Repentance based on love, not fear

Sermon delivered Sunday, Feb. 24, 2013 (Second Sunday in Lent, Year C), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN. (Readings: Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18, Psalm 27, Philippians 3:17-4:1, Luke 13:31-35)

Culturally, most people’s understanding of repentance probably has something to do with street preachers shaking their fists in judgment, holding up signs condemning the world, yelling at passers-by to “repent or perish!” Calls to repentance like these often come with a threat, a threat that if people do not change their ways, they will face destruction – either in this life or the next. It is a way of calling for change that relies on fear as a motivator – people respond to these calls out of a very real fear that if they do not do what the preacher says, their lives will be miserable and they will go to hell when they die.

However uncomfortable such methods might make us, this way of calling people to repentance is not entirely unbiblical. There are countless stories in the Bible of God threatening people with destruction if they do not change their ways, and actually following through on that threat if they do refuse to change. The texts of the Hebrew Bible tell us that God rained down fire and sulphur on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because of their sinfulness (Genesis 19:24), that God drowned the Egyptians in the Red Sea because the Pharaoh refused to free the Israelites from slavery (Exodus 14:26-29), and that God dispossessed the Canaanites and other peoples of their lands because of their wickedness (Deuteronomy 9:4-5), just to name a few of the better-known stories.

But this is not the only picture of God we receive in the Bible, a God who calls for change by using threats and fear. Mixed in with that portrayal of God is another image of God as a God who calls for change by humbling himself out of compassion and love. This is the biblical refrain that speaks of a God who turns society’s conventions upside down, who casts down the mighty and lifts up the lowly, who says that the last will be first and the first will be last. And, contrary to popular belief, this image of God does not appear only in the New Testament. It shows up as a constant refrain throughout the Hebrew Bible as well.

Today’s reading from the Hebrew Bible is one example of this image of God as one who motivates and communicates out of humility and love. When Abram doubts God’s promise that he will give the land to Abram’s descendants, God does not respond in anger, condemning Abram for not trusting God’s word. Instead, to prove his point, God radically humbles himself to show Abram just how serious he is about his promise.

When God asks Abram to bring the various animals to him for a sacrifice, he is setting the stage for a traditional way of making a treaty or covenant in ancient Near Eastern culture. This particular method comes out of Hittite culture and would have been the most serious way of making a covenant that Abram would have known. God is using the cultural conventions of Abram’s time to speak to him where he is.

Treaties between two parties who had been at war with one another in the ancient Near East would go something like this: After a war between two groups, the victors would be on the loser’s property, having just defeated them. The victors would offer a treaty to the losers that would consist of various demands: since you all are now under our rule, you must be loyal only to us and serve only us. There would be specific details about the things the losers were and weren’t allowed to do. Then, in order to ratify the treaty, they would take some animals and cut them in two and make the losers walk between the animal pieces while reciting the stipulations of the treaty. The implication was that if the losers did not abide by the stipulations of the treaty, the conquerors would do to them what had been done to the animals! [1]

If this were a story in the “repent or perish” tradition that uses threats and fear as a way to motivate, we would expect God to demand that Abram walk between the pieces to declare his utmost loyalty to God – with the accompanying threat that if Abram did not keep the stipulations of the covenant God was making with him, that God would make him look like the animal pieces. After all, in other parts of the Hebrew Bible, we do hear stories of God threatening destruction to the people if they do not keep the law and his commandments. But that’s not what happens in this story.

In this story, “When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces.” (Genesis 15:17). It is not Abram who passes between the pieces, but the very presence of God. Smoke and fire were classic symbols for the appearance of the presence of God: think about Moses and the burning bush, or the pillar of cloud that accompanied the Israelites in the wilderness. In passing between the pieces, God is taking on the role of the weaker party in the covenant; God is playing the role of the “loser.” God could have easily demanded that Abram perform the traditional role of the weaker party in the covenant, and no doubt Abram would have thought this entirely appropriate. But instead, in response to Abram’s doubts, God humbles himself, makes himself vulnerable, in essence saying to Abram, “May I be made like these animal pieces if I do not keep my word to you.”

Fast forward several thousand years, and God’s willingness to humble himself goes a step further. God’s willingness to take human form in the person of Jesus Christ, to live as one of us, and to be willing even to die on the cross, is the ultimate act of divine humility. Like God’s willingness to walk between the animal pieces to show Abram how serious God was about the covenant he was making with Abram, God’s willingness to go to the cross shows us how serious God is about the covenant he makes with us in Jesus Christ. God voluntarily puts himself in a position of human weakness in order to profess his love for us.

These acts of humility and love also serve as calls to repentance – a call to change our ways in the face of a God who is willing to give up everything for us. In this biblical theme, God moves us to repentance not by beating us down and scaring us, but by making himself vulnerable and giving of himself for us. If we truly understand the implications and magnitude of such divine humility, I believe it generates a much more authentic repentance than threats of destruction do. So often, calls for repentance that are based in fear, threat, and judgment produce change motivated by a fearful desire to protect one’s own personal safety rather than an authentic love for God. But when God chooses not to exercise God’s power to destroy, but shows mercy and forgiveness instead, we are naturally moved to a change of heart and a reciprocal loving response. The words of an anonymous 17th century Spanish poem, Soneto a Cristo crucificado, “Sonnet to Christ crucified,” express this point well. As one English translation interprets it, the poet writes,

“I love thee, Lord, but not because

I hope for heaven thereby,

nor yet for fear that loving not

I might for ever die;

but for that thou didst all the world

upon the cross embrace;

for us didst bear the nails and spear,

and manifold disgrace,

and griefs and torments numberless,

and sweat of agony;

e'en death itself; and all for one

who was thine enemy.”

The poet turns to God not because he fears punishment if he does not, but because Jesus’s life, death, and Resurrection moves him and fills him with gratitude and love. The author of the first letter of John writes that “perfect love drives out all fear” (1 John 4:18). As Christians, I believe our primary call to repentance comes from Christ crucified, an act not of judgment or threats, but of perfect love. In turning our eyes to the cross, we can find the authentic repentance and change of heart and life that we seek during Lent. Perhaps no one has said it better than the great English hymn-writer Isaac Watts:

When I survey the wondrous cross

Where the young Prince of Glory died,

My richest gain I count but loss

And pour contempt on all my pride.

Were the whole realm of nature mine,

That were an offering far too small

Love so amazing, so divine

Demands my soul, my life, my all.

[1] Information about Hittite vassal treaties from lecture notes from Rebecca Abts Wright’s Old Testament class, fall 2009, The School of Theology at Sewanee: The University of the South.

Lent, corporate repentence, and gun violence

Sermon delivered Ash Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN (Isaiah 58:1-12, Psalm 103, 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:10, Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21).

“Create and make in us new and contrite hearts.” This is what we asked of God in our opening collect a few moments ago. As we enter the season of Lent, the season of penitence and fasting, self-examination and renewal, we hear again that biblical refrain that we’ve heard recently from John the Baptist and the Apostle Paul: God calls us not only to right ritual, but to right intention and right action. Our hearts must be in the right place as we come to worship God, and our actions must reflect the faith we say we have.

This message was not new with John the Baptist and Paul: they were echoing the ancient call of the Hebrew prophets, like the passage from Isaiah that we hear today. “Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high,” God says through Isaiah to the people who observe the right rituals, but “who serve [their] own interest[s] on [their] fast day and oppress all [their] workers” (Isaiah 58:4, 3). And Jesus repeats this theme in the Sermon on the Mount, warning his disciples against doing religious acts for the wrong reasons. Fasting or prayer or almsgiving should be done out of a sincere faith and desire to please God and to grow closer to God, not out of a desire for approval or recognition from one’s peers. “Beware of practicing your piety before others in other to be seen by them,” Jesus says, “for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven” (Matthew 6:1).

The issue here is one of intention and motivation. Those who practice their piety before others in order to be seen by them will have no reward from God not because they have performed religious actions publicly, but because the act of “going public” with their faith has caused their intentions to go astray: they are motivated by a desire to please other people rather than a desire to please God. Their hearts are not in the right place. Their actions become all about them instead of all about God.

The people Isaiah addresses are caught in this sin of self-absorption: they observe the fasts because they want to win favor with God, but they ignore God’s commands to care for the poor and to deal justly with others because of their desires for power or money. Both their business practices and their religious practices are entirely self-centered. Their only concern is securing a place for themselves, both on earth and in heaven.

Fasting is intended to be an act of personal sacrifice, a way of emptying ourselves in order to open ourselves more fully to God. This meaning is negated if the person fasting continues to behave in a manner incongruent with the commandment of God to love our neighbors as ourselves. A real sacrifice of self, God says through the prophet Isaiah, is to give of yourself in service to others, to share your bread with the hungry, to clothe the naked, to work for justice and free the oppressed. Not only must there be right intentions, but right actions must flow from them. We must show, as John the Baptist would put it, “fruits worthy of repentance” (Luke 3:8).

The season of Lent invites us to take a step back from our regular routines and examine our own intentions and actions. Am I bearing fruits worthy of repentance? Am I giving of myself in the fast that God chooses, a fast that leads not to self-absorption, but self-giving? Has my worship become empty and rote, devoid of heart-filled sincerity? Am I at peace with the ways I am practicing my faith and living it out in my life?

But the self-examination of Lent invites us to go even further, looking beyond our individual lives. The discipline of Lent is a corporate as well as an individual one. We could ask the same questions of our life together as a church: not just am I bearing fruits worthy of repentance, but are we, as St. Paul’s, as the Diocese of Tennessee, as the Episcopal Church, bearing fruits worthy of repentance? Are we practicing the fast of self-giving rather than self-absorption? Is our worship heartfelt and sincere? Are we satisfied with how we are practicing our faith together and living it out in service to our community, the nation, and the world?

But it doesn’t stop there. We are also invited to consider, as we expand the circle of our concern even wider, the corporate sins and shortcomings of the country and culture in which we live. In the litany of penitence that we will pray together in a few moments, we confess not just ways that we as individual Christians have sinned and ways the Church has sinned, but systemic sins rooted in our wider culture: “Our self-indulgent appetites and ways, and our exploitation of other people… Our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts… our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty.” This “our” is much bigger than you or me or all of us in this church combined. It is an “our” that resonates with the wider American culture: our materialism that values things over people, our individualism that leads us to believe we need to care only for ourselves and our families and not for the wider community, and our obsession with violence that desensitizes us to the image of God in all people.

If you read the announcements in the February newsletter and last week’s Take-Out about our upcoming Lenten series on Thursday nights, you know that our adult Lenten program this year will be on the topic of gun violence. You may have wondered, as you read that announcement, what this subject has to do with Lent. I believe that the prevalence of gun violence in our country at this time is a corporate sin that we are called to grapple with, and it is in the Lenten spirit of self-examination and “taking stock” of ourselves that we will consider this issue in our Lenten study this year.

Gun violence is by no means the only corporate or systemic sin in our country, but we will focus on this one because of its immediacy in our national discourse at the moment. In the seven short months that I have been with you at St. Paul’s, there have been three mass shootings in the U.S. that have made major media coverage: the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado in July, the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin in August, and the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut in December. Although mass shootings are nothing new in this country, the frequency and intensity with which they happened last year has led many people, including me, to take note and begin to ask questions about why these things are happening, and about what it says about our culture. After the shootings in Newtown, the Episcopal bishops of Connecticut called for their diocese to spend the season of Lent this year in “a time of discernment and action on how all of us can best work to overcome the death-dealing culture of violence that seems to be so prevalent in our society at this time.” This is an appropriate topic to explore during Lent, a time set aside for reflection and self-examination, and a time during which we reflect on the ways in which another “death-dealing culture of violence,” in first century Palestine, led to the death of our Lord. My prayer is that these discussions will help each of us discern what part we are called to play in “loosing the bonds of injustice” (Isaiah 58:6) that leave too many parents childless and too many children motherless and fatherless.

And as we do this, I pray that we are mindful of another one of our confessions from today’s litany: “for all false judgments, for uncharitable thoughts toward our neighbors, and for our prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us.” There can and will be very different views amongst us about the best way to address the issue of gun violence, especially considering the ways this issue has been highly politicized. Our study will attempt to offer a balanced presentation of the issue and encourage honest dialogue between those of you with different perspectives, a dialogue that will attempt to dismantle those false judgments and prejudices that we may have toward those whose views differ from ours.

On Ash Wednesday, we are invited us to remember and contemplate our own mortality and the fragility of human life. During this season of Lent, my prayer is that we as individuals and as a community will examine our priorities and the intentions behind our actions, and take stock of what is really important in the life of faith. Whether each of you do that through participation in the Lenten study or through examining and contemplating other issues or concerns that are more pressing and relevant in your life right now, the underlying theme of our work this season is the same: to consider how we are called to live out our faith authentically in the world, in such a way that we contribute to God’s work of bringing justice and freedom to all. Through our Lenten fast, whatever form that may take for each of us, may we all seek a deeper knowledge of the heart of God and bear fruits of authentic repentance.

They'll know we are Christians by our love

Sermon delivered Sunday, Feb. 3, 2013 (Fourth Sunday After the Epiphany, Year C) at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Franklin, TN. (Scripture for the day: Jeremiah 1:4-10, Psalm 71:1-6, 1 Corinthians 13:1-13, Luke 4:21-30)

The passage about love from 1 Corinthians 13 that we heard today is familiar to Christians and non-Christians alike for its eloquent statement of the attributes of genuine love. But although we hear it most often at weddings, the Apostle Paul was not writing specifically about romantic love or marriage when he wrote it.

This passage actually comes directly after Paul’s discussion of spiritual gifts and of the oneness of the church as the body of Christ in chapter 12 of 1 Corinthians, which we heard last week and the week before. At the end of last week’s reading, after describing the various gifts and vocations given to people in the church: apostles, teachers, miracle-workers, healers, the ability to speak in tongues, Paul exhorts the people to “strive for the greater gifts.” “What greater gifts?” you may have wondered. Which of the gifts Paul just listed does he consider to be the greatest? The confusion comes due to an unfortunate choice of the editors of the lectionary to stop the passage there. The second half of that verse goes on to say, “And I will show you a still more excellent way,” and then Paul launches into the reflection on love in our passage for today. The flow of Paul’s message really continues seamlessly from the last verses of chapter 12 into the first verses of chapter 13, so let me read those for you together, so you get a sense of the flow. After Paul has just listed the variety of gifts given by God to the church, and pointed out that not all people have all of these gifts, he goes on to say:

“But strive for the greater gifts, and I will show you a still more excellent way: If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith [these are all spiritual gifts Paul was just talking about], so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing” (1 Cor. 12:29-13:2).

Can you hear what Paul is trying to say here? The “greater gifts” he was referring to at the end of our reading from chapter 12 last week were not the gifts of working miracles or being an apostle or speaking in tongues. The “greater gifts” are “faith, hope, and love – and the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:13). All the seemingly impressive spiritual gifts in the world are worthless if the person using them does not have love in his or her heart. Paul is echoing a biblical theme we heard recently from John the Baptist during Advent: intentions matter. The spirit in which you do things matters. Our faith is ultimately a matter of the heart. No matter how many gifts we have been given by God, if we do not use them in a loving manner, they are utterly worthless.

So as we continue to consider, during this season of Epiphany, how we might make Christ manifest in the world, Paul takes us a step further than he did two weeks ago when he first introduced the idea of spiritual gifts. Yes, the unique gifts and talents that we each have can be used to make Christ known to the world, but one sure way that all of us can make Christ known is to love – and to love in a very particular kind of way, with a selfless, giving love that has at its heart a concern for the well-being of others. That kind of love, that Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 13, is the ultimate spiritual gift by which we make the presence of Christ known to the world.

It’s like the refrain to that song you may know from your days in church camp or youth group: “They’ll know we are Christians by our love.” That’s essentially what Paul is saying here: it is not the things we do, but how we do them, that testifies to our faith in Christ. They’ll know we are Christians not by what we do, but by how we love.

And how we love flows directly out of our faith, for, as the first letter of John puts it, “we love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Our model for love is found in a God who was willing to take on our humanity, to suffer with us, a God who “came that we might have life, and might have it abundantly” (John 10:10).

This divine love often stands in contrast to much of human love, which can carry with it selfish desires for security and control. People can and do justify any number of sinful actions based on their love for something or someone. The community who sought to throw Jesus off a cliff in today’s Gospel reading probably did so out of a love for their religious tradition that they thought Jesus was challenging or disrespecting. The intense attachments that we develop to things or people that we love can lead us to lash out against anything that seems to threaten them. But as with the crowd in Nazareth, our intense attachment to those things we love can sometimes blind us to the presence of God among us. When we want to cling tightly, God sometimes asks us to let go. When we want to save ourselves and those we love, God tells us that we must lose our lives in order to save them.

And so what might first have seemed like a fairly easy task – all we have to do to make Christ known to the world is to love – suddenly becomes an even more difficult task than using the spiritual gifts we have been given. Paul’s message in chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians both simplifies and intensifies his message about the essentials of life in Christian community. “All you need is love,” yes, but the love that he describes is in essence a picture of divine love – the kind of love that we see in Christ but which we see less frequently in ourselves.

As Christians, we are called to imitate and model this kind of love in our lives. But it is important to keep in mind, as we strive to do this, that although we are members of the body of Christ, we are not Christ himself! As limited, finite human beings, we will not be able to manifest fully and completely the selfless, giving love of Christ that Paul describes. And Paul acknowledges this: in our current state of being, he says, we see “through a glass, darkly,” and know “only in part” – the fullness of God’s glory and love and God’s great design for all humanity will not be known to any of us until the next age. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have to try – it just means we should be gentle with ourselves and with our neighbors when we fall short of living up to the ideal picture of love in 1 Corinthians 13.

And the good news is that, as Paul describes it, the ability to love like this is a gift – the “greatest” of spiritual gifts. We do not have to, nor are we likely to be able to, love this unselfishly of our own willpower. It is one of those things which, like the vows we make at our baptism, we can only promise to do “with God’s help.” Such love is a true gift of the Spirit, and, as with all things of the Spirit, it requires intentional prayer to cultivate. May we all open ourselves to the work of the Spirit, so that, with God’s help, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.