Good Faith

A sermon preached in The Church of St. Stephen and the Incarnation, Episcopal, Washington, DC, August 8, 2010

Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16

Faith. If only I had it.

Have you ever heard yourself saying that? Or somebody else saying it?

Let me ask you something. If you had more faith (assuming you want more), what would you do with it? What would it do for you?

Once upon a time, according to Luke, though not in today’s gospel, the disciples asked Jesus: “Lord, increase our faith.” And he answered them, “If you had the faith of a mustard seed you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘be uprooted and planted in the middle of the sea,’ and it would obey you.” Another version of that story appears in Matthew’s gospel. Jesus is provoked at his disciples for having so little faith. They have tried unsuccessfully to perform an exorcism. After Jesus upbraids them and takes over the project himself, the disciples ask Jesus why they weren’t able to cast the demon out. “Because of your little faith,” he said. “For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.’”

So is that what we want if we want more faith? To be able to do the impossible? Or is faith something else?

The writer to the Hebrews clearly had some idea of faith, and I am not sure that his was exactly what Luke’s Jesus had in mind. That writer (whose identity we do not know and can only speculate about, but who was most certainly not St. Paul) wrote out a long, sustained argument, the longest in the whole Bible. He set out to demonstrate conclusively that Jesus on the cross had performed once and for all the sufficient sacrifice that had never been done and could never be done in the Jerusalem Temple. The writer with good reason takes his time in recounting what might be called the “faith history” of Israel.

We do not have to guess what was in his mind. He tells us. Christ is the great High Priest who has made atonement, unlike any “high priest” that there ever had been. By a single offering Christ has reconciled humanity and God. Sins are forgiven. There is no need for any more sacrificial offerings for sin. Incidentally—and this is totally parenthetical to this sermon—that is an extremely good piece of news, even if you don’t understand or buy into the Hebrews theology of sacrifice. What he is saying is that Christ’s sacrifice is full, sufficient, complete, unsurpassed, perfect. This should relieve quite a bit of anxiety about how we stand with God. That a great many people remain anxious, or that some are totally uninterested, does not detract from the goodness of the news.

Christ’s sacrifice is thoroughly effective. “Therefore,” states the writer, we have confidence to enter the sanctuary (that is, the presence and life of God) by the blood of Jesus. And we can approach with a “true heart in full assurance of faith," simply because all the barriers to our being with God and living in God have been removed by Jesus. But there are some cautions. (How could it be the Bible and there not be?) We must know that if we willfully persist in sin after having received knowledge of the truth, we bring judgment on ourselves. Still, the author calls his audience to remember the struggles they have been through, the abuse, the persecution. He exhorts them not to shrink back, but to live in full confidence that the loss of nothing is nearly as great as what God has promised. This, he says, is how the righteous live and have always lived: by faith. He begins calling the roll of those who in the holy history have been examples of faith: Abel, Noah, Abraham, Sarah. “All of these,” he says, “died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them.” They were, he says, like foreigners on earth. They knew that they belonged to a different land, a different reality. They could have looked behind and moaned sentimentally about all that they had lost and left behind, and could even have returned. But they kept pressing on towards a better country, a future with God, a heavenly country. And indeed God had prepared a city for them.

What is his point in all this? To get his Christian audience to take heart! To inspire them to keep on moving, going, growing; not to give up; to follow the examples of their forebears, not to mention the example of the pioneer and perfecter of their faith, Jesus, who pressed on through cross and shame and suffering to be seated at God’s right hand in glory. “You can do it!” he says. “Lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet….” Faith is the quality, very closely related to hope, that keeps people from giving up.

But that is not the only thing that faith is. Not, at least, according to the Bible, which is something of a textbook on faith and faithfulness. Let’s consider faith a verb, first. To have faith can mean to believe in something, to be convinced of something. It can also mean to give credence to a proposition, an account, a possibility, or someone’s story. More than that, to have faith frequently means to put one’s trust in somebody. Are you beginning to get the picture? It is beginning to dawn on me that maybe we don’t really know what faith is. When we say we want or we need it or we have it, might it be that we are talking about just a sliver of this rather complex thing called “faith”?

