, but it allots only one lane, the left lane, to cars, the right-hand lane being dedicated to bicycles. You may think that the drivers were merely being law-abiding by staying in the left lane. No, they could have moved over a couple of feet without infringing on the bike lane at all. Much of the week, in fact, impatient drivers use the bike lane as if it were a passing lane, to the significant endangerment of just about everybody. But most of these folk didn’t so much as swerve a few feet away from us or slow down to, say, the speed limit. They just glared. Even the desire to keep the front of one’s BMW or Mercedes or (worst offenders of the lot) Prius safe from that nasty rusted wheelbarrow couldn’t temper their determination to own that lane.
There is a lesson here. But I suppose there is little point in making it explicit, since we humans aren’t typically very interested in it when we’re in the grip of our unreason.
In a recent issue of The Church Times, Julian Henderson, Bishop of Blackburn, offered a defense of “the traditional view” among Evangelicals on homosexuality. His essay does indeed give what I have come to recognize as a standard Evangelical response. For better or worse, it also makes clear the profound problems in that stance.
He is apparently responding to some Anglican Evangelicals who have begun to rethink their position on this issue. It is an in-house conversation, then, but of concern to all Anglicans. Although I am not an Evangelical, I am an Anglican who shares with them a great devotion to the study of scripture as the Word of God and I have devoted much research and reflection to the present topic. (See my Dirt, Greed, and Sex, 2nd edition, Fortress Press, 2007.) The present post, then, seeks to broaden the conversation into an Anglican rather than a narrowly Evangelical one.
Henderson’s principal claim is that the arguments for change all come “from outside scripture” and therefore carry no weight in comparison to the “traditional view” which, he assumes, depends on scripture alone. I would suggest, however, that his own argument comes “from outside scripture.” He has, in effect, conflated scripture with a particular modern Evangelical interpretation of it. I have nothing against traditions of interpretation. They are necessary and inevitable. A problem arises, however, when any given tradition is made absolute and thus substituted for scripture itself. How does one know when this is happening? When its proponents become so adamant about their own interpretation that they can no longer read scripture in dialogue with other traditions or entertain the notion that their tradition could be questioned, even from within their community.
What are the extra-biblical bases that Henderson believes his opponents rely on? First he feels that the appeal to the Christian “responsibility to show love, welcome, and compassion to all” has led to the voice of experience “becoming a more important driver and authority than scripture itself.”
I find two problems with this. The first is that all interpretation of texts starts from experience and cannot avoid doing so. For Evangelicals, their tradition of interpretation is in fact a formative part of their experience. People reading scripture outside that tradition may and do come up with different readings. Either way, one always winds up reading as a self shaped by experience, both cultural and individual. I do not suggest that all reading is therefore arbitrary. Good reading is critical and open to learning how the text may be different from one’s first impressions. I simply mean that you can only start where you are. If you have committed yourself absolutely to a particular tradition, you can expect to be enlightened by it—but also blinded. Human depravity is such that we will always tend to some extent to substitute the more manageable and definitive tradition of interpretation for the sacred text itself, which is often obscure, occasionally (as Origen noted long ago) offensive, sometimes even unintelligible, and also inclined to challenge the presuppositions we bring to it.
My second problem is with Henderson’s bracketing of “love, welcome, and compassion” as things that might led to misinterpretation of scripture. Yes, any tool of interpretation can also be a means of manipulation. But the dismissal of love, which Jesus clearly underlined as the highest commandment—indeed the one from which all others derive—and its tacit replacement with another commandment to which a higher value is attributed is a maneuver of dubious scriptural validity. Whatever else the commandment to love one’s neighbor—indeed, to love one another (for remember that this is a conversation primarily among Christians, not with the outside world)—it at least requires taking one another seriously enough to listen respectfully to others’ account of their life with God. Experience is itself open to interpretation and one’s self-understanding is never perfect. But love does not permit us to dismiss the testimony of others without careful attention.
