Creation's Quickening (Mid-week)

 

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Creation’s Quickening

March 29, 2017

One of the vivid memories I have that I cherish is the first time, in each of Elena’s pregnancies, that I held my hand to her belly and felt the child within kick.  Quickening, or the coming to life or movement, is a moment in life that is non-repeatable, and awe-inspiring.  This is not because life before was not real or good, nor because life to come is guaranteed as satisfying and without moments of sorrow.  It is simply because in the moment of quickening we see the wonder of creation, the glory of God’s loving and life-giving presence in the ordinary processes and course of our life.

One of the complaints people have against Christianity is its supposed belittling of human life and experience, urging us to sacrifice now for a greater reward after life, “glory pie in the great by and by.”  But this is a profound misunderstanding of Christianity.  We are created in God’s image, and the natural world and our natural lives reveal the loving creator behind it all, in whose mind it is all being invented.   Our lives are glorious, though not sufficient.  The glories we see in them are foretastes, dim shadows of the real glories to come, when creation has reached its fullness and all that God intends is realized.    

C.S. Lewis, writing to a friend on the subject of the afterlife, says the following.  Note the overall optimism and joy found in our life here and now: 

“The symbols under which Heaven is presented to us are (a) a dinner party, (b) a wedding, (c) a city, and (d) a concert. It would be grotesque to suppose that the guests or citizens or members of the choir didn’t know one another. And how can love of one another be commanded in this life if it is to be cut short at death?

“Think of yourself just as a seed patiently waiting in the earth: waiting to come up a flower in the Gardener’s good time, up into the real world, the real waking. I suppose that our whole present life, looked back on from there, will seem only a drowsy half- waking. We are here in the land of dreams. But cock-crow is coming.”  (from Words to Live By: A Guide for the Merely Christian. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.)

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+

Metaphors Galore

 

 

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Metaphors Galore

March 22, 2017

As we prepare in two weeks to go into Holy Week, it is important to remember that many of the images, affirmations, and points of gratitude we express as Christians, especially about those things that are most central in our faith, are symbolic and metaphorical efforts, limping and imperfect all, to express what is beyond our ability to conceive of, let alone express.

From the beginning, Christians have seen the death of Christ on the cross as not simply a case of miscarried justice or persecution, but something much more.  St. Paul, writing just a couple of decades after Jesus’ death, quotes the apostolic tradition that he received from others and affirms, “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the [Hebrew] scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared…” (1 Cor. 15:3-5).  He also writes, “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, no longer counting against them their over-stepping of bounds, but rather giving to us what it is that reconciliation really means” (2 Cor. 5:19).

We tend to read such statements as if Paul were teaching a doctrine of atonement that sees the Cross as transferred punishment, where Jesus is punished in our stead to placate the anger of a Deity demanding violence and blood to set things right.  But this doctrine is an artifact of the late Middle Ages and is nowhere explicitly taught before St. Anselm of Canterbury.

Instead, Paul uses a wide variety of sometimes contradictory metaphors to describe what Christ accomplished for us and in us: 

·      justification (declare or make morally upright),

·      salvation (rescue on the field of battle),

·      reconciliation (restoring a personal relationship),

·      expiation (driving away ritual impurity or ‘covering over’ guilt),

·      redemption or ransom (purchase back from slavery or prison into freedom),

·      freedom (enjoying the status of a full citizen)

·      new creation (being made anew)

·      sanctification (being made or declared holy)

·      transformation (changing shapes)

·      glorification (being endowed with the light surrounding God)

Other writers in the New Testament also use other metaphors.  But none of these are ever seen by their authors as the sole or even wholly adequate description of what “Jesus died for us” or “Christ died for our sins” means. 

The fact is, the “wrath of God” describes more how our relationship with God feels to us when we are alienated from God than it describes God’s heart.   And it is we human beings who tend to think that violence can make things right, not God. 

In this light, our Christian belief that Christ “died for us” on the Cross takes on deep meaning. When we look at Jesus on the Cross, we see God suffering right along with us, dying along with us.  We are glimpsing from the inside what it looks like when God simply loves us, heals us, and forgives us.   It must never be some sick description of a bipolar child-abusing Deity.   

