“A Change of Heart, A Change of Mind”
5 December 2021
Advent 2C
Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church
Ashland, Oregon
The Rev. Fr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
8:00 a.m. spoken Mass, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Baruch 5:1-9; Canticle 16; Phil. 1:3-11; Luke 3:1-6
God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen
I had an interesting conversation with my teenaged grandchildren over Thanksgiving: after what was supposed to be a relationship-building activity had turned into a pit of competition and mutual reproach among them, we asked the question: what is that makes the same activities have such different results: team-building, fostering mutually caring relationships on the one side or alienating and making us further apart on the other? All of the various answers we came up were defective in some way and had spectacular exceptions, and so the question remained a question, a mystery of sorts. But the one thing that seemed to point to the elusive answer was how we entered into the activity, and what the disposition of our hearts and minds were.
We live in a broken world, and among its examples of brokenness we find our human relations and our difficulty to maintain them as supportive and mutually uplifting. Identifying brokenness and pointing to ways to amend it is the primary act of a prophet.
The prophets point out, in the words of the old devotional chestnut by J.B. Phillips, how 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. Rather, 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.
To the Saduccees, or the Temple party, he says: You stress strict adherence to ritual and respect for the Temple authorities. Conservatives that you are, you recognize only the most ancient of writings, 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 Saduccees. 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 ritual. 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 brokenness, to bad religion, all around. John 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, accessible to all. 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: share your abundance with those in need; end your abuse or exploitation of others.
A commonplace in exclusivist, insular Christianity is that if you act badly, your belief system will go bad: doubt comes from sin. But I found in my own experience that the opposite is more often the case: it was only after I change the way I think about things that I felt free to ignore some of the rules put forward by the hierarchs or encouraged to act in ways better than I had even imagined before. 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 song put it: “Free your mind, the rest will follow.”
What are some of the ways we in our brokenness have of making God too small, of having too narrow a perspective?
If our God is first of all a judge or policeman, a killjoy in the sky, then our God is too small.
If God condemns the faults of others but ourselves, our God is too small.
If God loves and supports only those whom we love and want to support, our God is too small.
If God prospers the righteous and starves the wicked, our God is too small.
If God hates the things we hate, our God is too small.
If God is a patriarchal cis-hetero white male, our God is too small.
If God is a partisan and enforcer of political orthodoxy, our God is too small.
If salvation is merely a personal forgiveness of sins, our God is too small.
If God is manifest only in Church or ritual, our God is too small.
If God is manifest only in our heart and feelings, our God is too small.
If God is manifest only in nature, our God is too small.
If God is manifest only in thinking and doctrine, our God is too small.
If God is Episcopalian, or Christian, Buddhist, or Jewish, our 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, our 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, a telling of exactly where and how we are broken. 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
No comments:
Post a Comment