Henderson’s second objection confounds two separate issues, one being the denial of marriage to a whole class of people and the other the vocation of celibacy. Paul quite clearly distinguished them, regarding celibacy as a higher calling and strongly encouraging it for all, but emphatically not imposing it on any who had not received the gift of it (1 Cor. 7:1-10, 25-28). The vocation to celibacy is indeed one to be taken seriously, and those called to it have made and continue to make a great contribution to the whole congregation of the faithful. Recent ecclesiastical scandals, however, should remind us that treating celibacy as a requirement rather than a spiritual gift and vocation can produce deleterious results both for those who lack the graces to meet the demand and for the community at large. The effort to require celibacy of a whole population is unlikely to prove any more spiritually productive in the future than it has in the past and also effectively denies spiritual support for those whose vocation is to marry.
Henderson’s third argument is not really Biblical, even though he quotes Jesus. It is an argument about whether the church should accommodate to the environing culture or not. The only possible answer to that question and the only one with historic grounding is “Sometimes yes, sometimes no.” There is no simple formula that can easily distinguish the one from the other. Certainly, one cannot distinguish good message from bad by measuring their popularity. Jesus’ instructions to the disciples indicated that we should expect both acceptance and rejection of the same gospel message (Luke 10:1-11). The present growing unpopularity of the Evangelical opinion in the Western World does not prove it is wrong. But its previous popularity did not prove anything, either.
Still, accommodations with our environing cultures have been vital to Christianity all along.The Christian theological orthodoxy that I share with Bishop Henderson would never have been formulated without the contributions of Greek philosophy, whether direct or filtered through Wisdom of Solomon and Philo. The Reformation would never have happened had it not appealed to a changing perspective among the townsfolk of northern Europe. Slavery would not have come to an end in the Western World had not the very unpopular message of the Abolitionists eventually become broadly popular.
Ironically, American Evangelicals were using the bishop’s argument decades ago, posing as a “counter-cultural” force when they were, in fact, he voice of the dominant culture, representing the consensus of the American public on issues of sexuality. Their opponents were a minority probably much smaller, proportionately, than the early Abolitionists. Evangelicals can better claim a counter-cultural status today, but it would still be misleading. Their US audience is increasingly limited to demographic elements that already agree with them and indeed demand their continuing allegiance. Their new challenge is that their own young people are increasingly unpersuaded.
There is no possible a priori judgment as to whether accommodation to the culture represents a positive or a negative development. Each challenge must be judged by the one absolute value that Christians acknowledge, love. It continues to be a matter of great astonishment to me that, for Evangelicals, the absolute rejection of gay and lesbian sexuality that they find in the Bible (mistakenly, I am convinced) has acquired the same absolute value as the command to love God and neighbor. Indeed, in many places (though not, I trust, in Blackburn) this has encouraged Evangelicals to make the lives of gay and lesbian people hell. I am not blaming the bishop for the behavior of such of his co-religionists—behavior which he rejects. But I wonder what it is about Evangelical Christianity in our time that makes it so easy to replace the command to love with some lesser commandment and to ignore the harm done thereby. I fear that, in their eagerness to be faithful to scripture as the word of God, they have actually wound up making an idol of their own particular tradition of interpreting it. They will not allow scripture itself to say anything not already embraced within that tradition.
Well, perhaps not quite what you were thinking. . . .Pots alongside the shop
I have a lot of potted plants in the garden. They help to define space. They provide spots of color when in bloom. And they can be moved around—within limits: some of them are too heavy to be shifted without serious motivation, others are picky about sun or shade. Pots can also set limits for more aggressive plants that might otherwise overrun the place.
But I also have a lot of plants that occupy their pots more or less by accident, the lethargy of the gardener, and/or the guilt I always seem to feel over failed experiments. (I think my sister Betty is made of stronger stuff. She doesn’t coddle plants that refuse to grow. But, then, she also has less space. My sister Wanda is more permissive than I am, but has far more space to work in. Maybe space interacts with temperament here.)
A begonia for color
Some plants are in pots because they had to be dug up to get them out of the way of construction. Some because I wanted plants to share with gardening friends—always one of the pleasures of having a garden. In any case, many of them have remained in their pots long beyond their replant-by date.
When an octopus agave blooms, it produces hundred of pups. Most of them wind up in the green bin to be collected and turned into compost, but a few of them wind up in pots. For a while, they’re quite charming, with a sort of lettuce-like freshness of foliage, but after six or seven years, they look both disappointed and disappointing. They want out. They want space. They want a proper mountain cleft to sink their roots into—or at least a spot in sunny ground.