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+

Beyond the Pale (Lent 3A)

Beyond the Pale
Homily delivered the Third Sunday of Lent (Lent 3A RCL)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
19 March 2017; 8:00 a.m. Said and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)
Readings:  Exodus 17:1-7; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42; Psalm 95

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

In 722 BCE, the Assyrian Empire destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel and leveled its capital Samaria, deporting most of its inhabitants.  The “people of the land” left behind in what was now an Assyrian province did their best in following their religion, something very similar to Judaism, though their Temple was on Mount Gerizim near Samaria rather than on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, and their liturgy and Torah were in a different dialect of Hebrew.  The fact that they tended to be more open to intermarrying foreigners complicated relations with Jerusalem.  When in 586 BCE the Babylonian Empire in its turn conquered Judah and largely leveled Jerusalem, Samaritans shed few tears. Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the Temple that Solomon had built and deported Judah’s  leadership elites to Babylon in chains.  Now it was Judah’s turn to survive under foreign rule, and intermarriage was one strategy to get by. 

When the exile ended and Judah’s leadership returned to Palestine, they were led by people like Ezra and Nehemiah.  Having thought long and hard over why God had abandoned Judah and the Davidic kings, they had a simple answer:  infidelity, not keeping the Law.  They blamed the exile on Hebrew men who had married foreign women.  Wanting to make their country great again, they demanded a return to “old-time values” and insisted that men with foreign wives simply divorce them and abandon them and their half-breed children. Break up families to make our country secure!  Erect a fence, a wall around the city and the Law, and define your borders and boundaries, regardless the human cost! 

Many men, especially in Samaria, refused.  Nehemiah reports how he responded: 

“I fought with them and cursed them and beat some of them and pulled out their hair; and I made them take an oath in the name of God ... Thus I cleansed them from every foreign impurity ...” (Nehemiah 13:25-30). 

Thus developed the mutual hatred between Judeans and Samaritans, fanned ever hotter in 110 BCE when Maccabean High Priest John Hyrcanus, in order to punish the Samaritans for Hellenizing and siding with the new occupying power, the Greek Syrian Seleucids, ordered the Samaritan Temple destroyed. Judean-Samaritan enmity was centuries old by the time Jesus sat by Jacob’s well in today’s Gospel.

We have that odd expression in English:  “beyond the pale.”  A pale is a stake or picket used in a fence as a boundary marker.   A “pale” was a thus homeland, a secured area inside the boundary markers.  The Dublin Pale was the area in Ireland marked as the private possession of the English crown, where English common law and customs reigned supreme.  “Beyond the pale” was the vast region beyond those boundaries and what the English considered civilization.

Samaria was beyond the pale for practicing Jews in Jesus’ era, who considered Samaritans permanently ritually defiling and avoided contact with them. When traveling from Galilee to Jerusalem, many would go days out their way to avoid Samaria.  But in today’s Gospel, Jesus goes through Samaria and stops at Jacob’s well:  he goes beyond the bounds, beyond the pale.

It is about noon, the hottest part of the day and least desirable for hauling water.  

A Samaritan woman approaches to draw water.  She is avoiding others, coming at this time:  even among the outcast Samaritans, she is an outcast.  That’s why Jesus’ disciples are so upset when they return to find him talking with her.  This is “inappropriate behavior,” beyond the pale. 

I am always suspicious when people say their standard for behavior is what would Jesus do?  Our mind’s eye image of Jesus is drawn by the orthodoxies and dogmas of our received faith, our boundaries of culture and homeland, in a word, by our biases.  What we all should be asking ourselves is not “What would Jesus do?” but rather, “What did Jesus actually do?’   

Again and again, we see him reach out to the marginalized, the outcast, and those condemned as sinners, wicked, and foreigners:  drunks, whores, Quisling toll collectors, lepers. He reaches out to Samaritans.  He reaches out to women.  The one time he tries to shut a foreign women out, he listens to her plea to be treated at least as well as little dogs under the table begging for crumbs, and blesses her.  If we understand the word pais in the story of the Centurion’s servant as any gentile reader of that age would have understood it, he reached out without condemnation to those in same-sex relationships too.  He reached beyond the pale, again and again.

