A Time to Choose: Sermon for Proper 27A

Choices. This week especially we have been reminded that we have choices.

We can choose one candidate, or the other. Or we can choose not to choose, and fool ourselves into thinking that refusing to choose isn’t itself a choice, and the worst one of all possible options, because it surrenders the agency that is part of what makes us human.

We can choose to be present in this moment, with all its pain and potential, rather than distract ourselves with electronics for fear of "boredom." We can choose to forgive someone, even if they never truly repent of the wrongs they have done us, even if they vaguely mutter that they “may have” hurt you when they know damn well that they have. Even if we know they ask our forgiveness out of selfishness, rather than because they seek healing or reconciliation.

Some people get lots of choices, because they’ve got lots of resources. Some effectively don’t have many choices, because they don’t have resources, through things they don’t get to choose, like the color of their skin or the place of their birth or their name or their caste. And we can choose to acknowledge that, and work together for better.

This week in America, we celebrate the fact that we DO have choices, and we stand up to make sure that our choices build up rather than destroy, that they are motivated by love and faith rather than hatred.

Even when you make the choice to come to church, there are choices in the lectionary. And our lectionary readings today are about choices, as well, as they often are, because no matter what some people claim, God wove the ability to make choices into the fibers of our bones and does not foreordain the outcome of illness, elections, or even football games that go into double overtime, no matter how strong the fans of Notre Dame think their connection with God is.

In our reading from Thessalonians, we see people being urged to choose faithfulness in the face of disappointment. In our gospel, we see both wise and foolish people within the community of Jesus can fail to have faith in the abundance of God and help support each other in remaining within the Body of Christ, instead choosing to live by a heartless insistence on scarcity that we ourselves know all too well.

The starkest choice in all our readings, though, is the one laid before the people in our reading from the Hebrew histories. The book of Joshua is the first of the books of history after the five books of the Torah, and tells the story of what happened under the leadership of Joshua, who succeeded Moses. Due to the placement of All Saints’ Day, this is the only reading from the entire book we will hear.

What we miss is the sweep of Joshua’s leadership. Moses, remember, dies without being actually allowed to enter the Promised Land. Joshua is anointed as leader, it actually has to bear the responsibility of leading the Israelites into Canaan. And it's a temptation, just like in the founding of America, to imagine that the land that they entered was empty of people already there (by the way, that is never true --not in America and not in Canaan). Instead, what happens is that the Israelites almost immediately have to engage in a series of wars with the various inhabitants of Canaan in order to get a part of it for themselves. That constant warfare is what we missed in the chapters we have skipped over.

When two cultures collide, there was always an exchange of customs and ideas that goes both ways. One of the common effects upon the colonizers, whether they were Europeans in America or Israelites going into Canaan, was the tendency of “going native.” When our first Anglican ancestors landed in Virginia in the 16th century, they soon ditched the European garb made for a European climate, and instead began to dress in buckskins and moccasins, and ate native food, such as corn, succotash, and pumpkin, even adapting canoes and dugouts for transportation on rivers and streams.

With the Israelites, the temptation to “go native” was different. They were, after all, a people who had already three times under Moses promised to worship only Yahweh. And yet, as they settled in their new lands, hard one through numerous battles, they looked around and saw their neighbors worshipping a variety of weather and fertility gods in particular-- gods who are small enough to fit into your pockets. Gods who were small enough to stick to one particular area of life and not be so terrifyingly, overwhelmingly all-knowing and all-seeing and creator of every single thing in the universe, as Yahweh claimed to be. Their neighbors’ gods were appealing because they were manageable gods. Controllable gods. Gods who sometimes demanded human sacrifice—but hey, those sacrificed were usually enemies, so it really wasn’t seen as a loss. The kind of gods humans have ALWAYS loved to fashion for ourselves, because in the end they are handy scapegoats for problems and outlets for our longing to have a powerful, wish-fulfilling genie in our weak little hands.

And so Joshua lays it all out for them: they must choose. Yahweh or idolatry. And he doesn't do too good a job of selling it, either. He claims-- falsely-- that God will not forgive , I guess he might have been injecting some of his own frustration with this stubborn people.

Against all odds, they choose Yahweh. And it is a choice that periodically has to be renewed in the history of Israel. It's hard to remain faithful, especially when you're surrounded by people who live a different way. It's hard to remain faithful, because there are idols everywhere. And that is just as true now, 8000 years later, as it was there as Joshua addressed the people of Israel and laid the matter out for them starkly.