Or, again, the Iris confusa, an odd palmish-looking iris that produces a cloud of blossoms in late winter,
Iris confusa
rather like an orgy of white moths—they adapt well to pots for a year or two. But they rarely bloom there. They want back in the ground in a partially shaded spot.
I’ve done lots of rescue work over the last few years, whether from building projects, or in the process of trying to find out what plants work in what parts of the garden. Eventually, my work area in the back became so crowded with them that I could barely move around in it. And they don’t all like that spot anyway—too shady part of the year, too sunny the rest. What’s more, they require regular watering and are inclined to turn up their toes when I go away for a week.
Time to do something about it. One piece of garden near the house has been neglected over the years. I don’t want to put anything permanent in it, since it is slated to give way eventually to a porch, a space for sitting, having a cup of tea, looking out over the garden. I’ve tried using the spot for vegetables in the summer, but without much success. The soil is very poor and shallow, with the local bedrock close to the surface.
Many of the plants in small pots were succulents, prompting me to think that drought- adapted plants might survive the harsh conditions of that space. I’ve popped a great many of them into it and have kept them on a stingy schedule of water once a week. Some seem quite happy. Some looked so pathetic before I stuck them in, it’s hard to tell. Some look as if they have decided not to survive this latest indignity, but most of them are still making up their minds.
The new succulent bed
It doesn’t help, of course, that the neighborhood cats have decided that this freshly dug and very dusty soil makes an excellent public facility for them. That prompted me to spread some stone fragments out among the plants. Success is not complete, but the situation is better. Next step is to wait and see what works—and fill in wherever plants have given up.
At least, I have more room around the potting bench again—ah! a place for pots of the Iris confusa that I need to dig up in order to make way for that Buddleya that’s been in the big pot by the steps far too long!
I want to begin today by giving thanks for the United States of America and for all the good that our history has brought to the world. We in the Western world enjoy a degree of freedom and justice that the world might still be struggling to attain if it had not been for the American Revolution and for all the effort that has gone into maintaining and expanding its goals over the last couple of centuries.
Now, I know this is a bit unconventional in a place like Berkeley. And, to tell the truth, I don’t think I’ve ever started a sermon in quite this way. But it wouldn’t have seemed odd in my childhood. The United States had rescued the world from Fascism, Nazism, and the militarism that ruled Japan, and it seemed natural for a preacher to praise our nation and its contributions to the world. The ongoing challenge of another totalitarian order, communism, gave us still more reason to feel good about ourselves.
And for several decades thereafter, that’s just what we did. We felt good about ourselves—so good that we came to believe that pretty much anything we did in the world must be on the side of goodness and light and freedom and justice.
Then came the Vietnam war and we began to feel less sure. Then came the fall of the Berlin Wall and we felt better again. And then came our deepening and, it seems, increasingly inescapable and destructive involvement in a disintegrating Near East. And it’s been hard lately to feel any great pride in our virtue and wisdom.
And, in fact, it’s not my intention to encourage pride. It can be a good thing, but there always hangs over it the danger of slipping into narcissism and arrogance. I want, rather, to encourage thanksgiving, which is a bit different. Thanksgiving can appreciate the wonder of the blessings we have receive merely by being at this place in this time. It acknowledges that we didn’t make all this by our own perfect wisdom and virtue. At most, we have worked to keep it alive and to share it.
Still, the blessings are real. If you have any doubt of it, there’s one very clear proof: the ongoing flow of people from other parts of the world who want to live here among us and will work hard and take great risks to achieve that. When we talk about them these days, it often gets framed, politically, as a problem—the problem of immigration. And it can be. I doubt that any country in the modern world can absorb the seemingly unbounded numbers of migrants fleeing from famine, oppression, and civil war. But it is also a testimonial to the blessings other people see realized in this place and time. We would be ingrates not to recognize and honor them ourselves.
Now, we’re very conscious these days of our nation’s failings: increased inequality and poverty, continuing racism, extreme partisanship, religiously fueled rancor, the easy availability of guns and the use that some of us make of them. Yet, people still want to come here. Why? Because there is a sense that here people can still work together to make things new, a sense that we enjoy not only the blessings of the past, but the blessing of having some hope for our future.
