Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

By Marsh Chapel

1 Corinthians 1:18-31

Matthew 5:1-12

To be wise is to know what counts in life. On the surface, this means knowing what to value, and what values should guide life. Deeper down, knowing what counts includes knowing the way the world works, what the deep patterns of causation are, how to tell the roots from the branches, what to expect when you pursue your values and your neighbors pursue theirs, and what the prices are for commitment to what really counts.

Bach’s music is wise. Our texts this morning address three dimensions of wisdom.

The first, from Micah, is the rock bottom and is presupposed by the rest. “And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” Justice, kindness, humility. The Big Three. Justice is complicated, of course, and sometimes we have difficulty figuring out the just path. Micah’s point is not to simplify justice but rather to say, whatever justice is, and we do indeed know what it is in the vast majority of situations, do it. I often use the old Book of Common Prayer for morning or evening devotions, and the 1662 version begins with this sentence from Ezekiel (18:27): “When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive.” No excuses. No temporizing. No appeals to ambiguity or understandable weakness: just do it. That plain statement sometimes stops me with tears, until I can remember God’s mercy that helps me face what I cannot face by myself. Then I rush on to the part of the service about confession and absolution.

“Love kindness,” says Micah. The older translations often have “love mercy,” and I think a whole host of connotations are intended here that add up to what Christians have come to call love. “Love love,” is what this clause means. Do justice, but love love. To be sure, this means that we should be loving just as we should be just. In addition, however, Micah enjoins us to prize loving-kindness as the most important personal trait. One can do justice while still being hateful or indifferent. To be kind, merciful, and loving, however, is a special condition of the heart. Jesus did not invent the love ethic as something to supersede the Jewish justice ethic, as so many Christians have believed. For Micah the prophet, justice should define our behavior and loving-kindness should define our hearts.

The reason the Bible advocates justice and mercy as what count fundamentally for human life is that it takes those traits to characterize God. God is just and merciful, and demands justice and mercy from us. We might be a little wary about this anthropomorphic view of God as a just and merciful king—God is so much greater than that. Nevertheless, the God who creates a world in which standards of justice and loving-kindness measure who we are in the perspective of eternity can easily and inevitably be symbolized as just and mercifully loving. Not to do so, in fact, would be to fail to take justice and loving-kindness seriously enough to define what counts in life.

“To walk humbly with your God,” the third thing that counts, would not seem to be a divine trait to which human beings are called. Rather humility is taken to define our very relation to God. To put the point in modern terms, how are we to present ourselves in ultimate perspective? Humbly. How should we behave when ultimate matters are at hand? Not arrogantly. Not bragging about our skills or accomplishments. Not even beating our breasts and crying for forgiveness. We should simply be humble. Humility is the attitude of heart by which we should face God: otherwise we do not know what or whom we face.

Christians go so far as to say that humility, like justice and loving kindness, is indeed a trait of God. When we have failed at justice, love, and humility, God calls us back with the humility of Jesus who, as Paul put it in Philippians 2, “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.” Jesus could break through to the unjust, unloving, and arrogant folks precisely because he was willing to be humble himself. Jesus showed us how to relate to God: with perfect humility. How can we keep God with us in our walk through life? By walking humbly with God.

Of course most of us are not very just, do not love kindness very far beyond the circle of our friends, and are not very humble, waffling as we do between arrogance and self-hate. Or rather, to put the point more humbly, we Christians are still only on the path to justice, love, and humility when our worst enemies are ourselves and the ways of life we have come to prize. Because we have the mind and example of Jesus Christ, and the witness of saints through the ages, there really is no excuse for us to fail at the effort of living wisely. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, it is not beyond our reach to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God.

Yet as Paul said in the lectionary text from 1 Corinthians that we did not read, this gospel that sets us free for justice, love, and humility is bafflingly counter-intuitive. The humility of Jesus to be crucified is a stumbling block to the Jews, Paul said, who expected the Messiah to come with shock and awe, and foolishness to the Gentiles who expected a philosopher. This is the second dimension of wisdom from our texts: our ability as Christians to be just, loving, and humble requires the special humility of faith in what God has chosen as means of grace. “God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.” It is the problem of humility again. We are prone to boast instead. Yet what has God done for us? God taught us justice, love, and humility in the example of Jesus. Thank goodness, other religions than Christianity also acknowledge the wisdom of justice, loving kindness, and humility.

The third dimension of wisdom in our texts is Jesus’ own teaching of the Beatitudes. Jesus goes beyond Micah to say that the just, loving, and humble are happy. That is the basic meaning of “blessed:” happy. Happiness in this sense does not necessarily mean filled with enjoyment. Jesus means rather that people with these characters are happy in their relation with God: those who are poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, the merciful, the seekers after justice, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those persecuted for righteousness’ sake.

In worldly ways, the people whom Jesus calls blessed are probably not happy. Although people have debated for two thousand years just what Jesus had in mind by these traits, they all signal humility, a mournful sensitivity to the suffering of others, responsibility for others so that mercy might be called for, a thirst for righteousness we feel we do not have, the hard discipline of integrating and pruning one’s desires so as to have a pure heart, a willingness to sacrifice one’s interest in order to make peace, and the lonely courage to stand for righteousness in ways that draw down persecution.

During many periods of Christian history, those Jesus called blessed were regarded as wimps. Christians have not
always attended to Christian virtues. The opposite of those who are poor in spirit are those with overweening confidence in their religiosity. The opposite of those who mourn for suffering are those who dismiss suffering as collateral damage in the pursuit of their interests. The opposite of the merciful are those who believe their own righteousness excludes the righteousness of their opponents. The opposite of those who thirst for righteousness are those who declare they have it. The opposite of the pure in heart are those who deceive themselves and lie to others to accomplish confused and dark ends. The opposite of the peacemakers are those who believe their righteousness justifies unprovoked war. The opposite of those persecuted for righteousness’ sake are those who persecute for their righteousness’ sake. We have many people in our land who proudly hold opposite traits to the beatitudes, perhaps even a majority of those who call themselves Christians, all in the name of their own righteousness. Perhaps they are happy in worldly ways of aggressive pursuit of their cultural and economic interests while feeling good about themselves.

But they are not happy in the ways of presenting themselves to God as just, loving and humble. In the ultimate perspective of the great Creator of this vast unmeasured universe, whose main movements are blasts of stellar gasses, and whose islands of hospitality for life are surrounded by cold vacuum, the pomp of human arrogance and self-righteousness is a cosmic pratfall, a joke, an abomination. In ultimate perspective the only way to be happy is to walk humbly with the Creator, to do justice wherever we can, and to prize the loving-kindness that binds us together against the dark and links us to God before whom all other walks of life are foolish offense.

As we listen to Bach, I invite you to feel the lines of his music that seem to come to us from nature far beyond the human spheres and to extend forever beyond our performance, linking us in cosmic loving-kindness. I invite you to hear in his music the complexity that models the intertwining of life in which justice consists. I invite you to understand in his music the signal that the greatest of human achievements is to be humble before the face of God. This is what counts. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 01.30.2005 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Isaiah 42:1-9

Acts 10:34-43

Matthew 3:13-17

The beautiful passage from Isaiah 42 that was our Hebrew Bible text this morning is the first of four “Servant Songs,” as the scholars call them. These are songs or poems in which the nation of Israel is personified as a servant, “upheld,” “chosen,” and “delighted in” by God. The work of Israel as servant is to go for God to all the nations of the world and bring them to justice. This will not be done by force but quietly and subtly: “He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice.” The servant role of Israel is to “bring forth justice” among all the nations of the world. God says to servant Israel, “I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from prison those who sit in darkness.” Israel should not live only for itself before God, as was the theme of the Sinai covenant with Moses. Now God says that Israel itself is given to the other nations as a covenant to bring all the world’s people to justice. Israel is to be God’s righteous servant sent to the world.

The early Christians seized upon this and the other Servant Songs to refer, not to the whole people of Israel as personified, but to the messiah, namely Jesus. Perhaps other Jewish groups identified the servant with an individual messiah, not with the nation. But the portrait in the Servant Songs seemed to fit what happened to Jesus rather than any successful kingly messiah of the sort that the others hoped for. The fourth Servant Song, at Isaiah 53, says things such as “he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity. . . . Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.” That description might well apply to poor battered Israel, as Isaiah saw the scene. But it also could be applied to Jesus, the crucified teacher of justice and peace whom the early Christians believed had redeemed them in his very humility and suffering. Jesus did not fit the description of a mighty military messiah like David at all. The early Christians looked to the Servant Songs to redefine what it means to be the messiah. It means to suffer as Jesus did to bring the rest of the world to justice, bearing “the sins of many.”

Think now of the Gospel lesson, Jesus’ baptism. John the Baptist had been preaching repentance of injustice and the immanence of God’s kingdom that would establish justice. Jesus came to John for baptism, recognizing John’s prophetic authority and committing himself in faith to the justice John preached. When Jesus came up out of the water, he had that astonishing vision: “suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased’.” That was a life-transforming religious experience, if I might use that almost trivial phrase for what Jesus went through. Doubtless he remembered the Isaiah passage, “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights,” and he then understood his mission: to bring forth justice among the nations. Perhaps it took Jesus a while to recognize the full extent of that mission. Originally he had thought it was to Israel only. But Matthew ends his gospel with Jesus commissioning the disciples to go to all nations, not Israel alone.

Paul understood the significance of Jesus to be for the salvation of the Gentiles as well as the Jews. Peter said, according to our Epistle lesson, “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ—he is Lord of all. . . . All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.” Peter said this in a sermon addressed to Gentiles.

Now we Christians take on the name of Jesus in our own baptism. Becoming Christians, we are “of Christ.” What does this mean? Two answers are very important to this question.

The first, and least important, is that by taking on the name of Jesus Christ we enter into the cult of Jesus, the Church. By cult I don’t mean a small extremist religious group, but rather a religious community that cultivates a special way of life. We ourselves are cultivated to be better Christians through participating in our community, the Church. Included in that cultivation is believing certain things about Jesus, and celebrating the significance of his life through the festivals of the liturgical year—today is the feast of the Baptism of Jesus. Most important is the cultivation of the way of life he taught, emphasizing justice, peace, forgiveness, and love.