Press on. Think of faith as a noun, a something, a quality. Faith can be a solemn oath, a promise, a proof, a pledge. It can mean trust, confidence, especially in God. It can mean giving your heart to somebody, even at the risk of having it trampled and trashed. Faith can be believing something that you have no evidence for, only a hunch about, or less, or more. Faith can be practicing piety like saying your prayers and going to church, or it can mean the things you believe or the persons you follow, whether they are religious or not. Faith can be virtuous or it can be pig-headed. It can make life sweet when it works like a charm, and it can be a bitter disappointment when faith turns out to have been sadly misplaced.

Are you still sure that you want some faith? Or more of it? Or are you totally turned off by the whole idea? Some of you will tell me that you have all the faith you need and that what you have works perfectly fine for you. I’m sure you do, and I rejoice that it works well. Others may say that you don’t see what it is all about. Faith is about as appealing to you a root canal. The truth of the matter is that we can’t live very well without faith. By that I do not mean a particular set of beliefs, let alone a specific body of dogma. I am talking about faith as a matter of trust. I am thinking even more specifically about faith as a quality of taking risks, like Abraham and Sarah, the practice of striking out occasionally into the unknown, for which you have no guarantees, and in which you have no charts or road maps. It is true that a great many people—you may be one of them—have an aversion to taking risks, and who can convincingly argue that they do very well staying on the safe side of things. I’d be lying if I didn’t say to such folk that I’d like to rattle their cages a bit! But this gospel we proclaim is not one that we can use to slam the timid and retiring—or anyone else—suggesting that somehow they count less than the brave-hearted. Yet, the writer to Hebrews has a point. People did not get to be models of faith by hedging their bets and pulling punches. The way of God demands some element of cutting loose and letting fly, for God’s sake! No one in the entire roster of faithful people gets to be in the Bible because he or she sat musing on the possibilities of adventure, vacillating about whether or not to join the innumerable caravan moving into the future with determination, analyzing to death the pluses and minuses of getting balled up in the hard stuff that comes from a challenging God.

If we, two thousand years later, were to add to Hebrew’s gallery of faithful heroes and heroines, we would quickly see that faithfulness is not a matter of particular content, nor of a particular vocation. We would find all sorts of people who have lived faithfully, from the hermit, St. Seraphim of Sarov, to the wandering Johnny Appleseed, from the cloistered Julian of Norwich to the activist Dorothy Day. So the problem is not that Hebrews, or I, or the Church, or the Bible, is setting up some kind of high bar of special performance or personality characteristics that assures only those who reach it can be in some kind of exclusive club. The idea is that whoever you are, you can be faithful. You can be a person of faith.

A great many people have stopped believing that. Some have been jerked around by the religious establishment to the point that the have spiritual whiplash, and only want it to stop. Others have wandered away from the faith, convinced that the requirement of being faithful means to tax their brains with credulity (the readiness to believe about anything without much or any evidence) and their consciences with confessing falsehoods. Still others only slowly wake up to the realization that there is more to life than conforming to social expectations (be they set by gangs in the ghetto or Vogue magazine or Oprah), totally unaware that life is a many-layered thing, and that some of the best layers are invisible to the naked eye, known to make the heart quiver, and the spirit do a somersault. It is just this kind of insight that nearly everyone on the Hebrews all-star line-up exhibits. Our author says that they knew their true native land was somewhere besides the front porch. They listened to a Voice that called them away from the familiar towards another country, a heavenly one.

My own take on most of the people on the Hebrews list is that they were not in fact motivated by a dream of an afterlife. Most of them did not know what that was, including Abraham, the prototype of faithfulness. But they did have a notion of “heaven,” if by “heaven” we mean where God is and if heaven and therefore God is everywhere including as close to you as your nose or your forehead or your buttocks. Being faithful is not dreaming of some airy fairy world. When it comes right down to it, being faithful is taking the presence of God in your own life quite seriously.