Jesus rejected zero-sum, us vs. them thinking.  “God is a loving father who shares the blessings of sun and rain equally with those we call righteous and wicked.”  “None of you poison your kids, do you?  Well neither does God!”  “Call no person father, teacher, or king save our one father, teacher, and King.”  “God can make of these stones children of Abraham!”  In his parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Abraham’s bosom has no distinction between master and servant, only between compassionate and selfish, between whom there is great gulf fixed.   For him men in the resurrection do not own women in chattel marriage, but all are like the angels, having God as their one father and husband.  Jesus rejected us vs. them, and opened his arms wide to all. 

You see it in how he treats this woman today.  He offers her living water, despite the fact that she is a Samaritan woman cast out for her own failure to keep her community’s standards of sexual morality.   She is overwhelmed by the fact that he sees things so clearly, does not condemn her, and still treats her with dignity, respect, and love.  She declares to her neighbors, “This man must be a prophet!” 

We live in an era where people want a secure homeland, and believe that this might be had by building walls, deporting people, and breaking up families.   Many who believe this say they are Christians, trying to get back the old time religion.  But I wonder:  are they following here what Jesus actually did rather than what the Jesus taught them in Sunday School would do?  I suspect they are deceived.  Our God is a God of love and welcome, not of strength through might.  Self-sacrificial love is the Christian way.  We worship God on the Cross crowned with thorns, not Caesar crowned in gold-leafed laurels, robed in royal purple, surrounded by fawning toadies.  Early Christian martyrs died rather than making any show of honoring the symbol of might through strength, the Roman Imperial Eagle or the image of the Emperor.

You know, most of us here today are refugees from other church communities.  Many of us  have suffered, in one way or another, from abusive church communities, some acting only for the best of reasons.  We came to the Episcopal Church, or for those of us who suffered abuse in Episcopal churches, came to this Episcopal Church because we loved the intimacy, respect, and love we felt in this place.  We came here because we found sweet Jesus here, with open arms and not one word of condemnation. We found here at Trinity a place where the veiled boundary between heaven and earth was so thin as to be almost translucent, what the Celts called a thin place.  

Love and compassion is a thin place; loving compassion that reaches beyond the pale is in fact the thinnest of all places.  Inclusion and non-judging welcome is where heaven meets earth.  Christ, this loving gentle man with his little jokes and open arms was the incarnation of God Almighty: compassion incarnate, the thinnest of thin places.  And he calls us to follow him.    

At the Thursday Eucharist, Diana Quirk shared her faith story: one where she took inspiration in the simplicity and service of Francis of Assisi and where she saw the face of Jesus in a pitiful person she was helping, who herself saw the face of Jesus in Diana’s help.  On Friday, I received the following from a friend, Louie Crew Clay, the founder of Integrity, the Episcopal Church’s ministry for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered persons.  He wrote of an experience where he saw the face of Jesus in the face of a bishop willing to go beyond the pale:

“Forty years ago today, March 17, 1977, I was in Jackson, Mississippi, for a consultation of black colleges. Integrity was 2½ years old. Bishop Duncan Gray, Jr., agreed to meet with me at 4pm.  It was a profound encounter for me, disciple with disciple, Suthunah to Suthanah.  He told me that our ministry is very important and that I need to live not just for myself, but in ways that will bring credit to God's work among us, that I need to be committed for the long haul, not just as a flash point for a resume.  He said that he must be candid: that he was stretching the Diocese of Mississippi about as much as they could take in his commitment to racial justice and reconciliation, that he would not be able to make public stands for LGBTQ persons without diminishing the willingness of Episcopalians to join him in support of racial integration.  “But you need to know,” he elaborated, “that I know who my gay priests are, and they have great dignity. They have not put the diocese in awkward positions because of sexual improprieties the way that some straight priests have done.  It is very important that The Episcopal Church embrace the ministry that you espouse. Don't be lonely. God is with you, and that's an awesome responsibility.”  Before I left his office, I knelt before him and asked him to bless me. That blessing continues its efficacy, I am enormously grateful.”

Jesus reached out to others in love and not condemnation.  We encounter Jesus in compassion by and for others.  May we open our hearts and arms, and be a blessing for others always. 