The second, and more important answer to the question what it means for us to bear the name of Jesus Christ is that we are God’s servants to the world to bring forth justice, as Isaiah said. Justice for us is a large notion, enriched by Jesus’ entire teaching to contain peace, mercy, forgiveness, humility, care for the poor, relief of suffering, love in all ways appropriate to people in different situations. To “believe in” Jesus does not mean only to join in the cult of Jesus. It means also and more importantly to believe in and join his servant mission. Isaiah’s servant did not live for himself but served God by extending himself to suffer for the world. Jesus did the same thing. To believe in Jesus is to live for God’s work of justice, peace, mercy, forgiveness, humility, care for the poor, relief of suffering, and love in and for all nations.

One of the main problems we Christians have is that it is so easy to live for the Church, aiming to make it flourish, rather than for the world. The purpose of the Church is to cultivate us just enough that we take on the life and work of Jesus whose name we bear. We need to hear and understand the word of God regarding justice; we need to cultivate the virtues of redeemed and sanctified people; we need to practice love of one another and develop supportive communities. Those of us in the religion business such as myself spend a lot of time trying to get the Church in such shape as to be able to cultivate these powers for the mission of justice. Yet we should know, as often we do not, that the Church does not live for itself, but for its mission, which is to the world. We should never forget the world when we devote our energies to building up the Church. The Church needs always to empty itself for the sake of the world.

Some Christians
, from the very earliest times, have thought that believing in Jesus Christ means mainly joining up as Christians. They have emphasized conversion and belonging, more than the mission to those who suffer injustice and might not belong to Christ. They are more concerned about getting people to become Christians than doing the Christian work of bringing justice to the world. I believe this is a mistaken and dangerous emphasis within Christianity.

Other Christians, including myself, have construed membership in the Church as mainly instrumental to fostering the real mission of Jesus, the suffering servant. Because so many people in other religions also pursue justice, a Christian’s true solidarity sometimes is more with them, because that is Christ’s mission however they understand it, than it is with those whose mission is mainly to get people to become Christians. Truly to believe in Jesus Christ is to be committed to his mission, and all those who are committed to justice are true believers, even if they do not use Christian language or know about Jesus Christ. They do not have to become Christians to take on Jesus’ identity as the servant of God for justice across the world.

So I am sadly suspicious of Christians who talk of conversion before emptying themselves in the pursuit of justice. It is absurd for Christians to want to convert Jews, because Jews already have Isaiah and his mission that Jesus seized for his own identity. Christian can encourage Jews to become better Jews. And is it not scandalous that some Christians now look upon the devastation in Afghanistan and Iraq first as opportunities to convert Muslims to Christianity and
only secondarily, if at all, as crying needs to bring forth justice, “to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness”?

America has brought forth vast and cruel injustice in the Middle East, attacking two nations that did not attack us, for no reasons that stand examination, destroying not only their governments, but also the infrastructures of their societies, leading to the ready threat of civil war. We treat the people who object to this unjust imperialism, and fight back, as our enemies rather than as colleagues seeking justice. We give new meaning to prisoners in dungeons and their torture, and seek to promote the people who justify such torture to higher office. And much of this evil, that Jesus would have called Satanic, is supported by Christians who seem to care more about converting others to Christianity than Christ’s mission of justice! How can the name of Jesus Christ be so perverted?!

Of course these political and ethical matters are very complex. Tribal and religious conflicts within both Afghanistan and Iraq complicate the insurgency against American occupation. Moreover, many American people support American imperial aggression inadvertently when they only want to attack gay marriage, stem cell research, or women’s rights to determine whether they will carry a child. Despite these complications and ambiguities, the Christian influence on American policy and public life should always be first and foremost to bring forth justice among all the nations, where justice means the rich panoply of conditions about which Jesus preached.

Just as the early Christians adopted and adapted Isaiah’s personification of the people of Israel as a suffering servant to understand the significance of Jesus Christ, so we need to look back
to Isaiah’s priorities for that servant to correct our understanding of the work of those who bear the name of Jesus Christ. Of course we need to foster the Church, the cult of Jesus Christ, in order to take on his mind, to cultivate the virtues necessary for the pursuit of justice, peace, humility, mercy, forgiveness, care for the poor, relief for the suffering, and love in all its forms. We need the Church for the support necessary to witness against the injustice of our own government and to provide a countervailing force for justice in other parts of the world. But we do not need the Church when it fails Christ’s mission of justice. As Jesus said in the Gospel of John, the branches of the true vine that do not bear fruit should be pruned away. Christianity that exists for its own sake is a sucker on the vine that saps the energy of the messiah and those who bear his name. We need scrupulous vigilance to root out those seductive images of salvation that make it seem a matter primarily of being on the right side, merely of joining up, only of belonging to the cult, mainly of converting from a different religious identity. Our Christian life does not truly begin until we find ourselves part of the body that carries on Christ’s mission of justice for the nations. What is the concrete meaning of salvation? It is to do justice, have mercy, and walk humbly with our God.

When Jesus rose from baptism, he saw the heavens open, God’s spirit descend like a dove, and heard God claim him as a beloved son. May we who bear the name of Jesus Christ understand that our identity as servants of justice has its roots in God, not politics, and share Jesus’ confirming vision. Amen.

The Rev. Dr. Robert Cummings Neville

posted in Uncategorized on 01.9.2005 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Isaiah 60:1-6

Ephesians 3:1-12

Matthew 2:1-12

The horrendous tragedy and suffering in South and Southeast Asia this week remind us of the true context in which religion is significant. We live in a world whose natural forces, such as the Tsunami, press ahead on a scale to which human affairs are trivial. Religion helps us understand humanity’s place in a world of such cosmic forces. Those forces also remind us that our God, their Creator, moves on a scale that dwarfs even their terrible powers of destruction and creation. As we weep for those lives drowned out, those people depleted by sickness and grief, those futures destroyed, we need to ask, who is God whose creation breaks shorelines and their peoples like a boot on an anthill? Can human beings be at home in a creation like this?

Today is the feast of the Epiphany in the liturgical calendar, which celebrates Jesus’ “appearance” to the public world. “Epiphany” means “appearance in public.” The traditional gospel text for Epiphany is the familiar story of the three Wise Men who come from the East to see Jesus as one they expect to be a king. The interesting question, of course, is just what it is that appears in Jesus. Christians have always answered that it is God that is revealed in Jesus. So what does Jesus reveal of God?

Today as we struggle to reconcile the Tsunami’s devastation with the appearance of Baby Jesus to the delightful gift-bearing Magi, I want to call to your attention three classic Christian symbols that themselves give content to the Epiphany: that God in Jesus is the Light of the world, that God in Jesus brings salvation to all people, and that God in Jesus is King of the Universe. These are large themes, but they are all necessary to grasp the religious significance of the Epiphany.

Our text from Isaiah says, “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.” Last week I talked about the text from the beginning of the Gospel of John that says, “The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.” In both Isaiah and John, light symbolizes understanding. But it isn’t just any old understanding. It is the understanding of the glory of God. For Isaiah, this meant something like a glory of Israel’s God that would be apparent to all the nations of the Earth, so that they would come in awe and response to worship God and receive divine judgment. The theological significance of this point in Isaiah is twofold, that the God of Israel is not merely for Israel but for all nations, and that God’s glory is something vaster and deeper than politics.

Christians took this passage to refer to Jesus as the light of the world. Now Jesus gave a new meaning to the divine light. On the one hand, according to John and others, the light of the world was the foundation of the creation of the world itself. The light reveals the Creator in the depth dimension of the world. On the other hand, the human meaning of Jesus as the light of the world is humility and faithfulness in love. Jesus was the one who showed God to be with the humble and poor, with those who would take last place and let others go first, with the losers in competition rather than with the hard-drivers. The light of the world never shone more starkly than at the crucifixion when the life of Jesus was snuffed out.

So as we cry for the dead and dying, the starving and grieving, we know that somehow in that suffering is the light of the world. In that suffering is the Creator, who is at once too glorious to be scaled to the concerns of human loss and too intimate not to be present in the stench and funeral pyres. Part of the Epiphany of Jesus is that we are graced by a cosmos beyond our imagining, and yet we are not alone.

Our text from Ephesians is a bit less metaphysical than the light of the world symbolism. Paul, or the author of Ephesians who was probably a student of Paul’s, understood the significance of Jesus to be that by his own sacrifice, both Jews and Gentiles, all the peoples of the world, now have access to God. Moreover, they have a new common way of life, based on love, with model communities of support and worship. Paul said that Christian Jews did not have to give up Jewish practice, and Christian Gentiles did not have to take on Jewish practice or give up their other religious life except in cases where it was synonymous with debauchery. Rather, the early Christians thought of the Christian Way as the promulgation of the good news, the gospel, that God saves all people, and that because of Jesus Christ all have access to God.

So the second thing revealed in the Epiphany of Jesus Christ is that we are all acceptable and need to find out how to live in the light of that acceptability. For Paul, and clearly for Jesus, the way to live before God is in communities of love and compassion. Surely this does not mean that only Christians should get together. It means that we who are only distantly affected by the water’s devastation should take the survivors as our brothers and sisters, equally loved by God, grieve with them for the losses of their families, friends, and homes, and help them to start anew. The Epiphany lesson is that Jesus died for them as well as for us, regardless of their religious beliefs and practices.

The third symbol of God in Epiphany is that Jesus was born a king. From our text, we know that King Herod feared that what would appear in Jesus is a king who would threaten his own throne. Some of you remember from last week’s gospel that Herod’s reaction was to kill all the children in and around Bethlehem two years old and under, a desperate expression of his fear of alternative royalty.

We know from what followed that Jesus was not a political pretender and never became a king in Herod’s sense. But Christians have claimed that Jesus was indeed a king in a more profound sense, a messiah in a sense not imagined by previous Jewish usage. The traditional word for this monarchy is Pantocrator, which means the Almighty Creator and Ruler of All. Images of Christ Pantocrator are common in Eastern Orthodox iconography, and the window above the altar here at Marsh Chapel is a somewhat domesticated version of this. The images are supposed to show how Jesus is at once human, and also the divine Logos. Christ Pantocrator is both the Alpha and
the Omega. However we understand the beginning of the cosmos, its Big Bang, and its ending, perhaps a re-contraction to a new Big Bang or simply a Final Dissipation of energy and order, Christ is the almighty king of that, the Cosmic King. Moreover, because God as Creator is intimately present in each thing within the flow of the cosmos, Christ Pantocrator is almighty king of that too. The Pantocrator is king of the most distant and the most intimate. Christ the King is in the death-dealing friction of techtonic plates, and also in the lost joys, the suffering, the grieving, the sickness, the hopelessness, the help, the sharing, the care, and the love in the aftermath of human disaster.