We need people of faith, real faith, as never before. I say that quite deliberately and literally. We are facing issues and battles today of unprecedented proportions. This dreadful oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a mere harbinger of what is going to happen if we continue to rape the natural world. The arguments that are flying back and forth about the economy ignore some very difficult truths that the entire planet is still perilously near economic trauma. Given the way things in this country are currently structured, General Eisenhower’s warning about a military-industrial complex is hauntingly observable, as even would-be Peacemakers find it practically impossible to extricate us from never-ending war. The planet heats up and people either refuse to believe it, or believe it and refuse to alter their attitudes. Meanwhile we let the religious crazies, at home and abroad, hijack our faith traditions and dictate the terms on which we decide to be faithful or not. We are looking at every bit as dangerous a time as Hebrews ever saw: a slow collapse of social institutions, a debasing of education, the triumph of anti-intellectualism, a fickle electorate that is run largely by fear, cynical people who lie big enough and long enough and steadily enough that hosts of people find it easier to believe the lie than to pull up stakes, like Abraham, and hit the road for the One who is True.

What will you do? Turn aside and fiddle? Turn back and regress? Turn and follow the one who has gone before you and opened up a sanctuary that is no longer the province of the professionals, but one where you can boldly enter yourself, and be yourself, and find in so doing that God is not ashamed to be your God?

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2010

Saints: Human Beings Fully Alive

Practicing the Imitation of Christ:

If You Were Fully Alive What Would You Be?

A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, November 2, 2008



Many people don’t want to be saints. And many saints never much wanted to be human beings. So thought George Orwell, British novelist and essayist of the last century. That doesn’t square with the lore of Episcopal All Saints celebrations and their accompanying theology. We sing with great gusto, “They were all of them saints of God, and I mean, God helping, to be one, too.”

So what is going on here? There are several differing, if not conflicting, meanings of sainthood. First, there is that basic definition that comes straight out of the New Testament: the saints, “the holy ones” are all the People of God, without distinction. Then, there is the use of saint to denote a exemplar of Christian life. And finally, there is the sense in which a saint is one who has passed even beyond the level of model or example to become a miracle-worker. Clearly in that sense, or even in the second, not all of us are saints. Furthermore, one does not get to be a saint by “intending” to be one. Sainthood is a gift, not an achievement.

I would like to propose a different way of thinking about sainthood—not necessarily original, mind you, but different from any of those ways. I propose that we entertain the possibility that sainthood, or saintliness, is something that is indeed a gift but one which cannot be fully realized unless and until it is practiced. What would happen, for example, if we thought of sanctity or saintliness as a gift such as playing a musical instrument, or sewing, or designing, or playing basketball, or dancing? We might see, first, that there are all kinds of forms of saintliness—not just one kind. And we might come to understand that while saintliness starts off and ends up being a gift, still it is a gift which gets better and better the more we put effort into it, much as the gift of sewing or of dancing or of playing the flute improves—and becomes recognizably a talent—the more we practice.

Those of you who have followed my preaching since July (don’t break my heart and tell me you haven’t noticed!) will recognize the theme song: Christian practices. We have now looked up close at discernment, proclamation, creating community, repentance, stewardship, love of God and neighbor as practices that Christians do in living the Christian life. It is by no means an exhaustive list. Each of these practices involves specific actions that we take in order to cultivate one or more specific virtues. Today is the climax of the series, although hardly the end of the exploration of Christian practices. Sainthood—being a saint—and its chief identifying mark, saintliness or sanctity—is exactly what the Christian life is about. It is about that gift of God’s life, eternal life, that is given to each of us in our baptism, which we take and practice and practice and practice so that we may become artists of the holy. To say the same thing another way, sanctity is the key virtue that we are perfecting through living the Christian life.

Now if I were a seeker, as some of you are, who was by no means certain about all this Christian life stuff, I would start fidgeting about now. I would not be too sure that this sanctity business was for me. Like Billy Joel, I might be singing, “They say there's a heaven for those who will wait. Some say it's better, but I say it ain't. I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints. Sinners are much more fun...” Sanctity has an appeal, as Orwell suggested, to those who really aren’t much interested in being human. But how many of you would fall into that category? Am I marketing something here for which there is no real market? Sanctity? Saintliness?

Then there is a further objection that will be lobbed my way from those who are theologically astute. “Works, works, works!” they will shout. “He’s selling salvation by works. We know better. It only comes by faith.” All right, both of you have me. So let me deal with both of you, one at a time.

Second objection first. The whole process of being a saint is in fact about living out our faith. But, as much as Luther despised the Epistle of James as “right strawy,” still I think James had it right when he said faith without works is dead. So we’re not talking here about “winning salvation” or “going to heaven when we die” or any of that. We are talking about living out our faith, living out our relationship with Jesus Christ. And the way we do that is in concrete actions. Hold your horses while I answer the seekers.