In the name of God, Amen.

Songs in the Night (Midweek Message)

 Icon of Blessed Lancelot Andrewes, 2015, Sacred Murals Studio

Songs in the Night

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

March 15, 2017

Bishop Lancelot Andrewes was a biblical scholar and preacher during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I.  He served as general editor of the King James translation of the Bible, and was principal author of the translation of Genesis-2 Kings.  Kurt Vonnegut in one of his novels suggested that Andrewes was “the greatest writer in the English language,” citing the first few verses of the 23rd Psalm in Andrewes’ translation. 

Andrewes wrote the following prayer about old age not long before his death in 1626 at age 71: 

Evening Prayer

The day is gone, 

and I give Thee thanks, O Lord. 

Evening is at hand, 

make it bright unto us. 

As day has its evening so also has life;

the even of life is age, age has overtaken me,

make it bright unto us.

Cast me not away in the time of age; 

forsake me not when my strength faileth me. 

Even to my old age be Thou He,

and even to hoar [white] hairs carry me ; 

do Thou make, do Thou bear, do Thou carry and deliver me.

Abide with me, Lord, for it is toward evening, 

and the day is far spent of this fretful life. 

Let Thy strength be made perfect in my weakness.

Day is fled and gone, life too is going, this lifeless life. 

Night cometh, and cometh death, the deathless death. 

Near as is the end of day, so too the end of life. 

We then, also remembering it,

beseech of Thee for the close of our life,

that Thou wouldest direct it in peace, 

Christian, acceptable, sinless, shameless, 

and, if it please Thee, painless, Lord, O Lord, 

gathering us together under the feet of Thine Elect, 

when Thou wilt, and as Thou wilt, only without shame and sins. 

Remember we the days of darkness, for they shall be many,

lest we be cast into outer darkness. 

Remember we to outstrip the night doing some good thing.

Near is judgment;

a good and acceptable answer

at the dreadful and fearful judgment-seat of Jesus Christ

vouchsafe to us, O Lord. 

By night I lift up my hands in the sanctuary, and praise the Lord. 

The Lord hath granted His loving-kindness in the day time; 

and in the night season did I sing of Him, 

and made my prayer unto the God of my life. 

As long as I live will I magnify Thee on this manner, 

and lift up my hands in Thy Name.

Let my prayer be set forth in Thy sight as the incense, 

and let the lifting up of my hands be an evening sacrifice. 

Blessed art Thou, O Lord, our God, the God of our fathers, 

who hast created the changes of days and nights, 

who givest songs in the night, 

who hast delivered us from the evil of this day

who hast not cut off like a weaver my life.  , 

nor from day even to night made an end of me.

Grace and Peace, 

Fr. Tony+

Begotten from Above (Lent 2A)

 

Begotten from Above

12 March 2017

Homily Delivered the Second Sunday in Lent Year A

8:00 a.m. Said Eucharist; (in simplified form) 10:00 a.m. Children’s Eucharist

Parish Church of Trinity Ashland (Oregon)

Genesis 12.1-4a; Psalm 121; Romans 4.1-5,13-17; John 3.1-17

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

 

In the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, we read the following in the preface:  “There was never any thing by the wit of man so well devised, or so sure established, which in continuance of time hath not been corrupted.”  Today’s gem of a gospel reading from John is a case in point.   A favorite of people styling themselves evangelicals, the way they teach it is 180 degrees in the opposite direction of what it actually says.   

Jesus here meets a man who wants to stay in control, and Jesus says “let go.” 

Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night, in private.  “I know who you are, Jesus.  I have seen the signs that you perform. I know you are from God.”  He calls Jesus “Rabbi,” and wants answers about scripture,  the commandments, and how to enter God’s kingdom.

But as we read in the verse just before this story begins, Jesus knows “what is in each person” (John 2:25).  He sees Nicodemus’ heart, and tells him what he needs to hear, not what he wants to know.
 