Nature’s carelessness about human life causes us to ask what place we human beings have in the cos
mos. The founding myths of Genesis suggest that the whole cosmos was made for the support of human life, and we know that this is not so. The cosmos is far older and vaster than anything imagined in biblical times, and we human beings have infinitesimal significance, products of mere chance evolution on a minor planet of a minor sun in a minor galaxy at the center of nothing. In the history of the Earth, last week’s slight slippage of the Indian techtonic plate under the plate of Southeast Asia is a tiny part of the movement that one day will put Bombay miles beneath Bangkok. How can human beings be at home in such a cosmos?

The Epiphany of Jesus reveals that the Almighty King who creates the cosmos of unimaginable span and power is the same humble God who enjoins us to seek justice, practice mercy, to help, and to love one another. For within the vast indifference of the cosmos exists the human sphere in which justice matters, mercy matters, helping others is our calling, and love is divine. Human life is full of meaning. From the intimate tasks of working and living with family and friends to the grand tasks of social justice, world peace, the cultivation of the arts, and the attainment of high civilization, life is meaningful. Its flourishing is a joy and its destruction means tragedy. Suppose our lives are short, they still are meaningful. Suppose our communities and civilizations last only a few centuries, they still are meaningful achievements. Suppose all carbon-based life forms are extinct in a few billion years, they still will have had their eons of glory. Humanly meaningful value does not lie in lasting forever. It lies in the density with which human meaning is rooted in the depths of God.

We are at home in the universe precisely because we can care for one another and share in the meanings of one another’s joys and sorrows. The vast indifference of the rest of the cosmos makes the studied care of human beings and the precious meanings of our lives all the more important. The Epiphany of Jesus Christ, Pantocrator, King of the Universe, reveals this.

I invite you, then, to squint with me in the light that reveals God’s glory so vast and cosmic that the Psalmist asks in amazement, “What is man that Thou art mindful of him?” We cannot deny the brightness of that glory by seeking to make God a domestic caretaker of the human scale of things. That same light, however, is the humble Jesus who illuminates the folds of justice, mercy, and love. I invite you also to accept Ephesians’ call to recognize that all people lie within the creative love of God and are free to approach God’s glory as redeemed sinners. Let us have no partisanship about who our brothers and sisters are, and where we all are going. I invite you finally to join the Wise Men in adoration of the Baby Jesus, helpless in the bosom of his family, nearly killed by imperial dynastic politics, finally killed by a later stage of that same imperial process. For, what that baby will teach is how to be at home as lovers of God and one another in a cosmos for which human life is wonderously strange and worthy. Come to the table where the light illumines God’s glory and our ties with all the people of God’s creation. Amen

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Cummings Neville

posted in Uncategorized on 01.2.2005 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

According to Luke, the angelic host sang to the shepherds, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors.” Christmas is the celebration of peace on earth, for it means that God is in our midst. The mystery of the incarnation is that God comes to us. We do not have to go to God: God comes to us.

In our reflective moments, of course, we smile at the fanciful stories surrounding the birth of Jesus, taking them with a grain of salt even as we love them. Even the logic of God “coming to us” is fancifully symbolic: God is our Creator and we are nothing without God. God cannot be apart from us at all, else we would not exist. So God cannot literally come to us from somewhere else. But we live in the dark about the foundations of our own existence so much of the time that the light that enlightens our true estate seems dimmed. The incarnation means that this true light has not been overcome by the darkness and in fact the light in Jesus calls this to our attention in saving ways. You recognize that I am paraphrasing John’s Gospel’s version of the Christmas story: “What has come into being in him [that is, Jesus] was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” (John 1:4-5)

The lesson the angels drew from the incarnation was peace. Because of Christmas, we have a very deep peace. But it is not a peace we can easily understand. Of all the attributes that characterize our world civilizations today, peace seems not among them. So we need to look closely at what the biblical notion of peace in this sense might be.

The Gospel lesson today reports the horror of Jesus’ birth, not the pretty part. Herod the King was furious that a messiah might be born so he killed all of the children in the Bethlehem area under two years of age. Think of that! Our government calls the slaughter of innocents in the pursuit of one’s goal “collateral damage.” Fortunately, Jesus’ family had been warned that something like this might happen, so they became refugees in Egypt, probably for about eight years. When they returned, Joseph was afraid to stay in Judea, where Bethlehem was, and settled north in Nazareth of Galilee, again a refugee. This was an inauspicious beginning for the incarnation and its strange peace.

Our passage from Isaiah praises God for all he has done for the House of Israel, showing them mercy according to the abundance of his steadfast love. In fact, Isaiah cites God saying of Israel, “Surely they are my people, children who will not deal falsely”; and Isaiah says God will be their savior in all their distress.” Isaiah goes on to say, after our reading, that the people were not faithful and that God did abandon them, only to try to claim them later. The House of Israel did not last, David’s line was cut off, and after a lapse of 19 centuries Israel today survives only by force of arms, not the active protection of God as in the days of Moses. To generalize the point, the biblical promises of God to Israel have not been carried through, and we read these promissory texts as if they were the attempts of a beleaguered people to explain to themselves why they were special to God when history made them seem like minor players, even losers.

What do we make of the divine promises? Those of you who remember the liturgical greeting with which we began our Sunday worship during Advent know that we spoke approvingly of the “sure and certain promises of God” that came to fruition in Jesus, with a similar promise that Jesus would come again. That language comes from our faithful liturgist’s Calvinist background. Was that rhetorical overkill, or perhaps whistling in the dark? For surely history has given the lie to those promises, unless you put up with indefinite postponement. Or perhaps the promises were not about history, as they seemed, but about something else. At any rate, whatever peace we have does not derive from any historical confirmation of divine promises.

Perhaps history is not the right arena in which to look for the incarnation or God’s victory. Christianity in America today is divided into two main families of response to this issue. Many of our conservative brothers and sisters are convinced that the Bible is to be read very much as a commentary on history and a prophetic historical document. The kind of theology expressed in the “Left Behind” series of books is an extreme example, though highly persuasive to many people, of the theology that regards Christianity as a witness to a cosmic historical war between God and Satan. Historical events are taken to have supernatural meaning relative to this war, and biblical prophecies are taken to refer to coming historical but supernaturally significant events. Human beings on this view are not at all decisive actors in this war, but are rewarded according to whether they are loyal to God’s side. One of the major battles of the war was when Jesus redeemed sinful humanity from the clutches of Satan, according to this interpretation. This historically oriented Christianity looks to the conversion of the Jews in Israel and the return of Christ for the last battle.

Biblical symbols for this conservative view of Christianity as literally historical come from the influences of Persian thought on Judaism during the Babylonian exile and subsequent Hellenistic culture. Portions of Isaiah, the Book of Daniel, most of the authentic letters of Paul, and the Book of Revelation can be read in support of this view, although they also can be read in other ways. Our text from Hebrews can be read this way when it says, “Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, [speaking of Jesus] so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.” For Christians of the conservative historical persuasion, it is easy to believe that the enemies of Christian nations such as America are the anti-Christ and that our wars have divine sanction as theologically righteous. Many conservative Muslims feel just the same way, though with the divinity on their side: the Iranian Muslim hate-word for the United States is the “Great Satan.”

For many other Christians with more liberal theology, the ideals of peace and justice outweigh the goals of vindication in the prophetic texts, and the person and teachings of Jesus are far more important than Paul’s account of the cosmic battle between supernatural forces. Liberal theologians emphasize the Gospels, as well as Ephesians, Colossians, James, and the letters of John. For these Christians, the cosmos is understood in scientific terms and the first century image of cosmic supernatural battles is laid down to ancient but false speculations. History for many of these liberal Christians does not have one unifying meaning as if it were a story, but rather is the arena in which social forces in different times and places interplay to produce crises of famine and plenty, justice and oppression, peace and war. Christian engagement is not merely to witness a war between supernatural agents but rather is to bring peace, justice, and abundance to the situations as they arise on our watch, precisely because Christ is with us. History as a whole does not have a narrative meaning. But history provides many contexts in which the meaning of human life is played out in communities and individuals according to the values of peace, justice, piety, faith, hope, and love, and in which human responsibility is very important, not mere witness.

During much of the course of Christianity these two
theological approaches have coexisted, differing mainly in stress and emphasis. This was because both sides used to recognize that all language about God is symbolic and each could acknowledge the symbolic truth of the other side even if each thought its own side was more nearly literal. Now, however, fundamentalism has wrenched the conservative side to an uncompromising literalism. Liberal theology too, alas, has sometimes taken the alleged literalism of science to mean that symbolic thinking of any kind in theology has no standing regarding the truth. There seems to be little middle ground save in those churches with a rich symbolic liturgy that are willing to use the symbols in full knowledge that they cannot be taken literally. I myself stand in the middle ground with a theology of symbolic engagement. But on the issue of whether the Bible’s historical promises are meant literally, I side with the liberal tradition.

All this is to the point of trying to understand the peace brought by the incarnation of God in Christ. That peace cannot be an historical peace. As Herod slaughtered the innocents at Jesus’ birth, we continue to do that today, and with much the same dubious motive of bringing stability to the Middle East. Disparities of wealth that drive people to war and terrorism are as great today as in Jesus’ time. Demonic fanaticism that attaches religious sanctions to political causes is as great today as ever. The only apocalyptic endings we can imagine are universal nuclear holocaust, destruction of the Earth’s ecology, or a cosmic collision. All this is bad news if your bet is on God turning history into a comedy.

