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!



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