Friday, September 25, 2015
Sermon for Pentecost 18
Proper 21 B ~ September 27, 2015
Christ Church, Bayfield
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity,
This is one of my favorite passages
in the Gospel! It is so exaggerated that
no one could seriously be expected to follow the advice, and what's more, no
one ever has. That helps faithful readers
to understand that everything in Holy Scripture is not meant to be taken literally.
After all, if you combine this passage with St. Paul's observation that
everyone — without exception — has offended and fallen short of the glory of
God, then why aren't all the faithful Christians stumbling around blind and
footless? Obviously, the meaning of
these frightful commands is on a level other than the literal.
Maybe the Collect for today gives
us a clue: we address God as the One Who displays “almighty power chiefly in
showing mercy and pity” — compassion,
in other words. Then the Collect aska
for grace to run without stumbling the race that is set before us. Well, aside from the fact that we can't run
very well with amputated feet, how do these words about the Divine Compassion
relate to the image of self-mutilation?
The Gospel is all about mercy:
completely free and undeserved grace. If
I think I have to earn my way into God's favor, then I have to gouge out the
eyes that see things that way, and cut off the hands and feet that try to earn
God’s grace. I think this is a way of
saying that it is just impossible to be righteous enough to earn my own way.
The self I have to mutilate is spiritual, my false self, my
ego, which Paul calls the flesh. This is the life that I have
to lose in order to find life, as our Lord said in the Gospel a couple of weeks
ago. Paradoxically, the part of myself that I have to cut out is the part that
thinks there is anything I have to
do to make myself acceptable to God. The life I have to lose is my illusion of life
on my own terms. What I have to cut out is every doubt that God already accepts
me. I think the awful images today symbolize that. They also symbolize the
necessity of purification.
Everyone will be salted with fire.
I think that is a reference to
purification. Purification means to be
cleansed by fire: purification. And salt, which draws the blood out of meat,
was also use to purify it according to the dietary laws. So we all need purification. "Everyone will be salted with
fire." At the top of the list of
defilements that require cleansing is every tendency of our ego to judge and
condemn other people and to imagine ourselves as separate from them, which is
simply the other side of the coin that says we
have to earn God’s favor.
This is the aspect of our
consciousness that St. Paul called the
flesh. That is what needs to be
purified, cut off, burnt with unquenchable fire. As long as there is any trace of mercilessness
left in us, we burn in hell, and we will continue to do so until our
mercilessness is burnt away.
There is nothing more important
than mercy. Everyone senses this, on
some level, which may be why Pope Francis is so wildly attractive: he is an authentic
embodiment of mercy. He reminds us what
true religion is all about. To run the
race that is set before us is to act more and more like God Himself, Whose almighty
power declares itself “chiefly in showing mercy and pity.”
“What is a merciful heart?” asked the
great, ancient spiritual teacher, St. Isaac the Syrian. “It is a heart that
burns with love for the whole of creation, for men, for the birds, for the
beasts, for the demons, for all creatures” (Mystic Treatises, edited by A. J.
Wensinck, Amsterdam, 1923, p. 341).
As for hell, we create our own in
so far as we refuse mercy to anyone — not that God wants to punish us, just
waiting to get us for our lack of
mercy. That’s absurd. God's mercy is infinite,
and greater than our sin, even when we show no mercy to others. But God has created us in such a way that we
can find joy only in Him, and our mercilessness does have to go before we can share the life of the One Who is
mercy itself. The elder son has to give
up his egotistical condemnation of his prodigal younger brother before he can
go in to the banquet of the fatted calf. The door is open, the father wants him
to come in, but the elder brother has to embrace their father’s mercy. In denying
it to his brother, he rejects it for himself. He will go in to the feast only
when it is more appealing to him than his own delicious sense of
self-righteousness.
Likewise, all of our merciless egoism
is a kind of hell fire. As long as I
nurture the ego and its resentments, I keep the fire going, I suffer at my own
hands. Only when I am willing to gouge
out the eyes that mark every offense, to cut off the feet that rush not to God
but to condemnation of others, and the offensive hands willing to inflict judgment
on anyone I think deserves it, can I run the race to God. I have to leave those
offending parts to burn out in the fire.
Last week I mentioned St. Gregory
of Nyssa, and his vision of eternal life as perpetual growth in love and
joy. That begins with purification. Everyone will be salted with fire. Gregory — the very definition of an orthodox
Church Father — taught that hell is not permanent, except insofar as we make it
so. Gregory said that Christians may
legitimately hope even for the redemption of the Devil! The fire that is
unquenchable is our own mercilessness; the worm that never dies is our own ego.
The race that is set before us is running
away from that toward God. We can begin
running right now, but most of us do not finish the race in this life. As long as we are stuck in our ego, the love
of God is a torment. Hell after death is really no more unpleasant than earthly
slavery to ego in this life. Gregory teaches us that everyone, without
exception, may complete the race after death.
Until we have become perfectly
merciful — perfect, as our Father in Heaven is perfect — we suffer fiery,
purifying pain, which is in fact an instrument of God's mercy, God’s love helping
us to let go of what hurts us. It may take some of us longer than others, but
sooner or later everyone can reflect and enjoy God's infinite compassion, God’s
mercy and pity, which is the chief expression of God''s Almighty Power.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS!
