05/15/2022
SERMON FOR THE FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER
May 15, 2022
St. Andrew’s, Carbondale, and St. James’, Marion, Illinois
The Rev’d Canon Dale Coleman, Rector
In the Name of God: The Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
My dear beloved brothers and sisters in Christ,
You may remember stories about President Calvin Coolidge, “Silent Cal”, as he was called, who spoke like the flinty Yankee he was, from Vermont, becoming Governor of Massachusetts. When President Harding, keeled over dead in 1923, Coolidge refrained from criticizing Harding for the several scandals he knew about, not just Teapot Dome (the bribes the Secretary of the Interior took from oil companies for oil reserves on Federal lands in Wyoming and California); but also about the many affairs, “mutual rapports” he called them, with various women, half his age. He had a mistress, Nan Britton, who had given birth to Harding’s daughter, and Miss Britton wrote a book about it. Dorothy Parker reviewed this in the New Yorker. Dorothy Parker was famous for her wit. “Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone”; “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to”; “Don’t look at me in that tone of voice”; “Brevity is the soul of lingerie”; “I like my men handsome, ruthless, and stupid”; “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think”; and my favorite, “If you have any young friends who aspire to be writers, the second greatest favor you can do to them is present them with The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course is to shoot them now, while they’re happy”.
But I digress. Get to the point. President Coolidge, was known as a man of very few words. A woman sitting next to him at a White House dinner, said to him, “Mr. President, I made a bet that I could get you to say three words or more”, to which he responded, “You lose”. When he came back from church, one Sunday, his wife asked him what the sermon was about. “Sin”, he said. “And what did he have to say about it?” she asked. “He’s against it”, was the reply.
Perhaps you can tell I’m in a mood. All active clergy, in the Episcopal Church, meaning not those who sit and think, mostly sit, received a well-produced video this past week, from the Church Pension Group, something I have become more interested in the last few years. The Rev. Dr. So-Shoos, calling himself a scientist, because he collects data to assist the Church, implored us to fill out a survey, which would help the Church become a more “Beloved Community”. This is a term used for the disciples of St. John the Evangelist. But So-Shoos said it would help the Church learn more about our “diversity”. Nothing then about the Bible, or theology, or God.
The survey was a simple one, with three questions.
What is your race? It had about twelve various responses, and “unsure”, and “self-describe”. I put down “dolphin”, because I was listening to David Bowie’s “Heroes”.
Next question: “What is your Gender identity?”. They offered, “male”, “female”, “non-Binary”, and last, “Self-Describe”. Under self-describe, I put “adverb”. S*x is s*x, gender is a part of grammar. See I do use “Elements of Style”.
The final question was my favorite one. “What is your S*xual Orientation?”. The choices were (in this order) : “As*xual, Gay, Le***an, Bis*xual, heteros*xual, (the only one not capitalized), Pans*xual (do you have s*x with Pan?), Unsure, and Self-Describe”. Well, now, this was going to be fun. I responded with the following, “whatever moves”, “accountant”, “Jew”, “Mother” and adding “If it’s not one thing, it’s your Mother”, “psycho-s*xual deviant and pervert”, and “The French”. Gee, I hope this helps them.
What a waste. I not only find these kinds of “data collecting” a fool’s game, but unhelpful, and worse, implying that what these secular bureaucrats list are our true identities. It is insulting, and deeply troubling to have this kind of dehumanizing, academic or business styled set of questions. It is an example of what rarefied air these survey makers breathe.
For all humans, we are created in the image and likeness of God. And we are sinners saved by Grace. And responding to our Savior who loves us and gave his life for us, and rose again, we are baptized and know our true identities as Children of God, the Body of Christ, Inheritors of the Kingdom of God, with eternal life given us to reign with the Holy Trinity and all the Saints. We are loved by our Savior so that the Church becomes the Bride of Christ.
Why does my Church not say any of this in such surveys? Why do we not hear about Sin? And the answer given us by the Church, from Scripture? Perhaps I have the wrong expectations about these, their purpose.
How can we watch those horrifying television videos which show sin, actually evil, magnified right in front of our eyes and not want our Lord to respond, and show justice? The so-called President of Russia, is a Monster.
Now I want to tell you about being proud of my Church this past Wednesday. Diana Butsko made arrangements to see me for some time. She came to say thank you to this truly “Beloved Community”, and tell you through me, what the last few months have meant to her, in our praying that our Lord be present with and love her, her family, her people, and the Russians. She is heading back home this very morning, to find her family now in Western Ukraine. She asked about whether there is an Episcopal Church in Ukraine. Yes, I said, there is one in Kiev. We talked about the heritage of the Episcopal Church, and our Anglican Communion. She pointed at my Icon, one very similar to the Icon found in her Catholic Church. She wanted to know how that mattered to me. In this and response to many other questions, we talked about the miracle of coming to faith in the Lord Jesus. We talked about sin, about the reading from the Gospel for this Sunday in Easter, as well as the reading from Revelation. How we must ask for forgiveness of our sin, and be pulled out of sin’s darkness, and power. Sin has a hold on us, and we have no idea that this is the case until we hear the Gospel to which we respond in the Holy Spirit. And we become part of that huge number of human beings worship and praising God as depicted in the scene of Holy Eucharist from today’s reading from Revelation. That vision of St. John the Divine is not only in the future. It is happening now. It is happening as what we are doing in the Eucharist now, with all the saints. In the power of the Holy Spirit.
