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Sun, Feb 24, 2019 St. Paul’s Ft. Mill

Homily Sun, Feb 24, 2019 St. Paul’s, Ft. Mill

The Seventh Sunday after the Epiphany Color: Green
Assigned Readings Lesson 1: Genesis 45:3–11,15 Psalm: 37:1–12,41–42 Lesson 2: 1 Corinthians 15:35–38,42–50 Gospel: Luke 6:27–38

I’m not really sure when it first struck me as odd. It might have been sitting in the pew, just 16 year old, with a little bit of a chip on my shoulder, thinking to myself as I heard the gospel read.

Jesus said, "I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.”

And I thought to myself, “I wonder if anyone here has read this before?”

You know the sensation. I think of it to myself as the, “Wait? What?” moment. It’s when you hear something and there is a sudden gap between reality and what has just been announced. Somehow loving your enemy was not then, and it’s not now, the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of what Christians typically look and act like.

As a teenager I had made a conscious choice to become an Episcopalian. There were no doubt many factors, most of which I was not aware of, that lead to that decision. But what I was aware of was that in this church there was something almost mystical about the candles in the sanctuary. There was a deep sense of what I later came to call a sacramental sign as the people drank wine from a common cup.

What I slowly became aware of in that moment of surprise was that the church that I had come to know, a church that was religious to be sure, but one which was comfortable, socially acceptable, presentable on the platform of the world around us – that church had somehow forgotten what had been there from the beginning. “Love your enemy.” And that was just the beginning of it.

Somehow the very direct command of Jesus, love your enemies etc, has been avoided for a very long time. I would learn that it was put very succinctly by g k Chesterton,

Faith not tried

Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried. –Gilbert K. Chesterton Read more at:

We get an inkling of the kind of avoidance that I imagine the church made many centuries ago in the passage we hear from Genesis as our first reading today. Imagine what’s going on inside of those boys. In their fit of jealousy many years past, they had joined together to get rid of their brother Joseph, they had lied to their father about it, and their father seemed never to quite get over the shock. And so all their lives they have been quite accustomed to carrying the embarrassment and the guilt of their failure.

But his brothers could not answer him, so dismayed were they at his presence.

They were being offered a blessing that was beyond measure, but it came at the cost of having to acknowledge who they really were.

Something like that I think was going through my mind and my heart as a rebellious teenager recognizing that the church which was my chosen home was guilty of having betrayed its main assignment. Love your enemies, the master had said.

The first time that I was made aware of the cost of discipleship came some years earlier. I was maybe seven or 9 years old. And I had been sent to summer Bible school. The teacher had chosen to read us a book that year. So we sat for long periods of time listening to her read from a book written by Dale Evans. Now even before this I have been sensitive to the name – the wife of Roy Rogers, I figure we all knew from comics and television. That summer school teacher knew that we would be able to relate to the voice of Dale Evans.

The book was Angel Unaware: A Touching Story of Love and Loss by Dale Evans (Author), Norman Peale (Foreword)

Entertainers Roy and Dale Evans Rogers were thrilled when their little daughter Robin was born. But their excitement turned to concern when they were informed that Robin was born with Down’s Syndrome and advised to “put her away.” The Rogers ignored such talk and instead kept Robin, and she graced their home for two and a half years. Though Robin’s time on earth was short, she changed her parents’ lives and even made life better for other children born with special needs in the years to come.

Angel Unaware is Robin’s account of her life as she looks down from heaven. As she speaks to God about the mission of love she just completed on earth, the reader sees how she brought her parents closer to God and encouraged them to help other children in need. [1]

I was introduced at that very young age to the notion that one’s life is not measured by how long it is, but by how fully we are able to live into what God has called us to be. We are all potentially Angel unaware, if only we can recognize the love that God has called us to.

"I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt.

Some years after I had left home and gone to college I encountered a Danish writer. Kierkegaard was his name. His impact on my life has been so thorough that I can scarcely measure it. He was a poet, a philosopher, a student of love, a Christian, and a theologian.

