Episcopal Church of the
Incarnation
The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 10 B]
Amos
7.7-15 Psalm
85.8-13 Ephesians 1.3-14
Mark 6.14-29
May the Lord be in my mind, on my lips, and in my heart,
that I may rightly and truly proclaim His holy Gospel.
When was
the last time you heard somebody called a heretic? My use of the word, just now, has raised more
than one eyebrow. Why? It’s because we have been conditioned that
the use of any “label,” calling anyone a heretic or apostate, is a perjorative
use. In our land and Church of
“political correctness” we have been conditioned to smile, to follow the one
“commandment” that our culture will subscribe to (which is “Be nice.”), and
above all to be “tolerant” and “inclusive”.
And so, for me to stand before you and say that a person who denies the
Creed is a heretic, that one who denies that Jesus is Lord is apostate, and
that tolerance is not a Christian virtue, is for me to shock some of you.
Why is this? It’s because for a very long time we have
been culturally conditioned to treat truth as subjective, as based on
experience, and to think of “judgment” and “being judgmental” as something
negative. So, what do we do with do with
a statement like that found in our lesson from Amos, when the Lord says, “See, I am setting a plumb
line in the midst of my people ...” (Amos 7.8)?
A plumb line is something which indicates objective truth, that
something is or is not straight. Our
response to this statement can be to relativize it, and to say that this is
just metaphor in a literary work written many centuries ago in a very different
culture. That’s a popular response to
Scripture today, but it’s not really the most popular reponse within the
Church. Among people who profess faith
in God, the most popular response is to measure any statement in Scripture
against another standard, and to say that the overall message of the Gospel is
one of love, with the rest being just cultural baggage or literary metaphor. In other words, the idea of there being a
message is not rejected, but the message is characterized in very general terms
that can only be further defined and applied subjectively and through
individual experience. The plumb line
can be changed to whatever curve we want to call straight.
The world
ignores God’s message, but within the Church we prefer to say that we pay
attention to God’s message, and then to bend the message to suit our own
desires. We do not, like Amos, say, “I
am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son ...” (Amos 7.14); rather, we assume the
prophetic mantle all the time. Every
time a Church leader says, “Here is what the Church must do,” this is the same
thing as saying “Thus, says the Lord”.
So, are the
prophets of today speaking for the Lord? Even within the Church, many of our prophets
are not speaking for God. This is not to
say that they preach a secular humanist philosophy either. That’s the problem: it’s not that our prophets are humanists, but
that they are not secular about it. What
they preach, rather, is a form of Comtism.
Auguste Comte was a nineteenth century French philosopher who argued
that mankind is “God”. He wanted people
to change the calendar, so that rather than have Christmas or Easter we could
have Darwin Day or Rousseau Day. (You
may recall that this past winter, at the 150th anniversary of the
publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, the media by and large did
celebrate Darwin Day, and if you look at how Earth Day is observed you’ll see
quite a lot of liturgy.) Comte wanted to
make a public cult of mankind, and while we have not changed the calendar
formally, and do not refer to humanity as God Almighty, our prophets today
speak very much as if the one thing to celebrate is the fact that we are.
The fact
that we are is worth celebrating, in the sense that it is very much worth being
thankful for; thankful to God, not to humanity, not to the earth. When we celebrate ourselves only, our
celebration is not “secular humanism” but “Humanism” with a capital “H”. It’s not secular; it’s just a different creed
that says humanity is the measure of all; that we set our own plumb line. And then we find that things can get just a
little strange, for when you remove the supernatural from from life you do not
get the natural. You get the unnatural,
the unnatural existence of “anything goes” and, while we’re at it, let’s
celebrate “anything”.
The
struggle we face in the Church is not that we don’t have prophets. We have a lot of prophets, but who are they
speaking for? Just last week we heard
Jesus say that prophets are without honor among their own (Mark 6.4), and so we
need not be surprised if those who claim to speak for God arouse strong
passions. For example, regardless of
what you might think about Bp. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, and about the
intersection of homosexual practice and ordination, or about the blessing of
same-sex unions, the first thing we see when we look at Bp. Robinson is a man
described in his own words as “in the eye of the storm” (the title of his
book); a storm of champions and detractors who are vocal indeed. Bp. Robinson specifically claims a prophetic
mantle. He is no coward. He believes in what he stands for, and
therefore claims to be “speaking truth to power”.
Speaking
truth to power is a classical description of the role of a prophet, which makes
me wonder at how one who is in power (a bishop) can claim this role. At his or her consecration a bishop first
solemnly declares “... the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be
the Word of God, and to contain all things necessary to salvation ...” (BCP 513),
and then vows to “... guard the faith, unity, and discipline of the Church ...”
(BCP 518). A bishop is part of
the hierarchy of the Church and vows to defend this hierarchy. In contrast, we have Amos. Amos speaks to power (the priest Amaziah) and
says, “I am no prophet ...; but a herdsman, a dresser of sycamore trees ...”
(Amos 7.14). In other words, “I’m not
part of the establishment. I’m not the
shepherd of the flock, but one who is in the flock.” That’s speaking to power; not as one
who is in power. That is not saying how
I might wish the world to be, but how it is, and how far it is from what God
has created it to be.
It’s easy
to claim to speak the truth when you tell the world what it wants to hear
anyway. When what you say is that we
have to celebrate ourselves, it’s easy to get people to join in the
celebration. When we join with the Greek
philosopher Protagoras, and say “Man is the measure of all things,” then we
deny that there is any kind of “plumb line” other than what we say is
desireable. That’s the battle in the
Church and in the world.
Every Sunday we recite the Nicene Creed. In saying the Creed we affirm what we believe to be true about God. We don’t say, “We define one God” or “We discern one God,” but “We believe in one God”. Our faith very much calls forth a response from within ourselves, but it is defined but what has been revealed to us from outside of ourselves. What we know about God and His will for us is defined by what He chooses to reveal to us. As He says to Amos, He says to us, “What do you see?” If our answer is that we are the measure of all things, then we are saying that He is not, that there is no plumb line, and that we can decide what is good and what is not on the basis of an authority no higher than our own desires and likes. That is the cult of humankind, and if we’re going to do that, then why don’t we just celebrate Darwin day or Rousseau Day, or soon, Robinson Day. As for me, I will keep this day holy because it is the Lord’s.
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit;
as it was in
the beginning is now, and will be forever.
Amen.