The peace that passes understanding, however, is deeper than history. The Glory of the Lord is that God is the creator of the entire cosmos, from the Big Bang to the Final Dissipation. God is the creator of our life on earth, perhaps not a grand narrative but rather countless episodes of social interactions, some connected with one another, others occurring in isolation from many other events. Within the situations pertinent to our lives we have friends and foes, and struggle to defeat the opposition to peace, justice, equity, and love. We have triumphs and failures, joys and griefs, exhilarations and suffering, births and deaths. Our lives are fragmented and often morally ambiguous. Yet we know that, because God comes to us as our very Creator, we are together as God’s creatures in more fundamental ways than our fragmented, ambiguous, and competitive lives might suggest. For we are all parts of the infinitely rich divine life, eternally bound to one another in God. Although it sounds paradoxical, I am who I am in part because of the ways in which you are my other, and vice versa. You are part of my definition. Take away all the things in terms of which I define myself, and I am nothing. For each of us to be what we are, God has provided the whole cosmos.

So Jesus said you should love your neighbor as yourself. The reason is that you and your neighbor define one another and you cannot really love yourself without loving your neighbor. Jesus said you should love your enemy. The reason is that you and your enemy define one another: to kill your enemy is to grieve his mother as yours would be grieved at your death. Jesus did not say that all things are righteous: he said that we should be in opposition to oppression, poverty, and errors of thinking that lead to suffering. But we should know that victory over others is also defeat within the larger economy that embraces both sides.

Jesus said we should love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. God is not exactly like another person to whom we are connected within a common creation. God is the Creator commonly connecting us with all else. Love of God is the flip-side of gratitude for our existence. But whereas gratitude can be selfish, true love of God has to acknowledge God to be the Creator of all those other things that define us, not only those others who love us but also those that hate us, not only the abundance that gives us joy but the poverty that diminishes us, not only the health that makes life a blast but the sickness that saps body and mind, not only the birth of family and friends but the death that will claim each one. God is the common source of all these things that define our glorious, fragmented, and ambiguous lives. To love this God is not easy, which is why Jesus demanded the commitment of our whole heart, mind, soul, and strength.

Nevertheless, loving God is possible precisely because God is the common Creator of us all. The light that came into the world in Jesus Christ, that little child, that refugee, that confrontational teacher, that humble man, that lover, shows us that our own depths are the depths of God. Deeper than our struggles to love neighbor is the depth and loveliness of God our common Creator. To see into these depths is the peace that passes understanding. Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, goodwill toward all. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 12.26.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

The main mission of John the Baptist, the hero of our gospel lesson, was to preach repentance, and then to baptize people as a sign of the seriousness of their return to virtue. Jesus came to John for baptism, and this was the occasion for John to point to Jesus as someone greater than himself. Christians since have transformed baptism into a once-for-all initiation rite rather than just a repentance rite. But we do celebrate the Eucharist as a repeatable rite that seals the bond of God with Jesus’ people. A crucial preparation for the Eucharist is a prayer of confession, which we just recited together. Confession is a preliminary step in repentance.

The sharp point of the Baptist’s remarks about repentance in our gospel text is what he says to the scribes and Pharisees, whom, with his customary good humor, he calls a “brood of vipers” and accuses of hypocrisy. He says that they ought to bear the fruit worthy of repentance, and that they don’t. “Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” Confession of sin is not enough: we have to do something about it and mend our ways. Confession is admitting that we have gone in the wrong direction. Repentance is actually turning around and going the right way.

On this second Sunday of Advent, as we are about to gather around the Lord’s table, we can ask whether we are a repentant people. As a nation we seem not to be peacemakers when we should be, not to care for the poor when that stands in the way of making the rich richer, not to exercise leadership from a position of humility. We seem to be defensive out of fear rather than kindly out of courage, self-assertive rather than loving, simplistic in our thinking rather than realistically complex, and convinced that one culture fits all and is above criticism. I recognize that other people interpret our national situation less gravely, and I hope they are right. But it seems to me that we do not bear the fruits of repenting pride in war, greed, arrogance, fear, national self-assertion over others, stereotyping and lies, and intolerance. Our nation has not turned back to Christian values in these matters, whatever else might justify our policies.

But not all of us favor the national course. Let me say no more about repentance for those who do favor our current national directions: the coalition of those who do is highly diverse, with many motives and differing cultural suppositions among themselves, as well as diverse understandings of the situation. I want to focus rather on what those have to repent who do not favor the national course, among whom I count myself. To be sure, each of us is highly inventive regarding sin, and we all have jillions of things to repent in particular. But my question is reaching for what went wrong among liberal Christians in America who now are so angry, grief-stricken, and depressed because we see our country to have become an aggressor nation when we thought it stood for justice and the protection of the weak, and we see our religion to have been defined publicly by a conservative version with which we share little but common symbols, interpreted very differently.

I have been struggling with this question, and have found a clue in some responses to the sermons I have been preaching recently. Several people have asked me, in one way or another, how they should relate to their conservative evangelical friends and relatives with whom they are in such fundamental and grievous disagreement, people they love despite the disagreements. Of course there is no pat answer to this, but the question itself is revealing. The culture wars in this country have been going on for decades, ever since the resurgence of fundamentalism in President Reagan’s “moral majority.” The theological religious disputes between conservatives and liberals have gone on for almost two centuries. What have we liberals been missing, or not doing, that suddenly it seems like a new problem to relate in friendly Christian fashion to the Evangelical Right?

To be sure, part of it is that we have not been thinking that the Right could co-opt our country and the public face of our Christianity, and it has suddenly done so. This was simply false pride on the part of the religious moderates and liberals. But there is a deeper failure here in liberal Christianity. It has to do with what I call “the paradox of liberal tolerance.” Whereas many outspoken conservative religious thinkers have no qualms about straightforwardly condemning liberal Christianity as unchristian and immoral, liberals have always insisted on tolerance of their opponents. Whereas our conservative sisters and brothers revel in sharp edged issues such as scripture first and last, liberals insist on taking into account every point of view. Whereas religious conservatives most often define morality by what they are against—abortion, stem cell research, and gay marriage in the most recent debates--liberals define morality by large values to which they are committed, such as peacemaking, solidarity with the poor, humility, courage in the face of ambiguity, love, cultural diversity, acceptance of complexity, and so forth, all fuzzy values that find specific meaning only in complex application in ambiguous situations. For most liberals, sharp-edged absolute values without particular contexts are ideological fictions good for nothing but verbal warfare.

Three things result from this difference between religious conservatives and liberals. First, liberals tend to respond to conflict by moving to the middle in order to be accommodating, apparently abandoning their own principles. Second, liberals tend not to articulate their own positions for fear of exacerbating conflict. Third, liberals look mushy and spineless whereas the conservatives look like they stand for something, and by standing for something definite they can rally people to their cause.

What we liberals need to repent of, therefore, is the failure to distinguish the practical work of bringing about harmony and Christian reconciliation from the clarion delineation of the essential Christianity to which liberal Christians are committed. The latter, the call to the positive liberal Christian way of life, is the more important of the two, because it is the justification for the reconciliation with other forms of Christianity. Conservative evangelicals tend to view reconciliation and religious harmony as signs of weakness.

The fruit of repentance for liberal Christians, therefore, should be a vigorous statement of the Christian faith and definite programs that put it into practice. This means, I believe, at least seven things:

*First, a fulsome theological elaboration of the great symbols and themes of the Christian belief in creation and redemption in Jesus Christ, without supernaturalism;

*Second, a detailed reading of the Bible, without crippling authoritarianism or literalism, but informed by all we can know about reading the message of texts;

*Third, a clear theology of the Christian community that does not insist that one culture be imposed on all but that articulates the obligations of many cultures living together with the norms of righteousness, piety, faith, hope, and love;

*Fourth, definite and specific programs for influencing public life in ways that operationalize Christian values of peacemaking, solidarity with the poor, humility, the courage to risk love, restraint on power, cultural inclusiveness, complexity of thought, and all the rest;

*Fifth, the development of specific demanding practices of spiritual discernment, formation, and growth that promote sanctification, wit
hout tying this to any one culture’s manners;

*Sixth, personal and institutional commitment to the most sophisticated and complex kinds of inquiry by which our world and God might be known, without the reduction of discourse to soundbites;

*And seventh, the rigorous education of Christians in these theological and spiritual habits so that we can be conspicuous witnesses in public life, not embarrassed about the particularities of our faith but eloquent in testimony.

The fruits that distinguish liberal repentance in our time, in short, are clear theology without supernaturalism, biblical understanding without literalism or authoritarianism, church life without cultural imperialism, political life based on Christian values without cultural imperialism, demanding spiritual life without cultural imperialism, complex thinking without authoritarianism, and Christian witness without simplistic parochialism. Only when we repent of accommodation and timidity by pursuing these fruits of repentance with vigor can liberal Christians have the strength to reach out to our evangelical brothers and sisters who otherwise seem to us to have stolen our religion and country.

I invite you to come now to the table of the Lord with the confidence that your Christian convictions belong here. In fact they are needed as fruits of repentance for the failure to be proper witnesses to the faith. At this table you will find people of deep conviction who might disagree with you. At this table you will find people who are seeking their way through confusion and doubt. At this table you will find deeper expressions of your own Christian commitments. But I hope that at this table you will find very few people who don’t care. Most of all, at this table you will find the God who comes to us this Advent and every moment, the God whose coming makes our responses to the issues of life matters of infinite urgency. As John the Baptist said, there is something better than and beyond the baptism of repentance, namely the baptism of fire and the Holy Spirit, the fire of love, the Holy Spirit of reconciliation. Come, Lord Jesus. Come, People, to the table. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 12.5.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

If any of us were tempted to think of Advent, which begins today, as only a preliminary to Christmas, the feast of the incarnation of God in Jesus, our texts today would disabuse us. Advent is not preparation for the coming of Baby Jesus: it celebrates the Second Coming of Jesus in judgment. The theme of our texts is that we should wake up for that judgment and be ready. The theme for next week’s texts is that we should repent in the face of impending judgment. The mood of Advent is urgency.

Because Advent and the Christmas Incarnation repeat every year in the liturgical calendar, we know that they are not simply historical matters. The long-ago birth of Jesus was not significant only for its time. It has an eternal once-for-all significance that Christians need to reconsider and appropriate every year. The same with Advent: its significance is eternal and once for all. Because the imagery of the Second Coming seems to be in the historical future, the fact Jesus has not come in so long tempts many people to dismiss the message of judgment. If Advent referred only to a future event, the chances of it happening in our lifetime are so remote we can safely forget it. The urgency of Jesus’ preaching about immanent judgment cannot be sustained very long if it means merely a future event.