Seekers, don’t be afraid of the concept of saintliness or sanctity. Because much to perhaps your surprise, it is not opposed to your being fully human. Irenaeus of Lyons, one of the Early Church’s prominent theologians, wrote, “The Glory of God is the human person fully alive.” Bingo. That is a great definition of sainthood: a fully alive human being. The heart of holiness, the center of saintliness, is being authentic. How do we know that? Well, that brings us to the heart of the practice at hand.

And the practice is what I call the imitation of Christ. In the book by that title, Thomas a Kempis laid out some ideas, one of which was to distrust the human intellect. In all due respect, that is not what I am talking about. I am rather speaking of following the pattern of Jesus’ life as it is set forth in the gospels. His is at once the quintessential spirit-filled life and also the prime example of an authentic life. There is nothing phony or hokey about Jesus’ life. Thus, to “imitate” him means that we cannot be phony or hokey either. To follow what the Prayer Book calls “his example in all virtuous and godly living” is not to be cheap plastic imitations of Jesus but lives styled on the model of his.

Let me pause to say both a good word and a word of caution about the recently popular notion of WWJD, “What Would Jesus Do?” On the one hand, it is not a bad idea for Christians to ask, “What would Jesus do?” It might well expose much of what we are up to as quite hostile to Jesus’ way of life. War, environmental damage, and investing money quickly come to mind as things that seem quite foreign to Jesus’ life. And that is the word of caution. Trying to live as a first century Jew in the Roman Empire is not an option for many people on the planet today. WWJD? is a question that sometimes must honestly be answered, “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

But there is in fact a series of actions in which the practice of the imitation of Christ consists. One could comprise lots of lists, some short and some long. I can’t think of a better one than the beatitudes from Matthew’s gospel which we hear today. They describe a series of steps that progressively lead to a practice of the kind of life that we see Jesus living on the pages of the gospels. Being “poor in spirit” describes that fundamental receptivity and openness to growth that is the opposite of pride and hunger for power. Being able to mourn may not sound like a gift, but in fact it is the capacity to feel genuine sorrow that is integral to being human. Showing mercy, hungering and thirsting after justice, the meekness exhibited in showing kindness and consideration, humility, purity and singleness of heart, making peace where there is discord: all of these are actions that accord with Jesus’ life. What is more they are possible for any human being. Not that they come naturally—that is the point: they have to be practiced!

Notice that the beatitudes end with a teaching about being persecuted. In Matthew’s day, as in our own, it is not infrequent that practicing the Christian life is a guaranteed way to make one quite unpopular with the surrounding crowd. Saints tend to irritate people, who generally experience them as cranky. That is why so few people get genuinely excited about being one. It is counter-cultural and counter-intuitive. And, in some circumstances—running for public office comes to mind—there are occasions when one is apt to be thoroughly trashed, if not killed outright, for speaking unpopular truth. All Saints Day never lets us forget that a great many of our models and exemplars are those who have had their white robes washed in blood, so threatening was their witness to and against the established order. If you are not willing to run that kind of risk, then it is fair to ask if the Christian life is something you are very much interested in after all.

One of my favorite stories by one of my favorite authors is “The Great Stone Face,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The young boy Ernest learns from his mother the legend of the great stone face, cut by the elements into the side of a mountain that overlooks their valley. Some day a person will come to resemble the great stone face. Various ones apparently do, but disappointingly fail to portray some quality of the great face—its warmth, its smile, its honor. Ernest grows up and grows old, spending his life meditating on the great stone face until finally his fellow townspeople see that Ernest himself reflects the great face. In becoming himself, he has become the long-sought likeness of the face. Even then, Ernest continues to watch for someone greater still who would by and by appear, bearing a better resemblance to the Great Stone Face. That is a parable of what the practice of sainthood is like. We mediate and emulate and gaze upon Christ the model to such an extent that we begin, quite unconsciously, exhibiting the qualities of the one who is our model. Ironically, the better we do it, the less preoccupied we are with ourselves. It really is not about us, after all. It is about the Great God, the fountain of all being, whose life and love are what the saints practice and practice and practice till they are lost in wonder, love, and praise. In a sense, nothing is left but God alone. But in another sense, the glory of God is finally realized when, one by one, human persons become fully themselves, fully alive.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2008

If Jesus Were a Candidate, What Would His Vision Be?

