Love and Judgment

A sermon preached at St. Paul’s Church Bantam, Connecticut, on November 20, 2011, by Christopher L. Webber.

It used to be  when a man and a woman were married in the Episcopal Church or anywhere in the Anglican Communion that they would come down the aisle and stand before the priest and he would look them sternly in the eye and say: “I require and charge you both, as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgement when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, that if either of you know any impediment, why ye may not be lawfully joined together in Holy Matrimony ye do now confess it . . .”   They changed that in 1979 but I still sort of miss it. Oh yes, it’s a bit overwhelming: “the dreadful day of judgement when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed.” It’s a wonder more brides and grooms didn’t turn tail and head back down the aisle, but if they stayed, you knew they were serious. You knew they weren’t taking it lightly and that God was serious about it too.  And that’s not a bad thing to be sure of.   It’s why I sometimes preach on judgment at funerals. I think it’s good to know that God cares enough to be your judge.

We’re down to the end of the Christian year. Next week we begin the new year with Advent Sunday. And what better Gospel reading could we have here at the end than this to tell us God loves us, really loves us, really cares, really puts a value on us, values every single thing we do. God loves us enough to judge us. That’s a lot.

Do you hear what I’m saying? Have you ever worked long and hard on something, really given it your best shot and thought you had done yourself proud, and brought it in to your boss, your agent, your mother, and been told, “I’ll look at it later when I’m not so busy”?  Have you ever been told, “Look, just do what you can; it doesn’t matter how it looks”?  Of course, that, too, is a judgment. To say, “You aren’t worth judging.” is a judgment. To say, “It doesn’t matter what you do,” is a judgment.  Better far to stand before the judgment seat of Christ and be separated out with the goats and sent to a warmer climate. At least that says, “You matter; God does care what you did.”

The souls in Dante’s Inferno at least knew God was not indifferent, that their lives were important, that their actions made an eternal difference.

To be judged  is to be valued, cared about, loved. When you tell a child to go to his or her room, you do it because you love them. You judge them, yes, and punish them, because you care. There are parents in every community – I think we all  know it – who don’t care, whose children are not judged but indulged, not disciplined but dismissed, not held to a standard, not seen to be worth their parents’ time. And that’s not loving; and children need loving.  We all need that kind of love.  We need to know someone cares enough to take the time to be critical, values us enough to think we could do better, loves us enough to expect us to do our best. That’s what judgment is all about: it’s about love. God is love: therefore God is our judge.

We have a good many people these days for whom there is no work to do, no place in our society. That’s a judgment too; a devastating, destructive judgment. And it’s not just the unemployed of the inner cities  who face that judgment.  There are many in every community who have been through the experience of being declared redundant. The organization you work for decides to reorganize and suddenly there’s no job for you, no place to go on Monday morning. It’s a judgment of value and it can be devastating, demoralizing. It says, “You don’t matter. Your skills are irrelevant. You yourself are a mere replaceable part.”  Better far to be judged and found wanting, to be held to a standard and judged by it even if we fail.

I think, to be honest, that the church often fails us in this respect. Unlike the God we worship, the church tends not to call for our best. We’re terrified to be thought too demanding, not friendly enough, not loving enough. There are churches that set standards: that list the amount each person pledges, that take attendance on Sunday morning, that send a committee around to visit each family each year and review their manner of life. What do we do? We look at someone whose pledge is insignificant compared to their income and express enormous gratitude; we keep sending the Newsletter to people who haven’t darkened the door in years; we write letters of appreciation to those who donate their old clothes to the rummage sale. Is that all we’re capable of? Is that really the best we can do? Does the church value us so little as to expect nothing much and be gratified when we achieve it? All I can tell you is, that when we do that the church does not reflect God’s love faithfully. Fortunately, God loves us more than does God’s church. Thank goodness! That’s good news. God loves us, therefore God is our judge.

Let me just point out two things about that judgment as it’s described in this morning’s gospel. First: it has to do with human relationships and, above all, relationships with those in need. Here we are at the last judgment and God does not say, “You weren’t in church on Sunday;  you didn’t pay your pledge; you used bad language .”  All the things we tend to center on as being what the church cares about. I wish I could tell you that on judgment day they will check your pledge card  and your regularity on Sunday morning.  That would make a great theme for stewardship Sunday. But it’s not in the gospel.  What is in the gospel is a very narrow focus on human need and our response: how we responded to the sick, the hungry, the homeless.   On that basis alone, if this parable is to be believed, depends our eternal destiny.

Notice one other thing: neither the sheep nor the goats were consciously aware of the significance of their actions. Both alike  are puzzled: “Lord, when did we see you sick or in need and fail to visit you?” In other words, the actions taken were instinctive responses arising out of  deeply ingrained character.  They did what they did  because that was who they were – and they never
even thought about it or remembered it.  I think the lesson is that there’s no way to calculate our way into heaven: to do the right thing because of the hope of reward.  No, the judgment is not on our calculated acts but on our character; who we are when we aren’t even thinking about it. And that is the result of many things but the one that we can do something about is exposing ourselves to  God’s love and judgment now.  Isn’t that why we’re here on this harvest festival, this judgment Sunday of the year?

We never do get a harvest, you know, by a few carefully calculated actions.  You can’t plug an apple into the tree for a quick  fill up of juice and flavor; it has to hang there day after day for months and absorb all that the tree, the earth, the sun, the rain have to give.

We too have to absorb almost unconsciously the life God pours out on us in word and sacrament and Bible study and prayer  – in the life of a continuing Christian community. It’s nothing sudden and dramatic but slow and patient and mostly unaware.  You come, for example, and hear this gospel and all the other gospel stories week after week and after awhile it works on you and you see a need and you respond  without even thinking why you do it. It’s just who you are, who you have become.

Surely that’s what God wants: not the showy dramatic moment  but the slow formation of character, the habitual, instinctive response  that comes from long exposure  to God’s love.   When that day comes – the day described in the gospel this morning – we will be judged  because God loves us and the love that will save us in that day is the love God pours out on us now.

Judgment and Mercy

A sermon preached at`St. Andrew’s Church, Kent, Connecticut, on November 13, 2011, by Christopher L. Webber.

I sometimes think we live too long to understand the Bible properly. Not that I would change anything; I still like waking up in the morning  and living in the northwest corner, but science has so changed the shape of human life  that I’m not sure we can still look at it the way the Bible does. Every year at this time  we find ourselves reading Bible passages full of warnings about the end. The Old Testament reading spoke of a “day of wrath” and the Gospel warned of being “cast into outer darkness.”  This week the parable of the talents, next week parable of the last judgment, all with the same note of warning:  life is not forever; there will be a judgment; you need to be ready. And after next Sunday we come to Advent itself and the serious stuff: “heaven and earth will pass away” and all that.

But you know, I’m not really sure it gets our attention.  A century ago, when the normal life span was maybe sixty, back in the middle ages when the normal life span was maybe 35,  they had a sense of “the shortness and uncertainty of human life”  that I’m just not sure we can share. Yes, terrible things happen:  we know about the Trade Towers  and all that. and if we go to war, young people will die.  And, of course, no one yet has proved to be immortal.  Death is still out there somewhere, but when we see so many lives go on well into the 90s and often past 100, I’m really not sure we can relate to all this stuff  the Bible and Prayer Book give us about the approaching end the way we ought to. We grow up expecting to live to be 90 or 100 and that’s a long way off, and by the time we get to be 60 or 70  it’s been a long way off for so long that I’m not sure we really take in the fact that it’s closer than it used to be.  All of which is perhaps my own personal reflection,  how it seems to me. But think about it.  How does it seem to you?  Do these parables about the end and judgment have an effect?  Do they make you take stock? Do you go home saying,  “It’s a fact; I need to make some changes because I’m not really ready for God to send an appraiser to put a final value on my life the way I’m living it now?”

