Friday, July 29, 2016
Pentecost 10, Year C, Proper 12, July 24, 2016
Sermon for The Tenth Sunday After Pentecost
Year C, Proper 12 ~ July 24, 2016
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
Your Kingdom come…
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
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heard that some insider journalists like to gamble on how many minutes it would take for a political speaker to mention Hitler. One doesn’t want to be too quick to compare the present state of the country to the Weimar Republic. Frequent wolf-crying notwithstanding, let’s remember that the other side of that coin is “it can’t happen here, and that kind of American exceptionalism is particularly fatuous. A few days ago was the Feast of St. Alexander Schmorell of Munich, the neo-Martyr of the White Rose circle – students who opposed Hitler and were guillotined in 1943. They had opposed Hitler on the basis of Christian faith, Roman Catholic as well as Orthodox. And today, the Sunday between our two political conventions of this critical election year, we hear our Lord teach us to pray that the Kingdom of the Father may come. We hear Him tell us that the Father will give to those who ask and open to those who knock. We hear Abraham’s relentless insistence on God’s mercy for the wicked city, and we hear our Lord’s comment that even wicked people give their children good gifts and that the sleeping householder will open to his importunate neighbor just because of his persistence. In the Collect we[bt1] also recognize God as the only Source of strength and holiness, and we address God as our Ruler and Guide.
It is probably time for some consideration of the Lord’s Prayer, but that will take a few weeks. Too much for one sermon. So today, I will concentrate on the first petition. Where we ask that God’s Kingdom may come. This prayer invites a consideration of political theology – particularly appropriate for us, just now.
The Kingdom we seek is not our own, and it is not of our own making. God alone is our Ruler, we pray that God is also our Guide. Listening to the Republican Convention, I kept thinking of the Nüremberg Rallies. People mistook their Leader for their Savior. The godless, Nazi ideology idolized German nationality and Hitler as its focal point: personal embodiment of the entire German People, the living incarnation of their suffering and hope, possessing the strength of will to achieve it. Trump said again and again “I am your voice.”
The theatrical adulation was, in fact, similar to Nüremberg, right down to the airplane circling low over Lake Erie, and then the Trump Helicopter delivering the Voice – the Leader – to the auditorium. Go and watch Triumph of the Will – Leni Riefenstahl’s great documentary about the Nazi Party Congress at Nüremberg in 1934. The whole message was similar: we are a great people, downtrodden by a corrupt elite, servants of foreign enemies: venal and self-serving parasites who care nothing for us ordinary Americans, but hold us in contempt. The would-be Leader invoked every real grievance, every fear, and every misguided prejudice: immigrants, terrorists, international financial arrangements, the “terrible crimes” of Mrs. Clinton, and on and on. We Americans used to be winners, now we are losers. But I am here to change that. I am going to fix it. I am America’s destiny. I am your voice. I am your savior.
There was one way in which Mr. Trump did not mimic Hitler, and that was his constant reference to himself. I am this, I am that, I will, I know how to, I am going to…, &c. Me, me, me. Now there was certainly a cult of personality in the Third Reich, but even Hitler didn’t talk like that. Trump appears to be even more self-absorbed than Hitler. Maybe that narcissism, that infantile egoism, will be his downfall. Maybe that will save us. Maybe not. We’ll see. But the combination of that pathologically disordered character with the Nüremberg theatrics in a celebration of grievance and anger and fear makes the comparison inevitable, in my opinion.
“Lock her up!” “USA, USA”. Not far from there to Sieg Heil. “America First.” Not so far from Deutschland über alles. Maybe this is nothing more than the exaggerated fever of a political convention. Maybe not. Unfortunately, if it is the latter, we won’t know for sure until it’s too late. For now, all we have to go on is style.
So we remember the glorious Neo-Martyr Alexander of Munich and his companions, who achieved the Crown of Martyrdom through political action in this world, and in so doing advanced the Kingdom for which our Lord taught is to pray. In our election year, it is legitimate to remember that all theology is political. Some of it is good and some of it is bad. Some is genuinely evangelical and some is ediabolical. Some say that it is the duty of every Christian to support Donald Trump. This diabolical kind of political theology passes off greed and the lust for power, scapegoating and hate-mongering as reform and salvation. The genuine kind of political theology is marked by self-sacrifice and refusal to offer – or to accept – idolatrous worship. The genuine kind of political theology points toward the Kingdom that only God can bring, the Kingdom of Him Whose throne in this world is the Cross. The Kingdom for which we pray whenever we say “Our Father…”. The prayer of a little child asking Abba for bread. If we ask, we shall receive. If, in the process, like St. Alexander, we receive the Cross also, that is not to receive a stone or a scorpion. It is to enter into the heart of the Kingdom, to join Jesus Christ on His earthly throne, to join in His suffering that is the Redemption of this world.
Today a light adorns [our glorious city] the City of Munich, having within it your holy relics, O Holy Martyr Alexander;
for which sake pray to Christ God,
that He deliver us from all tribulations,
for gathered together in love we celebrate your radiant memory, imitating your bravery, standing against th godless powers and enemies.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS!
Pentecost 6, Tear C, Proper 8, June 26, 2016
Sermon for The Sixth
Sunday After Pentecost
Year C, Proper 8 ~ June
26, 2016
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Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
Keep your hand on the plow: hold right on.