Practicing Love of God and Neighbor:

If Jesus Were a Candidate,
What Would His Vision of the Future Be?

A Sermon Preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, October 26, 2008

If Jesus had been running for President, the Pharisees and the Sadducees would have been blogging away like crazy. It is not hard to imagine them hunkered down over their computers, fingers flying, trading ideas of trick questions to ask Candidate Jesus at his next campaign stop, his upcoming appearance on Face the Nation, or his third and final debate. One wonders who might have been on Jesus’ side during the heated campaign for the hearts and minds of Israel. Depending upon which gospel one reads, it would appear that his disciples certainly were not masters of the latest public relations techniques, nor adept at internet fundraising. Instead, they seem to have been somewhere between floundering and clueless as to what sort of election this was, befuddled as to how to respond to the perennial question, “Who is Jesus of Nazareth and do you really know him?” They seem not to have measured what was at stake in the way the people answered this question. Pharisees and Sadducees, on the other hand, although mortal political and religious enemies, the conservatives and liberals of their day, arrayed themselves in an unholy alliance against Candidate Jesus, who threatened both groups, their backers, and their chances at controlling the opinion machinery of their beleaguered colonial nation.

Sadducees thought they had him right where they wanted him when they concocted a story that would quickly illustrate the silliness of the doctrine of resurrection from the dead, which the Pharisees supported and which Jesus seemed to court. And Pharisees, seeing a window of opportunity to entrap Jesus, wanted to test and see what he thought was the greatest commandment, since he had this habit, at least in the Matthew report, of saying things like, “You have heard it said that thus and such is the law, but I say to you so and so,” enough to make a Pharisee jittery, but more than enough to make a conservative Sadducee develop hives.

Neither Sadducee nor Pharisee cared a fig for what Jesus really thought, let alone for what the Truth might be, were it other than what they already had decided it to be. What they wanted was to justify their own narratives, their versions of what was what. And the reason they were aligned against Jesus was that he was calling people to a new narrative, one that was full of surprises like “The Sabbath was made for humans, not humans for the Sabbath” and “Love your enemies” and “Judge not that you be not judged; forgive and you shall be forgiven.” Both liberal and conservative wanted, naturally, to cling to their own stories. How best to deal with Jesus? Trap him. Expose him. Maybe even smear him as anti-Israel, anti-Law. Possibly—who knows?—brand him a Zealot, a terrorist, an enemy of the state, a clear and present danger to the national security, such as it was.

So the Pharisees recruited their brightest and best, a lawyer, who the Matthew report says, had an agenda not just of testing, but scrutinizing, accusing, or even disciplining Jesus. (Mark, reporting the same story, relates that the lawyer was a seeker, considerably more sympathetic.) “Teacher—” one wonders if he gritted his teeth when using the title—“Teacher, what is the greatest commandment?” We will never know what the lawyer was primed to say after he got what he must have known would be the answer to the question. He could easily anticipate that Jesus would give the answer that he himself would give: the shema, of course. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength.” But Jesus does one better. Notice that he does not only answer the question, he goes further and answers another one that he has not been asked. “Not only is there a first commandment, but there is a second one which is like it.” Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength, and love your neighbor as your self. On these two commandments hang the Torah and the Prophets.

In our continuing effort to figure out what it is to practice the Christian faith, Jesus’ answer gives us the hinge on which swings the door of abundant life. The whole kit and caboodle hangs on the love of God and the love of neighbor. The love of God involves the entire human being—heart, mind, soul, strength—and the love of neighbor is calibrated to match one’s own love of self, family, flesh and blood. It is tempting to see Jesus’ answer as providing a two-piece foundation. But on closer examination, we see that there is scarcely any way in which we can obey the first commandment and not the second. If Jesus’ ministry demonstrated anything, it was that the Reign of God was about relationships with people, right relationships. The one prayer that Jesus taught his disciples to pray was a simple one that brings things down from heaven to earth by the third petition. Then it gets into daily bread, forgiveness, temptation, deliverance. The love of God expresses itself in the love of neighbor, and the love of neighbor presupposes the proper love of self. It is all one continuous love, not to be divvied up into competing or discrete “vertical” and “horizontal” dimensions.