Already in the New Testament writers such as John and the authors of Ephesians and Colossians were saying that judgment is less a future temporal event to be anticipated than an eternal state of affairs that is always relevant now. The theological term “realized eschatology” means that we are eternally before God, which means in part “judgment now.” Realized eschatology is the opposite of literalist views of the Second Coming as a future event, made popular in our time by the “Left Behind” series of books. The literalist reading of Jesus’ apocalyptic language, and that in other parts of the Bible, gives rise to some unexpected policies. For instance, many of our evangelical colleagues strongly support the State of Israel, not for the sake of Israel or Jews or out of respect for Jewish religion, but because of their hope that enough Jews will convert to Christianity to trigger the Second Coming. That is actually an anti-Jewish policy. Sometimes literalist readers of apocalyptic biblical passages are in favor of war and chaos, a literal self-destruction of civilizations, also in hope that this will trigger the Second Coming. How far that is from the ethical injunctions to peacemaking that form the content of Jesus’ particular judgment! The result of repeated non-appearances of Jesus, despite temporary excited expectations, is that people finally dismiss Jesus’ apocalyptic language with a “ho-hum.”

The real point of Jesus’ message, I believe, is that we stand eternally before God and everywhere and always are under judgment, not later but now. The problem, Jesus said, is that we are like sleepwalkers and are unaware of this. We are like people before the flood, eating, drinking and marrying without knowing what is going on. Two people will be at work as if everything were normal and suddenly one dies. The householder sleeps on while the thief breaks in. The Gospel of Matthew is filled with parables about people being asleep or unaware of what is going on, such as the story of the tenants who thought they could kill the landowner’s agents, even his son, and get away with it, or the story of the marriage feast where the poor guest did not know what occasion to dress for and was condemned to the outer darkness, or the story of the sleepy virgins who missed the bridegroom, or the remark about the people who can’t tell from the buds on the fig tree that summer is coming. Jesus said, “Keep awake.” “Be ready.”

To apply Jesus’ point generally to our lives does not take rocket science. We know how easy it is to become so immersed in the daily struggles of life that we forget life’s real significance. Mundane things seem difficult enough that we don’t have time for religious matters, except insofar as they can become our mundane routine. Of course we recognize that we have moral struggles, with selfishness, neglect of others, failure to be attentive to people’s needs, and the rest. We know we need to do something about that, and we will, tomorrow. For today we have to get the term paper written, pay the bills, or get some relief from life’s stresses. To this Jesus says, “Wake up,” because tomorrow you might be dead. What you might do later to make amends is suddenly irrelevant. Jesus says, live before God as if you were ready to die. Part of the urgency of the Advent season is that this one might be our last.

Jesus had in mind something more specific than this point, however. When he thought of people standing before God in judgment, he understood that the ethics according to which they would be judged is that derived from the Torah and the Prophets. He liked to quote Isaiah, for instance, and our passage from the second chapter of Isaiah is particularly instructive. For Isaiah, the divine judgment was not so much God coming to judge individuals, as in Jesus’ examples, as it was the glorious elevation of Jerusalem, God’s city. Isaiah envisioned a future in which Jerusalem would be the capital of the world and all of the nations would come to it for judgment. The reason for nations to stream to Jerusalem, Israel’s Holy Hill, would not be that Jerusalem has a particularly powerful or wise king. Rather it would be because God, not some human king, will instruct and judge the nations. “Many peoples shall come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.’ For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples.” Perhaps Isaiah was hoping that this would be the future of Jerusalem, which in his time was sore pressed by the Assyrians. The point for us is that nations lie under judgment, and given the choice would, or should, go to God for instruction and judgment. Isaiah’s image of Zion as the place to stand before God is like Jesus’ images of heaven, or the coming Son of Man.

The religious result of Isaiah’s imagined encounter of all peoples with God on mount Zion is like the heart of Jesus’ teachings: “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.” Isaiah’s prophetic song of divine-human encounter in the Lord’s place was a song of peace. Jesus, the Prince of Peace, said, in the Beatitudes, that the peacemakers are the children of God. When Jesus said we would be judged, at the heart of his prophetic message was that we shall be judged as peacemakers.

We’ve gone to sleep on that one, haven’t we? Because the world has enough people ready to go to war when they think they can get away with it and advance their cause, Christians particularly ought to be peacemakers. Peacemaking is not only truce-making, a catch-up response after a war is started. Peacemaking is seeking out the frustrations, angers, and greed that give rise to war in the first place. How ironic it is, then, that the Western imperial nations sought to spread Christianity around the globe through their conquests but then failed to be awake to the peacemaking lesson of Christianity when our empires collapsed. The retreat of European and American imperialism from Africa, from the Muslim world stretching from Morocco to Indonesia, from India, Pakistan, Vietnam, the Philippines and Cuba, left a vast terrain of landmines ready to e
xplode with slight provocation: ruinous divisions of the rich from the poor, puppet governments that did not care for their people, corrupt rulers and ruling families, national boundaries drawn without regard to cultures, and apartheid structures of one sort or another. India alone seems to have emerged stronger in its days of freedom than in its imperial days, and that is probably because its revolution was led by a pacifist peacemaker, Mohatma Ghandi; even India seems to have a perpetual war with Pakistan. Why were the so-called Christian imperial nations asleep to the ways their withdrawals set conditions for ongoing warfare? Why have Christians since then been asleep to what should be done to alleviate poverty and ignorance, stamp out corruption, and redistribute the world’s wealth, so that the Third World doesn’t need to look on the First World with envy and hate? Of course, Western imperialism is not responsible for every nation’s ills, and many Christians indeed have acted as peacemakers—they are the heroes of our time. But the so-called Christian nations have been deep in slumber about the responsibilities of preventative peacemaking.

And what are we Christian Americans to say about our current situation? Granted, something needed to be done after 9/11, and it should have been aggressive, pre-emptive peacemaking. Instead, the government declared a war on terror and pumped up the inflated rhetoric of patriotic warmongering. The war on terror itself has been a bust because the terrorists just duck; the top leaders are still at large and the rank and file is growing. The government has gone to war with Afghanistan and Iraq, however, two countries that did not attack us. Iraq had neither weapons of mass destruction nor any close connection with terrorism. Whatever our government’s real motives were, disguised by its lies about terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, we are now engaged in continual wars from which it seems we cannot withdraw without causing even more damage. The Taliban are gaining in Afghanistan, and Fallujah was liberated by being destroyed, with the insurgents driven out to new hideouts. Now disaffected young men of the Muslim world are flocking to Iraq, a terrorist recruitment of our own making. The government seems to think that only more war can solve the problem. Meanwhile our poor soldiers occupying Iraq and Afghanistan are the targets of people whom they were misled to believe would welcome them, dying in a war that should never have been started.

How could Christians have been so soundly asleep as to support the government’s policy of glorifying war and defining peace as only what can be sustained by the threat or use of violent force? We know that 70-80% of the regular church-going Christians voted to support that government. We are a church of sleep-walkers. Too many Christians have been hypnotized to believe that war is the road to peace. Too many have fallen asleep to the Christian witness to help the poor. Too many have slept through Jesus’ lesson that humility, not arrogance, is the only way to lead. Too many have gone to sleep believing that only their own culture is worthy. Too many have been dulled by the narcotic of fear rather than awakened to the power of Christian courage. Too many have been anaesthetized to complex, critical thinking by the sound-bites of religious jingoism. Too many have translated the Gospel into their parochial culture without remainder.

And now the Son of Man is calling us to account. “Wake up,” he says. See what you are doing and remember the foundations of your faith, the gospel values for which Jesus died and to which the martyrs testified, the instructions of God on Zion. This Advent is for the sleeping Christians. It is not a season of comfort yet, but of urgency. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 11.28.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

The lectionary gives us three amazing readings today. The text from Isaiah comes from the time that the Jews exiled in Babylon were being sent back to rebuild Jerusalem and its temple. Its song of hope stirs our hearts even today: a new heaven and a new earth. Remember last week’s prophetic text from Haggai said that God will shake the heavens and the earth. For Isaiah, the new Jerusalem will be a joy, no weeping will be there, no children will die in infancy, death at a hundred years will be considered premature, people will build and plant, and enjoy the fruit of their labor. God will answer prayers as they are prayed, the wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox, the evil serpent will eat dirt, and “They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord.”

Don’t we need to hear such a word of hope in our time? Instead of peace we have war, instead of prosperity we have unbridled greed that besotts the rich and beggars the poor, instead of glorying in nature’s harmony, we destroy it for gain, instead of an harmonious world order the civilization of the West is set against the civilization of Islam. The world’s most powerful nation has made itself a loadstone for terrorists where no one is secure, and has so mortgaged its future that others will reap what it plants. We need to hear that there will be a new heaven and a new earth, and that our temple will be restored.

The Jerusalem of which Isaiah spoke was indeed restored and a new temple built grander than the old one. That new temple was precisely the one Jesus predicted would be destroyed, with not one stone left on another. Jerusalem, and Israel as a nation would be destroyed too. All that happened in fact between Jesus’ time and the time Luke wrote his gospel. Isaiah’s new heaven and new earth lasted only about 550 years, and even during much of that time Israel was an occupied country.

Jesus also said that his followers were in for a hard time. If they were to remain true in their witness to his gospel, they would be arrested and persecuted, betrayed even by their family and friends. Moreover, they would be called to testify to their neighbors and in public life before high governmental figures. They would be put in prison and subjected to the authority of religion hostile to Jesus’ true gospel. All these things did indeed happen between the time of Jesus and the time Luke wrote his gospel—many of them are recorded in Luke’s second volume, the Acts of the Apostles.

Our situation is more like the one Jesus was talking about than Isaiah’s. Because it is so difficult, and Jesus’ followers would be roundly hated and some put to death, he said that they would save their souls by their endurance. He did not say they would escape persecution and death, but through endurance while they lived, they would escape the loss of their souls, a theme he talked about quite a lot. Paul put the point even more directly: to endure in a time of perilous Christian witness people have to work hard. If anyone in the community of witnesses will not work, let them not eat!