So that’s a first thought about today’s gospel.  Can we really hear it? Does it speak to us?  Does it get our attention? If not, what would?  I think we need to get that in place first because otherwise the parable of the talents becomes something about stewardship,  about our pledge, about contributing to a holiday bazaar, and that just doesn’t get it. This is about life and death, about why we are here, what life is all about. And it is very realistic. Talents are distributed.  Everybody gets some. It may not seem fair that one person gets five talents and another only one, but, hey, that’s how it is, and nobody asks you to bring back ten talents if you only started out with one. But whatever you start with, for that you are responsible. Whatever life gives us, we are responsible.

I’m sometimes wish we could keep election seasons to maybe a week or ten days because I’m tired of hearing politicians appealing to our greed, running for office and asking for votes on the basis of what you and I get out of it. Cutting taxes on one side, increasing your benefits on the other.  Isn’t there anyone out there who’s been formed by reading the Bible, who understands that with gifts  comes responsibility? I don’t remember ever hearing  Franklin Roosevelt speak. He was dead long before I was old enough to vote.  But I know that he said, “To those to whom much is given,  from them much is required.”  Some of us do remember John Kennedy saying,  “Ask not what America can do for you, ask what you can do for America.”  Of course, that wasn’t a campaign speech,  that was an inaugural address. Where is the candidate who can inspire us by challenging us, by asking us what we might do with the great gifts we are given?

As I read American history, there are two great traditions: one is the ethic of self-sacrifice,  of mission, of a calling to set an example for other nations, to share the gifts we are given: at every level, from the smallest community, to the world stage,  to give without counting the cost because God has given so much to us. Whether you think in terms of the wealth of this country  or in terms of the cross and Calvary, the Gospel and the promise of life, either way,  one strong strand in our common life has been thankfulness for gifts given  and the challenge of changing the world.

But there is another tradition,  and that’s the one of rugged individualism, of the self-made man,  of the pioneer who finds and exploits, of the one who sees an opportunity and uses it enrich himself.  Whether Bernie Madoff or Goldman Sachs, we’ve been there before.  Enron and WorldCom are not that far back.  And then there were Teapot Dome in the 1920s and the Robber Barons in the late nineteenth century.  The Vanderbilts and Goulds and Astors were not remembered for the holiness of their lives. But now we have institutionalized greed and we’ve made it possible for everyone to go to the corner store and buy a chance on making your own million or ten million. “Hey, you never know!”  Actually, you should know:  when governments support themselves by lotteries,  they prey on the poor, they encourage our worst instincts, and they insulate themselves from having to make tough decisions.  Why raise taxes if you can add a new enticement to the lottery?  But God will not ask us why we didn’t win the lottery.  God will ask us why we spent our discretionary cash on the lottery when we knew our neighbor’s need.

And look at the catalogs that they stuff in our mail box.  Every day they come, and who needs that stuff? What are they pushing this year that every child will die for and every parent kill for?  Bishop Smith spoke to our diocesan convention a few years ago about his embarrassment when he used his sabbatical time to visit countries in Central America and saw American television programs  being watched in the poorest slums. What must they think of us, he asked,  to have such wealth and use it on such foolishness?  I stopped asking for Christmas presents years ago.  I ask for gifts to Episcopal Relief and Development; isn’t that what Christmas is all about:  God’s love coming into the manger, into the poverty of this world, enriching us with the love we need  not with the toys we break and discard?  Suppose Jesus were to return on December 26  and ask us what we got for Christmas: how embarrassed would we be  to show him the list? Are we, will we ever be,  able to face a judgment on our use of our talents?

I suspect we don’t want to ask ourselves that question  because no society has ever been given so much and been so well aware of the need  to use it wisely and well.  And yet we fail the test. These Advent messages leave us, it seems to, me without hope – except for the mercy of God.  But that, I think, is really the primary message of Advent: not despair, but mercy.  I think what Jesus wanted people to realize was – and is -  that we are totally, totally, dependent on God’s mercy – and that’s not a bad position to be in. The good news of the Gospel,  the fundamental message of the Christian faith, is that, in spite of our failures, there is mercy – mercy enough and to spare. God loves us,  Jesus died for us, and our gracious God  invites us here today to taste and see how gracious the Lord is and how much God loves us all.

Saint Julia

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber at St. Paul’s Bantam on November 6, 2011.
When All Saints Day comes around I usually do the same thing every year: I say that All Saints-tide is a time for stories,  that it’s like a family reunion  at the end of the year when we gather together and tell stories  about our family  and especially about members of the family  no longer able to be with us physically but members who are worth remembering and telling stories about them because of the impact they made on our family and because of the example they gave us  in some special way.  Over the years I’ve told stories about lots of them, people of every race and nation and century, who were part of our family, some of whom died only recently and some who died long ago, but all departed this life, all men and women of another age.

This year, I want to do something a little different.  Instead of telling you stories about past saints, I thought today might be a time  for telling you about future saints:  Saint Julia, for example.  That future begins in a few minutes.  In just a few minutes there will be a new saint, a small one, I’ll admit, but a real one all the same.  Because, you see, saints are not made by popes.  The ceremony and hoopla of a canonization in Rome changes nothing; it only calls attention officially  to something that happened long ago and that most people already know about.  It says that Francis of Assissi  or Julian of Norwich was somebody special  and it’s time we took official notice.  But it doesn’t make them a saint.  That happened long before when someone took them to the font and someone poured water on them and said. “Francis, or Julian, I baptize you  in the Name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”  And that’s exactly the same thing we will do this morning.  This is, we might say, a real canonization, “the making of a saint,”  and you are here to see it.

Today we will give Julia her name  – a name not that different from the name of Julian of Norwich, a woman who lived in England in the 14th century and is still a role model for us all. But this time the name is Julia and we might as well also give her the title too:  “St. Julia.”  This is where it all begins.  Not the halo. That comes later.  But saints are like any other people.  They begin small and they grow.  Some grow faster and some more slowly. Usually they grow in spurts, very unevenly, and sometimes they stop growing for long periods of time.  Some even die.  But once a saint, always a saint. We’re starting something here we can’t stop because God will be doing it, quietly most of the time, hardly visible to most of us, but continuing to make a difference in Julia’s life.

What I’ve usually done at All Saints-tide as I said, is tell stories  and that’s what I plan to do today.  Tell stories about a future saint, about Julia, St. Julia.  And the only problem is that it’s a little dangerous to give too many details in advance.  And certainly there will be times when her parents will really wonder whether what we did here really “took.” St. Julia!  He must have been kidding! But you have to be patient. It’ll happen slowly but it will happen. So look ahead.

I could tell you about the time, for example, when Julia came home from Church School  in about the year 2017 and told her parents the story the teacher had told their class and how impressed her parents were that she remembered it so well.  It actually made them go look it up themselves in the Bible and see whether Julia had it right – and she did! And then they talked about it for awhile as a family.  That was a big day because it was probably the first real sign of God being at work in Julia’s life.  Of course, it was a still a small sign which her parents didn’t even remember afterwards.  But God works so quietly that that often happens and no one stopped to think that back in 2011 they had prayed that God would “open her heart to God’s grace and truth.”  They asked God to make a saint and God was doing it even though  nobody really noticed.  There were weeks when they didn’t even go to church  but when they did it always seemed as if something stuck, something happened, it made an impact.