Our failings are as old as the nation itself. But they’re actually not the most important thing about us. We’re not living in the same US I grew up in. And for all that we may have lost (much of our unreflective sense of innocence for one!), I think we have gained as much or more. We are not, any longer, in the depths of Jim Crow. Those of us who are gay or lesbian have a public existence unimaginable seventy years ago. Women have a greatly enlarged space for choices in their lives. However, narrow or threatening or mercenary or bigoted life in our country can be at times, there are many people from many parts of the world who would be happy to trade their problems for ours.
When I was young, we were so close to the victory over totalitarianism in World War II and to the ongoing fight against it in the Cold War, we could see no evil in ourselves. Now, we are sometimes so close to our troubles that we can see no good. It’s time to stand back and look at the bigger picture and admit that this country has in fact been a blessing to the world in some very fundamental ways. Our principles—and sometimes even our actions—have helped create the freedoms that people enjoy not only here, but in many other nations as well.
I suppose it’s still right to be proud of this—without trying to ignore how poorly we sometimes live up to it. It’s a gift to us and a gift to share. You can call it luck or you can call it the providence of God. I see it as providence—not simply for our good, but for the larger world. Either way, it wasn’t just our own brilliance and energy that brought it into being, and thanksgiving has as much place in our celebrations of Independence Day as pride.
Now, you may be thinking, “Isn’t this supposed to be a sermon? When is he going to get to the scripture part?” Well, the time is now. But after last Sunday, when I talked about all three readings, I should probably tell you up front that I’m not going to try anything that heroic today—heroic either for the speaker or the listeners.
I’m not going to talk about Galatians at all. Not that there is nothing there to talk about. But it would take an hour, I’m afraid, to disentangle it from the tone of anger and frustration Paul has wrapped it in.
And I’m not going to say much about the wonderful story of Naaman and his cleansing from leprosy. What an astonishing tale it is! It crosses ethnic and religious boundaries. It reminds us of the blessings of generosity and humility. It tells us that even the powerful—perhaps especially the powerful need the counsel of people around us, people who can tell us, “You need help,” “You can get it over there,” and “Don’t be too proud to do what you need to do.” One could preach an Independence Day sermon on that one, all right.
But I do want to say a few words about Jesus’ instruction to his disciples in our reading from Luke’s Gospel. Jesus is sending them out to share the gift he’s given them. And he tells them, “Whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace to this house!'” They don’t have a clue yet how they’ll be received, but they give them peace anyway.
He also says, “If they don’t want what you have to give, then move on.” Mind you, Jesus isn’t recommending indifference. You may recall that the disciples last Sunday wanted to call down fire from heaven on the Samaritan village that had refuged to give them a room for the night. Jesus’ directions are that they leave: “go out into {their] streets and say, ‘Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off in protest against you.'” They had their chance to choose a life of freedom, generosity, and hope, and they refused it. It was a tragedy, but you can’t force people to be free and just and loving. No fire! Just truthful testimony.
We grieve over the troubles of people who suffer under regimes and economies that “bite and devour” them (as Paul put it in last Sunday’s reading). And we should. But we also have to come to terms with the truth that even an immensely powerful nation like ours cannot make everything in the world right by exercising our might. In most cases, what we need to do is focus on the slow process of education and setting an example worth following and nudging people toward it, just as Jesus told the disciples to do.
I invite us all, then, to offer thanks today and tomorrow for a country that has been blessed with principles that have given us and the larger world so much and to pray that we may continue to grow in our understanding of those principles and our commitment to them. As for those who would rather bite and devour—we do not take them lightly. We will defend ourselves against them as necessary, and we will offer the hand of friendship when that is possible. But we understand that, even as we offer them the prospect of conversion and new life, the choice will always lie ultimately in their hands and, we pray, the hands of God.
Bill Countryman Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley
SIXTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST, JUNE 26, 2016
Proper 8C: 2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14; Ps. 77:1-2, 11-20; Galatians 5:1, 13-25; Luke 9:51-62
THE SPIRIT OF HATRED AND THE SPIRIT OF LIFE
We find ourselves today pulled in very different directions. It’s the day of the Gay Pride Parade in San Francisco, celebrating a revolutionary increase of freedom that has happened in the last few decades—and it’s also just the second week after the massacre in Orlando. We can’t escape a certain bewilderment and disorientation and, inevitably, anxiety as to what might come next.
