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FROM JUDGEMENT TO BETHLEHEM

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Bill Countryman

ADVENT SUNDAY, 2016

Sermon for St. James’ Cathedral, Chicago, Illinois

Year A: Isaiah 2:1-5, Psalm 122, Romans 13:11-14, Matthew 24:36-44

This time of year, I always feel as if I’m caught between two different calendars, grinding against each other like two tectonic plates moving in opposite directions. One is the public calendar that’s hustling us from Thanksgiving to Christmas. It’s very goal-oriented. The tension of preparing for the great day builds and builds—until !boom! it’s all over in just a matter of hours. I confess I’ve come to hate that calendar for cramming way too much into one great climax and consigning the remaining 12 days of the feast to weariness and oblivion.

The church calendar version of this season carries us on a very different time scheme. Advent, too, is pointing us toward December 25th. But instead of plunging us into a goal-oriented scramble, it starts with a strange reverse flow of time. Advent begins far, far in the future with the End of All Things before drawing our minds and hearts back to an event now thousands of years to the past, the birth of Jesus. Luckily, Advent takes its time about this maneuver; otherwise, we’d all have whiplash. But why? Understanding this strange calendar of ours can give us some help and guidance for how to pray and live the four weeks ahead of us.

We begin, as I say, at the End of the World, at the Last Judgement. Jesus, in Matthew’s Gospel, tells us about it. It is unforeseen and unpredictable, he says; “about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven nor the Son, but only the Father.” It’s unpredictable and it is sudden, he says, like the flood that swept people away in the time of Noah. It’s unpredictable; it’s sudden; and it is seemingly random. “Two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.”

It sounds like a summary of our worst fears. And all Jesus tells us here, in the face of it, is “Keep awake.” That’s where Advent starts—with the unknown, the daunting, the uncertain, and the advice to stay alert.

Some years it’s been hard to take all this too seriously. Life was sailing along on an even keel, and apocalypse seemed no more than a topic for the movies—scary, but potentially entertaining. Not so much this year, following an angry and disturbing electoral campaign and during the first weeks of a transition in government that seems to many dauntingly uncertain. And this is not even to mention Syria, the Brexit, global warming, and all the other upheavals in the world around us.

The Last Judgement suddenly sounds more relevant, doesn’t it?

But what, after all, is it intended to accomplish? Our usual reflex answer would probably be “punishment.” But that’s wrong. Contrary to the libelous claims made by generations of religious zealots, God actually takes no delight in punishing. If the Last Judgement occasions suffering, that is a byproduct of its true goal.

The true goal is a very simple thing, really: the ultimate unveiling of all hearts. What God already knows about us, we, too, shall learn in that opening of souls. We shall know it for ourselves and know it inescapably. And it will be unpredictable. It will be sudden. It may well seem, to our eyes, random. What distinguishes that man taken out of the field from the one who is left? this woman taken while grinding grain from the one who is left?

Still, it all seems quite daunting. What ancient bishop or monk, we might well ask, had the perverse sense of humor to put something like this into the calendar a scant four Sundays before Christmas? But there’s more to it. The Judgement is not an end in itself.

We heard about it from the prophet Isaiah this morning:

In days to come

the mountain of the Lord’s house

shall be established as the highest of the mountains. . . ;

all the nations shall stream to it.

It was not in some happy, peaceful, safe era that Isaiah uttered this prophecy of hope. It was in a time of multiple threats, a time of change and uncertainty—a time like ours.

And then Isaiah reveals God’s purpose in this hope filled future:

[God] shall judge between the nations,

and shall arbitrate for many peoples;

they shall beat their swords into plowshares,

and their spears into pruning hooks;

nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

neither shall they learn war any more.

I

Isaiah and Jesus are not in conflict here. God’s goal, the goal of the New Jerusalem, even in judgement, is to see all nations beating our armaments into tools that will sustain human life and the world around us.