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided
Trinity
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Plows.
Prophets. Apostles. Elisha is plowing, and Jesus says whoever once sets hand to
plow, but then “looks back” Is not suited for the Kingdom of God.
Elijah
was the great Pro-phet of Israel after the time of David. And Elisha was his
successor. God commands Elijah to institutionalize
his prophetic office – just as prophets already anointed kings, they would
designate their own successors.
The
Church understands this as the duty of Apostles, too. The Apostles are
analogous to the prophets of Israel, and they are to ordain their own
successors. We make much of this in the Anglican Communion – Apostolic Succession, we say, and we
call ourselves Episcopal, which means
having to do with bishops, whom we
regard as the successors of the Apostles.
This
coming Wednesday is the Feast of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul. It is often
simply called the Feast of the Holy Apostles, and as such it may also be taken
as a celebration of the whole notion of Apostolic Succession – a significance much
grander, even, than the commemoration of the two foun-ders of the local church
at Rome. Both Peter and Paul were foreigners, born elsewhere, who died violently
in Rome – traditionally on the same day, June 29. Even though Paul was legally a
citizen, they were both outsiders, sent from abroad with a message. To fulfill
their commission, they had to give up everything, including their lives.
Just
like Elisha. He couldn’t even go back home to tell his father he was leaving.
That alone is kind of outrageous, given that filial duty is enshrined in the
Fifth Commandment, written in stone on Sinai, by the Finger of God! The twelve
yoke of oxen (twenty-four large animals) and the plow belonged to Elisha’s
father. Not only did Elisha disappear without informing his father, but he
destroyed a fair amount of his father’s wealth before he left! So also, Jesus
insists on complete renunciation of ordinary obligations.
What
are we to do with this?
· We can attribute it to the apocalyptic
consciousness of the Early Church – the ones who wrote the Gospel – and say
that everybody expected the world to end soon, so ordinary obligations are
meaningless.
· We can say (as I often do) that one size does
not fit all, and that people have different callings… that it doesn’t mean you
have to forsake all obligations in order to do Jesus’s will and to be approved
by God – just that not everyone is called to be an Apostle.
· We can allegorize and spiritualize and
individualize the meaning, noticing that sooner or later we all WILL give up
everything to follow Jesus, whether we want to or not, in the sense that we are
all going to follow Him in death. If we practice inner renunciation now,
constantly remembering that we are dust and to dust we shall return, we begin
to get ready for the Kingdom of God. Indeed, we call Baptism participation in His Death.
· We can remind ourselves that the Kingdom of
God does not mean a reward in heaven after we die, but the transformed society
and transfigured creation of perfect equality and harmony. Obviously, any kind
of obligatory preference for anyone is incompatible with such a régime.
Maybe
there is some truth to each of these interpretations. At the very least, the story
of Elisha and Jesus’ pronouncement about the plow would seem to caution against
attachment to aspect of our present arrangements. But it would be a mistake to
think it cautions us against love. If we
don’t love our parents, how can we love anyone else?
Somehow
the Elisha’s love for his father must be reconciled with the sacrifice of his
father’s treasure. A big order, but maybe there is one little clue in the
detail about giving the twenty-four boiled oxen to feed “the people”:
[Elisha] took the yoke of oxen, and slaughtered
them; using the equipment from the oxen, he boiled their flesh, and gave it to
the people, and they ate.
Leaving
aside the considerable resemblance of this story to that of David’s sacrifice
of the oxen on the holocaust of the cart they were pulling, carrying the Ark of
the Covenant, which the Philistines, in desperation, had sent back, we have to
ask “who were these people?”
Whom
did Elisha feed? Who knows? They must represent something like society as a
whole. The prophet or apostle must put everything at the disposal of everyone
else. Everyone is his family, not just his father. He owes that extended family
– all humanity – the same obligation he owes his own Father and Mother. If you
want to enter the Kingdom of God, you can’t be tied to the natural restriction
of obligations to immediate family. Or to clan, or to tribe, or to nation.
The
prophet/apostle recognizes the whole of humanity – indeed the whole of creation
– as “father and mother” of the
Commandment. To enter the Kingdom of God is to awaken the consciousness that
all people and all creation really are as closely related to one as one’s own
parents.
To live in this consciousness seems to me to
be a rare gift. How on earth can it be institutionalized? That is the dilemma
of the Church – just as it was the dilemma of Jesus and Elijah. Some
institutional successors are better than others. Those who really live up to
the prophetic and apostolic calling, who offer themselves as building-blocks in
the Temple of which Jesus Christ Himself
is the chief Cornerstone, sacrifice everything, like Elisha and Peter and
Paul, so that the People may eat.
Their
sacrifice is symbolized by a famous comment on the rite of consecration of a
bishop in the Orthodox Church. After the actual consecration, the new Bishop is
vested and presented with two torches – a triple candle and a double one,
symbolizing the Mysteries of the Trinity and Incarnation (dual nature of
Christ.) But the famous comment observes that these ceremonial torches also
represent those carried by the soldiers coming to arrest Jesus in Gethsemane. The
main calling of successors of the prophets and apostles is sacrifice.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS!
