Bishops' Blog

Sermon at Church of the Epiphany

I want in this sermon to think with you, as Christians, about freedom.  For there is nothing we want more, nor anything we are less able to possess, to hold. It is like gossamer, which vanishes to the touch. Here is a simple example, one you have doubtless felt yourself. At seventeen, feeling myself under heavy disciplinary hands, parent, principal, I imagined that the answer was college, escape, running my own life. At eighteen, freshman, confused, depressed, being on my own felt nothing like freedom. I had seen the enemy, in this case of freedom, and it was us (and not some authority without).  Or take the opposite experience. You spend painful hours throughout your youth, playing scales, or hitting a tennis ball, or working a lathe. Nothing free about it.  But eventually you become expert. And then you can stop thinking about the how, for you have internalized it. and your attention is turned to expressing yourself, which is after all what human beings in the so-called modern world most want. You can do something creative with a tune, or a shot, or a cabinet, and you are in a sense free, for you have something like the grammar of the thing, so that you can say something that is yours. Here freedom doesn’t feel so at the beginning, but grows out of discipline.

Let’s try one more run at the matter, this third being familiar as well. If we were to ask what words are the most important in our culture, surely ‘trauma’ and ‘addiction’ would be on the list. Things happen which affect other things we do later, in a deep way which it is at first hard to see. We realize that we have been doing things we didn’t want to do. The most famous example is found in Romans 7: ‘ what I want to do I don’t, and the thing I hate I do.’ We are mysteries to ourselves. But of course this sentence by the apostle is in the context of discovering the freedom of Jesus Christ. We might compare, in a quasi-religious way, the steps of AA, where the member comes to understand that he or she is powerless as a prelude to taking responsibility for his or her actions. The experience is real, but the relation of powerless to free is mysterious.

Enough head-scratching! When Paul says ‘the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit is there is freedom,’ he is saying that freedom is an attribute of God, like goodness or wisdom. He has it for real, we only partially, at best. And if that is true, then human freedom is always in relation to something else; you might say it is directional, from somewhere and toward somewhere. Freedom isn’t something isolated, or solipsistic; you might borrow a word from the scientists and say that freedom is entangled, for it happens in the space defined by what it is surrounded, and sheltered by. If you start there, then you can make sense of one of the greatest theologians to think on the subject, St. Augustine of Hippo, the bishop in North Africa in the 5^th century, as the Roman empire was collapsing around his ears. Freedom was obvious if by it you meant the power to go this way or that in life, to have a salami or peanut butter sandwich for lunch. But when it comes to God These decisions were, to use a Latin word, arbitrary, based on choice. But when it came to faith in God, that was more like being carried downstream by a great wave. You cannot up and change which fast-moving stream you’re in. Another, greater, has to pick you up and move you. That divine hand required grace, the free action of God. Turning to God is a greater kind of freedom. So to Augustine we are free, and yet not, and our experience consents to this insight.

Let’s try one more angle of entry. ‘Where the Spirit is, there is freedom.’ Ok, but that is not the same thing as saying, ‘where freedom is, there is the Spirit.’ The latter is not true, though we humans often want to think it so.  Paul is not saying that whatever and whenever we feel free, that must be evidence of the Spirit. Much of the worst theology and spirituality of our age really assumes this, but since Genesis 3 and the Garden we humans have a gift for self-deception.  There is a connection but the other way around. When we surrender to the call of Christ, there the Spirit works, and there we come to be free, however hard its experience may prove to be.

But what we really need this morning is to allow the story highlighted on this feast day, that of the transfiguration, to inform how we should think about freedom.  First a couple of notes. There is another transfiguration Sunday, in the middle of the sweltering Texas summer, as hard as that is to imagine. But this transfiguration is right before Lent, so as to underline that we catch this true glimpse so as to fortify us for the Lenten walk, lest we lose heart and think this whole gospel thing comes to naught in the face of all the worldly evidence to the contrary. And secondly, we hear this year Luke’s version, and one feature of his is the use of the Greek word ‘exodus,’ which means what it sounds like.  Moses and Elijah are pointing us back to the Old Testament so as to point us forward. All the law and the prophets have prepared for this. All of Israel’s faithfulness and rebellion have led, by God’s providence, more great and merciful that our minds can comprehend, to this. And the same can be said of our own lives as well, our straight paths and detours directed by God the Spirit to this day, possibility, challenge, in our life and mine.

‘And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit’

Let us end with these words, also from our passage of Paul’s from Second Corinthians.  Freedom happens when we behold the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. We behold it by grace, for only so are our faces, no more holy in ourselves than others, unveiled. Christ has unveiled them, and this is a great mystery. We behold as in a mirror, for the glory is too bright to survive. Jesus at once shows it to us and shields us from it- the brightness is accommodated in the incarnation to our weakness. In the bolding we are transformed into what we see, Him first, then us, the one beheld and the one transforming one, because God, Father, Son, Spirit are one, and their work one as well.  Yet we are only transformed to an extent, and in stages, with more to go, even in heaven seeing more, going as C.S.Lewis said, ‘further up and further in,’ but never static, for we are always following. The attention is always on the Lamb, we only the chorus. And the beholding is glory, which means holiness, brightness, beauty, power. And so, finally we see that this freedom we want, is not as we imagine it, a holding, but something more like beholding, and all this life of discipleship here, and son- and daughter-hood there, more like having our blinkers, step by step removed, a freedom not from, but always for, and toward, Him. Amen.