“Unless you are begotten from on high, you cannot see God’s kingdom.”   Nicodemus misunderstands: he thinks that Jesus is speaking of biological rebirth, tripping over the fact that the word used for “from above” can also mean “over again.”  Jesus corrects him by contrasting the physical body and the breath that animates it (or the “wind” or “spirit” that gives it life--it’s the same word in Greek and Aramaic). “Truly, I tell you: no one is able to enter the kingdom of God unless they are begotten of water and wind. Flesh begets flesh, but wind begets wind.”  Spiritual life is unpredictable as the wind:  You can hear the sound it makes, and see its results, but cannot see it directly. “So it is with everyone who is begotten by the wind.”  

Nicodemus still misunderstands.

Jesus tells him that it won’t make sense unless Nicodemus undergoes this begetting from above.  “How can you understand my teaching on heaven when you can’t even understand a simple example drawn from day-to-day life?” 

At this point, it is clear that Jesus is no longer talking to Nicodemus. The Evangelist is talking to us.  In a phrase Martin Luther called “the Gospel in miniature,” he concludes “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who puts their trust in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” 

OK—the story is complicated, relying on many puns not apparent in English. But basically, the drama of the story is pretty straightforward:  Nicodemus says, “I know who you are.  The signs that you perform show you are from God. Tell me what you know.”  Jesus replies, “You don’t have a clue about who I am. You heard about me supplying wine for a wedding feast, and driving out money-changers from the Temple; so you think I am worth listening to, and come here. But you do this in secret.  If you think you’ve just professed faith in me, you don’t know what faith is.  Faith is not about opinions privately held, conclusions safely stated.  It’s about commitment, about risk.  It requires a totally new orientation, a new life, one given anew by God.”  

Nicodemus misses the point, and asks, “How? How can this happen? How can these things be?” Nicodemus has questions, but not the right questions.  He wants Jesus to give him a formula, a check-list on how to be born of God.  Jesus sees that Nicodemus will not get closer to God without relaxing, without giving up control.  So he tells Nicodemus about water and wind.

Scripture uses many different images to describe what Jesus is talking about here: turning back, surrendering to God, being washed clean, becoming a child, getting married to God, finding a treasure buried in a field and selling everything to buy the field,  being sprinkled with purifying water, new creation, new life, waking up from a deep sleep, coming to one’s senses, regaining eyesight.  Some passages describe it from how it feels on the inside and call it forgiveness; others look at its results and call it a healing.  Though Jesus here calls it a new begetting and conception, some passages call it a death, or dying to one’s old way of life. 

Early Christians, who borrowed from John the Baptist a rite of full immersion into water as a way of marking and helping this process of death and new life along, called it a burial in the water.  That is why Jesus here says we must be begotten both of water and of wind. Though the Gospel of John never directly refers to sacraments like baptism and the Eucharist, it does make passing meditative allusion to them, as it does here. 

Jesus has in mind being pushed backwards into water, once and for all, with that feeling of falling, with that feeling of drowning.  The contrast could not be sharper—this is not Nicodemus’ view of tidy purity ritual washings, done regularly and on schedule according to the rule book he wants from Jesus.

Jesus doesn’t give Nicodemus the rule book he wants. Though Jesus is no slouch when it comes to the demands of justice and faith, he knows that without God breathing in us, rules only bring frustration and arrogance:  flesh begets flesh.  Nicodemus wants a list of things he must do; Jesus talks about being begotten.  Nicodemus wants rules; Jesus talks about the wind blowing here and there.  Nicodemus wants to play it safe; Jesus wants risks, deep, life-threatening yet life-giving risks.   

The wind blows where it will, the breath breathes where it wants—giving up control to God, living in the Spirit, cannot be mapped out, counted up, or predicted. This confuses Nicodemus, who knows how to trust the security of the rules, rituals, and moral aphorisms of conventional religion.  He asks Jesus “how can I make this new birth happen?”

Jesus replies, “This is not about what you need to do. You cannot give birth to yourself. This is about God, who breathes life and makes the wind blow.  Take the risk.  Relax and let go.  Let God do whatever God wants to do with you. He may surprise you.”

Some people misread this story just as badly as Nicodemus misunderstands Jesus’ words. They think that “being born again” is an action they must take.  Like Nicodemus, they think their salvation lies in taking an action, even if it just confessing Jesus with their lips and believing in him with their hearts.  But Nicodemus confesses Jesus in the opening line of the story.  And Jesus says that is not enough.  We have to open ourselves to God, trust him fully.  It is that simple. It is that risky.  It may feel like drowning until God reaches down and pulls us into the breath of  new life. 

