Saturday, August 29, 2015
Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 16B ~ August
23, 2015
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
This teaching is difficult. Who can accept it?
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity,
We pray today that we may be gathered
together in unity by God's Holy Spirit, and that we may show forth God's power
among all peoples. The power we are to show forth, however, is not what we
usually mean by power. It is not any
kind of coercion. It is certainly not military domination. This is what power means to the rulers of
this world, as Paul calls them. Imperial power. In the world of separation from
God, human beings try to dominate one another.
The world calls this "power".
It is opposite to the power of God, the Power the Church is sent to show
forth.
The power of God is
the power to give life. That is, it is
the power of love. The power of God is
the power to overcome separation and alienation, which is to say, Sin. The power of God is the power to include
everyone who wishes to be included, and to attract them, as our Lord attracted
the Twelve, who stayed with Him because they could not imagine anything better
– however difficult His teaching. The
considerable number of disciples who did stop going around with Him, show us
that God's power does not coerce. It
attracts, but it does not coerce.
Finally, the power of God is the power to suffer and to overcome evil.
All those evildoers
mentioned in today's Psalm — those whom God will punish and destroy — are not
to be thought of as human persons, but rather the mysterious forces of
wickedness that cause people to find His teaching too difficult. These forces are all around, they are found
in social and economic systems, as well as in our own psyches. Sometimes they are just annoying, at other
times they are really dangerous, in any case, they all are ways of confirming
our separation from God and from one another, and beckoning us toward death.
That is what the Psalm seeks to destroy – not other people, but the spiritual
forces of alienation.
I ran across an image
our individual psyche — ego, consciousness, subconscious — as a bus or light-rail
car, crowded with passengers, each of whom has a particular agenda. They get on and off the car at various stops,
sometimes they get very close to us and bother or delight us. The point is that what we usually think of as
"Me" is more like a crowd of tendencies, agendas, and forces, which —
taken together — are really Me. (This
would explain why other people may sometimes surprise us with their opinions of
who we really are: these opinions may differ vastly from our own.) I can use this picture to understand and
apply the notions of judgment and punishment I encounter in scripture, such as
today’s psalm: the annoying and dangerous passengers on the car will be thrown
out.
Evil shall slay the wicked, *
and those who hate the righteous will be punished.
and those who hate the righteous will be punished.
The LORD ransoms the life of his servants, *
and none will be punished who trust in him.
and none will be punished who trust in him.
The power of God, not
our own effort, improves the crowd on the streetcar of my inner being. Likewise, it improves the whole world, but
not by force. The Power of God in the
world is the power of the Cross: that is the power to endure all the abuse the
world has to offer, and thereby to overcome it.
The Joly Spirit gathers
the Church. That is, we are called out
of individual separation into unbreakable Communion — out of sin into
righteousness, out of slavery into freedom, out of death into life. But that is not the whole deal: it is not
simply about our individual salvation — not just about the improvement of the
population of our individual subway-cars, nor even about our rescue from
individuality itself; because the Church is also commissioned to show forth
God's power among all peoples.
That means the Church
is to exercise the divine capacity to absorb all the world's evil – all the forces of sin, slavery, and death –
and by absorbing to vanquish them. To
show forth the power of God among all peoples is to universalize the Victory of
the Cross.
The Cross, after all,
was the world’s assertion of ultimate power.
Crucifixions showed forth the power of Rome among all the peoples of the Empire. The crucified person
was utterly powerless, totally subject to the will of the Emperor. The Cross was imperial propaganda: the symbol
of the invincibility of Rome, and the folly of opposition, made legible in the
suffering victim. But Jesus Christ has turned that on its head. The Son of David has slain Goliath with his
own sword. The power of God in the world
appears as powerlessness, but Christ has turned the ultimate symbol of imperial
domination into the emblem of liberation from that kind of power, altogether.
The repose of the
Julian Bond has given occasion to remember the civil rights movement of a
half-century ago. The freedom riders,
the voter-registration organizers, the numerous martyrs like our own Jonathan
Daniels, and hundreds of confessors, who suffered short of death, had no power
at all, from the world's point of view. Their only power was their capacity to
suffer without retaliation. Yet, in the words of their hymn, they did
overcome. United by the Holy Spirit,
they showed forth the power of God among the people of the United States.
The Communion of the
Holy Spirit – God’s New Creation, the Church – shares Christ’s power to endure
all things, and by doing so shows forth God’s power among all peoples.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME,
LORD JESUS!
