Mosaic "Sermon on the Mount" Basilica of St. Apollinare, Ravenna, c. A.D. 504
God Where We Least Expect
8
February 2019
Homily
preached at 11 a.m.
Funeral
with Eucharist
For
Earl Patrick King (Mar. 17, 1946 – Dec. 3, 2018)
Parish
Church of Trinity Ashland (Oregon)
The
Very Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
Matthew
5:3-12
God,
give us hearts to feel and love. Take away our hearts of stone,
Jesus’ beatitudes suffer from our familiarity with them. We
think the beatitudes are moral targets, the way Jesus wants us to be: be-attitudes. Not so!
Beatus in Latin means
“blessed.” A beatitude is just a phrase that starts with the word “blessed.”
Jesus’ society, like ours, praised certain things, and
called certain people happy or blessed.
But Jesus turns these on their head. “It’s a good thing to be hungry, it’s a good
thing to be poor, it’s a good thing to
mourn, to be excluded.” Really?
Obviously,
whatever it was that the historical Jesus said, it troubled his
followers. Both Matthew and Luke interpret these sayings in very
different ways, a sign that Christians then struggled with these sayings just
as we do.
Jesus turns conventional views on their head. Some
things, let’s admit it, are just bad: starvation, hardship, sorrow at a
loved one’s death, social exclusion. Some things are just good:
having enough food and money to provide for yourself and family, being
well. But Jesus is not so sure.
It’s commonly held that God blesses good people with good
things and punishes bad people with bad things.
But Jesus knows that bad things can happen to the good and that the evil
can prosper. He says, “You misunderstand what a blessing or a curse is.
Things are not as they appear.”
Announcing the coming of God’s reign, Jesus sees God at work
exactly where we expect not to find him: hunger, yearning, dependence, illness,
death, and vulnerability are all signs of God’s active presence and saving
work, not marks of God’s curse or punishment.
It is important, profound theology. He is not making
light of suffering, or saying, “it’s not all that bad.” He knows that hunger, sickness, grinding
poverty, misery, deprivation, grief, and deadly exclusion inflicted on
marginalized people are all truly intolerable and not what God
wants. Death, though part of the natural world God created, is not
God’s ultimate intention for us.
Jesus here is not trivializing suffering, but magnifying
grace. God is the answer to, not the
source, of horror.
Isaiah 45:15 says “Truly you are a God who hides himself,
the God and Savior of Israel.” St.
Thomas Aquinas draws from this to develop his doctrine of Deus Absconditus,
the Hidden God. God by definition is
hidden, but if you have faith in God, it is God whom you must wholly
trust.
Horror, Evil, Death in the world—these are not
evidence that God does not exist. Rather, the fact that we revolt against
them and find them intolerable is one of the strongest evidences of God. Our idea of justice and right cannot grow
merely from this messed up world we live in. Rather, it comes from God
himself, imprinted in the creation of God bearing God’s image, written in our
hearts. Immanuel Kant expresses this when he says that he finds evidence
for God not just in how the stars are moved above, but also in how our hearts
and minds are moved.
Buddhism teaches that all suffering comes from attachment;
getting rid of all desire will end suffering.
Christianity teaches that while we must learn acceptance and patience,
it is all right to feel the discomfort and pain caused by need and
dissatisfaction with wrong. In fact, it is essential because God is at
work in such need and discomfort.
Each of the beatitudes includes dissatisfaction: hunger,
grief, need. Mourning is unhappiness at the loss of a loved one, not a
state of acceptance. Neediness and hunger do not describe satisfaction,
but desire for something different that what we now have.
Reinhold Niebuhr's great "Serenity Prayer" is
misnamed. It is not a prayer only for serenity
to accept the things we cannot change. It also prays for courage
to change the things we can. It also asks for wisdom to
know to distinguish between the two.
God at work in the day-to-day things of life, even its horrors, is a key idea in Jesus’ preaching, his announcement that “God’s Reign is in your midst”.
So how does this apply to us today?
We love Earl, but no longer see him. This does not mean he no longer exists. Earl’s sudden death does not mean that he was
abandoned, or punished, or left to random chance. It does not mean that we are abandoned to
random chance. It does not mean that God
is not here.
God is here, where we least expect to find him, says
Jesus. Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the sick. Blessed are they who mourn. Blessed are the dead.
Earl was an honest man, one who recognized his own doubts,
fears, and failings. A seasoned sailor,
both in the Navy and the merchant fleet, he was steady and firm in the face of
physical fear. He came to church with
Victoria, and participated in the degree he felt comfortable. For whatever reasons of the heart, he sometimes
declined full participation, but he worked and worked and worked to serve those
in need. In addition to his work, he was
present and built a lasting relationship with his sweetheart, Victoria. He took care of that lovely house and grounds
up in the mountains behind South Medford.
Many of the builds of Habitat for Humanity in this valley were his
handiwork. He served as Saint Nicholas
each December 6. He loved and supported
music both at Saint Mark’s Medford and at Trinity Ashland. He lived and died a full Christian, and is, I
am sure, part of the communion of Saints.
Every funeral in our Prayer Book tradition is a Mass of the
Resurrection, a celebration of hope in the face of death, of confidence in the
face of sickness, and of grateful joy in the face of all it means to be human,
good and bad.
Thank God for such hope, confidence, and joy. And thank God for our brother Earl.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
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