Sermon St. James, Texarkana

Imagine with me a great hall, alabaster, bathed in morning light from great clear stained-glass windows.  Shaped like a cathedral, it is empty but for a great chair at its center, and seven more seats in a semi-circle facing the throne.  It might remind you of the room some describe in a near death experience., or more recently, of the empty train station where Harry Potter, dead, sees Dumbledore and Voldemort. Is it in time or beyond, made of stone or spirit, in the earth of the future or in heaven or in your mind, it is for you to decide.  All is silent, until the one on the throne says these words…

‘Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’ his voice resounds like a waterfall, as Revelation says. And each time he speaks one more human being walks the length of the great salon and sits in one of the chairs.  They recognize the Master’ voice, as it speaks these same words, although to each hears their import in a slightly different way.

You ask, ‘who are these?’ they are the saints who have answered the summons to be ‘the blessed poor.’ Let me introduce them to you.

The first is a tall gaunt man, wrapped in a cloak. He had left the chaos of a declining empire. When he heard the words about the poor, he went to a mountain top and began a community of prayer. In the following centuries his monasteries would spring up across Europe. His name is Benedict. The poor are the brothers in work and devotion, and they lived alongside the peasants, and taught them to farming and herding wherever they lived.

Second in is a man wrapped in the saffron robe of an Indian guru. He too is wizened from years of fasting. His name is Sadhu Sundar Singh. He was a Christian but he heard the voice of the Master’s call with an Indian lilt. The poor ins spirit? Self-denial, deep meditation, the surrender of the ego.  He was a wanderer, finally lost somewhere in the Himalayas.

The third to enter the hall has a high German accent, and old-fashioned farm clothes.  She hailed from the Midwest. She was Amish, and she distrusted the wiles of the modern world (and I have days when I envy her). The poor are those who do not run after the false gods of possessions and the latest fashion of one kind of another decadence or another. She sat with an open but serious gaze.

The fourth in was a proper English gentleman, with a high collar and a morning coat.  His name is Charles Simeon, a proper Anglican. You know of him, even if you don’t. For he believed, as one of the earliest evangelicals, that the poor in the spirit are those with a converted heart, who have turned away from efforts to save themselves, and trusted in grace alone as Paul taught in his letters. He never left Cambridge and London much, but had a hand in inventing Sunday school, the mission society, seminary, and university ministry. He had no use for the intricacies of high church liturgy. He lived as a cultured man of his time, but that blessedness of which Jesus spoke was in his heart. He helped raise the money to convert, by God’s grace, a continent.

Fifth striding up that great bright hall lived here in the United States, a little later in the nineteenth century than Simeon. She was a pioneer student in seminary, then spent a life time in the slums of Chicago, one of the first social workers. She won a Nobel prize for her labor at Hull House among the struggling working immigrants of her generation. Her name was Jane Addams, and blessedness was working hands on for social change among the poor. The voice summoned her to her a social gospel, a serving, active gospel written in deeds more than words.

Six, a Latino, in scarlet cassock and rosary, is the martyr bishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, finally killed like Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas a Becket, eight hundred years before, by a death squad as he stood at the altar. He had spoken up for the poor campesinos against the violation of human rights by the land owners, against the violence of the fascists and for a liberation theology. He was himself a man of peace, but had heard the voice of Jesus speak of the beatitude of the poor and the woe of the rich later in today’s passage.

We are missing one more, the seventh, to fill out the seven virtues and the seven stars in the crown in Revelation. This one looks different for each of us onlookers, with a different name and face. For me it is an old Armenian man from the parish where I was a young curate. His name was Kachador and he was dying of throat cancer. After every sermon he would whisper in my ear, in the line to shake hands, ‘way to go’ in the whisper from what was left of his throat. Blessed meant dying, and in pain, for him, but turned in a simple and human way to care about others. That simple gesture I remember forty years later.

There is a debate among New Testament scholars about our Gospel. You see Luke has a sermon on the plain, which is remembered in some subtle differences from Matthew’ sermon on the mount, but has also remembered parts not found in Luke’s version. Both say ‘blessed are the poor’, but then in Matthew added ‘the poor in spirit’- how much freight should that difference carry? Is Luke turned more turned toward the world, while Matthew’s memory of Jesus more interior? Similarly Luke has woes to match the blessings, denunciations of  the rich and those at ease like Dives, not concerned with the poor man at his gate. Matthew recalls the positive side, though he does share with Luke the memory of persecution which the followers of Jesus in the ancient world faced.  Likewise you can see how our different saints heard Jesus’ one summons in variable ways. You can see that who ‘poor’ are differed- living the lowly life in community, or dwelling in things unseen, or giving oneself to social work, or standing with the oppressed, or showing a converted heart, or renouncing the vanity of this world, or suffering, and dying with an out-turned heart. Which is it? well yes, the passage gives different answers, though with Jesus it is always Yes, as Paul says.

Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the earth- what does this array of saints tell us, beyond the fascination of their own unique lives?  The important and shared thing is the Master’s voice, as well as the power of that voice to change us, to turn us. That voice they all recognize, as sheep hearing their shepherd, says Jesus in john’s Gospel. And there is always more to hear in his word. Each of their responses is right, and not the whole tale. Each must listen to the rest of the Scripture. For Jesus will also say that even the rich man can be saved, since with God all is possible. He will tell us to take the flawed culture of our time captive. He will tell us that the social work is discipleship, but so is prayer together on the Lord’s day. He will tell us to praise famous men and women, and to realize the least, the widow with the mite, is sainted too. Blessed are all those called into the kingdom, all by grace, but the how and when requires the vast witness of Scripture, the whole of life, to see more and more of how he reigns over us, in weal and woe. And to this end you and I are called together, an array of struggling saints indeed, to this place, on this Lord’s Day, Amen.