Epiphany III, Year B

Jeremiah 3:21-4:2
1 Corinthians 7:17-23
Mark 1:14-20

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Our Diocesan Convention met this weekend. I do not know that I've ever felt a little jazzed after it - and 'jazzed up' may be too strong a term. I am going to feel 'jazzed up' this evening after the Raiders win. Bishop Chane's address this year may have been a first for making me feel inspired by a convention. He gave us a lot of good news: his new staff appointments, his desire for us to recruit able, young people for the priesthood, his plan to establish a permanent diaconate program in the Diocese, his assistant bishop, Bishop Bartlett's agreement to continue to serve the Diocese into 2004. Bishop Chane spoke about the shame of our internecine conflicts, that we sometimes allow the darkness of our disagreements to be our message instead of the light of the gospel. It is encouraging, it is thrilling to hear our Bishop declare that mission, that proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ, is our business and that we must support one another in this work; that there must be charity in all things, including our disagreements; that the variety, the diversity of congregations, is our strength and must be honoured. He spoke about our responsibility to confront the axis of evil of poverty, illiteracy, and disease, and to assist the billions who suffer from these; that the Church, our Diocese, must do what we can to ameliorate the horrors of famine, war, and the HIV pandemic - all of those things that make Jesus weep. I suspect that I disagree with Bishop Chane about some things - all of us would find things about which we disagree with one another, but his talk, his vision, helps to make me proud to be a Catholic Christian in the Episcopal Diocese of Washington.

Bishop Chane's address to his Diocese, to us, implicitly recognized what is primary about being a Catholic Christian. Most of the time it seems that a rigid separation of the Church and state is a good thing, but we may forget the price. Our culture has a diminished understanding of religion. Our secular public sphere limits the realm of religion to moral teaching. Our secular public sphere values religion primarily for its moral teachings. When the public calls upon religious leaders for their contribution to public life, it is almost always to deal with issues of moral controversy, such as race relations, economic disparity, social justice, sexuality, protection of the environment, international relations. Those are extremely important issues, and the Church has something to say about them, but they are not primary. I do not think that I have never heard a Christian leader in a secular forum, be it on a television program or in the newspaper or at a non-religious public gathering, proclaim what we heard in today's gospel - the heart of the Jesus' message to us: "Repent of your sins and believe the gospel. Follow the Lord Jesus Christ." We do not hear that because that in almost every case would be bad manners, and most Christians want to be civil people. Indeed, we have a moral obligation to be civil and well-mannered.

Since the public regards the Church primarily as a moral voice, the result is that not only does the public misunderstand the primary mission of the Church, but also the Church herself often becomes confused. Our bishop is not. Church members sometimes begin to assume that morality is the essence of the Church's existence. The Church does have an essential moral viewpoint, but we must not allow her to reduce her mission to that of a moral authority, and simply one of many moral authorities. That is not the only thing that we have to offer people, and it is not the primary thing that we offer people. The Church offers richer, more fulfilled lives; strength and purpose; goodness, truth, and beauty. Through the sacraments, through the gospel, the Church changes lives, not merely giving advice about how to live. Yet, how can we not sympathize with the unchurched public that thinks the Church simply directs its people how to live moral lives, especially with regard to sexuality? The unchurched public assumes that the church shopper looks for the local church which tells him what he wants to hear, whether it is from the right-wing or the left-wing. We do not want the unchurched public to think that morality is what is most distinctive about the Church. As Michael Sean Winters put it, "What is distinctive about [the Church] is not the manner in which its members copulate, but how we pray and to whom." ⁽¹⁾

The Church is rarely at her best in making moral declarations. She gets herself in awful binds. I have enormous regard for the Roman Church, but if you are a Roman Catholic, "you can murder your spouse, go to confession, remarry, and continue as a communicant; but you cannot divorce your spouse, go to confession, remarry, and continue as a communicant." ⁽²⁾ Episcopalians are fortunate that we have not tried to codify morality to such a ridiculous extent where we get into such absurdity, but we hardly agree with one another except on the most fundamental issues. We may be too amorphous. But regardless if you are a Roman, an Episcopalian, a Lutheran, a Baptist, a Bible church member, whatever you are, even the most rigid fundamentalist, the Church does not provide an absolutely consistent, positive, clear moral voice. There is a lot more gray, and many shades of gray, perhaps more than there is black and white.