But anyway, the years went by and Julia was in Junior High and going around with some other kids who were, well, not bad kids, but maybe  a little more trouble than most.  One day one of them got hold of some of that new drug they were using  back toward the end of the 2020s. some new chemical that everyone was trying and they invited Julia to join in a party one of the group was planning.  And she really wanted to go, wanted to be with her friends, but on the other hand  she had this funny feeling, not somehow feeling quite right about it, and so she didn’t go at the last minute, she made some kind of excuse and stayed home that night.  Her parents thought it was kind of funny that she didn’t even ask about going out that weekend but they had long ago  stopped trying to figure out this young teen ager in the family so they just kept quiet about it.  They forgot that they themselves  had placed this young woman in God’s hands fifteen years earlier and said,  “Keep her separate: ‘Deliver her, O Lord,  from the way of sin and death;  Fill her with your holy and life giving spirit …’” And probably they even forgot how the preacher that day had talked about how the word “saint” means “separate” among other things:  separate, set apart, belonging to God, different.  “Once you put someone in God’s bands,” he said, “they are always a little different,  a little separate; they don’t quite identify with the rest of the world.  It’s as if they had a different agenda.”  And that’s tough for a kid in Junior High, it’s tough at any age.  But that’s how you know it’s God at work when you see it happen, when you feel it happen.  God makes us different, God gives us a new identity,  and sometimes it shows.  Sometimes you can really see it.

There was another time too.  Let me see if I can fit in one more story.  It was along about the year 2038, I think, not long after Julia was married.     She met this guy from Massachusetts and moved up there. She’d been married maybe two or three years and it wasn’t going all that well.  She and her husband both had jobs and there was a lot of pressure on them and they didn’t always have time  to get things sorted out.  They were trying to save enough to buy a house, and suddenly they found out a baby was on the way  and the tension was just too much.  There were nights when it seemed as if there were constant arguments and no matter what either one said  it just seemed to make it worse.  They just couldn’t seem to communicate, to understand each other.  And one day she’d had enough and just walked out, just got in the car and drove.  At first she just wanted to get some space but then she thought she ought to go somewhere and she had a friend down in Waterbury so she went there and they talked,  they talked for hours.  She told her friend how terrible it was and all the arguments and fights they’d had and the friend said,  “Well, why put up with it if you don’t have to?  Why not just walk away from it and get a separation and just get your life back under control.  Take charge of your life.  You’ve got to take care of number one.  You don’t have to put up with all that garbage.”  And put that way, it made a lot of sense and she decided to do it.  She went out and got in the car  and started driving home back up to Massachusetts. But it was a Friday and traffic was slow and somehow as the miles went by it all seemed to get mixed up again.  It wasn’t all that clear after all.  But the car kept on going somewhere, going home, and after awhile  it was almost as if she too, was heading somewhere,  almost as if she had a sense of being pulled, being guided.  I don’t think she probably ever knew  that the priest at her baptism  had talked about a saint  as someone who has a calling, a vocation, someone called sometimes even to suffer  for the sake of others and for the sake of getting to the place where God wants them to be.  But somehow the friend who laid out the alternatives  so clearly had really helped clarify things and when her husband got home she was there and they had a really good conversation for the first time in months and agreed they both needed to cool it a bit, try a little harder  to see another way of looking at things, be a little more patient. It wasn’t anything very specific but somehow after that it went a little better . . . not always, of course, but a good part of the time.

St. Julian of Norwich said once that God never promised “you will not be tempested, you will not be travailed” but God promised “you will not be overcome.” Sometimes it seemed that way for St. Julia also.

Later that year, the baby was born  and they came to the church for a baptism  and the priest talked about how holiness isn’t a matter of halos but perseverance  and taking the small steps one by one that add up to a difference that matters.  More than anything else, he said, God’s gift of grace makes that difference – sometimes so quietly we hardly notice – and bring us to good place we could never get to by ourselves.

Well, I could go on, but you realize I have to keep the details vague at this point. But that’s the story – or something like that – or maybe I should say, that will be the story.  It’s not very exciting because God likes to work in the background and not be noticed. But where God is at work,  good things happen. God makes us better people than we might have been left to our own devices, makes us different, holy, and changes the world one life at a time.

And one final word.  We hear the stories of past and future saints to learn from their example  and find some help for ourselves because no saint is up on a pedestal all alone.  Saints, above all, are people involved with God and with God’s people.  So Julia’s story will be shaped by our stories and ours by hers,  because we are all saints together and we are all involved in each other’s stories and God is at work in all of us to write more stories and to make more saints.

Render to Caesar

A sermon preached at St. Paul’s Church, Bantam, Connecticut on October 16, 2011, by the Christopher L.  Webber

Text: St.  Matthew 22:15-22 (provided at the end)

So they asked Jesus about the separation of church and state and he asked for a coin and ever since then  people have been asking what he meant by what he said. “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.”  But that was the question to begin with.  What does belong to Caesar and what does belong to God?  And that argument continues today,  and nowhere is the argument more fierce than in the United States.

If you look at other countries around the world  you see Islamic countries  where the idea of separating religion and government is brand new and there usually is no division or separation and you see European countries that think of themselves as secular and in which the churches have almost no influence. But here the churches have always played  a powerful role in shaping society and the exact relationship that ought to exist  between church and state has always been a battleground.

But let me review some history because I think we forget how churches and faith-based movements  have shaped this country, have constantly worked for change and created change. Think of the abolition movement  that dominated the nineteenth century, led for the most part by Christians,  culminating in the Civil War and bringing an end to slavery. Think of the women’s suffrage movement  beginning a little later in the nineteenth century, led again largely by Christians and churches,  and culminating in the Women’s Suffrage amendment in 1921. Or think of the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s,  again led largely by Christians and churches and bringing an end to segregation  and second class citizenship  for African Americans.

In all of these, Christians set out to change society by ending restrictions on some groups of people. And in these movements  there was anger and violence on both sides–  think of Bloody Kansas and John Brown  and of women chaining themselves  to the White House fence  and think of Selma, Alabama, and police dogs and clubs -  but in the end society was changed,  laws were changed, and eventually the changes were accepted by almost all.

On the other hand, think of the Prohibition movement.  Here again, you can trace  a long and growing effort by churches and Christian people to change society that finally succeeded. Good Christian people were concerned by the impact of alcoholism on children and families and finally succeeded in having it outlawed.  Alcoholic beverages were prohibited.  But it didn’t work and it didn’t last.  The Constitution was amended but then amended again. But Prohibition was different from the other moral crusades because it was not an enhancement of freedom  but a restriction of freedom and however well intended  it just didn’t work. This time the violence and lawlessness came after the change. People, it turned out, would rather break the law than have their freedom restricted. And Prohibition produced one of the most lawless eras in our history.

I see our present differences in the light  of all this history.  It seems to me – and I’m speaking very personally because Christians differ radically on these issues and you have a perfect right to disagree with me –  it seems to me that the effort to restrict abortion  and to maintain restriction of homosexuals is more like the Prohibition campaign than the Civil Rights campaign, that it aims to restrict freedom, not enhance it.

Now, I think there’s altogether too much abortion but I don’t think the answer is laws. I think the answer is in learning to use our freedom.  Freedom involves risks and danger but the whole course of human history,  it seems to me, has been in the direction of greater freedom  and learning to use that freedom.

Jesus said, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s” and that sounds like a neat division  between two realms. But if you look at it twice, you have to realize that it isn’t that at all. If you try to divide the world between what belongs to Caesar  and what belongs to God, what would you put on Caesar’s side?  What is there in the world God made that doesn’t belong to God?  Think of that, by the way, when you make your pledge for next year. The question is not, How much should I give?,  but how much should I keep?  What is there that doesn’t come from God and belong to God?

And besides that,  we have a Biblical vision beginning with the prophets  and continued in Jesus and culminating in the Book of Revelation  of a world remade, transformed. There’s that great proclamation  at the end of Revelation, “The kingdoms of the world have become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever.” So that’s the vision Christians have had in mind  in working for abolition and prohibition and women’s suffrage and civil rights: a world, a society, that truly belongs to God  and in which all have equal opportunity to serve God and offer God their gifts.

But here’s another aspect of our history:  Christians in this country come from two very different places in their understanding of government and its role in our lives and when we set out to reshape society I think we have two very different visions and the visions clash. There are Christian churches, on the one hand,  that come from a long tradition of establishment, of working with government  for the interests of the whole society. The Episcopal Church with its background  in the established Church of England has a very strong tradition of establishment but so do Lutherans and Presbyterians  who were part of the establishment in Scotland and Switzerland and Scandinavia and much of Germany.  Even the Congregationalists  who came here as dissenters became the establishment in New England.  So there are those churches on the one hand.

