It is a real pleasure to be with you here at St. Michael’s, this morning. I made my first visit here in the fall of 1976, when fresh out of seminary I served as the late Bishop Rusack’s chaplain. I preached here a few times in the 1990s when my good, longtime friend Peter Haynes was your rector, and your church surprisingly was not struck by lightning even once. And Barbara Stewart (who was made a canon of the diocese by Bishop Taylor at our Diocesan Convention this weekend) and I have long been members of a clergy colleague group together. (Barbara, I’ll show you the secret handshake at coffee hour.) So I have many ongoing connections with this parish, and I appreciate Louise’s invitation to join you today.
I, for one, am deeply glad that the midterm elections are (almost!) over. It got to the point in the days before Tuesday that I was afraid to turn on the television. The cable channels were filled with the kind of pointless prognostications that TV anchors usually reserve for the moments just after earthquakes. “Where was it? We don’t know. How big was it? Your guess is as good as mine.” And then there was the barrage of political ads designed both to enrage and confuse you. It was enough to make you want to go live on a desert island.
The days leading up to and following Tuesday’s midterm elections have felt positively apocalyptic, so we should feel right at home in this morning’s gospel reading [Luke 21: 5-19]. Jesus paints a lurid picture there: wars, insurrections, a thrown-down temple, persecutions, and betrayals. To one who lived and worked in Washington D.C. for several years, this sounds like a normal day in Congress.
We Episcopalians are very near the end of the church year, a calendar based not on solar or lunar models but on the outline of the story of Jesus. The year begins in Advent as we expect the coming of Christ, and it ends with the revelation next Sunday that Jesus, not the principalities and powers of the world, is the one finally in charge. In between those poles we experience Jesus’s birth, his teaching and healing, his entry into Jerusalem, his conflict with the authorities there, his trial, crucifixion, and death, and finally his resurrection, ascension, and the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost. A lot happens in a year with Jesus, and today we are getting ready to ask ourselves what it all means.
There seem to be two clusters of ideas in today’s gospel: one describing the chaos of the present moment, the other suggesting how Jesus’s followers should interact with the world. I’d like to say a word about each cluster and then to conclude with a thought about stewardship, which I gather is the focus this morning of parish life here at St. Michael’s.
Listen again to Jesus:
Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.
The great 20th century theologian Karl Barth once said that preachers should hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. (I wonder what he would have said about Facebook and Twitter.) There are times when the Bible seems hopelessly alien. There are moments when it seems ripped from today’s headlines.
We live now in a time of dreadful portents and great signs from heaven. It is no wonder that Monday night’s lunar eclipse was hailed by some as an omen about what the next day’s elections would bring: wars and insurrections indeed. The leadup to Tuesday was brutal: horrible negative ads, lawsuits filed contesting votes that hadn’t even happened yet, promises of violence if the election did not go a certain way. We are fortunate that there has been relative calm since Tuesday, but the recounts haven’t started yet.
Those of us of a certain age have spent most of our lives under a relatively peaceful national and international order. We became conditioned to a long stretch of world peace and bipartisan domestic tranquility. But history and our recent experience teach us that the post-World War II period was a bit of an anomaly. Chaos and contention are more rule than exception. Those who came before and after us have been more conditioned to sustained conflict both at home and abroad.
When we listen to Jesus, we should remember that his own time was one of great animosity and tension. Israel was subject to a brutal Roman occupation. And the gospels also witness the internal dissensions within Judaism itself. Jesus was living with, ministering and preaching to, people who were stressed out economically, politically, and even spiritually. They lived, as the King James Bible had it, under the continual threat of “wars and rumors of wars”.
The first thing we need to hear today is that we should not be misled by our nostalgic wish for a more bipartisan, harmonious time. Sure, it was more peaceful in the 1950s. But that peace was paid for by the silencing and oppression of people who were not white, straight, and male. Relative peace can hide systemic injustice. History is the record of an ongoing struggle between good and evil, justice and oppression, love and hatred. From time to time we may experience a pause in the conflict, but we should not confuse a temporary calm with a lasting peace.
As much as I dislike the tensions and enmities of the current moment in America and the world, the persistence of the conflict reminds us that people of faith are always asked to engage with the issues of our day. Long as we might to escape into a fantasy of a more civil and harmonious past, Jesus reminds us that there is no safe haven on offer for those who follow him. We will make our way through wars and rumors of wars by remaining faithful to the vision of hope and justice to which Jesus always calls us.
This first realization cluster suggests a second. Again, in Jesus’s words:
You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name. But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.
Just as the second half of the last century was a time of relative political calm, so the relative security in which we who follow Jesus live, at least in the United States and Europe, can lull us into thinking that it’s easy to be a Christian in a contentious and violent world. Again, history helps us here. The earliest Christians were persecuted by Rome because they refused to accept Caesar as the one with ultimate authority over them. In every subsequent era of world history, the followers of Jesus have found themselves at odds with the values of the prevailing culture in which they live. Our current critique of environmental, racial, and economic violence is another version of Jesus’s critique of the values of ancient Rome and all subsequent authoritarian impulses in world history. If we really get and enact what Jesus is saying about how we ought to live with each other we will always be an irritant to the powers that be.
When Jesus tells us,
so make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance; for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict,
he is simply telling us not to live through something painful twice. When we worry about something in advance, we experience it both in anticipation and in real time. Once is clearly enough.
From what I read on your website, today is the day on which St. Michael’s begins its stewardship campaign. I will leave it to others to say in particular why this parish deserves your support. But, given what we’ve heard in the gospel this morning, I would like to leave you with one thought about living in and supporting a Christian community.
We Episcopalians are fairly worldly as Christians go: we dance, we drink, we even play cards. We are at ease in the habits of the secular world. We do not hand out tracts on the street. We wear our faith lightly.
Our church’s cultural comfort should not disguise the extent to which we nevertheless hold the world and its values up to the judgment of the gospel. Like Jesus’s earliest followers and Christian witnesses through history, we know deep down that we are not entirely at home in this world. And that is why, even at an unconscious level, we Christians come together and form communities. As much as we love this world, we know we are not entirely of it. We need a place and a community where we can remember and live out who we really are.
Remembering who we are as Jesus’s followers and living out our true identity in worship, in fellowship, in pastoral care, in service to those who are sick or who suffer—this is why churches exist and this is why you and I who belong to them give them our support. We give to the church not out of guilt but out of gratitude that there is at least one place where we can be who we are and live as God calls us to live.
The midterms aren’t entirely over, and 2024 is just around the corner. You and I who come together in the church will continue to hear of wars and insurrections. We will continue to come up against the skewed values of the culture we live in. We will continue to be asked to witness to the compassionate values of Jesus. We cannot do that entirely on our own. Jesus promises to be there with us when we come face to face with the forces that would deny him and dehumanize us. He is there with us in the life, worship, and ministry of our parish church. We need our church community more than we know. And it is there for us in ways we can never truly enumerate. That is why St. Michael’s deserves your support. Amen.
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