Nicodemus later in the Gospel learns to allow himself to be carried away by the wind.  He speaks up for Jesus in the Council, and after Jesus’ death, with a friend asks to help bury Jesus’ body.   Risks, indeed, but exactly where the wind blew. 

What happens when we learn to let go and let God flow over us like water? What happens when we let ourselves be borne up on the wind of God? 

We are more sure of the love of God, but less sure of our own formulations about God. 

We can look at suffering and death in the face, and not be afraid, still trusting the love of God. 

We stop trying to use rules to limit God or control others.

We begin to listen to God’s Word without prejudgment, without fear.  

We begin to notice God where we least expect Him.  

Our heart is more and more open, and our mind less and less closed.

We love others as we know God loves us.

We do good out of this love, not because it is required.

Sisters and Brothers, we are damaged goods, all of us.  We are like Nicodemus in the night.  But God made us for a home we have never yet seen, and that we can barely even imagine now. Jesus tells us of that home, because he came down from there. He loves us dearly, each and every one.

Jesus not only showed us the way, he is the way.  He accepted and opened himself to the will of his Father, risked all, and let himself be borne away on the wind, even to the point of being lifted high upon the cross.  Through this and his glorious coming forth from the grave, he is reaching down to pull us from the deep water.  

Let us all learn to relax as we let ourselves fall back into the mysterious love of God.  Let us lose our lives so that we may find them.   Let’s not struggle as he buries us in the waves and pulls us up again, sputtering, into new breath and life.  Let us allow ourselves to be borne away on his wind.   

In the name of Christ, Amen.  

 Jesus and Nicodemus, Stained Glass in National Library of Wales

Woodbine Willie (midweek message)

Woodbine Willie

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

March 8, 2017

Today is the feast day of Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy (1883-1929), an Anglican priest and poet who served as a military chaplain on the western front in World War I.  The BBC in a profile broadcast about him told the story that once Fr. Kennedy was crawling out to support a group of soldiers putting up barbed wire in the front of their trench.  When one of the soldiers noticed him and asked “Who are you?” Fr. Kennedy answered simply, ”The church.” “And what is the church doing out here?”, asked the soldier. “Its job” Kennedy replied.

He was beloved by the troops, who gave him the nickname “Woodbine Willie” because of his practice of procuring and handing out the popular woodbine brand cigarettes to the soldiers in the trenches.

James Joyce in Finnegans Wake mentions Studdert: “tsingirillies’ zyngarettes, while Woodbine Willie, so popiular with the poppyrossies…”.

The rock group Divine Comedy also refer to him in their song, ‘Absent Friends’:

Woodbine Willie couldn’t rest until he’d
given every bloke a final smoke
before the killing

Kennedy’s published books of poetry include Rough Rhymes of a Padre (1918) and More Rough Rhymes (1919).

His experience in the trenches changed him, and throughout his life he was a committed Christian socialist and pacifist.  A poem that reflects his view of how social justice and mercy are interconnected reads: 

Indifference

When Jesus came to Golgotha, they hanged Him on a tree,
They drove great nails through hands and feet, and made a Calvary;
They crowned Him with a crown of thorns, red were His wounds and deep,
For those were crude and cruel days, and human flesh was cheap.

When Jesus came to Birmingham, they simply passed Him by.
They would not hurt a hair of Him, they only let Him die;
For men had grown more tender, and they would not give Him pain,
They only just passed down the street, and left Him in the rain.

Still Jesus cried, ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do,’
And still it rained the winter rain that drenched Him through and through;
The crowds went home and left the streets without a soul to see,
And Jesus crouched against a wall, and cried for Calvary.

One of his poems, now hymn #9 in our hymnal, reflects ideas that are close to the hearts of many members of our parish: 

Not here for high and holy things
we render thanks to thee,
but for the common things of earth,
the purple pageantry
of dawning and of dying days,
the splendor of the sea,

the royal robes of autumn moors,
the golden gates of spring,
the velvet of soft summer nights,
the silver glistering
of all the million million stars,
the silent song they sing,

of faith and hope and love undimmed,
undying still through death,
the resurrection of the world,
what time there comes the breath
of dawn that rustles through the trees,
and that clear voice that saith:

Awake, awake to love and work!
The lark is in the sky,
the fields are wet with diamond dew,
the worlds awake to cry
their blessings on the Lord of life,
as he goes meekly by.

