John the Baptist, El Greco. M. H. de Young Museum, San Francisco
“A Change of Heart, A
Change of Mind”
9 December 2018
Advent 2C
Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church
Ashland, Oregon
8:00 a.m. spoken Mass, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
I saw a comment earlier in the week
that struck me: “If you want to praise a young missionary who crosses a border
illegally and is killed, but criticize a mother who tries to cross a border
illegally to save her children, and yet support officials who lob tear gas at
them, then maybe your gospel is too small.”
“Your gospel is too small.” Or, alternately in the words of the old
devotional chestnut by J.B. Phillips, Your
God is too Small.
This is at the heart of what John
the Baptist is all about. He is not
preaching a sectarian rule of life, a set of doctrines and practices you must
accept or be damned. I saw another meme
this week parodying a beloved Advent hymn: “On Jordan’s Bank, the baptists cry,
were I a baptist, so would I.” No. John the Baptizer was not, after all, a
baptist. John is saying to all the
groups around him: you have all sorts of
ways of figuring God and this life out.
But they’re not working.
Something’s wrong: your God is
too small.
To the Saduccees, or Temple party, he
says: You stress strict adherence to
Temple ritual and respect for the Temple authorities. Conservatives that you are, you recognize
only the Torah as scripture and thus reject any afterlife. But you are in bed with the Romans. Your royal supporters, the Herods and the
Maccabees before them, have put the High Priesthood for sale to the highest
bidder. You think that you are the sole
franchise holders on God’s forgiveness and purification. Few can afford your prices, or stomach your
corruption. Your God is too small.
To the Pharisees: You think yourself liberal, accepting the
prophets and the writings as part of scripture.
You think yourselves pure, rejecting the corruption and accommodation of
the Herodians and Sadduccees. You stress
careful observance of the Law, but also add extra rules aimed at putting a
fence around God’s law. But few can
follow your rules, or stomach your own profiteering from religion. And you remain in the thrall of the Temple
authorities. Your God is too small.
To his close coreligionists the
Essenes: You accept the entire canon of
scripture plus your own sectarian writings.
You have fled the corruption of Jerusalem and the Temple, and seek, here
near where I baptize, to prepare in the desert the way of the Lord. You reject the authority of the purchased
High Priesthood, and try to live the Law more strictly than all the others,
recreating in your life the wandering of the Children of Israel under Moses. But you are a small sect, highly insular and
exclusive, and your leaders abuse power just like those of the other
sects. Your God is too small.
John’s preaching and baptism is a
reaction to bad religion all around. It
tries to make God’s rescue and hope accessible to all: something real,
something tangible, something available.
John offers all and sundry the grace
of God. “Repent and be baptized for the
remission of sin” is better translated, I think, “Change the way you think, act
accordingly, and receive this washing as a sign your failings no longer
separate you from God.”
John’s baptism fed a great
hunger: in his community, most people
felt they were perpetually unclean and unworthy of God’s fellowship. The ways offered them out of this did not
work. The Temple was too far away and
expensive for most. The Rabbis’ fence
round the Law too constraining and its practices too costly. The monastic life in the desert was too
exclusive and inaccessible. And many
were unwilling to follow these paths precisely because their corruption had
become part and parcel of the oppression of the Romans and their Jewish
quislings.
John answers this problem with the great
message of the prophets: Turn around, turn around. “Focus on your wrong thinking and your wrong
acting, and then turn around.” That’s
what “Repent” means. John says “Do that,
come and let me wash you, not in the Temple after a sacrifice, not in a ritual mikveh
built and owned by those who have their lives together and can afford it, or in
a closed monastic community, but in the open water of the river. Then show in your lives fruit of that turning
around.”
It's all a question of
perspective. Too narrow a perspective,
and you have narrow exclusive religion.
Too broad, and you have vague gas without specific demands on you. John says: Change your minds. Change perspectives. To the narrow, he says, broaden. To those who see religion flexibly enough to
allow unjust and abusive behavior, he says, tighten up the focus, eschew
injustice. He preaches a demanding set
of ethical rules.
I was raised in a Church that taught
that incorrect thinking was the result of sin.
But I found in my own experience that the opposite was more often the
case: it was only after I changed the
way I thought about things that I felt free to ignore some of the rules put
forward by the hierarchs. How we think sets boundaries on what we
believe is possible and good. A change
of thinking usually precedes a change in behavior.
Sometimes, how we think is constrained
by our habits and vices. In this case,
we may indeed have to change the way we behave in order to change the way we
think: the Twelve Step programs’ principle of “Fake it ‘till you make it.” In this case, we act better than we think we
are so that we can become better. This
is the opposite of hypocrisy, where we act better than we are so that we can
remain the same or even become worse.
But in general, the Baptist’s cry to
“Change your Mind” as the stepping off point for hope and accepting rescue is
what holds true. As the early 1990s
disco/ hip hop cross over song put it: “Before you can read me you gotta learn
how to see me. Free your mind, the rest
will follow. Be color blind, don’t be so
shallow.”
What are some of the ways we have of
making God too small, of having too narrow a perspective?
If your God is first of all a judge
or policeman, a killjoy in the sky, then your God is too small.
If God condemns the faults of others
but not of you, your God is too small.
If God loves and supports only those
whom you love and want to support, your God is too small.
If God prospers the righteous and
starves the wicked, your God is too shallow.
If God hates the things you hate,
your God is too small.
If God is a patriarchal cis-hetero
white male, your God is too small.
If salvation is merely a personal
thing taking away sins, your God is too small.
If God is manifest only in Church or
ritual, your God is too small.
If God is manifest only in your
heart and feelings, your God is too small.
If God is manifest only in nature,
your God is too small.
If God is manifest only in thinking
and doctrine, your God is too small.
If God is Episcopalian, or
Christian, Buddhist, or Jewish, your God is too small.
If the struggle between Good and
Evil is between groups of people, divided by class, wealth, nationality,
politics, race, or religion, your God is too small.
“Change your minds. Change your hearts.” John the Baptist teaches us that hope for
salvation comes from broadened perspectives and focused vision that allows honest
recognition of failings. In the coming
week, as we continue our advent preparations and spiritual practices, I invite us to ask “in what ways is my God
too small?” Let’s open our minds and
hearts, broaden our perspectives, and then let this change express itself in
our actions.
In
the name of Christ, Amen.
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