by The Rev. Gale Davis Morris
Rector of Church of the Good Shepherd in Acton, MA.
"Abraham and the stars, faith is the assurance of things hope for, the conviction of things not seen--where your treasure is there your heart will be also"
It is with great humility underscored by a sense of anger and confusion that I stand before you this morning to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. Two things have happened in the world this week that make me wonder where Jesus is in all this-this God of ours who promised to be with us.-The first event was the bombings in Africa-in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam. The second event was a vote by the bishops of the Anglican Communion who were meeting in Lambeth-a vote that excludes, condemns and judges and a whole community of faithful Christians-- denying them as full members of our communion.
These two events affirm to me that indeed the world is far more political than it is faithful. Not surprisingly, guidance about these events are spoken to us in the lessons this morning. Abraham was promised that his descendants would outnumber the stars on a summer night-or the grains of sand on the sea-and they have-people of Christian faith, Islamic faith and Jewish faith all consider themselves descendants of Abraham.-What God did not say that day in those promises to Abraham was how we were all supposed to get along-for the Islamic Jihad has claimed the responsibility for the killings in Africa.
It is a killing done in the name of God-by a people descended from Abraham-as we who sit here this morning are also his heirs. The bombings are the product of a world-a faith-a people who want desperately to cling to a fundamentalist reality-an absolutism that assures their salvation and gives them the freedom to condemn -even kill any others of Abraham's descendants who are not one of them. It is the sort of fundamentalism that Jesus most readily spoke against- that even Mohammed condemned-and certainly modern Judaism deplores-a sort of exclusive righteousness that takes the power of judgement away from God and places in squarely upon our own shoulders and the shoulders of those who are most like us.
This seems to me to be where the political and the religious get bound up. When God is used for gain-political or secular in reality but covered with God language to justify what is not justifiable. The religious use secular political structures and ways to insure their own righteousness. It seems to me that to kill indiscriminately in the name of God, any God, certainly any God known by the descendants of Abraham is to denigrate that god. Such killing happens-has happened or is happening--only when the teachings, the texts of their faith are interpreted too literally and the hierarchy becomes too fundamentalist. -too dependent upon a few pieces of the scripture rather than taking the scriptures as a whole work
In the gospel lesson this morning Jesus tells the people-and us by extension- that where one's treasure is-there also will be their heart. And then tells them a story of expectancy-of servants with lamps lit for a master returning form a wedding feast-of being served by the one they had intended to serve. That tale is followed by a warning: if they had known when the master was coming they would have all been awake! This warning is a warning to us that Christian living is a matter of living in expectancy.-Faithful living is not something one can turn of and on-anymore than one can live by a certain set of rules that will earn their way into the good graces of the master. The grace is the master's to bestow-not ours to earn. We prepare by faith not because we will earn anything-but in response to what we have already been given.
That is where the theology of the extremists, the absolutists-the literalists breaks down for Christians-and I suspect for the other faiths of Abraham as well-we do not earn God's grace-we receive it.
And we cannot become the judge of who is the recipient of that grace-that is God's prerogative.
And I would further note that human beings who are afraid cling desperately to what they have-and it could be observed that the more they have the more they cling. Fear becomes their talisman-fear, which is the opposite of faith, controls them and God cannot get to their hearts. One wonders if those who cling desperately to absolutism in any form-liberal or conservative are not ones afraid to truly examine their faith-to let it stand in the light of a multi-cultured, multiracial, multifaithed world and let God's grace and truth contained therein shine through-Are we not all like Abraham? standing with a faith we have inherited and have nurtured yet not really knowing into what lands that calls us?-a people who live in the assurance of things hoped for and not always by what we have seen--?
Then are we not called to let go of certitude of our interpretations of the bible-as we would hope that the Islamic people would of the Koran and the Jew of the Torah-to rely on the things unseen-but hoped for-the God of mystery and grace-the God of love-acceptance and tolerance-the God of inclusivity? Now hear me correctly-I am not saying we let go of our dependence upon the gospel- but rather our time and culture bound interpretations of the bible.-It is easy for us to see the time and culture bound flaws in the others faith-but what about our own?
One of the joys for me in being an Anglican, the treasure of it, if you will, of the Anglican way, the Episcopal way-has always been that our Christian denomination stands (or sits or kneels) firmly on a three legged stool of reason tradition and scripture-that we have, through history, been a people who agree to disagree and to search for the via media-the middle way-not so much a way of compromise as a way of inclusivity. We make political statements rarely-and our theological statements have allowed for the possibility of the strains of culture placed in time to be what influences those statements more than an eternal truth. We have, met to celebrate the Holy Mysteries together since Queen Elizabeth the First declared that all Anglicans will worship in the same manner on Sunday mornings-(but may then live out their spirituality in the afternoons in anyway they were so comforted). In Elizabeth's day that meant that -in the afternoons the high church people had bells and smells and the low church people listened to 4 hour sermons. In our day it means that I who stand slightly to the right of Jack Spong can take communion with and see in my evangelical colleagues the face of Christ --tho I differ drastically in interpretation of the scripture and tradition and reason we both so cherish.
The second event-the one that makes me tremble to stand before you this morning is the vote that was taken at Lambeth on the subject of homosexuality. A reasonable reflection of the whole of the Anglican communion was worked on faithfully by a subcommittee of the bishops charged with coming up with a statement on homosexuality. The statement they came up with was a masterpiece of Anglican wisdom-honoring our tradition and stating most clearly that this was a subject that ran the gamut of theological interpretations, cultural dissonance and emotional responses and that there was no common mind. That the people of the Anglican Communion and the bishops in particular would have to continue to learn, discern and pray with each other about this subject.
When it came to the floor for a vote, a well oiled political machine fueled by-if the reports on the web are correct-the most conservative of American Episcopal dioceses and organizations which made sure that clauses were added that reversed the spirit of the original statement. An overwhelming vote was made by the conference that condemns homosexuality and forbids homosexual people from full participation in the Anglican Communion, stating that homosexual "behavior" is incompatible with scripture. Now some will say-as does the Archbishop of Canterbury who helped to orchestrate this vote, that it was the mind of God and it reflects scriptural truth, traditional truth and reasonable truth-and there are still others who say it was the well oiled machine born of politics and fear that allowed the vote to be so devastating to many in the American church, gay and straight alike.
Now regardless of where one stands on this issue of homosexuality-and I acknowledge that there are a variety of stands people of faith take, the thing that feels lost to me in this Lambeth was our Anglican treasure-the gift of being the via media; the treasure of allowing all voices to be heard and listened to and welcomed at the table.
I fear that we will become as the Islamic Jihad who have no compunction about slaughtering hundreds of innocents in the name of god-I fear we will become ones who do not live by the assurance of things hoped for but who need to have everything of God somehow reduced to absolutes that allow us to think we are the makers of our own grace-that we earn it rather than celebrate it.
Where is God? Where is Christ in all this? I think God is where Christ most often appears in scripture-and is today. Christ is with those who are injured, hurting and cast out.-We, as Christ's own, pray today for those injured and the dead in Africa be they Christian, Jew or Islamic-all of Abraham's children. We pray too for gay and lesbian members of our Anglican communion who are feeling they have been cast out and labeled (as lepers were in the first century) We pray that we will have the courage to live in the via media-the middle way, the way of faith -things hoped for and not known---a way that honors all people, and trusts that our deepest hopes will be realized. We pray that our treasure and therefore our hearts, will be in beholding God's face in the lost, the hurt, and the outcast as Jesus so often does.
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