Come, let thy voice be one with theirs,
shout with their shout of praise;
see how the giant sun soars up,
great lord of years and days!
So let the love of Jesus come
and set thy soul ablaze,

to give and give, and give again,
what God hath given thee;
to spend thyself nor count the cost;
to serve right gloriously
the God who gave all worlds that are,
and all that are to be.

Grace and Peace,  Fr. Tony+

Original Blessing, Original Sin (Lent 1A)

 

 

“Original Blessing, Original Sin”

5 March 2017

Homily Delivered the First Sunday in Lent Year A

8 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.  

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7; Romans 5:12-19; Matthew 4:1-11; Psalm 32

God, give us hearts to feel and love; take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

When we lived in Shanghai, Elena had a startling experience.  She was teaching at an international school.  One day in chapel, she asked the children who we are, expecting, of course, something like “child of God” or “follower of Jesus.”   But one of the first graders, the son of a Consulate colleague and friend of mine raised his hand excitedly.  “We are all sinners, hopelessly depraved in how we think, feel, and act.  It’s only through Jesus that we can be saved.”    When Elena told me the story, all I could say was, “I knew his father was a Calvinist,” I replied, “but not quite that Calvinist!” 

The image of this earnest seven year old thinking so ill of himself troubled us.  How might it affect his self-image?  Both of us were raised in a tradition that intentionally rejected the doctrine of original sin.  As children ourselves, we had both memorized our church’s Articles of Faith, including, “We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam’s transgression.” 

We had seen in our four children, newly born, the beauty of God’s creation, and the warmth and power of God’s love.  How could anyone teach their children that they were monsters, deformed and depraved, bent beyond all hope of doing anything good, let alone being good?  But then we had to raise those children: a constant effort to civilize the little creatures and teach fairness and consideration for others. They may have come innocent from the heart of God when they were born, but they clearly were not the complete persons God intended.

John Phillip Newell writes: “If a child grows up being told she is ugly or stupid or selfish, at some point, she comes to believe that about herself.  The descriptions haunt her self-understanding, and she lives in a state of doubt about her deepest identity.  This is exactly what happened in relation to the doctrine of original sin, a belief that has dominated the landscape of Western Christian thought and practice from the fourth century.  It teaches that what is deepest in us is opposed to God rather than of God” (Christ and the Celts, pp. 18-19).    He notes that 4^th century British monk Pelagius was declared a heretic for opposing the doctrine of original sin, a martyr to what Newell calls “the Imperial church,’ the church of Constantine and the newly baptized Roman Empire. 

Newell here is right in rejecting the morbid form of original sin taught by Augustine and Calvin.  But original sin as taught by the church--both Eastern and Western, Roman, Orthodox, and Anglican--has always been broader:  it meant we were impaired, but not depraved.  Only some Protestants pushed the doctrine of total depravity.  

Pelagius was not excommunicated for his affirmation of basic human goodness.  The Councils at first agreed with Pelagius’ criticism of Augustine—that he was importing a false Manichean contempt of the flesh into Christian teaching.  But they ultimately condemned Pelagius for intransigence.  They wanted him to accept that we all need God’s grace, and truly so.  But he appeared to them to insist that we could gain righteousness and salvation in theory at least through our own choices and actions.   Like most condemned by the early church as heretics, the issue was not a lack of truth, but insistence on that truth to the exclusion of a more inclusive and comprehensive truth taught in scripture and accepted by the Church.  Such people as St. David (Dewy), bishop of Wales, himself a Celt deeply grounded in the spiritual traditions of the original peoples of the British Isles, within a hundred years taught regularly against Pelagius because of his understanding of Christianity, not despite it. 

The Pelagians were known for their high morals and insistence on right choices.