The Last Judgement, whenever and however it comes, comes to show us who we truly are. Parts of that revelation may be painful; parts of it may be occasions of joy and thanksgiving. But whatever the Judgement shows us, it is granted to us precisely so that we can wake up and become part of the cloud of witnesses, the saints of this world, who are building the Holy City for everyone, transforming our thirst for enmity and destruction into love—love for God and God’s world and one another. The Judgement by which we see ourselves as we are frees us to join in God’s great work of creation and restoration.

And, yet, as we know, we live now in the in-between time. The Judgement is not yet. We are still trying to figure out where we can get the strength, the hope, the love to live through the present time. And that is where we turn from the Judgement and the New Jerusalem to another much humbler time and place—Bethlehem. No, it wasn’t mentioned in the readings. Those cranky old bishops and monks were too clever for that. Don’t show your hand all at once. Build up the tension before you get to the heart of the story. But they knew what lies four weeks off. And they knew that we would know, too.

This is really all about Bethlehem.

BETHLEHEM

Here comes to birth

the One who birthed us all.

Here lies the Upholder of all,

too weak to raise his head,

God, choosing helplessness instead,

has left the throne of deep tranquillity

to live in human poverty—

Has come to earth.

We speak today about the Last Judgement and the New Jerusalem in order to say that this is a world God has risked entering into. God has not sat back in the throne room of the universe, looking on while we struggle with fear and hope, blessings and disasters, failure and success. God has chosen to experience all this with us, alongside us.

I suppose God had the same thought that occurred more recently to the songwriter Eric Bazilian: “What if God was one of us?” “Risky,” God must have thought, “but worth the danger and the sacrifice. That’s what I choose to do.”

Our times are difficult. We find ourselves caught in deep national conflict, in a changing world order, in a crisis of ecology, and in a time when religion has again become, as it has sometimes been in the past, a stimulus to violence. We also find ourselves uncertain of our direction. Perhaps that’s why we follow the public calendar of feasts so intently: we find the distraction comforting.

The sacred calendar is trying to help us find our footing. If we start with acknowledging who we are, both our failures and our hopes, our weaknesses and our gifts—in other words, with the Judgement—we shall also begin to see ways, large and small, in which we can contribute to the New Jerusalem and grow into our citizenship there—citizenship in the city of peace.

Yes, there’s much to be done in the next four weeks as we prepare to greet the infant of Bethlehem again. But the great truth we encounter there is that God has already come more than halfway to meet us: “has left the throne of deep tranquillity/to live in human poverty.” And the God who was willing to take that risk that will stand with us in our time of struggle here and now.

WHAT WE DESERVE VS. WHAT WE GET

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You probably don’t need a reminder that this 9/11 was the anniversary of the suicide attack on the World Trade Towers fifteen years ago—the day that put Americans on notice that we’re not miraculously set apart from the rest of the world, that we would be experiencing a share of the violence that has become endemic in other places. In a world that’s increasingly globalized, boundaries become easier to cross, harder to fortify.

We’re still experiencing the consequences of that event in our current election campaigns. One side represents our visceral reaction to it—fury, outrage, indignation; the other our ongoing search for a meaningful, productive response. And all bound up in it are questions of who is worthy and deserving of good and who is evil and deserving of ill.

And the scriptures we heard this morning could almost have been chosen for this exact occasion. They all focus on the slippery issue of justice and grace and they confront it in ways that seem, at first, diametrically opposed.

We began with that argument between God and Moses over the incident of the golden calf (Exodus 32:7-14). God is furious. After all the trouble he has gone to in rescuing Israel from slavery, the people have made a golden image and are saying “These are the gods that led us out of Egypt.” He tells Moses he’s going to wipe them all out and replace them with a new nation made up of Moses’ own descendants.

Moses, to his everlasting honor, declines the offer. Perhaps he is thinking, “There’s no future in this. Human beings are what we are. It will be the same story all over again in another generation or two.” Who knows? What we’re told is that he approaches God in terms of honor—part of the basic value system of his time and place. “If you do this,” he says, “if you destroy these people, your reputation is mud. You’ll never get another nation to call your own.”