Obviously, we’re not yet completely through this great process of change. We’re still caught between celebrating of the freedom of a long-oppressed group and the reality that there are some people who will go to great lengths in their effort to suppress the change.
You don’t need anyone to tell you that people fly the banners of religion on both sides of this tension. Indeed, it goes deeper that that. Some of us quote the Bible in behalf of gay liberation. Some quote the Bible in behalf of fostering hatred. What, one wonders, will God say to us here today through these same scriptures? Obviously, they weren’t chosen for just such an occasion as this; they couldn’t be. Yet, read in the light of our present experience, they seem to have a remarkable bearing on it.
Let me start with the words of Jesus from Luke’s Gospel. It’s a difficult passage. In the first part of it, Jesus behaves exactly as we would wish. His disciples want to call fire down on the Samaritans who turned him away, and he rebukes them. But, in the second part, he is curt and off-putting. To people who want to become disciples, Jesus says things like: “Let the dead bury their own dead” or “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” Isn’t he, in his own way, as hostile as his disciples had just been?
Well, no. However off-putting he may seem, he is not rejecting these would-be disciples. He is confronting them with the necessity of making decisions. I think many LGBT people can recognize themselves in these stories. There comes a point at which you realize “This is the person I am.” And you have to begin living as that person, even if it might mean estrangement from your family. I was struck by a story in the NY Times about young gay men who came out to their families after the Orlando shooting. They realized that it would be wrong to “spare” their parents now only to have them find out something so important about their sons in the aftermath of a tragedy. They realized that it was an either/or moment in their lives; they had to respond now.
Jesus, in this gospel reading is telling all of us that that we will come up against decisive moments like these, times when postponement becomes betrayal. You can’t put the response off by claiming other obligations. No, you have to live the life God has given you now.
We also heard Paul’s eloquent passage, from Galatians, about the fruits of the Spirit. This, he says, is how we recognize life lived authentically with God—from the presence of “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” Not much of that to be seen in the assassin of Orlando or his predecessors in San Bernardino or Charleston or Paris or hundreds of places in the Near East, was there? Obviously no kindness, generosity, or gentleness. But also, and perhaps more deeply, no love, joy, peace, patience, self-control.
This is not a difference of Christian and Muslim. These are gifts esteemed the world over. And Paul is suggesting that they are not just a polite list of social accomplishments. The great sorrows of our day are not simply a battle between one political position and another or one religion and another. They are a world-shaking confrontation between the Spirit of God, trying to bring true humanity into being among us and another motivating principle that prompts us, in Paul’s metaphor, to “bite and devour one another.”
He calls that principle “flesh.” But don’t think, as modern Americans immediately do, “sex.” It’s not about sex as such. It’s about the frightened little finite thing inside each of us that is afraid to take chances, that wants to grab everything and control everything and lock everything down so that it can’t escape or offend us. It’s the quality that prompts us to “bite and devour one another.”
This biting and devouring isn’t all on the big stage. We know it from our daily lives. Remember: Paul was writing to a church congregation. (We all know it’s there. We even make jokes about it.) This may seem like something completely different from killing people in a gay bar. And it is. But the difference is one of degree, not of kind. We who would never commit a great bloody crime still know where some of the motivation comes from. We still have further to go in putting on the generous, hope-filled life of the Spirit.
This will involve the same difficult process of learning and growing that Jesus’ first disciples stumbled over. They were so ready to bring down fire on those inhospitable Samaritans. And that pastor in Sacramento—the one whose sermon about Orlando was so unloving, so devoid of joy, so belligerent rather than peaceful, so unkind, so ungenerous, so faithless, so without gentleness and self-control—that pastor still, like the disciples who wanted to summon hellfire from the heavens, has a long way to go in learning the gift of the Spirit. With God’s help, perhaps he, too, will yet succeed.
Jesus, in today’s readings, told us we must choose. Paul is telling us what we must choose. However great and even justified our anger may be, it will not by itself give rise to anything but more anger. To move forward in a truly human and humane life means learning to live by the fruits of the Spirit, to live out of a principle radically opposed to the one that warps people into biters and devourers.