We may take pride in our ultra-modern, postmodern way of life, where we are surrounded culturally by a social order in America shaped by Christendom specifically. We take it for granted that we will get time off for Christmas or get visited by the Easter Bunny, even if we never darken a church door. In this country, as well as in most of the Western World, Christian traditions and holidays remain ubiquitous even as those who claim to be Christian has steadily decreased until people who acknowledge themselves as Christians are now approaching a minority in this country. 

Yet it's true: we are all born with a God-shaped hole inside of us that only God can really fill, as the French theologian Blaise Pascal pointed out in the 17th century. But it’s easier to try to fill that hole with things. And those things anesthetize us, and close us off from being open to God and seeking God. We want control. And so we too often we want those tiny little gods, rather than the capital G God.

I want to propose to you that rather than being necessarily a tragedy, this decrease in nominal Christian identity is actually might be a good thing. There has been and there continues to be great damage done to the cause of Christ by those who in name only are Christian-- by those who subvert and tarnish Jesus’s name as a way to gain political power or economic advantage. Because then we are living in a world shaped by Christendom, which seeks to dominate and oppress dissent, but not by Christ, who seeks to call us to choose love and see our commonality with all of creation.

This week, we continue to see COVID-19 numbers exploding, despite ridiculous predictions to the contrary, and all this week we heard a lot of arguing about ballots and whether or not to count them. And what boggles the mind is that there are people in this world who claim to be Christian, and yet look at that suffering and injustice, and shrug—or worse, become gleeful about it by calling it “justice.” This is not faith, but hatred.

The words we use matter. Look behind the mathematical words "numbers" and "counting" and remember that there are human beings behind those COVID cases and behind those votes. All just as beloved of God as we are, and who are our kindred as God’s children. No matter what, as our kindred, not our competitors, we are called to love and works with each other. Choosing Jesus means choosing the well-being of each other, turning aside from trying to push others down, or strip them of rights we claim for ourselves.

We need to remember that every number represents a person, and a web of family and friends around that person.

It's not about "us" and "them."
It's all "us."

The goal of our political lives, especially of the political lives of those who are people of faith, must never be the destruction of our “enemies,” but to abandon the language of “enemy” on those who are our fellow-humans. To understand that disagreement is healthy (and can even be educational, if you listen as much as you talk), but compromise and collaboration are healthier still. To remember that the benefits of living in a community such as a parish or a nation outweighs the fact that, just like toddlers, we don’t always get everything we want, and that our greatest strength comes from each other in times of crisis, not setting up lines of battle between us.

Being disciples of Jesus means that the most visible way of showing Jesus’s power and glory is by how we demonstrate our love for other, even those with whom we disagree. And that’s important as we desperately need to heal the wounds inflicted by this last many months, especially.

This is the absolute core of Jesus's teaching, and it is a revolutionary idea meant to turn the world upside down, just like those Beatitudes we have been urged to lean into since hearing them last Sunday. We are all one. We are all beloved of God. Rights are not pie-- we don't get more for ourselves by denying rights to other people. Similarly, God’s love is NOT pie, either.—we don’t get more for ourselves by excluding others.

And the world needs to see this witness from us in our relations with all of those around us. Even in, especially in, this modern time, the greatest competition to Christianity is not atheism, or trendy mishmashes of spiritual practices from around the world. The biggest idols we often worship instead of God are ourselves—especially our tendency to draw a tiny circle around those we consider worthy, and making everyone else around us an enemy. And it sneaks up on you, because these gods and idols are everywhere. So we all need to ask ourselves: what gods am I worshiping to fill the God-shaped hole inside myself?

We must not make enemies of each other. We must not put our trust and faith in things or human-designed economic or political systems that benefit the few at the expense of the many and treat them as if they are sacred. People, even those different from us, are sacred. Creation, which we are called to care for not drain dry, is sacred. God, who chooses us and ask us to choose God back, is sacred.

Jesus did not come to teach us passivity or to draw exclusionary lines. Jesus came to urge us to choose the power of community, and to remind us that we may not be able to do everything, but we all have the ability to do something to make things better for those around us. Even if that's just mask-wearing, hand-washing, and distancing from others.

Now is the time to reach deep within ourselves, and witness to the healing and reconciling love of Christ. The easiest way to witness to that love and its power is to choose it and commit to that love ourselves. Right now. All that we have and all that we are comes from God. That’s why we are called to take care of each other and this earth we live upon, and to give to God boldly, so that we may witness boldly. Choose community over division. Choose love for everyone. Choose God.