But on the other hand there were the Baptists and Evangelicals who were never the establishment in Europe or America, never had responsibility to shape a society but existed almost always as a persecuted minority. Their focus was not on changing society – they couldn’t – but on the hereafter, the end times, when Christ would return and establish his kingdom  and set things right for them. Meanwhile what mattered to them was individual salvation and individual morality. Evangelicals remember when they were converted;  Episcopalians remember – or not remember – when they were baptized into the church.  The evangelical tradition has been to oppose Caesar  and not to imagine that any good could come from government. Their vision has been of churches working on individual morality,  not social issues. They could get enthusiastic about Prohibition  but not Civil Rights. And today their focus is again on individual morality: abortion and homosexuality  rather than unemployment and health care and the larger social issues. Even now, with the evangelical churches  playing a major role in our society and electing government leaders  it’s individual morality that gets their concern. And with a focus on the coming end of the world  it’s hard to get excited about the environment and climate change.  Why think about the long term when there may not be a long term?

The evangelical churches have tended to understand Jesus’ words to mean, “Let government do its thing and let Christians do their thing and keep government out of our lives.”  Even in the recent elections, when more evangelicals have voted than ever before, the percentage of participation is still below the national average. There’s a long tradition of distrust of government.  I think that’s partly why the government was so ineffective  in responding to Hurricane Katrina. We had a government that didn’t believe in government. It’s not that evangelicals are indifferent to human need;  they will give as generously as anyone and maybe more generously than those of us who think government ought to act;  it’s just that they don’t trust government to do the job.

And the tragedy is that these two great Christian traditions have a lot in common and a lot to learn from each other.  Just speaking personally I maybe trust government or rely on government  too much. Sometimes more government isn’t the answer.  Sometimes it’s up to us as individuals to act.  And sometimes it isn’t enough  to go to church and say the Creed. Sometimes we Episcopalians don’t spend  nearly enough time reading the Bible and saying our prayers and concerning ourselves with our own sinfulness and need for conversion. And sometimes we don’t worry enough  about the end of the world  and the coming judgment.  But here we are in a country with more practicing Christians than any other and a chance to make a real difference in our own society and the world but instead of working together  we find ourselves at each other’s throats.  Christians are and ought to be  concerned about human need; they are, and they ought to be, concerned about government control over our lives;  they are, and they ought to be, concerned about building a personal relationship  with the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ. One tradition has trusted government too much;  the other tradition has trusted government too little.  We need to reach out to each other and learn from each other and try together to give God  the honor and thankfulness that belong to God.

“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s  and to God the things that are God’s.”  All things belong to God;  Caesar is here only to serve God. And part of our task is understanding  what Caesar’s role is: is it to enforce God’s laws  or to enhance human freedom? Both are good,  but how do you balance those goals?  Now, these are not easy questions  but Christians ought to be able to discuss them without anger, trying to learn from each other, and bearing in mind the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples: “your kingdom come, your will be done on earth.” That’s the goal.  That what we need to work for and pray for.

++++++++++++
St.  Matthew 22:15-22
Then the Pharisees went and plotted to entrap him in what he said. So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality. Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the coin used for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. Then he said to them, “Whose head is this, and whose title?” They answered, “The emperor’s.” Then he said to them, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away.

Remembering

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber at St. Paul’s Church, Bantam, Connecticut  September 11, 2011.

I remember where I was on December 7, 1941  and where I was on November 22, 1964 and, of course, I remember where I was  on September 11, 2001 – even though, there, in New Zealand, it was already September 12.

September 11 is one of those dates  that marks us and changes us and it’s right to remember.  By now, ten years later, we have had some space and time  to recover a bit, to begin to put things in perspective  and to see what we have learned and can learn and should learn.  You remember that familiar saying perhaps that those who don’t learn their history  are condemned to repeat it.  No one, I’m sure, wants to repeat the dates I’ve mentioned.

So what have we learned? What do we need to learn?  I think it’s good that we spend so much time reading the Old Testament because it reminds us of our roots and a whole series of dates that are forgotten.  We remember the event, of course, and we can date it within a century or so but the exact date is long forgotten.  It’s the event that matters in the long run.   But when we read the Old Testament what we are doing is reading stories  and remembering the plan and purpose of God as it has been worked out in human history, and perhaps the most striking thing about it is that we can’t help seeing that the Bible is not what you might expect.

This central document of Christian faith,  the Word of God written, is not a book of good advice  or good teaching even – though it has that – so much as it is a story of human beings, people like ourselves, stumbling and failing, winning sometimes and losing probably more often, but in whose lives nevertheless God was at work. It’s not a book about good people doing good things  but about ordinary people doing ordinary things.  It’s the story of human families with distant fathers and scheming mothers and hostile brothers. We hear about treachery and rape and murder  and fear and envy and greed. And yet, in this story God was at work.  And that makes it possible, you see,  to look at our own stories and ask where and how is God at work here – even here?

Where and how is God at work in the event we call 9/11?  It’s disappointing, I think, that none of our political leaders have seemed to address that question, but to react in the classic human manner in terms of power and retaliation.  Has anyone asked not how have we been hurt and what can I do to prevent a recurrence but how best can we serve God  in these circumstances?

We are often advised to ask, “What would Jesus do?”   WWJD.   But we seem not to ask that as a country,  as if Christianity applies only to personal lives, what we do as individuals  not what we do together.  But the Bible is the story not just of individuals but also of a people, God’s people, Israel and the church.  And the Old Testament reading this morning shows us a disastrous confrontation  between two peoples – Hebrews and Egyptians -  that winds up with thousands dead and thousands of others free from slavery.  And the remarkable thing about it is that the Jews did not come away from Egypt saying “God is on our side” but that “God is a God of justice and God will set the enslaved free.”  The prophets hammered that point home centuries later: God is a God of justice and you, God’s chosen people, are acting unjustly and therefore you will be destroyed as the Egyptians were destroyed unless you change your ways.

In stained glass at the entrance to the Episcopal church in Canaan is the inscription, “God is not a respecter of persons.”  That’s a good thing to remember when you leave church.  God is a God of justice and it matters not who you are, you cannot act unjustly and escape God’s judgment.  We need to bear that in mind. God is a God of justice and it matters not at all who you are: you cannot act unjustly and escape God’s justice.  That‘s something to remember when we think about the tax code and the role of the government in our lives and the health code and our treatment of aliens.  God is a God of justice and plays no favorites.

But secondly it is God’s justice, not ours.  The Bible tells us that “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” says the Lord. And therefore Jesus taught his disciples,  “If your enemy is hungry feed him, if he is thirsty give him something to drink.”  And in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus tells us when we are hit  to turn the other cheek. That’s hard counsel.  I have to admit, I don’t know exactly how to apply it. I’m never been able to be a pacifist.  Logic tells me I have to resist evil.  Maybe I do, but the gospel is still relevant because even if we see no alternative to the use of force,  we have to use it reluctantly and minimally and never out of blind anger and hatred.

It’s remarkable, it seems to me,  how careful the American response  to 9/11 has been;  how much effort there has been to avoid demonizing any particular  ethnic or religious group the way the Germans were demonized in WW I and the Japanese in World War II. Maybe we have learned something and have not needed to repeat past mistakes.  There’s been some  demonizing, but relatively little when you compare it to the past.

Judgment is God’s.  Judgment is also individual. And judgment is always with compassion. I’ve told the story before I think that the rabbis have told for centuries of how, after the events we just heard about at the Red Sea, when the Hebrew people were pursued by Pharaoh’s army and escaped  through the waters of the Red Sea while Pharaoh’s army was drowned, the angels, seeing the Egyptians lying  dead on the sea shore, burst into applause and songs of praise. But God rebuked them, asking, “How can you rejoice, when my children are lying dead?”