How do we practice the love of God, neighbor, and self? The baptismal covenant, which we shall be renewing next week on the Feast of All Saints, gives us a handle. “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons loving your neighbor as your self?” is one of the key questions. Notice how loving our neighbor is the connecting link between love of God (seeking Christ) and love of self. Our covenant is to seek Christ in all persons. We do not promise to find Christ in all persons, but we do promise to look for him in all persons.

We do that, first, by acting kindly towards other people. We do that before we analyze them or even before we theorize about why. “Love is patient, love is kind,” says St. Paul. We treat people on the Metro or in traffic jams in the supermarket check-out line with the courtesy that we would extend to Christ, and with the deference that Christ shows to us. In his directions as to how we go about loving God and neighbor, Richard Baxter, the great Puritan divine of the 17th century, put it this way:

Love God truly, and you will easily love your neighbour; for you will see God's image of him, or interest in him, and feel all his precepts and mercies obliging you hereunto.
To this end let Christ be your continual study. He is the full revelation of the love of God; the lively pattern of love, and the best teacher of it that ever was in the world: his incarnation, life, and sufferings, his gospel and covenant, his intercession and preparations for our heavenly felicity, all are the great demonstrations of condescending, matchless love. Mark both: God's love to us in him, and his love to man, and you will have the best directive and incentive of your love.

All of this is pretty obvious, isn’t it? Is this not what you expect to hear in church? So why does it seem so hard? What gets in the way? Let’s take another look at the Sadducees and Pharisees. They were not bad people. At least they didn’t intend to be. They were captives of their own world views, I would argue. So cocksure that they were right, they couldn’t see anything beyond the boundaries of their own opinions. And to that extent they function as negative models for us. Sadducees and Pharisees are those who assume that theirs is the only way, the right way to think, to act, and to appropriate other people. What is more, they have themselves convinced that God agrees with them. I don’t know that they engaged in scurrilous political attacks on each other, but I do know that they could easily have justified doing so, because each thought they were acting on behalf of God.

What happens when we stop acting as if we own God and start loving God and the world God has made? What happens when we open ourselves to the possibility that not only our friends but also our enemies deserve respect? Above all what happens when we begin to follow Jesus in his project of developing a new story that does not see humanity divided into camps of believers and non-believers, saved and damned, nation and adversary, friend and enemy? Might it be possible to construct a new framework that views humanity as one?

Frankly, it is risky. There are always those who are ready to take advantage of kindness and forbearance, and to crush gentleness with overbearing force. In this world where destructive individuals are real menaces, dangerous, operating by standards that are themselves hostile to the gospel of peace that Jesus embodies, it is suicidal to believe that love of neighbor entails blindly trusting everyone and assuming the best of the worst. Yet, the risk is that, if we capitulate to the old stories that encourage distrust, rivalry, and self-justification, what virtue, if any, will we be nurturing? Valor? Prudence? Justice? At the end of the day, we might have to face the stark truth that only by loving God and our neighbor are we able to cultivate the virtue of hope. Hope is the dynamic that drives us forward to a future more rewarding than the prospect of a permanently factious, squabbling, or even murderously violent, and thus degraded, humanity.

There is nothing simple or easy about seeking Christ in all persons, nothing naïve or elementary about loving one’s neighbor as oneself. All our acts of courtesy and kindness, of mercy and generosity, of consideration and caring we perform in a world that is in the grip of partisans committed to narrowness, like Sadducees and Pharisees, and you name the other parties. It is a world that is perilously fragile, jerked around as it is by the forces of evil. But if that world is ever to become a different place, where the poor have a crack at a better life and even the rich have a chance to heal their souls, is there any alternative to starting to hope, to believe, to act in a way that envisions a life-giving, healing story? And if we are going ever to have a different, peaceful, and just society, is there any better place to start than by loving the God of peace and justice with every fiber of heart, mind, soul, strength, and, hard as it may be, loving our neighbors as ourselves?