(Now before you shake your head over Moses for thinking in such—to us—outdated terms, remember that we are as much creatures of our time and place as he of his. Sometimes, in our determinedly democratic way, we aren’t sure we want to allow God any sort of distinctive power at all.)

But the important thing here is that God relents. Is he persuaded by the argument? Did he set Moses up? We don’t know. We are told only that “The Lord changed his mind.” God, it seems, is capable of both anger and forgiveness. And God is one who works with human beings in our own terms as necessary. This is an extraordinary story of faithful boldness, one that leaves me a bit stunned every time I encounter it.

There is an old way of trivializing stories like this. It goes like so: the God of the New Testament is a loving, generous, forgiving God; the God of the Old Testament was an angry and demanding and punishing God. Not so. The New Testament is by no means free of punishment and the Old Testament has plenty of forgiveness in it. Just remember that Psalm we read together (51:1-11):

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your loving-kindness;

in your great compassion blot out my offenses.

The Psalm appeals to God humbly, but confidently. It knows the God it’s addressing. It trusts. But it also knows that we human beings have faults, sometimes profound faults. It knows that these place barriers between us and God and between us and our neighbors. Grace and forgiveness are necessary parts of our lives, the only things that prevent sheer paralysis. It’s nothing to do with waving sin away, pretending it doesn’t exist. No, no. They’re ways of getting beyond it to something new and life-giving. Sin deserves punishment, yes; but only grace and forgiveness can get beyond it to create new life.

Our third reading was from the First Letter of Paul to Timothy (1:12-17). Actually, there are good reasons to think that Paul didn’t write this letter himself. Probably some thinker in a community Paul had founded was trying to “channel,” as we might now call it, what the apostle would say to the challenges the community was facing fifty years or so later. The effort isn’t always convincing, but in some places, he strikes the pure Pauline tone just right. The passage we heard today was one of those:

“I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord who has strengthened me, because he judged me faithful and appointed me to his service, [that’s our author trying to emphasize Paul’s authority; but he goes on] even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. . . . [And why would Jesus do this? He tells us] Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the foremost. But for that very reason I received mercy, so that in me . . . Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience. . .”

Paul the religious terrorist becomes Paul the apostle. And how confusing so you suppose that was for him? Paul himself tells us that, after his conversion he went off into the hinterlands of Arabia for several years (Gal. 1:17-18). I’ll bet he needed a little while to process all that. How does a persecutor deal with it when the God whose people he was persecuting suddenly confronts him and commissions him to be a missionary of the faith he was just trying to stamp out of existence?

Grace didn’t just dismiss his past. Grace built it into an extraordinary, life-giving future.

And finally we heard from Luke’s Gospel (15:1-10) two of Jesus’ most beloved parables: the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin. (There’s the lost sheep right up behind me in the crook of Jesus’ arm.) Notice that both these little stories are drawn from every day life. Nothing exceptional here. Jesus makes that clear in the way he phrases the questions: What man . . . doesn’t leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that’s lost? You know that’s what you’d do. What woman whose lost one of her ten coins doesn’t light a lamp, sweep the house and search for it? Of course! Anybody would do this.

The lost coin gets less attention, but I particularly love it. Here is a woman who’s missing a tenth of what she had to manage her household on for what? a week? a month? Who knows? She is a practical person. She doesn’t panic, but she isn’t going to stand for it. She lights a lamp. Who cares if it’s broad daylight? There are dark corners in every house. She gets our her broom to give every inch of that floor a thorough scouring. Nothing will be missed. If coins could tremble, this escapee would be quaking in its boots.

And so, too, God. Grace, the seeking out of the lost, God’s searching for us in our lostness in the hope of building something new—this isn’t exceptional behavior on God’s part. This is God’s immediate, everyday response to human waywardness.

Yes, God is indeed offended, appalled, even angry at that same waywardness. God, I think we can fairly say, hates cruelty, falsehood, oppression of the weak, arrogance, manipulation of religion for evil purposes, hard-heartedness of every variety. . . . The list is long. We may identify ourselves as great sinners, along with Paul, or as relatively minor ones. However that may be, God is out there every day, trying to retrieve me and my failures and turn them to good use through the workings of God’s grace.

