Saturday, June 20, 2015
Easter 2, 2015
SERMON FOR THE
SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER
April 12, 2015
HOLY TRINITY
& ST. ANSKAR
The Blood of Jesus … cleanses us from all sin
+In the
Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity.
The metaphor
of cleansing in Blood is a striking contradiction of traditional religion,
since any contact with blood or dead bodies was considered a defilement. Moreover, no blood was ever to be consumed – that’s the most
basic law of kashrut. Yet Thomas
insisted on precisely that contact: thrusting his hand into the wounded side of
Christ. It’s all about touching the Body. Thomas’s finger of doubt might be seen as our own probing, in the sense that
the Reconciliation of the New Covenant means overcoming our own separation from
Christ’s Body, through even more outrageous contact with His Blood: we are to
drink it.
In the New Covenant of Reconciliation, Blood does not defile,
it purifies. What is impure is the alienation scripture calls sin. Blood is
life. Christ’s Blood is Divine Life – the interpersonal
Communion of the Trinity – poured out to
undo the apartness we call sin. The Precious Blood is not the price of reconciliation in the sense of an appeasement so that God
will forget our debts. The Blood is not a propitiation,
as we used to say, but Life itself, poured out upon us and on the whole
universe. We drink it into our own
mortal bodies, so that God’s Lifeblood flows in our own arteries, and through
us into the whole cosmos. As in Adam all
die, even so in Christ shall ALL be made alive. We say that the Blood of
Christ washes sin away – cleanses us from sin. Yes, but we must stop thinking
of this legalistically. The Blood is Life that does away with sin because the absence we call death and sin are filled
with the Real Presence of the Blood
of Life. As Gregory of Nazianzus said – a few drops recreate the whole
universe.
John writes of Life in
His Name. A life. Not many lives, but one life.
There is only one life. We live
insofar as we participate in it. If we separate ourselves from it, we die –
tautology. If we cut ourselves off from Life, we die. The One Life is the Life of the Trinity – Whom we
call the Most Holy and Life-giving Trinity. The Apostles
understood this Life in His Name in a
startling way: life in common. Everyone renounced individual possession.
Christians have been doing so ever since – and those who do have usually been
sectarians. One thinks of utopian communities like the Amish and Shakers and
Mormons. Or the whole monastic movement, in all its variety. The Christian
answer to the philosophers’ question about the good life is: communal life. The good life is life in which individual possession is no longer an
issue. The opposite is avarice – the will to regard one’s own being as having. The Ancient Fathers, singled it out as the primary distortion
of consciousness that produces separation (sin). Carnal indulgences are not so
serious, though they too can be deadly. Adam and Eve first take and eat. The root of
sin is taking for myself. The result is the Fall into mortality – the
ultimate weakness.
Conversely, the power
of the Apostles’ testimony is juxtaposed with their renunciation of individual
possession. Are we not invited to detect a connection between that power and that
non-possessing? Many Christians have thought so. Whenever somebody suggests
that we ought to imitate the first Apostles in their communalism, the Church
puts on the brakes. “Hold on! This will have to wait until the Second Coming,
otherwise, there will be chaos and misery.” But still, the Church has always
tolerated, even admired, non-possessors like St. Francis and Dorothy Day,
within well-defined limits. In effect, the Church recognizes them as heralds of
the Kingdom. Possession, after all, is a sign not of life, but of death and
apartness.
Sin is just our shorthand for willful separation from Life.
Not immoral actions, but any turning from Life. We all do this continually,
since we are still being brought to life. Like Thomas, we are half in the dark
– we want to ACCEPT Life, but we keep turning away because of our darkened
consciousness. That is Sin – not something for which we deserve to be punished,
but something from which God want to save us – by His Blood.
The Collect speaks of the Paschal Mystery as the New Covenant
of reconciliation. What is reconciliation, if not the breaking down of barriers
among persons – all barriers? If Sin is
separation, Reconciliation is the opposite: communal love. Community property
would have been the natural result of the breakdown of the wall of enmity – the
sense of separation from one another – that the Pascha overcomes through contact with His Blood. To those who have
experienced that, who have already died to the Old Adam and put on the New,
what good at all is the “private ownership of any possessions”? None. Such Adamic grasping is nothing but the
sign of death. It would be laughable if it did not pose such a danger. I refer
not only to individual danger, though avarice and greed are what keep us individuals as opposed to persons in the Apostolic Community. The
danger is also cosmic, because avarice now threatens the very existence of
terrestrial life.
The Good News is that the Blood of Christ IS Life, and Life
Invincible. The world may change unimaginably, but Life and Love are victorious.
It may be that cultures and societies and whole civilizations must pass away –
as do our own mortal bodies – but if they do, it is only to make way for the
universal incorporation into the Risen Body of the One to whom Thomas cries out,
My Lord and My God.
ALLELUIA!
CHRIST IS RISEN FROM THE DEAD,
TRAMPLING DOWN DEATH BY DEATH,
AND BESTOWING LIFE ON ALL IN THE TOMBS!