And what of our first reading, the one about Elisha receiving the fallen mantle, the two-fold spirit, of Elijah? You know, these two men are both deeply troubling figures. In some ways, they might rather seem like suitable patron saints of modern religious brutality. Elijah slaughtered the rival priests of Baal. And, worse than that, he called down a devastating drought and famine in his day. He killed far more Israelites, far more of his own people, than he did outsiders. Even modern military communiques might have trouble excusing all those deaths as “collateral damage.”
St. Romanos, in the fifth century, explained it this way: Elijah was completely devoted to God, but failed to understand that God loves humanity even with all its faults, that God was deeply grieved by all those deaths. And so, says Romanos, God—unwilling to shame Elijah publicly—finally tricked him into bringing the drought to an end. (A story for another time.) But Elijah wasn’t really satisfied and later on, as he began to get restive again, God sent the fiery chariot and took him up to heaven mainly to get him off the earth where he was doing so much harm.
And so his mantle fell to Elisha. In some ways, it was more of the same. His world was a bloody one. He left some corpses behind, too. But most of the stories about Elisha are very different. The first thing he did after the passage we heard today was to cure a village’s spring of some toxic substance that was causing miscarriage. And he healed childlessness and leprosy. He provided food and water in times of need. When he found himself surrounded by enemy soldiers, he did not, like Elijah, call fire down on them, but visited them with temporary blindness, took them captive, handed them over to the Israelite king, and told him to send them home.
It’s astonishing to find the inheritor of Elijah’s mantle beginning to walk the way of peace—and that in an age that saw little value in it. It means that we do not have to get stuck in an age of hatred and retaliation. It will not be easy to emerge, but it can happen by the grace of God and by the willingness of human beings to make the hard decisions and to embrace the Spirit and her gifts.
“Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” We know them all. Where do you see them around you? Where do you see them in yourself? I’m not just talking about heroic examples. The ordinariness of daily life is their seedbed. And they have the power to change not just the passing moment, but the whole world in which we and our neighbors live.
This would be good for Orlando. This would be good for the United States, so riven just now by anger and hatred . This would be good for desperate places like Syria. This would be good for the world. This would be good for our own lives. What stands in the way? Whatever it is, leave those dead to bury their own dead. Take on this other life of “Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”
Jesus’s commandment to his followers is framed in two ways in the New Testament: “Love your neighbor as yourself” or “Love one another.” For the life of the church, both forms are vital, but the second is the more telling. We seldom succeed in loving one another very well. Most of the time we do not know one another and, if we do, we may not like the people we know. What does it even mean to love people one does not know or like?
It is impossible to specify in advance what the full dimensions of such love might be, since love is a creative force, a manifestation of the Spirit. It creates relationship even as it grows out of relationship. But we can specify a few minimum elements of it. One would be to offer respect to one another as human beings and creatures of God. If we keep people submerged into some clearly defined group of “others,” we are keeping them at arm’s length, assuming that we know everything about them we need to know. Those people over there are “western liberals”—end of story. Those people over there are “bigoted evangelicals”—end of story.
Another element of love would be to esteem one another as people of faith. This implies that we all have a story of faith that, however imperfect (and it is always imperfect), is worth hearing out. It means that we do not readily dismiss one another. It also means that we persist in telling our own story, even when we may be saying unpopular things. After all, God has often been known to speak through prophets who were rejected by the larger community. At the same time, loving one another requires us to entertain seriously the notion that any of us may, being human, also be wrong. Our disagreements have to be talked through. But love does not co-exist with arrogance; it only lives in the house of humility.
The opposite of love is withdrawal from relationship—in other words, to use its churchly name, schism. Schism has always been regarded, at least in theory, as a grave sin, precisely because it is the opposite of love. This hasn’t kept Christians from practicing it extensively over the course of our history. But it is still a sin and a serious one, given how specifically Jesus warned us against it.
But what can we do when faced with divisive issues? How were the two parts of the community at Rome to eat together? How are Christians today who disagree over ordination of women, blessing of same-sex marriages, or the authentic identity of transgendered people to love one another and remain in communion? Despite claims on all sides, there is no simple formula for determining in advance which side is right. Christian conservatives were wrong on the topic of slavery in the nineteenth century; liberals were right. On the other hand, in the time of Hitler, some who opposed him could be described as conservatives, while some liberals (at least in one definition of the term) were willing to accept his “German Christianity.” Historically, the course of the church’s future gets worked out through a complex process of interaction. Each age’s issues are subject to a process of discernment. It seldom happens overnight.