Amen.

Preached at the 10:30 am online worship service from St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, in time of COVID.

Readings:

Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25
Psalm 78:1-7
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
Matthew 25:1-13

Of Communion and Covenant

With General Convention coming up, the topic of the Anglican Covenant is on everyone's minds, it seems. Even though the Church of England itself has shot the thing down pretty resoundingly, I think that the advice from our Scottish friends cited in the recent Episcopal Cafe article is wise. Kelvin over at What's in Kelvin's Head? writes:

I was surprised though recently to hear from American friends who were saying that they thought that the US based Episcopal Church was likely to affirm the first three sections of the Covenant but not the fourth section. The fourth section is the one that deals with discipline – the ability to throw a naughty Province off the councils, networks and committees and what have you that make up the Anglican Communion’s ways of working.
I was surprised because it meant that there were no apparent fears about the first section, and it is that which I think is the more dangerous. This may be because theological statements are sometimes read differently by different people.
In Scotland we used to get people saying that we should affirm the first three sections but not the fourth section only up until the time when we really got down to talking about it. At last year’s General Synod it became apparent that some of us were very troubled by section one – particularly because affirming it would mean that once again we would have to affirm the Thirty-Nine Articles.
Now there are all kinds of reasons why affirming the Thirty-Nine Articles isn’t a good idea. I was on my feet a year ago saying that coming as I do from a city troubled by Catholic-Protestant sectarian tensions, the last thing we need to be doing is affirming once again the anti-catholic Thirty-Nine Articles. And that isn’t even to begin to deal with the things that those articles condemn which some of us hold dear in our worship still.
Now, the US-based Episcopal Church has the Thirty-Nine Articles in its Book of Common Prayer and we in Scotland don’t. (We did for a bit but we don’t affirm them any more). The Americans cope with them, I think, by thinking of them as Historical Documents – things that show us where we have come from but don’t necessarily regard them as things which should guide our faith for today.
Not so the Church of England. Or at least, not so all of the Church of England.
The release this week of a long denunciation of same-sex marriage from the Church of England Evangelical Council should give the Americans pause for thought before they affirm any part of the Covenant which promotes the Thirty-Nine Articles. Anyone reading it will be in no doubt that the Thirty Nine Articles are no mere historical document in some parts of the Church of England. For some, they are the Thirty-Nine Weapons of the Church of England in this long and tiresome culture war in which all the bullets are theological concepts ad all the collateral damage seems to be in terms of souls lost to the church and wholesome relationships between gay folk traduced by the loud, the ignorant and the shallow.
The US based church should make no assumptions at all about the nature in which the documents listed in the first section of the proposed Anglican Covenant are read in other parts of the world.
I remain convinced that we need to say No to the Covenant and say an unequivocal Yes to the Anglican Communion. And that No needs to be a clear and deliberate rejection of all the sections of the Covenant. Our American friends put themselves at some risk from those who would do them harm if they don’t understand this.

This is so well-stated, and it brings up a point I think many of us overlooked in our anger over what seemed at least to me to be an attempt to punish the Episcopal Church for disagreements about human sexuality and what that means for how we treat our brothers and sisters in Christ. Kelvin makes a good point that even removal of the most obviously punitive part of the Anglican Covenant still makes it possible to use any instrument derived from the Covenant as it now is into a punitive weapon of division. 

As Grand Moff Tarkin said to Senator Leia Organa in Star Wars, "You're far too trusting."

Interesting discussions for and against the Anglican Covenant

Interesting discussion at the Lead about the most current trends in the debate over an Anglican Covenant can be found here: http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/anglican_covenant/antiamericanism_and_the_anglic.html

The text of the pamphlet by Peter Doll can be downloaded as a .pdf file here: http://deimel.org/commentary/b_pages/doll.pdf Be ready for some pretty bitter (but hardly original coming from our British cousins) invective of Americans as imperialist, arrogant, impatient, narcissistic boobs who have of course created this whole mess all by our little lonesomes.

And here is a rousing defense of we arrogant American Anglicans by one of our English brethren, the Rev. Jonathan Clatworthy, here: http://www.modernchurch.org.uk/resources/clatworthy/2012-1.htm His refutation of the parochialism and illogic of some of the arguments presented by Doll in his attack upon America are quite well done, and I highly commend it.

Other commentary can be found here and here.