Words of Love and Longing

Pentecost 8 Sermon Yr C -  St. Michael’s Episcopal Church
The Rev. Canon Michael J. Horvath
(Colossians 3:1-11 Luke 12:13-21)
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I must admit that I’ve never been a big fan of the Apostle Paul, and it is a rare occasion when I would preach from one of his Epistles or his story in the Acts of the Apostles. His conversion on the road to Damascus is certainly engaging, I grant, but it’s when he starts to open his mouth (or put pen to papyrus) that he becomes less of a light for me in some ways.

Paul has written some of the most beautiful and important passages in the whole of the Bible. But over the centuries his works have often been used to justify homophobia, slavery, anti-Semitism, and anti-feminism. For example, the language that he uses later in this same chapter of Colossians - wives be subject to your husbands, and slaves obey your masters - are gaining new currency with certain segments of our society to again support these same outmoded and unchristian positions.

For all my uneasiness about Paul, one can’t deny that he was the first great Christian theologian. I appreciate that he forces us to think about what it means to not simply be a Christian, but what it means to actually LIVE like one, and he doesn’t mince his words. And what I especially like about Paul is the message that is distilled in today’s passage from his letter to the Colossians.

What’s the message? First, that our whole being should always be moving towards God, and, second, that the Good News – and all that it implies – is for all people.

Today Paul turns from talking about the redeeming nature of Christ’s death in the earlier sections of the letter, to how Christians should live. In essence, he’s starting to fill in the shading by showing us how to apply the message of Christ in concrete ways – an early self-help book, if you will. In each of his epistles, Paul reminds the early churches in Colossus, Galatia, Rome, Ephesus and Thessalonia, who they are as Christians and helps them set out on a moral and ethical path that leads toward God above and God in each other here below.

"Put your mind on things above and put to death the earthly desires of fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire and greed", Paul says. This is Paul's statement of a way of living that separates Christians from everyone else. This is not to say that the Jews and Greeks were hedonistic, unethical peoples who engaged in these things indiscriminately. Instead, having been raised up to a new life in Christ, the Christians in Colossus don’t have to look to their neighbors or generally accepted social mores to see how they should conduct themselves. They need only look to the example of Jesus Christ for a new way of living.

Paul reminds us that sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire and greed are things that germinate in our minds and which usually send down deep roots into our hearts. They may all be things of the mind, but Paul goes on to remind us that they usually result in wrong actions, wrong conduct, and wrong behaviors that play out in our lives. And don’t forget Anger, wrath, malice, slander and obscene talk. What starts in the mind, finally exits through our mouths, and beyond that, to the myriad ways we abuse one another. All of these things Paul raises up as example of ways we distance ourselves from one another, and ultimately from God.

Yet because we are very human, these things happen and while we can come up with many excuses for our behavior, we also have to accept the fact that at some point we will have to answer for them. As Paul sternly warns us, “On account of these the wrath of God is coming on those who are disobedient.” It’s easy to accept the sweet aspects of God – kind, benevolent, all loving – but the time will come when we’ll also have to stand before our God and be judged (remember Jesus’s sermon about separating the lamb and the sheep?). Do we take this seriously? I hope we do.

And what does all of this setting our minds on things above enable us to actually do here below? Here again, Paul gives a practical pastoral response. The unintended (or possibly intended) effect is that no one is beyond the grace of God and the reality of the Good News of Christ is for everyone if we are indeed making ourselves rich toward God, as Jesus says today. In understanding that we are all made in the image of the Creator and that we are called to honor the God in one another, Paul says, we can come to understand that there is no longer Greek and Jew, slave and free. There’s nothing that separates us from one another when we love in the name of Christ.

And where the early church needed Paul’s reminder to look toward the God in each other, we need to be reminded of this very thing again today… in our own time.

From New Zealand to Pittsburgh to a synagogue in Poway, Calif., and now to El Paso, Texas, aggrieved white men over the last several months have turned to mass murder fueled by hatred against immigrants, Jews and others they perceive as threats to the white race. And, when voices from the highest offices in the land are permitted with impunity to inject our national discourse with divisive insults and racist abuse that deny our sacred identities as children of God, then our minds are not set on things above. And when the abuse and insults are allowed to remain unchecked and unanswered by those we trust with the welfare of our country and its people, then we are not honoring the God in one another.

At times like this, it’s important to remember who we are as Christians, as a Christian community – you, me, anyone who proclaims themselves to be a Christian. What are our prayers and how do we live into the truth of Paul’s words that “Christ is all and in all?” What words do we need to tell each other today? I’m not talking about the old, sacred prayers we find in the Prayer Book, or childhood prayers that we recite from memory, or the Prayers of the People that’s on continuous play from week to week. I’m talking about words of love and longing that we should have for one another, yet which somehow get muddied by our lack of commitment to seeing God in our midst. We need to hear and say those words of reconciliation and love.

This week, the Bishop of Washington D.C. and the clergy of the National Cathedral of the Episcopal Church issued an open letter in response to the racialized rhetoric coming from the President of the United States, including most recently statements regarding the historic American city of Baltimore, the city celebrated in our National Anthem, and its citizens. The National Cathedral is not just any church. It’s the closest thing we have to a semi-official house of worship where as a nation we come to mourn and celebrate.

I’m not going to repeat the President’s language here, but the words have been weighing heavily on my heart, and in the National Cathedral’s epistle to our Church, I finally found voice and a sense of hope. It’s not just the letter’s admonishment of the President’s rhetoric that resonates with me, but the call to self-reflection that the open letter challenges us with. The authors are admonishing us (in a very Pauline way) to follow the well-worn adage of being part of the solution, not part of the problem. What our Christian faith teaches is that before pointing fingers, individuals ought to first ask themselves, “Is it I?” Do I accept hate-filled speech? Do I spread false narratives or exaggerated perceptions? Do I stand for truth and do so with kindness?” These are questions we need to ask ourselves as part of the process of pushing out the boundaries of our circle to welcome more in. And one day, we will have to stand before our God and be judged. Will we find ourselves judged rich towards God, as Jesus calls us to be?

I’ll leave you with a quote that I’ve been repeating endlessly to myself this week. In his book called The Prophets, Rabbi Abraham Heschel famously wrote, “Few are guilty, but all are responsible.” He wrote it with respect to the slavery of the Israelites in Egypt. In Heschel’s mind, Pharaoh and his ilk may have been guilty of enslaving and mistreating the Israelites, but all of the Egyptian people, even those innocent of the ugliest of crimes, were responsible for the suffering that happened right before their eyes and yet remained silent.

May we put our minds on things above and raise our voices here below. Amen.