How, then, to proceed? The answer is a bit different, depending on where your starting point is. Paul held that those who were “weak in faith” were inclined to be judgmental, those who were “strong” to be dismissive. Having found myself, at different moments in my life and on different issues, on both sides of that divide, I think Paul’s critique is right.
I can’t say why I have the misfortune of living on both sides of the divide. I only know that, by temperament, I like things to be relatively predictable and well-formed. Take the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. I shall probably always miss the cadences of the older language. The late twentieth century may have been a high point in liturgical studies, but it was a low point in terms of English liturgical prose. At the same time, the revisions revealed in a much clearer way the basic form and meaning of the rites, and for that I am grateful. I don’t want things to change. But I do want them to make sense. And, often as not, those two desires are in conflict.
In that situation, my “weak in trust” side thinks that the changes are destroying my religion. Easy enough to think. Christianity has repeatedly been botched by Christians with devout intentions. But my “strong” side is saying, “Oh, but it’s so much clearer and more intelligible now.” The “weak in trust” says, “You’re losing the sense of the numinous.” The “strong” says, “Mystification is not the same as mystery.” And so they go at each other. The “weak in faith” side thinks the “strong” side is a wrecker and a barbarian. The “strong” side dismisses the “weak in faith” side as a prisoner of the past who will just have to get with the times.
How do these two co-exist without producing some kind of spiritual breakdown? The “weak in faith” side has to get reacquainted with the Spirit, the creative whirlwind that deals out destruction as well as new life—destruction, indeed, that makes new life possible. I have to learn that I cannot make an idol out of every detail of my received faith or I will soon have no room in my sanctuary for the real God who is always making all things new. It doesn’t mean that I treat the received tradition lightly—only that I remember that it has changed in the past and it will change again and each change must be judged on its own merits.
The “strong” side, on the other hand, which sees (eventually) the sense of ordaining women or of celebrating the desire of two men or two women to a stable, life-giving, socially-supported and -supporting marriage or of accepting transgender persons as the people they have come to recognize they truly are—this “strong” me is tempted to dismiss the “weak” for not seeing what is so obvious. (I encourage this arrogance when I conveniently forget that I didn’t “get it” right away myself.)
To put it another way, both sides agree in one respect—in their ability to forget that they are not perfect or omniscient—and so each insists on the partial mode of grasping truth that each enjoys. And they’re not forgiving of the people on the other side. They dismiss each other. They break communion. They shut out the possibility that those other people are also trying to be faithful.
What do I hope to see happen? Not that either side should simply give up, but that we remember that we are, all alike, imperfect people who are nonetheless people of faith, people touched by the love of God, people who may yet see things differently. The bad thing is if we ignore each other and pretend that those people on the other side of the church aisle don’t really exist. The worst thing is if we leave the building and pretend that there is no one on the other side of the aisle. “What people? What aisle? I don’t see anybody over there. We left them back at St. Bidulph’s when we organized this new, purer congregation. After all, they were traitors to the Bible or the tradition.”
Loving one another means hanging together somehow through the troubles. And that is possible only if we have the humility to hear one another out and to go on seeking ways to explain our faith to those who cannot yet see what we see. In the process, I think all sides will have to unpack and reexamine their basic assumptions. And we shall all have to learn how to look around us for signs of faith, hope, and love in our lives and in the lives of others. Love does not live in the house of arrogance. No one is infallible—no single Christian, no single group of Christians. That’s one reason why love is so important.
I was in the midst of a series of posts here about problems with purity in the church when the massacre of LGBT people in Orlando made the seriousness of the issue still more apparent. That series was prompted by the way in which some conservative Christians have been ripping Christian churches apart in order to create zones of doctrinal and moral purity around themselves—and are now attempting to extend such zones into the larger community on the pretext of protecting their religious freedom. The crime in Orlando, I’m afraid, shows the graver dangers of the obsession with purity.