Now how does all this apply to us? I need to begin with a little personal testimony. I came to adolescent political consciousness after the Second World War, which I thought on the whole was a just war, won by the right side. I took pride in the United Nations as a positive if imperfect step toward democracy and the containment of violence. The Cold War was scary but it turned out that no one really wanted war and Communism’s totalitarianism was simply not viable. I grew up in the civil rights movement, which recognized a great and longstanding evil and actually made significant progress to rectify it. Of course the brutal effects of slavery have not been erased, but they are tractable to progress, I thought. The Vietnam War, and the counter-cultural revolution it spawned, seemed to me the painful ending of the era of Western imperialism. I hoped that the Hippie movement would mature into a humbler conception of the role of America in the world and an economic worldview that would set stringent controls on the evil excesses of capitalism, while acknowledging its obvious benefits as an economic system. Although the culture of consumerism had long been recognized as a demonic parody of the culture of freedom, the very fact that this had long been recognized and criticized meant to me that it was not out of control. In sum, as I matured as a Christian I thought that the Christian critique of American culture was in place, and that I could participate in applying its pressures to the social, cultural, and political scenes of my time. In fact, I thought that the Christian critique of American culture was itself a powerful part of that very culture.

The recent election, however, has disabused me of that view, which I think was shared by many. I believe now that the choices made in the election render a serious Christian witness dangerous, as it has been at so many points in history, and for that very reason all the more necessary. I believe the Christian witness will divide families as it has rarely done in recent history. It will be punished by a government that treats disagreement as unpatriotic and unsupportive of our soldiers who occupy foreign countries. The religious culture that has recently achieved establishment status by its contribution to the election will condemn Christian witness as heretical to its alternate vision of what that witness is. Because there is such disagreement as to what that witness is, permit me to say what I think its basic tenets are.

First, in the arena of international politics the Christian witness is primarily to peacemaking. After 9/11 it was of course imperative for the American people and government to support a vigorous international police action to apprehend the murderous terrorists and break up the terrorist rings around the world that threaten everyone’s security. But even more imperative for Christian witness, the American people and government should have taken pre-emptive action to make sure there were no warlike responses and to investigate the reasons and conditions for the 9/11 attack. When people are so aggrieved as to resort to widely-supported terrorism, their grievances need to be addressed at the front of our agenda. Christian liberals are called weak because they want to eliminate the anger that fuels terrorism, yet that is the Christian witness to peace-making. Because our nation has consistently chosen war over peace-making on this issue, our witness needs continually to criticize that choice and devise steps toward peace-making now.

Second, although justice is always important, a dimension of every Christian critical endeavor, the Christian witness is that judgment should be left to God and that Christian effort should be to help the poor and relatively powerless. While our nation has vaunted its strength and wealth, it has also let the poor get poorer at home on many fronts, for instance in jobs education, welfare, taxation, and community participation. The Christian witness should always be in solidarity with the poor, and if that looks like weakness to the rich and powerful, so be it.

Third, Christian witness needs always to lead from a position of humility rather than arrogance and self-righteousness. The very idea that America should insist that its own righteousness justifies masking motives for war with lies so easily found out, disregarding the interests and advice of allies, and claiming that anyone who criticizes the government is unpatriotic and helpful to the “enemy,” is abhorrent to Christian witness. If Jesus could say, in reference to himself, that no one is good except God, how can th
e government claim such goodness and represent itself as religious?

Fourth, the Christian witness should be to a generous acceptance of all peoples and their religions, with the same critical tools brought to Christian theology as should be brought to the theologies of others. Jesus represented this in his inclusive table fellowship and in his courteous treatment of people from other religions (Samaritans, Canaanites, and pagan Romans). Jesus said he had sheep of other folds than that of his own disciples. His God would create no people who are not loved and filled with grace in spiritual as well as other matters. Christian witness needs to be sounded loud and clear against bigotry and exclusivism, even when that seems to be a liberal pampering of enemies. Christians should tolerate no one to remain their enemy if it is at all possible to change that.

Fifth, the Christian witness should always be to love. “Love your enemies,” said Jesus. Love is perhaps too personal a trait to be a political virtue. Yet love or its lack is the inner formation of the attitudes that shape public policies. Christian witness needs to expose the hate that demonizes gays and lesbians, African-Americans and women who seem too uppity, Jews who insist on not being Christians, Muslims who think Americans are greedy, and liberals who put principle above pre-fix patriotism. The other side of exposing hate is reaching out to the haters in love.

Sixth, the Christian witness should always be to courage over fear. Christians are confident of the salvation that comes from God and have no need to fear what the world brings, however canny and prudent we should be. People with no real God strike out in fear against real, imagined, and demonized enemies. They let fear keep them from peacemaking, helping the poor, taking the humble place, the acceptance of people who are different from themselves, and the risks of love. Fear makes them warmongers, greedy for themselves, arrogant as a form of whistling in the dark, bigots, and haters. Such fear is incompatible with the Christian faith, which says that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Most of all, courage is the Christian witness against the fear of ambiguity and confusion. Christian faith accepts life’s ambiguities and witnesses to the power of God’s grace to get us through.

Seventh, and most important for people whose religious connection is with a university church, the Christian witness is to the complexity of life before God. To understand the complexities of life, including its ambiguities, requires dedicated, sophisticated, complex thinking, which is a primary way of worshipping the divine Word. The Christian witness to this is both negative and positive. Negatively, the Christian witness needs to expose and ridicule simplistic religion and simplistic politics. The worst kind of theology is that which reduces itself to a simple story with winners and losers, God’s people and the enemy. Theology of that sort sells a lot of books these days, and it should be exposed for the satanic simplification that it is. Positively, Christian witness needs to enter into the kind of complex inquiry that can sort through complicated issues and deal with ambiguities. Political and economic issues are difficult enough, and Christian witness should support scholars inquiring about them. Theological issues are even more complicated, and Christian witness should demand preaching and teaching equal to the task. Set aside the desire for a simple take-home message and demand to be shown the complex insides of issues. Christian thinking needs to respect the witness of peacemaking, solidarity with the poor, humility, neighborliness, love, and courage. Yet that respect should never lead it to simplifications that lie.

Peacemaking, solidarity with the poor, humility, neighborliness across cultures, love, and courageous confidence in God’s grace, are not the exclusive preserve of the Christian witness. Change the rhetoric only slightly and those points can be the witnesses of Jews and Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus, Daoists and Confucians. They all point to a counter-culture against the recent majority. The unanimity of that ecumenical religious witness gives great hope in a time when all need to go into opposition to the majority culture, however slim the majority is. The most important power of witness is that it can bring light to those who had mistaken martial strength, wealth, arrogance, prideful bigotry, self-righteous hatred, and defensive fear, for wisdom. The people who have made those mistakes are our fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, children, and friends. Not for winning the next election, but for the sake of their souls, and ours, let us endure together to touch the Spirit and voice the witness of the crucified and risen One. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 11.14.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Most of you know the famous recitative from Handel’s Messiah that precedes the Refiner’s Fire aria. The standard English text is, “Thus saith the Lord, the Lord of Hosts: Yet once, a little while, and I will shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land, and I will shake, and I will shake all nations; I’ll shake the heavens, the earth, the sea, the dry land, all nations, I’ll shake; and the desire of all nations shall come. The Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to His temple; ev’n the messenger of the Covenant, whom ye delight in: behold, He shall come, saith the Lord of Hosts.” This is our reading from Haggai in a slightly different translation. Haggai was a prophet when Cyrus of Persia returned the Jewish leadership to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon, and he was anxious to promote the rebuilding of the Temple that had been destroyed a half-century earlier. Haggai did not say, with Handel, that the Lord whom ye seek will come to the Temple; he said rather that the gold of all nations shall come to adorn the Temple. Haggai was confident that the rebuilding of the Temple would in fact rebuild the nation of Israel.

My concern here is not with Haggai’s building program but with God’s power to shake. Of course, to say that God shakes the heavens, the earth, the seas, the dry lands, and all nations, is symbolic speech. God is the creator of the entire cosmos, including things that shake and are shaken. It cannot be true in a literal sense that God acts as a shaking agent within nature or nations. Symbolically, however, God’s shaking of the most stable and steady parts of our world describes God’s temporal creative Spirit. From our temporal historical standpoint, we can see God’s Spirit as the creative force that builds things up and shakes them down. When we look toward the building up of things, we see God creating harmonies out of natural and social processes. Those processes on their own might never connect, they might inhibit one another, or even destroy one another. Divine creativity builds things up as it brings the processes into harmony. So in the ancient cosmology of the Bible, God creates the world by distinguishing within the original chaos between the heavens above and the earth beneath, between the surrounding seas and the dry land. Much of the story of the Hebrew Bible has to do with God creating a reasonably harmonious nation out of the rag-tag tribes of Israel. Psalm 139 says God knits things together in the mother’s womb to create a person. So also in our own lives, we look to the divine Spirit to be creative in organizing the multitude of factors of our existence to gain an education, to raise a family, to work out a career. We look to the Spirit to bring justice to the relations among people and peace to the nations, all matters of organizing disharmonies into harmonies.

In Christian theology, the conditions for harmony as such are called the Logos, the Divine Word that is the universal precondition of all actual structures. John’s Gospel says the Logos became incarnate in Jesus, so that Jesus harmonizes his path in the ideal way for human beings and also effects the harmonization of alienated people with God and each other. The harmonizing mode of the Divine Spirit leads to the achievement of the harmonies of existence.

The flip side is that the Spirit also has a dis-harmonizing mode, a destructive mode. Because we live in time, no harmony lasts forever. Every structure wears out. As scientists know, the energy required to maintain a specific kind of order when the conditions for sustaining that order no longer obtain is enormous—entropy means that all the achieved harmonies of the world will pass away as the energy is used up. If our careers do not adapt to new conditions, finding new energy, they fall apart. If our families don’t continually reform, their static relations become prisons. Every human body wears out with age. Nations that cohere well at one time self-destruct as time passes if they do not reform to find new energy. A social structure that seems an advance in justice when it is established can become a scaffold of oppression. The very conditions that make for peace one year make for war the next.