The Egyptians too are “my children.” God created all of us,  loves all of us, died for all of us. Our enemies also are God’s children.  Every human life has value in God’s eyes: every human life.

The story of the Red Sea follows immediately on the description of the first Passover in which we are told, “This shall be a day of remembrance for you throughout your generations.” But what does Passover remember and celebrate?  Not the death of the Egyptians  but the freedom of God’s people  from slavery. We remember God’s justice  and God’s love for us and the value God places on every human life. That’s the second lesson the Bible has for us  that we need to learn and remember. Every human life has value.

I’ve never understood why a country like this  with the highest percentage of Christians, I think, of any country in the world has some of the most savage laws. We hold six times as many people in jail as Canada  and execute more people than any countries except China and Iraq and places like that. No other nominally Christian country  jails or kills as many as we. Why is that? Where have we gone wrong?

Every human life has value.  It’s not going to be easy to conduct a campaign against terrorism  and rogue states while holding fast our values and reserving judgment for God and respecting the value of human life, but it’s just because this country holds such values that we have such enormous influence in the world  and draw some many people to our shores who want the kind of life we have. If we lose our values along the way,  we’ve lost everything.

There’s one final lesson to hold in mind:  the Bible has a lot to say about suffering and pain. It teaches us that God can work through them.  They don’t need to be unredeemable evil. The crucifixion can lead to resurrection.  The death of martyrs is the seed of the church.  The old Prayer Book had an interesting rubric in the section for the visiting of the sick. It said the priest is to address the sick person  “on the meaning and use of sickness.” Think of that: “the meaning and use of sickness.”  Nothing in God’s providence is wasted. Everything is to be redeemed,  made use of, and that includes pain and suffering.  God is able to redeem them, to use them. And with God’s help, so can we.

9/11 is a dark day that will be forever remembered but from it there are lessons to be learned and the Bible has guidance for us in the lessons we take away and the shape and direction our national life takes as a result. Judgment is God’s, not ours.  Every life has value. Even suffering can be redeemed. Let us lay aside the works of darkness,  said St Paul, “and put on the armor of light, ” indeed, “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” and act in the power of his transforming Spirit.  What better evidence could we give the world of the truth of our faith  and the power of God’s redeeming love?

For the Anniversary of 9/11

A prayer composed by Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold in the aftermath of 9/11.

God the compassionate one, whose loving care extends to all the world, we remember this day your children of many nations and many faiths whose lives were cut short by the fierce flames of anger and hatred. Console those who continue to suffer and grieve, and give them comfort and hope as they look to the future. Out of what we have endured, give us the grace to examine our relationships with those who perceive us as the enemy, and show our leaders the way to use our power to serve the good of all for the healing of the nations. This we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord who, in reconciling love, was lifted up from the earth that he might draw all things to himself. Amen.

From Give us Grace: An Anthology of Anglican Prayer edited by Christopher L.Webber

Circles and Straight Lines

“This month shall be for you  the beginning of months . . .”      Exodus 12:2

A sermon preached at St Paul’s Church Bantam on September 4, 2011, by Christopher L.  Webber.

You have to wonder whether the committee that planned the readings for today was thinking about the new school year when they chose that passage from Exodus.  The new school year has been a bit delayed for a lot of people by Hurricane Irene, but Labor Day weekend feels like a new year anyway.  And we’re only three weeks or so from Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.  I’ve been trying to make a list of the number of new year’s days. How many can you think of? January is the official one at the moment, but Chinese New Year comes in February, I think, and March was the European New Year  until a few centuries ago.  July begins the new financial year. I don’t think August is anybody’s idea of New Year but September has two with the school year and the Jewish year.  October draws a blank but November brings Advent and the beginning of the Church Year. And that’s just off the top of my head.  Which means that if you want to celebrate New Year you never have to wait long to do it. Which means that if you want a chance to start over, it’s always theoretically available.

I think that’s a very human impulse. We make a mess of things and  want the chance to start over. I’ve gotten really tired in recent years of hearing interviews with athletes who say, “I’ve just got to put it behind me.” Some of them have pretty much used up  the space behind them. Politicians too. Wouldn’t Washington like a chance to put Afghanistan behind it?

You look back and you see a trail of devastation, broken lives,  things no human power can set right, and you can’t just start over as if it hadn’t happened. The money you spent is gone.  The lives sacrificed are gone.

There are two ways of looking at time and I think only one of them is truly Biblical.  The Greeks thought of time as cyclical. Agricultural people think of time as cyclical. You plant and you harvest, plant and harvest.  I’ve been reading a collection of poems by Wendell Berry and his world is like that. You plow things under and they come up again and get plowed under again.

There is one book of the Bible, the Book of Ecclesiastes,  that takes that approach but we never read it on Sunday. You remember the song that was based on it, “To everything, turn, turn, turn, there is a season, turn, turn, turn.”  Ecclesiastes says,

“A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun goes down. . . All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they continue to flow. All things are wearisome; more than one can express; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, or the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun.”

Why is that in the Bible? Maybe for the same reason  that they put salt in cookies: for the sake of the contrast. But when this morning’s Old Testament reading talks about a “beginning of months” the purpose is not to repeat what has been or to put it behind us; the purpose is to remember, to remember what God has done so that we can begin again, so that life can be lived  with renewed confidence in what God is able to do.

“This day shall be a day of remembrance for you,” said our reading this morning. Not a day of new beginnings or a day of putting things behind us, but a day of remembrance,  a day that transforms our time  by recalling the relationship with God that needs to center our time.

Notice how the second reading  looks at the same subject.  “You know what time it is,”  St. Paul wrote: “it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light  . . . put on the Lord Jesus Christ . . .”.  It’s time to wake up, the night is far gone.  Paul is looking forward, not back, and seeing the passage of time not moving around in a circle but moving ahead, moving forward, moving toward an end, a completion, a fulfillment of purpose.  And that is the usual Biblical perspective: looking ahead, moving toward a purpose. Instead of an infinite succession of circles getting us nowhere, time is seen as a road leading us always on and the distance to be traveled is not all that great and less with every passing day.

And don’t we know that that’s a better approach to life? When we say, as we all sometimes do, “I seem to be just going around in circles” that’s when life is most frustrating, least satisfying, when we need a way out, a way forward. And that’s what the Bible offers when it says “remember.” Remember what God has done: how he called Abraham to follow, how he revealed his holiness to Moses, how he set the people free from slavery, how he gave them a land and a mission, how he sent prophets to speak of an ultimate purpose, how he sent them into exile and brought them back and how he sent a Messiah and gave us a meal to remember, how he moves history forward toward a purpose.  

There was a Japanese emperor who created a garden of rocks and raked sand with no plants, no flowers, no trees, because he thought the constant flowering and fading, flowering and fading, was so unutterably sad he couldn’t stand it. So he created a garden  where nothing would ever change.  He had no reason to look forward. He knew nothing of a God with a purpose.

But we do.  And if you want to think of this week end as the beginning a new year –  school year, Jewish year, whatever –  the only real question to ask yourself is this: with one less year to work with, how can I use this time more towards God’s purpose?  Time doesn’t move in circles. It moves toward a purpose. And we have only this day, this minute,  to use – now or never –  it won’t come again.

We spend a lot of time in the church talking about stewardship and we’re beginning to talk about it in larger terms, as we should: stewardship of the environment, of our resources. But we haven’t talked nearly enough, I think, about time and our stewardship of time. “Treasure, Time, and Talent” are the three “T”s of stewardship, but somehow it seems as if Treasure is  the only one we really talk about.  But think about Time. We’re asked to think in terms of a tenth  for our treasure, a tithe of our income, and most of us are a long way from that standard. But the Biblical standard for time is higher, not a tenth but a seventh.