This era we find ourselves living in—the era that turned up in so distressing a form fifteen years ago—calls us to remember all this and to set it at the very center of our consciousness. God is angry with all the harm. And God is searching relentlessly for the strayed sheep, the lost coin. Even the worst of them. And even you and me. Hoping for a way to transform the past wrongs of this world into new life for the future.

So let me leave you with one bit of advice: Watch out for that broom!

Preached at Good Shepherd, Berkeley, September 11, 2016, 17th Sunday after Pentecost

(Proper 19C: Exodus 32:7-14; Psalm 51:1-11; 1 Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-10)

WHAT SORT OF BIRTHDAY GREETING IS THS!?

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WHAT SORT OF BIRTHDAY GREETING IS THS!?

Sermon preached by Bill Countryman for the 138th Anniversary of Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley

13th Sunday after Pentecost, August 14, 2016

Proper 15c: Isaiah 5:1-7; Psalm 80:1-2, 8-18; Hebrews 11:29-12:2; Luke 12:49-56

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.

Happy Birthday to us!

BISHOP HENDERSON’S “CASE FOR A CONSERVATIVE APPROACH”

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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.

GIVING THANKS—AND CHARTING A DIFFERENT COURSE

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Bill Countryman Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley

Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, July 3, 2016

Proper 9C: 2 Kings 5:1-14; Psalm 30; Galatians 6:(1-6)7-16; Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

GIVING THANKS—AND CHARTING A DIFFERENT COURSE

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.

THE SPIRIT OF HATRED AND THE SPIRIT OF LIFE

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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.”

PURITY HAS BEEN A CHRISTIAN PROBLEM FROM THE START

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As I wrote in my previous post, conservative Evangelicals are trying to create a “pure” space around themselves where they can avoid coming into contact with what they regard as impure—preferably at the expense of the people whom they want to keep at a distance. It is a widespread desire—active today across the religious spectrum and even among secularists when they seek an environment purged of religious references. Historically, it’s been a common cause of schism in Christian churches, with the “pure” showing a strong inclination to separate from those they see as unclean, either by evicting them or, if that fails, by leaving the existing community themselves.

This tendency has dogged the church from the beginning. Let me turn to one very early instance of it, described by the Apostle Paul in a somewhat neglected passage of his Letter to Romans. Imagine the meetings of that first-generation church: relatively small groups meet in the houses of the more prosperous members and eat a meal together. The meal begins with the blessing of bread, following the custom set by Jesus at the Last Supper, and concludes with the blessing of the cup. In between, is a full dinner. And that is exactly the problem.

The church gatherings included both people who believe that God wanted Christians to follow kashruth, the ancient Israelite rules of purity, and people who believed God had given grace freely to everyone without any such precondition. Purity in this context, I should note, was understood in an entirely physical sense. All early Christians agreed on what they called “purity of the heart,” which meant surrendering hatred, jealousy, and other evil and harmful motives. The purity that created the problems was the system regulating such physical issues as foodstuffs and food preparation, sexual intercourse, leprosy, and the handling of corpses.

At Rome, food was the problem. Since the life of the church centered at the dinner table, food purity quickly became a make-or-break challenge for it. Did non-kosher members of the community have to observe the rules of Jewish food purity when providing food? Could those who kept kashruth dare eat in gentile houses? The danger was that the church would wind up being split between two entities, one predominantly Jewish (with some gentiles who accepted the importance of purity) and one predominantly gentile (with some Jewish members who believed that God no longer required it).

Modern American Protestants may be inclined to think, “What’s the problem? Separation sounds like just the solution.” Paul was horrified at that prospect. He strongly believed that God, in the Gospel message, wanted to bring Jews and gentiles together in the same community of faith and that this unity was an important mark of Christian behavior.

For Paul, then, it was important to find a way for Christians to stay together without forcing either group to violate their understanding of the faith. But he couldn’t give directives to the Christians at Rome, since he hadn’t founded it. He could only try to talk them into a solution.