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2008

Suppose There Were a Financial Meltdown and Nobody Cared

Practicing Stewardship:
Suppose There Were a Financial Meltdown
and Nobody Cared

A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, Sunday, October 12, 2008

Leo Bebb is his name, and he is a character. A guy by the name of Frederick Buechner invented him and gave him not one but four novels in which to star. The third one of them is called Love Feast. Bebb is a southern, overweight white preacher whom we come to know because another character, much more like you and me, by the name of Antonio Parr, decides one day in New York City to follow Bebb in order to expose him as the charlatan that he had to be. Parr goes after him to Florida, to Connecticut, and then to Princeton, New Jersey. It is the 1970’s, just about the time that I myself was living in Princeton. The university is chock-a-block with hippies. It is to them that Bebb offers his message of salvation. He persuades the rather stodgy Princeton University to let him hold love feasts in Alexander Hall in the middle of campus. The students by and large love attending Bebb’s services, not the least reason for which is that he serves tropicanas, a tasty orange drink which he has imported from Florida.

By the time he reaches Princeton in the wake of Bebb, Antonio has discovered that Bebb is anything but a phony. His brand of Christianity, while unpolished and blunt, captivates Antonio with its courage and imagination. Bebb manages to attract a well-heeled supporter whose name is Gertrude Conover. Gertrude lives in a big house on Library Place in Princeton, which is truly the high rent district. His faithful patron, she offers to give a Thanksgiving dinner, expecting a crowd of university students stranded on campus during the holiday weekend. Her grand house, Revenoc, is immaculate, ready for the occasion. Wreaths decorate the big lions at the end of the driveway, whose gravel is carefully raked. Caterers deliver the makings of the feast to the house, all decked with chrysanthemums throughout. And when nobody comes, Bebb gives a little homily about how much there is to eat and how few there are to enjoy it, just as it was in Jesus’ story. So Antonio gets into a friend’s rusty Chevy. They go hunting through the nearly deserted streets of Princeton, rounding up unsuspecting people to come for Thanksgiving. Gertrude gets on the phone and calls some of her pearls-and-blue rinse friends. A miscellany of people, like “ants and anteaters, cats and dogs, lambs and lions…were stabled together there in uproarious harmony while outside the chilly sky darkened.” And there followed an amazing love feast where differences melted faster than the stock market last week.

Matthew’s story is not quite as nice as Buechner’s, let’s admit. Matthew got his story from Q, another author, and rang some changes on it to make some of Matthew’s own favorite points. Luke had a version that was closer to Bebb’s and Buechner’s, and the Gospel of Thomas told one, too. But Matthew wanted to let folks know that this was not just anyone behaving like Gertrude Conover with her slip showing innocently, but the God and father of Our Lord Jesus Christ who had given a banquet for his Messianic Son. Prophets of old, like servants of a king, had given out the invitations. They had been shabbily treated to say the least. So God, fed up with the combination of ungrateful guests and murderous villains, fell into a rage and up and burned the place down, presumably his own town, while dinner had to wait. Not a pretty sight! Then he gave the order to go into the main streets and invite everyone they could find to the wedding banquet. And just as at Revenoc, the wedding hall filled with guests. But Matthew wants us to know that the real messianic banquet, much more serious than even the parable would have it, was not a come-as-you-are affair. It involved complete conversion, symbolized by a new suit of clothes. All of that is the way that Matthew read history and understood it as a narrative of a gracious and just God who extended a generous invitation but was definitely not to be trifled with.

Ah, there is so much here if we want to mine this parable for some cues as to how to practice our Christian faith! There is a message about carelessness and one about carefulness. There is a message about generosity and one about profligacy. There is a lesson about welcoming, balanced by another about presuming on the graces of the host. Where to dig in?

If it is all right for Matthew to take a story and use it to convey an urgent message about getting ready for the coming Reign of God, then might we not take the bones of the story and flesh them out with a slightly different point, one that serves the cause of the same Reign of God, but addresses the particular concerns of this week in this place?

This week I opened several statements that have come at the end of the third quarter to find what many of you have likely discovered. What I have socked away for my future has rapidly dwindled. I don’t even want to ask how bad it is. It is that bad. And while I received a reassuring letter from the Church Pension Fund, my first instinct is to be angry, which is the mask my fear usually wears. When threatened, we frequently resort to the default position, which is to hold on tighter rather than to let go, to grasp rather than to trust. It is precisely at this point that I am learning the Christian practice of stewardship. Sometimes that is described as “holding something in trust,” as stewards typically do. But I am beginning to think of it as “letting go of something in trust,” which is counter-intuitive.