The Church can't provide a definite, unequivocal position on every human act with moral implications. Christianity is not a religion of law. Judaism is a religion of law. Islam is a religion of law. I doubt that those religions provide significantly greater moral clarity, but they base their teachings on a written law. The Church has no detailed law like Judaism or Islam. The Church bases her teachings on grace and faith. ⁽³⁾ The Church's first great council - the Council of Jerusalem, described by S. Luke in Acts 15 - determined that Christians were released from the Jewish Law. Instead, Christians follow the moral teachings of Jesus. We can identify three basic parts of his morality: love, the Sermon on the Mount, and imitation of him. ⁽⁴⁾

The Great Commandment, the commandment to love God and our neighbor, is fundamental to each of the gospel writers, the pinnacle of our Lord's teaching. Luke writes, "Do this, and you will have life." (Lk 10:28) Luke then follows it with the parable of the Good Samaritan to emphasize that everyone is our neighbor; we ought to love and to care for not only our family and friends, but the foreigner, the stranger, the immoral, our enemy. S. John writes, "God is love." Like God, love is undefinable, mysterious, powerful. It is a way of living, a way of total, unconditional self-giving. We are to love one another as God loves us. We can't prescribe what that means in every circumstance. There is a lot of gray. S. Augustine wrote, "Love and do what you like." ⁽⁵⁾ God gives us freedom, not strict, inflexible codes of behaviour. He requires us to be grown ups, not to follow rules slavishly. Freedom is harder. It requires imagination, creativity, and responsibility.

The rules of love are amorphous, but the closest our Lord comes to codifying them is probably the Sermon on the Mount. He seems to exaggerate and to set impossible standards for us. How can he be serious? If someone strikes your cheek, give him the other one also. If someone would have your coat, give him your cloak also. If someone looks at a woman lustfully, he has already committed adultery. Love your enemies. While these are not strict commandments, they show us how radical Jesus is in wanting us to love beyond our comfort level. Jesus wants us to love "beyond anyone's grasp, but not quite beyond our occasional reach. . . [Love is] something continually beckoning onwards, essentially limitless." ⁽⁶⁾ God wants us to do our best, but even in doing our best our efforts are humble and lowly. All of life is about learning to love, growing in love.

One of the great lessons that I learned from college was how little I knew. I went to college to learn, and I learned that I didn't know very much. Learning should be humbling. In a similar way, as we grow in love, we grow in our knowledge of our lack of love, our sin. Loving should be humbling. We see how often we fail to love. Our sin is more apparent. So our Lord tells us to repent. Repenting is not simply being sorry for our sin, but turning and following Jesus. It is changing our minds, re-orienting our lives. It is dropping everything and following Jesus. We are called to be disciples of Christ, and disciples imitate him. "If any man would follow me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me." (Mk 8:34) If Jesus is our Lord, we act like him, not exercising power over one another, but serving one another. Jesus gives us few particulars, few specifics, but he gives us broad principles and examples. It is washing the feet of his disciples. Jesus humbles himself before his followers. That is what he wants from us.

Christians know that God has changed our lives, and he changes our lives through love, through teaching us to love. Love is what unites us to God and makes us like him. Following a set of strictures does not change our lives in a positive, joyful way or deepen our union with God. Christians do not seek to live so that we can say, "I did not do anything wrong. I am not at fault." Christian live so that we may say, "I have turned and oriented my life to Christ. I have taken a risk to follow Christ. And now I am growing in character, becoming more self-giving, sacrificing with less reservation, being more forgiving and merciful, committing myself to God and other people. I am reaching out to people and being a fisher of men." That is love. The emphasis is not upon following commandments, but upon maturing, upon developing virtue, upon following Christ.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

1. Michael Sean Winters, 'How to Save the Church,' The New Republic Online, 6 May 2002.

2. Ibid.

3. Adrian Hastings, art. on 'morality' in The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, OUP (2000), p. 449.

4. Ibid.

5. Quoted by Hastings.

6. Ibid.