Haggai made his point in reference to the most stable things in his universe: the heavens, the earth, the seas, and the dry land. God shall shake even them. The Divine Spirit in its destructive mode is as profound and thorough as the Divine Spirit in its harmonizing mode. Although it seems uncomfortable for Christians, who sometimes like to think of God as a well-intentioned manager of our universe who preserves all good things, we would do well to borrow the symbol of God the Destroyer from Hinduism, for that is what Haggai is getting at.

To be sure, we would like to think that destruction is for the sake of new and better harmonies. You need to break eggs to make a cake, the cliché goes, with the supposition that a cake is better than unbroken eggs. Let us pray that the destruction, pain, decay and collapses in our world go to serve some better, improved situation in the future.

But we should not kid ourselves that the Gospel promises a better tomorrow out of the destructions of today. It promises only that each of us, our communities, and our nation, will be held accountable in ultimate perspective for who we are before God. It promises God’s mercy and forgiveness. It promises a resurrected life with God. But it does not promise worldly success or a rosy future that somehow justifies the Spirit in the destructive mode with the Spirit in the harmonizing mode. Things just might get worse. For long periods of history, decline has been the main story rather than enhanced civilization. Hope lies in the bosom of God, not necessarily in success for tomorrow, although we do need to give our all, heart, mind, soul, and strength, to promoting justice and satisfaction in our time and to improving the future.

Another level of meaning of the Divine Spirit as the Shaker of the most apparently permanent things of the cosmos is that we must look to that Spirit in order to grieve loss. We need to rest awhile to witness and lament the destruction of things that have been good and important. Sometimes Christians want quickly to get past loss to new and better things. Many Christians like to jump from the crucifixion on Good Friday directly to the Resurrection on Easter Sunday. As my colleague in the School of Theology, Professor Shelly Rambo, says, this is to forget the Hell of Holy Saturday when the death of the Logos can still be smelled, when God is gone on a distant Sabbath, and when nothing new has come to be. The Holy Spirit unifies its destructive and harmonizing modes in the remembrance, grief, and lament of the time between death and resurrection.

For many people in this nation the election this week was an extraordinary destruction of a treasured national identity that often has had the strength to risk its own prosperity and power in order to lead other nations to self-determination and prosperity of their own. The recent imperial adventures to force other nations to our will might have been an aberration of the electoral college four years ago. Now that program has been chosen by a majority, however slim. We have chosen to commit to “holding the course” rather than to learn new information and respond accordingly. We have chosen to get our way by our own military power rather than to trust allies who would help develop a reasoned common way. We have chosen religious values of simplistic certainty over faith in the grace to handle ambiguity and uncertainty. We have chosen a moral culture that re
duces the color of life to black and white and seeks to impose the particulars of that vision on other cultures. These choices destroy forever America’s innocent confidence in its own virtue, even while they attempt to justify themselves by that false righteousness. We are now as dangerous to the rest of the world and to our own people as any nation on Earth, and by deliberate majority choice.

We Christians, of course, operate in the world as humble peacemakers, attempting to heal and bring about reconciliation. At least some Christians take this as their calling. This fellowship of reconciliation has a natural course when our people are agreed in distant essentials and differ over proximate strategies. But reconciliation is filled with wrenching ironies when the common essentials are lost and Christians are forced into opposition to their fellows, not mere difference. I fear we have lost the common essentials and, in order to bear true Christian witness, need to go into opposition to the majority culture, which includes many who also name themselves “Christians.”

God has shaken the heavens and the earth, the seas and the dry lands, and all nations. We need to seek out the Holy Spirit to understand and grieve the good that has been lost, and also to understand and commit ourselves to any new good that witnesses to what we can best understand as Christian righteousness, piety, faith, hope, and love. Although we are comfortable with the Holy Spirit in the harmonizing mode, we must grit our teeth to seek out the Holy Spirit in the destructive mode. Now is the time to do that, to sit with grief and uncertainty and find God in precisely that. Of course, many people look at the election as a victory rather than a source of grief. For them the Holy Spirit in the harmonizing mode is quite enough. But for those who grieve, the Holy Spirit who comes destroying and confusing is the source of strength while we wait for orientation to what’s next. The Holy Spirit in both modes is present at the Eucharistic table where we eat the symbols of torture and death while joined in a body that metabolizes death to new life. The Way of that body is to bear, believe, hope, and endure all things. I invite you to join this body at the table that has borne far greater losses and confusions than we endure at this time. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 11.7.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

This is a day of many special observances. The text from Habakkuk begins, “O Lord, how long…”; those of you who are here have obviously mastered the transition from Daylight Saving to Standard time. Habakkuk goes on to say that the political and moral situation of his nation is a disaster, but he holds out hope for a vision of a new time; today is the last Sunday before the elections, and more religious fervor has been poured out on this campaign than any in my rather long memory. Some people believe that the affairs of the Red Sox are more important than those of the election, but I dare not comment on that: freedom of speech in Boston does not go that far. The text from 2 Thessalonians is a grand expression of gratitude on St. Paul’s part for the steady increase in saintliness of his little flock in Thessaloniki. Today is the eve of All Saints Day when we remember the saints who have died in the Lord. The secular celebration of Halloween these days seems to have come untethered from the religious holiday, but here in chapel we note the great cloud of witnesses with whom we live in eternity. Finally, to conclude the many special occasions of this day, Protestant churches commemorate the Reformation. Our Chapel Choir and Collegium will perform Bach’s marvelous Reformation Cantata, Ein Feste Burg.

I am going to pass for the moment on all these topics, however, to focus on the point of the gospel lesson, the power of Jesus to convert such a person as Zacchaeus. Religious conversion is an extremely contentious topic these days. American society is based on principles of religious tolerance, which usually means that we should treat people as fine just as they are, in terms of religion. Yet every religion believes that its own way is particularly apt for living out our destiny in relation to what is ultimate. Some religions, such as Advaita Vedanta and Judaism, tend to tie the aptness of their religion to a particular people, a social class or ethnic group. Others, such as Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, believe their way is apt for everyone, although they recognize historical associations with national and ethnic cultures.

In recent years we have seen the rise of fundamentalisms in nearly every religion, fundamentalisms that go beyond advocating their own path to attack the alternative paths as hopeless with regard to authenticity and salvation. Theologians call this strain of fundamentalism “exclusivism,” the conviction that only one’s own way is apt for the ultimate matters of life. Whereas the dark side of fundamentalism is a militant defensiveness and antagonism toward other ways of life, the bright side is a joyous compulsion to convert the others to one’s own path for the sake of their own good. Nearly all religions accept converts who choose to join them and become worthy of acceptance. For theological exclusivists, conversion of others goes beyond offering them a choice that they can freely accept. For exclusivists, the obligation to convert others is part of loving them. Not to do everything possible to convert the others is like dismissing them as important human beings.

Let me illustrate this with our situation here at the University. We have a complex chaplaincy that aims to serve the religious needs of all our students. Student groups representing a vast array of world religions are recognized and supported with regard to their leadership, facilities, and activities, all with the aim of fostering religious practices and maturity as befits university people. This emphasis on flourishing religious pluralism and tolerance flows directly from the theology of Methodism in the original School of Theology, which in turn founded Boston University. The first president of the University, William Fairfield Warren, was a professor of comparative religions as well as dean of the School of Theology. The rule at the University from the beginning has been that all people are to be supported in the practice of their religion and that no one is to be made to feel inferior because of their religion. This rule did not derive at Boston University from some secular Enlightenment principle of privatizing religion so that it does not count; it comes rather from the theological conviction that God’s grace cannot be limited to any one path and that all may count.

The negative rule following from this has been and still is that proselytizing is forbidden on campus: you can explain your faith and invite others to join, but you cannot put pressure on them to do so. The University Chaplains work hard and cooperatively to encourage the religious practice of all the religious groups while at the same time preventing activities that seem to harass or disrespect people of other religions or no religion. Fine and delicate lines need to be drawn here separating the vigorous witness of a religion from the pressure to make others feel inferior, disrespected, or damned if they do not join it. All theological points can be debated, of course, in academic ways proper to university life. This happens frequently in informal conversation as well as formal discussions in classrooms and special events. But theological debates should not be framed in ways that target people for conversion. Respect for the others’ beginning point is the precondition for intellectual debate in the civil society of the University.

You can imagine how difficult this rule against proselytizing is for students from exclusivistic religions. Converting others is close to the center of their intrinsic religious practice, and this because of imperatives to love and care. Yet they cannot do this here in ways that make the others feel pressured or harassed. Proselytizing is as much in the eye of the proselytized as it is in the intent of the proselytizer. Insistence on foundational respect as the principle of civil society in the University is hard on the evangelical Christians and fundamentalist Muslims who believe that others miss salvation. It is hard on observant Jews who have to be careful not to suggest that secular Jews are inferior as Jews because they are non-observant. In cases like these, genuine religious conviction legitimately can be expressed only in ways that do not seem to be pressured existential criticisms of those who do not share them. The University Chaplains work very hard to help draw the proper lines.

Imperfect as our University system is for insisting on the foundational respect necessary for freedom of religion, would it not be a vast step toward world peace if all the world followed such a policy? Instead of such political idealism today, however, I commend to you Jesus’ approach to converting Zacchaeus. Note that Jesus did not attempt to convert Zacchaeus from one religion to another. Zacchaeus, like Jesus, was a Jew, a “son of Abraham,” as Jesus put it. But Zacchaeus was a failure as a Jew. As a chief tax collector, he worked for the Roman occupation force. Tax collecting in those days was something like a franchise operation: the collector contracted with the government to raise a certain amount of money, and sometimes collectors were unscrupulous about how that was done. So Zacchaeus was a cheat, and he had made himself very wealthy at least in part by defrauding others. He admitted as much. All this was very contrary to even ordinary faithful Jewish practice, not to speak of the religious virtuosity of saintly Jewish people. The technical term for this kind of religious failure is that Zacchaeus was a “schlub.” Every religion has schlubs, usually far more schlubs than saints and spiritual virtuosi.