I read something a few months ago by a person who encouraged living more generously than necessary. Tip generously, he said. Never let it be less than 20% unless the service is just abysmal, and let it be more if the service is really good. Frankly, I had always been a 15% man, even though I remember quite well the days of my own life as a waiter. Now I am hearing another voice when it comes time to pay the bill. That is the way one gets ever closer to giving a great banquet, like the one in the gospel or the one in Princeton. You give a little here and a little there, not counting the cost and soon you find that the universe is humming in harmony with you, or you with it. The occasions multiply. The amounts grow. And the worries lessen.

Suppose there were a financial meltdown and nobody cared. Suppose we were all as drunk on the joy of giving as the proverbial “Wall Street gang” is reputed to have been during the sub-prime mortgage spree. Suppose we honestly didn’t care because we knew that if God clothes the birds of the air and the lilies of the field how much more will he clothe us? I don’t know that I can do that. But I don’t know that I will in fact have much choice. Might as well make the most of it. Hoarding has never been known to do much besides harden a heart, like that of Moliere’s Misanthrope counting out the contents of his pathetic strong box.

Suppose there were a financial meltdown and nobody feared. What might happen if we said, in effect, as long as I have resources and others have fewer; as long as I have food, and there is someone who is hungry; as long as I have a hand to give, I’ll give? The funny thing is that it has never been prudent to wait until you have abundance, let alone security, before you give anything, because in all probability you’ll never cross that line. Abundance only comes after you have learned to give it away. Those who have not yet learned that have not yet learned one of the open secrets of the universe.

Years ago when I was a young pastor in Charlotte, I learned the lesson from someone who modeled for me what it means to live like a king throwing a wedding banquet. His name was Holt, and his titled was Elder. I think he was the pastor of an off—shoot of the AME Zion Church, maybe. Elder Holt called one day and wanted to come see me. He sat and told me about his project. He drove from Charlotte to Morganton each week to visit the patients at the large state mental hospital there. He had no agenda but to build relationships with the patients, many of whom had been abandoned by family and what friends they might have ever had. Elder Holt would invest in trinkets, candy, little favors, plastic flowers, maybe, anything that he could use to strike up a conversation or to meet some small need. I had a paltry discretionary fund, but I gave him what I could. One time I bought a putter from him when he was selling some golf clubs that someone had given him. Over several years I got to know him. One day he came asking if I could help him get his car fixed. “Elder,” I asked, “what will you ever do if you get out of debt, when you are free and clear, when your wife no longer fusses at you because you spend all this money on mental patients?”

He looked at me without hesitation and said, “I’d go right back in.” Elder Holt is one of that company that includes Saint Xenia of St. Petersburg and St. Francis of Assisi that are known as “fools for Christ.” Most of them are anything but fools, except by the world’s standards. They simply have learned how to give without counting the cost, until it becomes first a joy and then an all-consuming passion. None of them would be the least bit bothered by a financial meltdown. They have a gold not of this world, which strangely enough knows precisely what to do with the gold of this world, and that is to keep it moving, giving it away.

Everything follows that. Hospitality follows, because it is simply another form that generosity takes. Openness, too, grows, because money is incidental to the more basic work of the soul, which is its own opening to embrace the other. Forgiveness, patience, thanksgiving: they all grow from a common seed as fruit sharing a stalk.

Every virtue, like generosity, has its counterweight in the form of a vice. It would be easy enough to say, quite reasonably, that the vice opposing generosity is profligacy. And that might well be. But I think there is another vice more dangerous than being a spendthrift. And that is ingratitude. Grace is the essence of generosity, and charity is the essence of grace. Grace finds its expression in a sustained attitude of thanksgiving. And so its opposite is ingratitude, pictured like the wedding guests who made light of the king’s invitation, oblivious, no doubt, to the hurt that rode on the arrowshaft of bad manners.

Suppose there were a financial meltdown and nobody stopped giving. Sharing simply increased. People laughed instead of wringing their hands. And got into theirs and their friends’ beat-up old cars and pick-up trucks, and combed the city streets and alleyways looking for people to invite to dinner, where “ants and anteaters, cats and dogs, lambs and lions, were all stabled together in uproarious harmony, while outside the chilly sky darkened.”

© Frank G. Dunn, 2008