Third Sunday of Epiphany - 24th January 2016
Sermon by Fr James Heard, Sunday 24th January 2016, Third Sunday of Epiphany
Last week I returned
to where I served my curacy, All Saints Fulham, for the requiem mass on a dear
priest, Canon David Tann, who died on New Year's Day. He had been in relatively
poor health for a while but his death, when it came, was unexpected. He was
deeply spiritual, a great thinker and ponderer, a man of few words; but
goodness me how they all counted.
He was gentle,
humble, non-judgmental – for many years actively involved with inter-religious
dialogue. I remember hearing him preach a sermon in which he quote from the
Bhagavad Gita, one of the sacred books for Hindus. I immediately felt slightly
uncomfortable and challenged. Should a priest be reading out something from
another religious tradition? We’re in church, we’re Christians, shouldn’t we
only be focusing on following in the footsteps of Christ? What do I, what do
you, really think deep down about other religious traditions?
This issue has risen
in the United States, at an evangelical college I visited many years ago,
Wheaton College in Illinois, not too far from Chicago. The issue has gained
national media attention. On January 4, Wheaton notified Larycia Hawkins that
it had initiated formal proceedings to terminate her employment. She was
Wheaton's first female black tenured professor, a political science professor.
Her misdemeanor? In December, as part of her Advent journey, Hawkins posted a
picture of herself on Facebook wearing the hijab, and stated her support for
Muslims after the terrorist attacks in Paris. She said, ‘I stand in religious
solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the
book, and as Pope Francis stated…we worship the same God.’
In Wheaton's view,
Hawkins's statement compromises trinitarian orthodoxy: ‘Her recently
expressed views, including that Muslims and Christians worship the same God,
appear to be in conflict with the College's Statement of Faith.’
Last week Wheaton
faculty and students publicly demonstrated on her behalf.
Of course, there’s
nothing new about religious groups attempting to protect its orthodox
boundaries. Fr Peter made mention of the Anglican Church doing exactly this
last week, effectively sanctioning the Episcopal Church for its progressive
views on same sex relationships.
Orthodoxies, or right
belief and worship, have their place, especially when the alternative is
believing something that’s false or idolatrous. And orthodoxies aren't limited
to evangelicals, to Christianity, or even to religion. There are many other
sorts of orthodoxies, whether secular or religious, left, right or center,
whether in politics, economics, history, or science, and whether in private or
public institutions. To give just two examples, try being a Tory
supporter at the London School of Economics. Or try expressing appreciation of
and love for the Church of England as a Guardian journalist.
Woe to the person who
questions institutional orthodoxy. Which is exactly what Jesus did in Luke 4.
It’s fascinating how Luke’s story pivots so sharply and so bitterly.
Jesus had started to
teach in local synagogues. Luke tells us that ‘everyone praised him’.
Drawing upon Isaiah, at the beginning of his public ministry, he states his
Mission Statement. It involved compassion for the poor, the prisoners, the
blind, and the oppressed. When people heard this, they loved it, ‘amazed at the
gracious words that came from his lips’.
Later in Luke 4, we
are told that the Jewish community from Jesus’ home town asked for their own
miracle. Jesus told two stories about how God blessed two unorthodox Gentiles –
a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon, and Naaman the military commander
of enemy Syria. What was their response? ‘All the people in the synagogue
were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove Jesus out of the town,
and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to
throw him down the cliff.’
God working and
blessing people outside your religious tribe? This was too much to hear. The
universality of the gospel is a particular theme in Luke. He is the only
Gentile author in the Bible. Whereas the very first sentence of Matthew calls
Jesus ‘the son of David, son of Abraham’, Luke’s genealogy describes him as
‘the son of Adam’. In other words, Jesus is not just the king of the Jews, he's
the son of all humanity.
Throughout the
gospels, the Jewish Jesus embraced the unclean Gentiles – the Roman centurion,
the Canaanite woman and her demon-possessed daughter, and Samaritans like the
leper (Luke 17), the woman at the well (John 4), and the good Samaritan (Luke
10).
Then there were other
orthodoxies, like ritual purity. Jesus ‘declared all foods clean’. What
about keeping the sabbath? Jesus stated, ‘The sabbath was made for man,
not man for the sabbath’. And the temple? Jesus called it a ‘house
of prayer for all nations’.
Its easy to see why
Jesus was viewed a dangerous, even as unorthodox. The problem with orthodoxies
is that they can lead to a sense of entitlement, privilege, and superiority,
not to mention power over another person. They can all to easily foster
communities that are insular, isolated, and exclusive.
Returning to the
quote from the Bhagavid Gita I heard in church – it got me thinking. Perhaps
the discomfort I felt was due to a residual exclusivism in my theology. And
this is the potential problem with a certain sort of monotheism: if there’s
only one God, and that God is mine, then your God is obviously false and
therefore needs destroying. It’s little wonder some people think we would be
better off with a live-and-let-live polytheism, or indeed with no gods at all.
The other way at
looking at this is seeing the way Jesus taught and lived a form of
self-criticism, willing to challenged the orthodoxies of the day. Jesus
expressed a rather radical form of self-critical vigilance, a sort of permanent
revolution of religion against itself. (Giles Fraser)
The well-known
Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai (1924–2000), speaks to this aspect of self-obsessed
religious orthodoxies.
From the place where
we are right
Flowers will never
grow
In the spring.
The place where we
are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.
But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be
heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.
That whisper, the
whisper of peace – one that desperately needs to be heard in the ruined houses
of Syria – is also the whisper of Jesus: Love your enemies, welcome those not
deemed respectable. Because God’s love cannot be contained to one religious
group; God’s love is all encompassing, it embraces all, saint and sinner.
Reference
Giles Fraser, Thought for the Day,
17 June 2014
Daniel B. Clendenin