But they could offer little to those who had difficulty with sin, particularly obsessive or compulsive sin, other than “try harder” and “look to Jesus’ example,” which was, for them solely how grace worked.  When this failed to get people driven by sexual urges, or addictions to clean up their acts, Pelagians simply tossed them out of the Church as lost causes.   But the Catholic Church—the inclusive Church, the church of the whole (katholikos)—always wanted to keep hope and engagement for people, especially sinners.  It never wanted to simply keep itself pure by defining the impure out. It was the narrowness of Pelagius’ vision, not its breadth, that got him into trouble. 

I saw this in my own Mormon upbringing.  In that Pelagian church you had a sense of free will and original blessing, to be sure, but you also were ill-prepared to cope with actual sin and the slavery that sin brings with it.  Mormon belief in free will and human natural innocence tends to exclude the possibility of God’s love and help if you have the misfortune of a repeated, besetting sin, especially one dealing with sex, drink, or drugs.  If you couldn’t clean up your act, you were hopeless, and expelled.  Those who ended up in desperation going into 12 Step programs ran head-long into a road block: the first step was always “we admitted that we were powerless, and that our lives had become unmanageable.”  To rely on grace, admission of powerlessness was first necessary.  You had to give up any notion of free will to have any traction with problems this big.

There has been a lot of talk of late about the conflict between the doctrine of original sin and the doctrine of original blessing.   Because of the mischief wrought by the distorted and pathological teaching of Augustine and Calvin, these two doctrines are often put in opposition to each other:  original sin OR original blessing.  But the scriptural and catholic teaching here is BOTH/AND not EITHER/OR.    

The Priestly story of creation in Genesis 1 says it clearly: we are God’s beautiful and good creatures.  We are in the image and likeness of God.  The Psalter teaches we are but a little lower than the angels.  Original blessing—the basic goodness at the heart of humanity—is scriptural teaching.  God’s image is woven throughout our nature, no matter how we may have broken or twisted it.  If it were somehow pulled out of the warp and woof of our beings, we would, simply, unravel.  Original blessing is scriptural. 

But then so is original sin, the seeming universal tendency we all have toward brokenness.  Today’s story from Genesis chapter 2 is often called “the Fall of Adam and Eve” but it is most definitely NOT history.  Modern biblical scholarship and theology are unanimous that when we read scripture paying due attention to the literary forms it uses, it is clear we Genesis 1-11 contains origin myths and legends.  Genesis 2 is about ha’adam, Hebrew for “the Human Being,” or Every Man and Every Woman.  It is about each and every one of us, and the predicament we find ourselves in regarding evil, sin, and knowing the difference between good and bad. 

We often lose sight of this because of the historicized way these stories are commonly read, a process helped along by the rhetorical flourishes you can see in today’s reading from Romans 5. But even here, note that Paul says Adam passed sin to his descendants “because all have sinned,” not “so that they all sin,” or “be punished for a sin not theirs.”   Paul in these chapters portrays Sin, the Law, and Death as characters in a great drama spread over the centuries.  We should take him at his word and recognize that these are personifications of things we deal with every day, not historical description. 

St. Augustine believed that sin in our origins was a moral contamination transmitted through the very act that generates children, sex, which he sees in the symbol of eating the forbidden fruit in the Genesis story.  Calvin taught that we are totally depraved.  But neither of these are scriptural teachings. This story does not teach that sexual sin corrupted our first parents and transmitted corruption to us all.  Instead, it tells of figures representing each one of us who go astray.  And go astray we do, all of us. The greatest proof of the truth of the teaching of a “Fall of Humankind,” is not to be found in the fossil record.  It is to be found by looking in the mirror. 

One of the reasons the Councils condemned Pelagius was that his teaching seemed to go against an almost universal practice of the Church, infant baptism.  But again, here the issue is not so much the need to remove some inherited stain and sin, but rather to show that as we are born, we stand in need of God and the community of family and church.  

Paul goes to the heart of the matter later in Romans when he talks about indwelling sin:  ^“So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me.  For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me.  What a wretched man I am!”   See?  We are all in God’s image.  We want to do good.  But we feel driven to distort the image, to be broken.  We are sinners, driven by some mysterious element in who we are.  Paul continues: “Who will rescue me from this body subject to death?  Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:21-25)

In the name of Christ, Amen.