The Bible says, “Six days you shall labor and do all your work.   But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God . . .”  One seventh of our time belongs to God. And here too, we fall way short. The commandment doesn’t say “Go to church once a week for an hour.” It would be real progress if we all did just that. But it asks a seventh, one day, twenty-four hours, out of every week.  And I think we need one day when we don’t do the ironing  or balance the check book or go shopping, one day that doesn’t get used for our routine purposes. I envy the people that really do keep a Sabbath. I’m not there yet, but I’m working on it.   Setting aside some time as God’s time can remind us that all time is God’s time, all time has a potential holiness.

The Bible says “Remember.”  And we need to remember.  The monastic offices are said seven times a day, but usually combined into five or six. The Prayer Book has always provided two offices to be said morning and night and it’s not just for priests. The current prayer book provides four much shorter daily offices and that might begin to get us where we need to be.  We need daily Bible reading, daily prayer, daily meditation.

How will we ever get away from that spinning sensation unless we straighten our lives out and get them in line with God’s purpose by remembering – not repeating, but remembering –  who God is and who we are and that we belong to a God with a purpose.  The night is almost over. Paul had no idea  there were two thousand years to go, but none of us can count on that much time still available. We talk about “making time” for something but of course what we do is reprioritize. We can’t make time, but we can stop misusing it, stop wasting it, remember who does make it and who it belongs to and why we have the gift of this day, this short span, and we can use it as it was meant to be used carefully, prayerfully, joyfully to the glory and praise of God.

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber on August 27, 2011, at St Paul’s Church Bantam, Connecticut

We heard this morning about Moses out in the desert watching the sheep. Most of the time keeping the sheep is not an exciting job. They have their minds on grass. Sheep have an ability to concentrate better than most of us. So if you are a shepherd, the sheep will do their thing and your job is to keep them from being distracted by wolves or bears or anything like that.

Watching sheep is like screening baggage at an airport: most of the time it is not exciting to look at pale images of other people’s carry-on stuff. But you aren’t paid for that.  What you’re paid for is the time when something goes wrong:  You see a handgun in the attache case or a wolf about to pounce. That’s when you earn your pay and the job is interesting. But it’s not like that most of the time and I’m sure your mind can wander. I think I’ve heard that they purposely put images of guns and knives on the airport screen every so often to make sure the screeners are still awake.

Moses didn’t have that advantage: just a lot of dull days with nothing much to do. And then suddenly he notices something strange – a bush on fire but the bush seems not to be burning. And then he begins to hear a voice and a summons to change the course of history.

Now there are people who always want to explain the strange stories they find in the Bible to make them less strange. So there are some who would like to suggest that there was a natural gas vent – this is, after all, the Middle East and gas does sometimes make its way up through the layers of rock to escape into the air and those vents do sometimes catch fire and burn a long time. So maybe some dry leaves under the bush caught fire in the sun and the gas vent would make a very bright fire that might use the bush like a wick and that would explain what Moses saw.

But, in fact,  that doesn’t really explain anything.  Who cares why the bush was burning?  What matters was Moses response.  I mean, probably most people, on seeing a burning bush, would get a bucket of water and put it out.  If Moses had done that, the Jews might have stayed in Egypt and God might have chosen Hungarians to do the job.  The point is the response of wonder that turned Moses’ thoughts to God.

A bush doesn’t even have to be on fire to get that response. Have you ever sat on a hillside contemplating a bush – or tree or flower or cloud? Does it take a fire to make you wonder, to fill you with awe? Moses, after all, had a lot to think about.  He’d been raised as a member of Pharaoh’s family but he knew he was a Hebrew and he had killed an Egyptian who had been using violence against one of his fellow Hebrews. And as a result he had fled into exile and had wound up as a shepherd sitting on a hillside with a lot of time to ponder issues of justice and injustice, “the meaning of life” – in capital letters. Why was he here?  What was life all about? Most people have jobs that leave their minds just as free to wander – and a computer screen or a stretch of highway or a boring meeting can provide just as much opportunity to ask, Why am I here, what’s the meaning of it all?

So how many young adults have sat on a hillside thinking about the meaning of life?  Or taken a dull repetitive summer job that doesn’t absorb much mental capacity?  Is it any surprise then that one of them might be ready to respond to God’s call and to understand that the whole meaning of the universe might be found in a simple bush.  If we weren’t so used to seeing bushes, we would see it ourselves.  Each leaf would seem so marvelous that we would begin to think about creation and a Creator and a purpose and begin to think more seriously about why we are here and what we should be doing to carry out the Creator’s purpose.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning said it about as well as it can be said:
Earth’s crammed with heaven
and every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees takes off his shoes,
The rest sit around and pluck blackberries.
Most of us, most of the time, don’t even bother to pick the blackberries. Who has time any more to appreciate the goodness on every side? But Moses had time and saw and understood.  “Earth’s crammed with heaven . . .” and our first challenge is to try to put ourselves more nearly in position to see and to hear God’s voice, God’s call, God’s purpose. We all have a calling – but not very many of us take time to ponder it and understand it.  Whether our calling is to work in a bank or teach school or raise children or work for the state or serve in an ordained ministry, those are all potential callings. And sometimes God just steers us to where we ought to be and we wind up doing it by default. But any work goes better if it’s understood as ministry and any ministry goes better when it is understood to be a way of serving God.

But see for now what was involved in Moses’ call. First, that he came to an awareness of a Creator, a God who is. That’s a breathtaking leap all by itself.  God is.  Most people never get that far. A lot of the primitive gods of this world were thought to be created themselves by other gods who were created by other gods and so on. But Moses had a vision of a God who simply is – not created, not dependent on any source, but a God who is the source, and the only source.  Moses could have gone home right then and have learned something worthwhile. But the story goes on.  The call is not simply to know an all-holy Creator evident in the creation but one with a purpose for human life and one whose purpose is justice.

We still haven’t gotten the message that Moses got that day.  God has a purpose and the purpose is justice. It’s a deep human instinct God has placed in us and yet we get it so wrong so often. 9/11 was about that instinct for justice so badly twisted as to be unrecognizable. There are, after all, reasons for the Arab rage at the west. They’ve been left out of a lot of the good things and not so good things that we take for granted. And you can analyze all you want about the effects of colonialism or a religion that teaches subservience but, whatever the causes may be, there’s a substantial number of people angry at being left out; angry enough to lash out and destroy and to let simple blind hatred over ride any sense of justice for all and compassion for others and the God of mercy that all the great monotheistic faiths proclaim.

But here is Moses, a shepherd with a vision, a vision that still challenges us, who saw a burning bush and understood in that vision who God is and what human life is about.  Few of us, as I said, have the time of peace and quiet that enables that sense of the holy to speak to us, that enables us to see injustice and dedicate ourselves to removing it. We live in a world that’s a battleground between forces of good and evil and evil uses all the resources of our so-called civilization to overwhelm our senses with trivia, to drown out any sense of the holy, any concern for justice.  If you were to make one resolution out of today’s readings and sermon it might be this:  try to find that time for yourself to set aside a few minutes – at least a few minutes – day by day to read the Bible, to pray, to be silent in God’s presence, to contemplate the beauty on all sides and to offer yourself as Moses did to God’s purpose. God’s purpose is spelled out for us in the baptismal commitment “to strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being.”

That was not only Moses calling; it is your calling also.