It so happens that I have been reading Crucifixion by one of the finest theologians and preachers today, the Rev. Mother Fleming Rutledge. It is subtitled “Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ”. This is a thrilling book! This Episcopal priest, writes luminous prose, with such knowledge and deep faith in our Lord, that you know she prays fervently and truly. An added joy for me is that the book is filled with Scripture passages, hymn lyrics, quotations, that I have used myself. I quoted from the book to Diana, on what Rutledge notes about sin, and how it is totally misunderstood in our culture:
“Douglas John Hall has written about the gravity of sin”. Hall writes: “When it comes to this profound category of Biblical faith, most of us seem to have advanced little beyond the mental estate of that fictitious but representative character, Boso (?), the dialogue partner of St. Anselm in Cur Deus Homo, in English “Why did God become Man?”, who evidently incapable of getting beyond the idea sins are bad deeds, proposed that a mere declaration of forgiveness on the deity’s part could remedy the situation. In response, Anselm uttered what may be the most penetrating insight ever stated [concerning the doctrine of Sin]: ‘You have not yet considered the weight of sin’”.
Rutledge goes on and notes a survey from People magazine concerning “Sin”. The responses were published in a “Sindex” with each sin rated by “sin coefficient”. “The outcome (she writes) is both amusing and instructive. Murder, r**e, in**st, child abuse, and spying against one’s country were rated the worst sins in ascending order, with smoking, swearing, ma********on, and illegal videotaping far down the list. Parking in a handicapped spot was rated surprisingly high, whereas unmarried live-togethers got off lightly. Cutting in front of someone was deemed worse than divorce or capital punishment. Predictably, corporate sin was not mentioned, though it is at the top of the Hebrew prophets’ lists. Most telling for our purposes here, ‘Overall, readers said the commit about 4.64 sins a month’”.
In talking to Diane, I mentioned that I know of atrocities Ukrainians have engaged in. She asked what I thought about sin in the United States. I responded, “All have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God”. I mentioned any number of atrocities Christians in particular in our country have carried out. We had the best and the brightest gather, in 1787 in the Constitutional Congress, to hammer out our Constitution. Nearly half of these the men of property, all white, left in Slavery. How do you account for that if not the power of sin? I told her, I was still appalled that General Curtis LeMay, with Robert McNamara’s help, ordered his Army Air Corps to firebomb so many cities in Japan, killing upwards of 240,000 men, women, and children. In one night on March 11, 1945, we wiped out almost the entire city of Tokyo, burning down all wooden structures, and killing more human beings than ever before or sense in one day, 100,000. Then we killed 120,000 with the dropping of the Atom bombs, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Nagasaki we wiped out the entire Christian ghetto, of thousands and thousands. In my book I call that sin.
May I interrupt here, and note that I was at an Episcopal Church clergy conference in 1992, when Canon Gene Robinson came to speak. During the conference, I become friends of his, but I opposed him when he said if we could get rid of Genesis 3, and sin, we would be a much happier Church. I remember raising may hand and saying if there is no sin, why do we need a Savior? Why don’t we become the Rotary Club with haberdashery? Later, while praising the Dalai Lama, as though he was perfect, I questioned Fr. Robinson again. I had the gauche manners to quote from Scripture. I quoted Romans 3: 21-26. Let me quote this:
“Now apart from the Law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the Law and the Prophets; the righteousness of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all who believe. For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the Glory of God; they are now justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by His blood, effective through faith. He did this to show His righteousness, because in His Divine forbearance He had passed over the sins previously committed; it was to prove at the present time that He Himself is righteous and that He justifies the one who has faith in Jesus.” I then said to my friend, I don’t see where it reads, “except for the Dalai Lama”.
My brothers and sisters in Christ, we must not be ignorant or sentimental in our Witness to our Lord. Rutledge later quoted novelist Harry Crews, who “writes of the community of fallen humanity in his memoirs. Desperately poor, and deprived in rural Bacon County, Georgia, he and his black friend Willalee, daydream about the models in the Sears catalogue, as a form of escape. ‘Nearly everybody I knew had something missing, a finger cut off, a toe split, an ear chewed away, an eye clouded with blindness from a glancing fence staple…But the people in the catalogue had no such hurts. They were not only whole... they were also beautiful.’ Even at an early age, however, Mr. Crews knew that the pictures were lying: ‘Under those fancy clothes there had to be scars, there had to be boils of one kind or another because there was no other way to live in the world. And … I had decided that all the people in the catalogue were related, not necessarily blood kin, but knew one another, and because they knew one another there had to be hard feelings, trouble between them off and on, violence, and hate between them as well as love”.
Rutledge adds, “This is as good a description of the human predicament under the rule of Sin. There is no other way to live in the world”.
This is the Word of God: By Grace are you saved! We sing from Rock of Ages, “Be of sin the double cure, cleanse me from its guilt and power. Should my tears for ever flow, should my zeal no languor know, all for sin could not atone; Thou must save, and Thou alone; in my hand no price I bring, simply to Thy cross I cling”.
For me everything gets back to Rock of Ages.
Amen.