He too had looked out on a church in his 19th century Denmark and wondered if any of them had actually read the New Testament. They certainly didn’t, he thought, take the New Testament very seriously. Contrasting what he calls Christianity with Christendom, he said toward the end of his life:

When Christianity came into the world the task was simply to proclaim Christianity. The same is the case wherever Christianity is introduced into a country the religion of which is not Christianity.

In “Christendom” the situation is a different one. What we have before us is not Christianity but a prodigious illusion, and the people are not pagans but live in the blissful conceit that they are Christians. So if in this situation Christianity is to be introduced, first of all the illusion must be disposed of.
p. 97 Attack upon Christendom quoted at

Kierkegaard wondered: if Jesus were to walk into a church today, would he recognize it as consistent with the New Testament? Kierkegaard thought no. He bluntly proclaimed that, in Denmark, “Christianity does not exist at all.” cite

Only a few years ago I heard a leader in the new monastic movement observe that in some Bibles the words of Jesus are printed in red ink. At a talk he gave in Honolulu he said, “Since it’s printed in red maybe we should pay attention to it.” (He was of course being a tad bit sarcastic.)

How is it, I’ve often wondered, that the part about Jesus’s commands to us that we find difficult to put into practice are the ones we tend to ignore. We are quick to pay attention to the parts that seem to judge the people we would like to judge, our enemies for example. But the part that makes an extraordinary demand on us – well, we skip over that rather quickly.

Love. Love your enemies.

It does seem that the message of the New Testament has to do with love. But that kind of love is not the comfortable kind of love. It is the kind of love much easier to avoid than to put into practice.

Love is somehow what it’s all about and somehow not at all easy to implement. Not in the style Jesus had in mind, anyway. At least I have not found it to be so.

About the same time as I encountered that Danish theologian, I learned about an Austrian peasant who knew something about the cost of discipleship. He became important to me because he was an example of someone who sought to be a conscientious objector in the Second World War. There were others like him on the British and American side as well.

Franz Jägerstätter lived in Austria.

The Fatherland was calling on all able-bodied men to fight. The fatherland was Germany. It was 1943. Drafted, then called to report – he refused on the grounds that war (that war, anyway) seemed to be contrary to the Christian faith. He was dejected that the Bishops and leaders of the church (the hierarchy) were, of course, most reluctant to make that claim that seemed so obvious to him. He was beheaded for taking Jesus’s commands seriously.

What we see around us does not measure up to Jesus command to us. We have dropped the ball over and over again. Our leadership has failed us and we have failed the master, again and again. But here’s the amazing thing. God has chosen us and does not let us go. From the days of Noah to the present day, God returns again and again.

In one snippet from Bernstein’s Mass we hear,

You can lock up the bold men. Go and lock up your bold men and hold them in tow. You can stifle all adventure for a century or so. Smother hope before it is risen, watch it wizen like a gourd, but you cannot imprison the Word of the Lord. No, you cannot imprison the Word of the Lord.

On the whole I think Chesterton was right, that Christianity has always been found to be difficult. But age after age there are some who know that it is important to try. They often stumble along the way, struggling to hear what it is that God has called them to be. Dorothy Day. Oscar Romero. Sr. Dorothy Stang, Carlo Carretto. These are some of my angels, helping to call me to the impossible task of being a Christian.

Not even remotely easy. But worth trying. And in some sense or another, I begin each day with my pale attempt to give myself to the One who calls us. One version of my prayer comes from Charles de Foucauld. It is known as the "prayer of abandonment.

Father,
I abandon myself into your hands.
Do with me what you will.
Whatever you may do, I thank you;
I am ready for all, I accept all.
Let only your Will be done in me, and in all your creatures.
I wish no more than this, O Lord.
Into your hands I commend my soul.
I offer it to you with all the love of my heart,
for I love you, Lord, and so need to give myself. to surrender myself into your hands.
without reserve and with boundless confidence. For you are my Father.
Amen.

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