Awe and Wonder

Romans 11:33  “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past finding out.” [This was actually the assigned text for the previous week, but we got out of sequence somehow!}

There was a night not long ago when I had trouble falling asleep. As I lay awake I could look to the south and see a very bright light in the sky. Without my glasses on I couldn’t be sure whether it was the moon or a very bright star. I had seen the moon earlier as I was coming home from a meeting and it was a crescent moon but through the window screen the light was filtered in such a way that what I was seeing might have been a thin crescent. Well, finallyI got up and put my glasses on and went outside to see and then it was obviously a planet. The moon had gone down by that time and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. However many billions of stars there are, you could see everyone of them. The Milky Way stretched across the sky from one end to the other. So I sat down for a while and just looked. Phrases from the psalms came to mind:
The heavens declare the glory of God * and the firmament showeth his handiwork
He telleth the number of the stars, * and calleth them all by their names.
When I consider the heavens the work of thine hands, *
the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained
What is man that thou art mindful of him *
and the son of man that thou visitest him.
Unfortunately I memorized the psalms in the days before inclusive and politically correct language, but maybe you get the point. That’s one way to talk about the stars.
Another to talk about the stars is in the Encyclopedia which tells us that, “Stars are massive, self-luminous objects, shining by radiation derived from internal energy sources.” There are 100 billion stars in our galaxy and the nearest one Is 4 1/3 light years away. One of the brightest stars in the sky, Deneb, is 1400 light years away.  Some of the largest stars are 400 to 600 times the size of the sun. That is fairly prosaic information but I think my response to the stars is largely shaped by this kind of data.
In the Psalmist’s day the stars were thought to be fixed in a dome above the earth and maybe not that far away, so their response was different from mine. Their response was to the beauty of the stars; mine is in large part to the immensity of the universe, the sheer unimaginable size of creation.
It’s interesting that the word “awesome” has become popular in recent years because “awe” is what I’m talking about and awe is what we have more reason for today than ever before in human history. A sense of awe is one of those basic human instincts that just in itself seems to point to another dimension of existence. Fear and love and courage and joy and many other emotions have a practical survival value; they help preserve the species. But awe, a sense of wonder and reverence, is somehow different. It seems to serve no practical purpose. It leads to activities like worship that have no obvious survival value.  It seems to point to a power beyond ourselves with whom we might have a relationship.
When I was a candidate for ordination to the priesthood, one of the requirements was (and still is) to write three sermons on texts assigned by a group of senior priests. Mine came in the mail so I opened the letter and found my assignment. I’ve completely forgotten the other two texts, but the third was in this morning’s epistle: Romans 11:33 – “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past finding out.”  How’s that for a text for your first sermon!
I don’t know whether the sermon I wrote is still in a file somewhere. I don’t think I ever actually preached it. And I didn’t even try to find it in preparation for this morning. But I’ve never forgotten this text – or forgiven the examining board for asking me to wrestle with it. But what a marvelous statement it is of who God is and who we are.
Now Paul put those words at the end of what may be the longest and most carefully thought out piece of theology he ever wrote. Paul was a practical man. His letters are full of specific advice about specific problems. But when he wrote to Rome he was grappling with a mystery he had never quite resolved in his own mind: why so many in Israel had failed to accept Jesus as Messiah. How could it be: God, the Creator, made the universe and created the human race in the image of God, and called Abraham to be the first of a chosen race and promised them the Messiah.  How could that chosen race not fulfill their destiny? Paul agonized over it and finally reasoned out a theory: he suggests that Israel’s rejection took place to enable the Gentiles to be brought in like a wild olive branch grafted into a cultivated tree.  And then, says St. Paul, if the wild branch is grafted in, eventually the natural branch will be grafted back in also and Jews and Gentiles alike will be nourished by the same tree, worship the same God, be reunited as branches of one family to the greater glory of God.
And then – and then – at the end of that long, logical, reasoning out comes this burst of awe and praise: “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past finding out.”  But that comes at the end of the rational process. Paul has taken reason as far as he can before he turns to awe and wonder.  I believe that that is exactly what God meant us to do. You hear people say, “Well, you have to take it on faith,” and very often it seems to me that’s an excuse for not thinking. There have been times and places when the Christian church – parts of it any way – have taught that approach: “Take it on faith; use your mind from Monday to Friday but leave it at the church door.  Don’t bother to try to figure things out on Sunday; just believe.”  As if the Creator of the universe created minds by mistake. As if God could be glorified best by mindless beings.
It’s one of the hall marks of our Anglican tradition that it gives a very high place to the use of reason. Ask your friends what the final authority is in their church, and some will tell you it’s the pope and some will tell you it’s the Bible and some may even tell you it’s the congregation. But the traditional Anglican answer is “Scripture, tradition, and reason.” The Bible comes first, of course, but the Bible doesn’t answer every question. The Bible never mentions worshiping on Sunday; that’s a tradition almost universally accepted. So if we can’t find it in the Bible, we ask others and try to find out what Christians have usually thought and done. And that can give us very useful guidance.
But sometimes neither the Bible nor tradition has an answer or maybe they have an answer we can’t really accept.  Maybe it seems to us as if Christians in the past have always found a wrong answer and we have a better one: like the ordination of women. The Bible has no solid evidence either way, but tradition has been negative.  Over the last thirty or forty years most Anglicans have come to believe that the tradition was wrong and women should be ordained. It seems reasonable in the light of the general attitude of Jesus and Paul, the larger feel of the Biblical witness, and so our church has done what the Roman Church and Orthodox Church will probably also do in the next hundred years. Human reason must be respected. What else is it for?            But reason can be mistaken and it has its limitations. So what happens then? I think we very often get the impression that reason is a plank that takes you part way and then you jump: the so-called “leap of faith.”  But it seems to me that’s not quite how it is. Why would we jump if we had no reason to do so? Why would we believe unless there were reasons?
I think it might be better  to think of different ways of knowing. There’s scientific investigation and evidence and proof; that gives us one kind of knowledge. But I doubt we have that kind of knowledge about most of the decisions we make.  The last time I bought a car it was second hand and I didn’t know – couldn’t possibly know – how good a buy it was. But I knew the dealer and I trust him. That’s reason enough.
I read an article once on the state of American music and the enormous variety of styles and voices. It ended up this way: “The all-American messiness of contemporary taste is something to be savored. Don’t try to make sense of it; lean forward and listen.”  But isn’t that also a way of knowing? You can’t demonstrate or prove to me that one form of music is superior to others, but you know what music speaks to you and when you lean forward and listen you are responding to something beyond reason and logic which is not unreasonable or illogical;  in fact, it too is a way of knowing.  Imagine, if you can, a world without music and art galleries, in which all decisions were scientifically logical and no one ever planted flowers or went to concerts or gazed at the stars or got married.
I wonder, actually, if in such a world there would be any scientists because who would be motivated to study the stars unless they had a sense of wonder and awe? Who would plant a garden or sing a hymn or get married? So instead of our assumption that reason comes first and awe begins where reason leaves off, might it be more accurate to say that wonder inspires reason and reason deepens wonder and that both are ways of knowing which need to work together to produce the fullest knowledge and the deepest faith?
This service this morning can be looked at simplistically as following a two step progression: first, lessons for the mind; second, a sacrament beyond our understanding. There is some truth to that. But the lessons ought also to inspire a sense of wonder: the prophet Isaiah, this passage in Romans, Peter’s confession of Jesus as Messiah. There’s more going on there than logic. And when we come to the sacrament, how can we respond as deeply as we should unless we have tried to work out as far as we can how it is that God feeds us, renews us, in the gifts of bread and wine? And then, the logic of language is deepened by the inspiration of music and the beauty of music helps to fix the words in our minds as well as in our hearts. And all of it is a way of knowing.
Some things I know by reason and logic – but maybe not the important things. I know you and you know me by a process that involves very little of logic and a  great deal of wonder and even awe.  There remains always a  mystery about human life and relationships. There’s probably much more that we don’t know than what we do. l’ve often said, “If I understood human beings better I might go into the ministry.” But here I am -  and it’s probably because of  the mystery, the constant sense of  wonder, that is part of all our relationships and especially those built on faith.  I don’t think I knew that nearly as well when I was ordained as I know it now. Notice the verb “know.”  I know what I know not by any sort of  scientific knowledge but from long years of  experience that only increase the wonder and awe and joy. We stand always on the edge of that boundless ocean of knowledge and wisdom Paul points to in the reading today and which I’m sure you know also and which is why you are here.  When you get to the end of it and understand it all, you can stop coming.

Mercy

A sermon preached at St Paul’s Church Bantam, Connecticut, by Christopher L. Webber on August 15, 2005

The Episcopal Church Pension Fund sends out an annual report which is full of bar charts and statistics and heart warming stories of “your pension fund at work”:  all the sick and elderly people whose lives have been enriched by a check from the CPF.  Now I don’t want to seem critical of the Church Pension Fund. I might get elderly myself some day and meanwhile I’m glad to get their monthly deposit in my bank account. But what got my attention not long ago was not the bar charts and heart-warming stories but the title on the cover:  “God’s goodness and mercy.”  I thought to myself, “Wait a minute;  this is my fund.  Churches have been paying into it for years on my account.  That’s my money you’re talking about and it’s a legal obligation not a question of ‘mercy’.” I looked inside for some explanation but it was all statistics and heart-warming stories and it never again referred to “mercy.”

But that word “mercy” is something to ponder, not least because it comes up four times in today’s second reading, but also because if you are concerned at all about Islam you might recognize that you can’t study Islam without coming across that same word. Every chapter of the Qur’an begins: “In the name of Allah, Most gracious, most merciful.”  But the odd thing is that you can read through the Qur’an and never find a definition or explanation, just the repeated assertion that Allah is merciful. If you look in the Prayer Book you won’t find an explanation in the Prayer Book either.

So here is this word “mercy” or “merciful” in the Bible, in the Prayer Book, in the Qur’an and in the Annual Report of the Church Pension Fund and I guess we are just supposed to know what it means – but I’m not sure we do.  I think it used to be a common word in English. People used to say things like “Mercy me!” Or “Merciful heavens!” or just plain “Mercy!” But I think our vocabularies have gone down hill in recent years and I wonder if we ever use it any more outside of church.

But when we come to church, there it is in the intercessions: “Lord, have mercy,” and often and again in the readings. So I looked it up in the Oxford Dictionary and some other places and I began to find a word with a badly split personality: there’s common usage on the one hand and there’s proper usage on the other hand and they seem to be miles apart.  I reacted badly to the CPF Report because I think of the pension as an obligation and I think of mercy as something special. Mercy, it seems to me, is undeserved and unexpected. The Oxford Dictionary offers as an example: “What a mercy it was that I held the ace of spades.”

But that’s common usage and the odd thing is that that’s totally different from the more formal definition they provide which talks about “forbearance and compassion shown by one person to another who is in his power and has no claim to receive kindness. . . . a disposition to forgive.”  Notice that last especially:  “a disposition to forgive.” Aren’t there certain people who are more inclined to forgive than others, more disposed to be merciful? With some people, you know there’s no point in asking. “You’re late with the rent?  Get out on the street.”  “You’re late to work?  You’re fired.” With other people, there’s more of a chance.  Some people are likelier to have mercy. Maybe God is likeliest of all.

It seems, in fact, to be a definition of God, Jewish, Christian, or Muslim: God is supremely “disposed to be merciful.”  You might even say: Mercy is who God is. And we who are Christians know best of all that God is like that because we have seen that mercy in a single human life lived out day by day and most of all seen in its fullest power on the cross. At the cross we find “a disposition to be merciful” that can still say, “Father, forgive them . . .”

Now, if you like doing this kind of research you can go back into the root meanings and origins of a word and you will find that there are at least two different words in the Old Testament that can be translated as “mercy” but the primary one has the same root as the word for womb. There seems in other words to be some relationship between this quality of God and the womb where the first bond is formed between a mother and child.

Let me tell you a story about that from the Bible.  Maybe you know it.  The Bible says that Solomon was wiser than anyone else who ever lived and it illustrates that by telling how two women came to him one day with an argument about a child that they both claimed to be theirs. They were, it seems, living together and both gave birth at the same time but one night one child died and in the morning both claimed that the living child was theirs and the dead child belonged to the other.  So they came to the king to settle their dispute and as they stood and argued Solomon said, “Bring me a sword.” “Cut the child in half,” he said, “and give half to each.”  And one woman said, “Fine.  Do it.” And the other said, “No; don’t do that; give the child to her, but don’t kill it.” And Solomon said, “Give the child to her; she is it’s mother.”

Now, that’s a wonderful story, but what brings it to life is the way it’s told: when the king calls for the sword, we are told of the one woman that “compassion for her son burned within her.”  And the word “compassion” there has the same root as womb and mercy.  A relationship with the living child “burned within her.” Mercy is a bond, an unbreakable bond.  “Can a woman forget her nursing child,” asks God through the prophet Isaiah, “or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget,” God says, “yet I will not forget you.”  God’s relationship with God’s people is like the relationship of mother and child – but even stronger. It doesn’t matter what the child does, mercy is always there, always available. You need only to ask.

And, you know, when you come at it this way, the Church Pension Fund maybe isn’t as far off base as I thought at first. Mercy is about an unbreakable commitment.  Whatever I do – well, maybe within some limits! – I can always come back and they’ll be there for me. And that is mercy.  That is what God is like.  And that was certainly the experience of the Jewish people: they rebelled and went astray, they turned to idols and false gods, they looked to Egypt to help them against the Assyrians, they looked to their city walls and their armies, they tried everything they could think of to avoid relying on God, to be able to say, “Look how smart we are. Look how strong we are.  Who needs God?  We worked it all out ourselves.”  But of course, it never did work.  They were not that smart. And finally they began to see that the prophets were right.

The prophets said their conduct was like leaning on a rotten staff for support, like relying on broken cisterns for water. And aren’t we still that way?  We don’t want to need God, do we? We don’t want to take the time for church or prayer. But notice the result.  Are we proud of the world we have made, and the wisdom of our choices? Maybe the thing we can learn first by keeping up with the daily news is our constant need for mercy.  What the news tells us is what the Bible tells us and what the Prayer Book tells us: “we have erred and strayed from our ways like lost sheep, we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, we have offended against thy holy laws, . . . and there is no health in us.”

I was hoping for a statement something like that last week from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual leader of the English people. There were mobs in the street burning and looting and the Prime Minister had nothing to say except about punishment. I waited to hear from the Archbishop some word of understanding of the ability of the gospel to change lives and the need to communicate that gospel to a society in turmoil and I finally found on line a speech he had made in the House of Lords that never mentioned God or the gospel or the responsibility of the church.  No wonder England is in trouble!

But let us not look at others but look at ourselves. Where in all the debate about debt in recent weeks did the word “mercy” ever come up? “Mercy” as an unbreakable bond uniting us in a single society with obligations to each other and a need to forgive each other for our failures and come together to solve common problems? Where was that mercy, that unbreakable bond that unites us when all we heard about was division?  Where was the “disposition to forgive” when tensions were at the breaking point?

But even that is to illustrate my point by looking at others but not ourselves, not my relationship with the clerk at the checkout counter, the people in my office, my neighbors, my friends, my family. How much of the anger that seems endemic in American life these days, indeed in the world community, our so-called “global village” where important people shout at each other, accuse each other, take violent action against each other – how much of that infects my life and my relationships? Does the anger and divisiveness I see so often in the news begin to affect me?

We need to ask ourselves that question often: why did I react that way? was it fair?  did I realize what problems the other person may be having? was there any compassion, any mercy, in what I did, what I said? Was I disposed to forgive, or predisposed to anger?  We are here today not just to pray and not just to hear about God, but to receive communion, to be joined with the life of God, to receive God’s life into ours, and that life is given to change this world beginning with you and me.

God is merciful.  God “knoweth whereof we are made” and has compassion. God does not change.  Even the Church Pension Fund may change, may misplace my records or invest my pension funds badly and what I rely on from them conceivably might not be there and then I would need someone else’s mercy. But the mercy I need most is not like that. The mercy I need most is the sustaining, upholding, constant and unvarying love and compassion of my Creator, who knows me better than I know myself and yet forgives.

Knowing that mercy is there can change lives, can change our society, and needs most of all to change me.