Puritanism (I refer to the obsession with purity as such, not simply its particular historical manifestation in the seventeenth century)—puritanism can go to much more destructive lengths. The perpetrator in Orlando was not Christian, but Muslim. His motive, however, seems to have been the same kind of reaction to what he described as the “filthy” Western culture. It differed mainly in that he was prepared not just to push aside people he identified as impure, but to kill them.
That Christians are not immune to the appeal of such a move is shown by the now infamous sermon of Pastor Roger Jimenez, of the Verity Baptist Church in Sacramento, California. Pastor Jimenez claims that he did not advocate such killing (though he did in fact say that the government should be doing it). He only rejected mourning for the dead. That is too fine a distinction to offer much protection to the human beings who belong to the targeted group.
The preacher has taken God’s commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself and thrown it back in God’s teeth. He has entirely subverted the Gospel of Jesus and replaced it with a purity code that justifies rejoicing over the death of the “unclean.” No matter how many conservative Christians may think that this is the teaching of Jesus, it is not. I pray God will reveal to him his sin, that he will come to repentance, and that he will find that his true mission in bringing others to repentance as well.
Some churches have responded very well in the aftermath of the attack. But there has also been a widespread avoidance of language that might seem to acknowledge GLBT persons as people of worth, as Frank Bruni pointed out in his column “A Time to Stand with Gay Americans” (The New York Times, June 14, 2016). Voices from the Roman Catholic hierarchy (and also the Southern Baptist Convention) seem to have been more concerned to avoid any appearance of compromising their anti-gay stance than to stand with an endangered group of human beings. (Bruni noted the voice of the Roman Catholic Bishop of St. Petersburg as an outstanding exception. I suspect that places him closer to Pope Francis than his colleagues.)
The pussy-footing of those who want to appear sympathetic without actually being so is as sinful in its own way as the open brutality of a Roger Jimenez. The silence of churches during the long evil time of Jim Crow helped whites excuse their infamous treatment of African-Americans in this country. The silence of churches on the targeting of GLBT people has the same effect.
All the more reason to give thanks for the many faithful who are rediscovering the love of God and choosing to share in it. All the more, too, to take the whole issue of puritanism in the church as a matter of serious concern in all its manifestations.
When I heard the news of the massacre in Orlando, my first assumption was that the perpetrator was probably a poorly socialized, unanchored, Southern, culturally Christian male like the young man who committed the atrocity in Charleston some months ago. Odd to find that he was a poorly socialized, unanchored, Southern, culturally Moslem male. I made the opposite mistake twenty one years ago at the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
What strikes me is how much the two alternatives seem to be mirror images of each other. Change the religious badge (which is more often a cultural badge in these case than an expression of serious religious practice), and they are not very different. Both take up the same weapons—made so stupidly easy to acquire in our country—and turn the hollowness of their own existence outward into the devastation of the lives of others.
The Charleston killer and the Orlando killer alike could apparently find nothing of positive value to offer to their world. Did they even try to find it? They decided the only thing left was to purge their world of some of the people whom they felt polluted it. American whites have long treated blacks as pollutants. Many groups regard gay and lesbian people as pollutants. It was history that armed the killers as much as the NRA and its political minions.
But where does their hollowness come from? I think there are many sources of it. The chaos of work in our world is one problem. It’s difficult for people to shape an identity around work when it so often takes unreliable and demeaning forms. The lack of meaningful associations is another. Watching overpaid professional athletes on TV is not a substitute for exercise. Absorbing stray ideas from the internet is not a substitute for arguing them out with friends who might disagree with us. The loss of voluntary organizations and the redefinition of modern life as oriented toward individual acquisition can also produce people without meaningful interior lives.
And the rise of religious rant, which has almost eclipsed the great intellectual and spiritual traditions of the world religions and replaced them with hatred of those who are different has a part to play, too. The American white “Christianity” of the Charleston killer and the extremist “Islam” of his Orlando counterpart are not so far apart. Both turn their backs on the positive traditions of their faiths, which have created many of the great monuments of human civilization, and replaced them with incitements to hatred—hatred that empty souls embrace in the false hope of giving meaning to their own emptiness.
The only winner is Hell, the kingdom that lives and breathes hatred. Augustine said that evil has no true existence. In the great scheme of things, he may have been right. In the short run, its power to destroy seems very real indeed. It devours first the killer, then his victims. But the victims at least have mourners who do not let them go without tears.