Despite being a schlub, Zacchaeus longed for something he knew not what. He was so intrigued to see who Jesus was that he climbed a tree to get a bet
ter view; imagine a short, rich, chief governmental official doing something like that. What did Jesus do? He called him down from the tree, treated him respectfully, and said he would take Zacchaeus’ hospitality. Apparently no one had treated Zacchaeus like that in a long time, because the effect was astonishing. People began to mutter against Jesus for associating with the likes of Zacchaeus, but Zacchaeus right there said he would give half his wealth to the poor, instantly becoming a virtuoso of charity. Right there he said he would pay back four times the amount he might have defrauded people. That not only was a confession of guilt and repentance but a saintly work to make amends: the Torah specified returning what you stole plus 20%, not 300%. Jesus said Zacchaeus had been lost, but that salvation had come to his house. That is true conversion, from being lost to being saved within the religion of his house, in this case as a son of Abraham like Jesus.

By no means do I want to minimize differences between religions. Disputing theological differences is my business as a professor. Nevertheless, the existential matters of faith have more to do with the difference between schlubs and saints than they do with differences between religious affiliations and theologies. I have taken part in many inter-religious dialogues, with the universal experience that the leaders of the various faiths who engage one another have more in common with one another, and more mutual respect, than they do with the schlubs in their own religion. As a Protestant I agree with Luther’s criticism of selling indulgences that would buy people a place in heaven, and with his insistence that each individual can be related directly to God, as well as indirectly through the church. So I guess the Reformation movement was preferable to the Roman Catholic establishment of its time. But I regret the vicious divisions it caused with all their wars, and I regret the action of Pope Leo X to excommunicate Lutherans, causing a still permanent schism. I have much more solidarity with and respect for saintly Catholics than I do with Protestant schlubs. No sectarian principle can limit God’s grace to bring people to attention in ultimate matters. Why waste time trying to convert the saints of other religions when the fields are white with lost souls like Zacchaeus for whom many hands are needed for the harvest?

With regard to celebrating Reformation Day, let us do so with studied ambivalence, remembering that in Luther’s great hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” the enemy is Satan, not Catholics. With regard to celebrating All Hallow’s Eve, let us lift our hearts in joy for all the saints who attend on God, not only those of our fold. With regard to Habakkuk’s hope for mitigating political disaster, let us remember that it is rich and powerful schlubs like Zacchaeus whose greed and corruption bring it on. With regard to the time, the time is now for us to catch the attention of the greedy and corrupt and bring them to a conversion like Zacchaeus’. The world is such a disaster now that the need for genuine conversion, after the model of Jesus, has ultimate urgency. May God be with us this week. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 10.31.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Jesus said, “all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” No principle is more central to the Christian Way than this. Matthew, Mark, and Luke cite Jesus saying that the first will be last and the last first. The Beatitudes bless the meek and say they shall inherit the Earth. The most radical claim of Christianity, beyond any doctrines of cosmic sin and salvation, death and resurrection, or even of Jesus as judge and redeemer, is that the world’s values are turned upside down. Those who are winners by worldly standards are in fact the losers if they are exalted and not humble. Those who are the losers by worldly standards are in fact the winners if they are humble and do not seek worldly exaltation. Not only was this a powerful, radical teaching in the early church, it was the point of the narrative of Jesus Christ himself. St. Paul put it in the most dramatic way in the second chapter of his letter to the Philippians:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name. (Phil. 2:5-9)

Jesus humbled himself before poor, ignorant, corrupt, and oppressive human beings, and thus was exalted by God as Lord over all. Jesus was humble to the point of humiliation on the cross—what could be more humiliating than to be tortured to death as a common criminal, naked, in front of your mother and friends? Yet out of such humility comes new life and a proper exaltation before God. Without humility, our old sins keep us captive and we seek exaltation like the self-righteous Pharisee in Jesus’ parable. With humility, no matter how sinful we are, like the tax-collector, God forgives sins and exalts us like the risen Christ.

As a principle of ethics, humility is a virtue common to nearly all religions and humanistic traditions. The opposite of humility is something like arrogance, and arrogance is commonly thought to be a vice. In Jesus’ teaching, however, the opposite of humility is not exactly arrogance but specious exaltation, the chief example of which is thinking oneself righteous in comparison with others and expecting others to recognize that superiority. In other teachings, being humble is quite compatible with being exalted. After all, some people are more righteous than others, and the educated righteous people know this. They construe themselves to be better, and often are recognized by others as being better, aristocrats of virtue. Good people are often exalted to positions of high power and responsibility. Surely we would not want unrighteous people in those positions. Exaltation to such positions with proper recognition and a proper self-consciousness about one’s virtues is usually though to be quite compatible with humility. In fact, only the humble ought to be exalted to worldly power and recognition.

Yet Jesus took a slightly different approach. He was not against rich or powerful people; he was not against those who had gained the world’s respect. But he was against people thinking that they are better than other people and accepting that self-exaltation. We should “judge not, that we be not judged,” as he said in the Sermon on the Mount. Instead of thinking that we are better than others, even when that is palpably true, we should address the Almighty saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” If we repeat that mantra a hundred times a day—God, be merciful to me, a sinner!—everything in our ethical life will be different. We will be humble, and not touched by any circumstance of exaltation. And we will come to see people, not for their accomplishments, honors, riches, or exalted reputations, but for their humble practice, or lack thereof. Christians exalt the humble precisely because of their humility, not because of their righteousness, power, or wealth.

The principle of humility extends beyond the sphere of personal ethics to politics, I fear. Does a nation believe itself to be especially righteous in comparison with others, labeling them evil? Some nations surely are better than others, but all are sinful. Saddam Hussein was outrageous to invade Kuwait in order to control its oil. But was that motive lacking in the American invasion of Iraq? Saddam Hussein jailed people illegally and resorted to torture. But the American prisons in Iraq have held people secretly without account and the prisons in Guantanamo are filled with people taken while defending their country and religion, and held without due process. The exposure of torture and humiliation at Abu Graib shows, not that a few people misbehaved, but that such treatment is not uncommon in prisons in America whose jailers were hired for Iraq. How can America rail at some “axis of evil” when it should be saying, “God, be merciful to us, a sinful nation?”

The danger of political self-righteousness, especially when we know that America is not as bad as some other nations, is that it emboldens our nation to think it can simply do what it wants to impose its righteous will on the world. To be sure, democracy is the best form of government that we know, and the world would be a better place if it were thoroughly democratic. Yet to impose democracy on a people whose social forms are not fit for it is not itself democratic behavior: it is imperial tyranny. Democracy by definition comes from the self-assertion of the people. How can a nation invade others to impose democracy when its own voting machines don’t work, many of its people are illegitimately disenfranchised, and lawsuits are threatened about election fraud before the election takes place? The humility of democracy means we should say, “God, be merciful to us, a sinful nation.”

A nation moves from self-exaltation to plain arrogance when it asserts and exercises a right to make war on others simply because it has the power to do so and war serves its best interests for power and economic control. Where is the sense of moral limits to the exercise of violent power? When the Soviet Union was powerful, each super-power limited the other. With the demise of the Soviet Union some of our American neo-conservative thinkers have argued that in our current “unipolar” political situation, what is needed is a benevolent American empire. I commend to you a new book by the historian, Gary Dorrien, called Imperial Designs, which traces the development of this neo-conservative political philosophy. That no other nation wants a global American empire, though many want American protection and handouts, suggests more than a little self-exaltation and even arrogance in the neo-conservative proposal. Given the world’s problems of poverty, lack of education, the sleazy theft of wealth by national leaders, and violent clashes between cultures in multicultural societies, who would want imperial power in the hands of a nation whose economic policies widen the gap between its very poor and very rich, whose primary and secondary school systems lag behind those of many other developed nations, whose big businesses associated with governmental leaders are rocked by scandals, and whose government courts the favor of cultural groups that insist their values regarding life, death, sex, and domestic issues be imposed on the rest? America is not Zimbabwe or the Sudan by any means, cesspools of corruption. Neither is it the kingdom of God, as people must think who want to impose some version of the American way of life
on other nations by force.

Only when America can present itself, saying, “God, be merciful to us, a sinful nation,” can it legitimately exercise leadership to stimulate other nations to struggle against poverty, ignorance, corruption in government, and the oppression of other cultures by the most powerful culture. The world does not need to hear from America a hypocritical self-exalting righteousness backed by overwhelming force. It needs to hear that, though we have the power to sin outrageously, instead we restrain ourselves, humbly seek mercy for sins we acknowledge, and turn our power to amending our ways. The world needs to see America as a model of humble continuing self-transformation. Then it can request American help for transformation in other places of poverty, ignorance, corruption, and oppression, with each nation taking responsibility for its own democratic self-affirmation.

None of this is to suggest that the United States should let itself become militarily weak so as to be unable to defend itself when attacked or fulfill its defense treaty obligations to other nations. The international rings of criminal terrorists are an astonishing threat to civilized societies, and America needs to take the lead in international cooperation for gathering intelligence and effective police work. The Christian point about humility is that we should never use military or police force in a spirit of arrogance or self-exaltation, only and always in a spirit of humility that says first, “God, be merciful to us, a sinful nation.”

We should remember that the American government is a secular enterprise in which Christian voices are mixed with many other constituencies. Moreover, not all Christian voices seem to heed Jesus’ remark that “all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” Many Christians seem instead to support the self-exaltation of a policy of imperial manifest destiny for America. Nevertheless, the gospel in its many statements is clear that the worldly values of exaltation are turned upside down in the kingdom of heaven and that humility is the only value worth exalting. Christians should promote humility in public life.

Humility, of course, begins with us individually and in our interpersonal relations. It is no simple virtue to learn. Self-exaltation easily disguises itself in forms of false humility, and we need to discern the counterfeits. We need to learn humility when we are powerful and wealthy with many kinds of resources. We need to learn humility when we are in fact among the elites in scientific, intellectual, and professional attainments, an especially poignant point for a congregation at a university church. The beginning of humility is a consciousness of faults that we present constantly to God, saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” To keep ever before our minds the honest need for God’s mercy is a good start to the work of exercising power and attainments with humility, a work that falls to each of us particularly and to Americans generally in this time.

So I invite you to see the world through Jesus’ eyes. Those who exalt themselves saying, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector,” are yet to be humbled. Those who come to God with downcast eyes and say, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”, are justified before the merciful God and will have true exaltation. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 10.24.2004 at 11:00 am