In a sense, the whole of Romans constitutes his argument, but he comes to the point in chapters 14-15. There, he describes the division in terms of two groups: “the weak in faith” and “the strong.” The “weak” are those who are pressing for observance of food purity. In modern parlance, we might speak of them rather as “strong” believers: insisting on a full, detailed observance of their religion. Paul calls them the “weak in faith” In the sense of “weak in trust.” To his mind, they lack trust in God. They have a detailed and explicit set of beliefs and practices to which they are committed, but they do not put their trust in God so much as in the practices themselves—exactly contrary to what Paul believed was central to the gospel, namely, justification by grace alone through trust alone.

Paul, in contrast, numbers himself among the “strong,” who trust God to save them without regard to their fulfillment of a specific set of religious duties. This didn’t mean that the strong were indifferent to ethics and morality—just that they emphasized God’s grace in redeeming all people through Christ, Jews and gentiles without distinction.

Paul urges both groups to develop mutual respect and affection. The weak, he says, are inclined to be judgmental. In doing so, they are getting above themselves, for judgment belongs to God, not to them. The strong, for their part, are inclined to be superior and dismissive of the weak, whom they see as just not “getting it.” They feel the weak would be better off giving up their traditional dietary and calendrical practices. Paul wants both groups to esteem one another as faithful fellow-members of the congregation. And he admonishes the strong that they must not put temptations in the path of the weak—in other words, don’t make it difficult for them to follow their own consciences in this regard.

This is surely the only long-term spiritual solution to the problem. If a Christianity that embraces a diversity of people (like Paul’s churches and our own) is to survive, it will always have to surmount the challenge of different basic assumptions among its members. What seemed normal to Greeks in his age did not always seem so to Jews—and vice versa. In order for the community to continue, the whole issue of purity had to be moved out of center place in people’s concerns, whether they were defending kashrut or wishing to be to rid of it.

The church also needed a practical, institutional solution, which it eventually found by separating the rites of bread and wine from the church supper and combining them into the Eucharistic rite that Christians still observe. The issue about the purity of other foodstuffs thus disappeared. Over time, the Jewish component of the church was swamped by increasing numbers of gentiles, to the point that the issue came to seem almost meaningless to Paul’s later readers.

The problem of purity, however, is as crucial today as it was in Paul’s own time, albeit with a changed focus. We are interested not in food purity so much as in sexual purity. Are women pure enough to be ordained? Are same-sex partners pure enough to be included in the sacrament of marriage? What is the status of transgendered people? As the search for institutional solutions to these issues continues, we also need to devote ourselves to the spiritual task immediately at hand: how do we love one another across the lines created by these disagreements? How do the weak stop judging the strong? How do the strong stop despising the weak? More reflections to come on this topic.

Those who would like a more detailed explanation of Paul’s argument in Romans can find it in my book Interpreting the Truth (full information in the column to your right). 

EASTER: THE DISCIPLES TO THE RISEN ONE

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Duccio, The Incredulity of Thomas, 1461
Duccio, The Incredulity of Thomas, 1461

One of the most remarkable things about the resurrection appearances in the Gospels is the way the disciples are perplexed—even distressed—by them. Almost, one might say, “undone,” though in fact it is not so much they themselves as their world that is undone. Things that were clear and fixed have come loose. The future, for them, was now radically different, and they could not tell exactly how. They are torn between the known, mournful past, and this future that they could not absorb—could barely imagine, in fact. That’s why they had trouble recognizing Jesus when he appeared. He had, after all, no business being there. That’s why they had difficulty making sense of his presence when they did recognize him. The following poem tries to capture—in admittedly anachronistic images—some of their confusion:

SONNETS FOR MARY: RETURNING FROM THE TOMB (Matthew 28:1-10)

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This painting by Bellini is my favorite portrayal of the risen Christ. In the lower right background, you see the woman hurrying along. (Clicking on the picture may enlarge it.) Is this just before he meets them? Or just after?

Giovanni Bellini, Christ Blessing, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
Giovanni Bellini, Christ Blessing, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas