Homily: The Sixth Sunday of Easter [May 6, 2018] Trinity, Santa Barbara

            Over the course of my life I have read George Orwell’s classic novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, on four widely separate occasions. I first read it in 1964, my sophomore year in high school, for a book report. I next read it in 1984 because, well, it was 1984. I then read it after September 11, 2001 when the president and congress passed the Patriot Act and questions of terrorism and civil liberties were so prevalent. And I read it again recently because of all the assaults on truth and language we seem to be undergoing. Somehow today, the idea of a leader insisting that 2 + 2 = 5 doesn’t seem quite as farfetched as it once did.

            Every time you read a great book something new emerges for you. In high school I was particularly taken with George Orwell’s inventions of doublethink and the Thought Police. In the Reagan years I focused on the way allies and enemies kept changing places. In the Bush-Cheney era, with its continual assaults on language, George Orwell’s coining of the language called Newspeak (in which euphemisms abound) seemed most important. This time, something unexpected caught my eye.

            If you remember the plot of Nineteen Eighty-Four, you will remember that its protagonist, Winston Smith, is detained by the Thought Police and interrogated by a man known only as O’Brien. Smith has been found to have been harboring negative thoughts about Big Brother. Early on in their dialogue, Smith admits hating Big Brother. O’Brien says in reply,

You hate him. Good. Then the time has come for you to take the last step. You must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him: you must love him. 

What ensues, of course, is one of the most horrific episodes of brainwashing ever recorded. O’Brien finds the way in to Winston Smith’s deepest fears and gets him to betray the woman he loves. As the novel ends, Winston Smith’s mind has been changed. Here is how George Orwell describes Smith’s final epiphany:

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

            Now I will resist the temptation to make the obvious connection between Big Brother and other possible large national leaders we might think of who seem to exact loyalty in exchange for absolutely nothing. Instead, what struck me on this rereading of Nineteen Eighty-Four was its ironic connection to this morning’s gospel (John 15:9-17):

                  As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

            There are many things we might say about Jesus, but first among them today is that John’s gospel portrays him as the ultimate anti-Big Brother. On Maundy Thursday Jesus washes the disciples’ feet but does not ask that they wash his in return. Last week we heard Jesus describe himself as the vine and us as the branches. Today we hear Jesus commanding us to love one another. Big Brother demands that we love him. Jesus commands not that we love him but that we love one another.

            George Orwell’s Big Brother is not the first (and will certainly not be the last) leader in human history to demand love from his subjects. The political world in which Jesus lived and taught was dominated by Rome, whose official state cult made the emperor a god. In our social lives we have become habituated to dealing with leaders (usually political and religious authorities, sometimes even our bosses) who demand something more than mere loyalty: they demand personal adoration. These encounters begin with the transactional (“I will keep you safe and you will pay your taxes”) and then morph into the relational (“I give your life meaning and you will love me”). This slow creep from covenant to worship is one reason I have increasingly come to distrust charisma. There’s always a hidden price to pay. There’s always a dark side.

            But none of this is true for Jesus. To be sure, he does talk in the gospel reading about laying down his life for his friends, but even there he does not move to the obvious and logical Tony Soprano conclusion, “so you owe me big time”.  Jesus refers to his self-offering as an example of the depth of his love. And what he asks in return is neither obedience nor worship. What he asks in return is that we love one another as he has loved us.

            I think one of the reasons we spend not one day but fifty days celebrating Easter is that it takes a long time to take in just how countercultural the resurrection really is. I spent the last years of my professional life in Washington D.C., and I think one of the reasons Americans distrust our capital city is because it encapsulates all the worst transactional values of American culture. All relationships there are based on power and obligation. When I first went to D.C., people continually asked me how, having grown up in Hollywood, I was adjusting to Washington. “No problem,” I would say. “They’re both the same culture.”

            The resurrection of Jesus, which we celebrate in these fifty days of Easter, is the ultimate rebuke to a culture of power and obligation. Big Brother and Caesar demand unthinking obedience and fawning love. Jesus and the God he incarnates ask only that we love one another. The values of power and obligation always appear to be winning. The values of humility, justice, compassion, and peace always seem to lose. But the day and season of Easter suggest the way things really work. In George Orwell’s world, Big Brother will always prevail. In God’s world the humility, justice, compassion, and peace made real and present in Jesus eventually outlast the pretentious imperial forces that seek to crush them.

            In God’s universe, it is Jesus and those who care for others who prevail. And when all is said and done, our only obligation is to love our fellow human beings. We love God not vertically but horizontally. And as Reinhold Niebuhr reminds us, in the social realm, love must be more than a feeling. We love each other one way in a family, differently in a community. For those of us who seek to love one another socially, love must always be translated as justice.

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

            As followers of Jesus, you and I believe and hope that love and justice will ultimate prevail. As realists, we know that we must follow Jesus in a world dominated by the values of Caesar and Big Brother, Washington, and Hollywood.  On this Sixth Sunday of Easter, Jesus shows us how we can make our way through all the bad values and false loyalties that our culture tries to force upon us. We follow Jesus and become our real selves by loving and serving each other and the world.

            Every generation that reads George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four sees in its pages its own problems reflected back to it. Winston Smith’s tragedy lies in the way he is persuaded to love an authority figure instead of a fellow human being. In that novel’s world, there is tellingly no voice of Jesus to remind anyone of the priority God places on mutual human love.

            Patriarchy, hierarchy, and empire die hard. Even after centuries of Christian faith and practice, we Christians persist in thinking that God is more like a jealous emperor than a humble Palestinian Jewish peasant. After all these years, we still seem to think that God is some kind of narcissist who, like Big Brother, demands love without question. But if we really hear what Jesus is saying, we’ll find that it isn’t like that at all.

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

            Here is the good news: we do not yet inhabit the world of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. There is still room for us to hear these countercultural words of Jesus. We stand against empire whenever we choose to love people instead of power. May we continue to hear these words and live them out in our personal and social lives, and in so doing frustrate the narcissistic demands of all our various Big Brothers and of all systems that would alienate us from Jesus, each other, the world, and even ourselves. Amen.

           

           

Homily: The Fifth Sunday of Easter [April 29, 2018] Trinity, Santa Barbara

Earlier this month, Kathy and I were away celebrating our 40^th anniversary for a couple of weeks, and we returned to an avalanche of troublesome American news. This may sound like the understatement of the year, but there seems to be an epidemic of incredibly bad behavior going around. I am not sure how to process the news I see and hear about all kinds of people—presidents, cabinet members, entertainers--these days. Just this week, a former policeman has been charged with a decades-old series of murders. A nominee for a cabinet-level position withdrew after allegations of workplace harassment and on the job drinking. A cabinet secretary blamed all his very serious ethical lapses on his subordinates. People we thought we looked up to are being shown to have behaved abusively and, now, criminally. The conviction of Bill Cosby on three felony counts of sexual assault last week is only one more in the series of what we might charitably call “disappointments” we have witnessed in the past several months. The good news is that these people are finally being called to account. The bad news is that it seems that almost everybody in public life an has an incredibly dark side.

The temptation we all face is to look at these public malefactors and to draw a hard line between them and us. If I see one more tweet or Facebook post about how my innocence has been shattered I will scream. “I loved Bill Cosby as Scotty on I Spy and as Dr. Huxtable on The Cosby Show. I feel cheated.” But who ever gave us permission to think ourselves innocent in the first place? It is a great mistake to look at abusers and not see ourselves somehow implicated in the culture that enables their behavior.

Now that’s a kind of post-Easter downer way to begin a sermon, but remember that the theologian Karl Barth once said that Christian preachers should hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. Today, on the fifth Sunday of Easter, we are asked to understand how Jesus can be for us the way, the truth, and the life. How might we put the Bible and the newspaper together today?

This morning’s Gospel (John 15: 1-8) is relevant here.  It gives us Jesus’s well-known allegory of the vine and the branches [John 15: 1-8], a familiar yet challenging text. Here is the part we always remember: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower,” says Jesus.  “Abide in me as I abide in you. “ Gosh that sounds nice. But then comes the part we always forget: “He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.” Not very sentimental at all.

            “I am the vine, you are the branches” is a saying that has brought comfort to Christians over the centuries, an extended metaphor suggesting our unity, our oneness in Christ.  The figure of the vine was also a traditional Old Testament metaphor for the people of Israel [Psalm 80].  In John’s understanding, Jesus himself is the new Israel and all of us who believe in him are what Paul would call “members one of another.” [Romans 12: 5] But the more we press on it, the more we see that Jesus’s use of this figure of the vine and the branches is not just about the connection of Jesus with the church. To say that Jesus is the vine and we are the branches is to suggest something not just about Jesus and the church but something even bigger about the nature of God and the world.  Remember the words of Dr. King:

We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools.  We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.  And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.  For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.  This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.  [“Letter from Birmingham Jail”]

All of us—not only Jesus and the church, but God, humanity, and the world--are woven together in one fabric of life.  We are all in this together.  So one thing we hear in today’s Bible-newspaper dialogue is a word of human solidarity even in hard moments like the present.  The bad news is that because of this solidarity I find myself judged in the dark work of human sin and aggression. The good news is that I find myself vindicated whenever justice is done. A full, mature Christian spirituality understands that we see ourselves in both sides of this equation. It is tempting to identify only with the victims, but we must also see ourselves in the aggressors. We cannot look at these events—sin on the one hand, righteousness on the other--and not see ourselves implicated.  Human solidarity is universal and absolute. “We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” Jesus is the vine. We are the branches.  We are all in this together.

            But what are we to make when Jesus speaks of God’s role as the vinegrower? “God removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit God prunes to make it bear more fruit.”  The Greek verb here (airo) suggests both cutting and cleansing.  Yes, we are all connected to each other through our oneness in Christ.  And yes, God is at work in events that try and test and shape us into the people God intends us to be.  As Dr. King says, “For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.” Vines need pruning and we need cleansing. Just as you would not let a rose bush grow wild but would cut it back to enhance its fullness, so God uses hard events in our personal and social lives to shape us for God’s own purposes. The life of faith is the process of becoming ourselves, of growing and being shaped into the people God intends us to be. This process has moments of joy and wonder. It also has times of self-examination, suffering, and pain.  To describe the way life shapes us through testing and trial, the Hebrew prophets often compared it to the smelting of precious metals. Jesus uses the figure of the gardener and the vine.

Whichever figure you use, the point is inescapable: the events of our lives—the joyous ones and the painful ones, even and especially when we see ourselves and others revealed in all our uncomfortable complexity—these events weave us into a single garment of destiny with God, each other, and the world. Even when Jesus says something hard that makes us squirm in our pews a bit—as in today’s, “Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.”—even that cleansing, pruning announcement is shot through with good news. Whether I like it or not, God is making me into the person I am called and destined to be. God is doing that through the agency of every person with whom I come in contact. Those parts of me that resist God’s love and justice will, like those branches that wither, be thrown into the fire and burned. Rose bushes probably do not love being cut back. But they only realize their potential at the end of some rigorous pruning.

The season of Easter is all about the deep and abiding solidarity you and I share with each other in Jesus. It is only because we all live and grow together in Christ that the resurrection is not only about Jesus but is now also about us. In coming to terms with the complex fullness of our cultural icons you and I are being asked not to excuse their behavior but to see how even the dark side of someone else can illuminate our understanding of ourselves. If we look at the events of the week and come away only concluding that there are some bad apples out there but thank God I’m not one of them we will have missed the point entirely. God loves and transforms and blesses us in all our complex and ambiguous fullness. Easter is about God’s ability to take the sum total of who we are and prune and shape it into new and beautiful life.

Jesus is risen. We shall be, too. Getting there is a lifelong journey of sometimes painful self-discovery. God knows and loves and blesses even the parts of you that you cannot acknowledge and accept. Pruning and cleansing are painful, but as in vines and roses, so in you and me: they always lead to new life. Dr. King knew what he was talking about when he described life as a “single garment of destiny”. For that life, for the way we are inescapably tied to each other, and for God’s ongoing remaking us into the image of the one we see in the risen Jesus, we proceed in this Eucharist to give thanks. Amen.