Saint Mark's Church

There is no economy in the Divine mercy, which is as inhuman, as alien and as uncomfortable as we can imagine. "You can't conceive, nor can I, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God," says Graham Greene.

All of which is a fancy way of saying that God is not “fair” or “just”. How can we conceive of a compassion and mercy which sees no distinction between murder and petty theft, between stealing paper clips and genocide? I always feel, when I look over the cliff of God’s mercy, a strange sense of vertigo, of being off-balance.

It is human to long for boundaries, for rules, for order; for all that which defines and makes clear and safe. We want distinctions, levels of sin. We are uncomfortable with the idea of a forgiven Stalin, a reconciled killer. We are unhappy with too much chaos, without answers ready to hand, without structure.

But there is no economy in the divine mercy. It is not enough to forgive seven times. Instead it must be seventy-seven times, or seventy times seven. Regardless, the effect is the same: there is no time when we can cease forgiving. It is hard to imagine even the most Type-A personality, the most obsessive person counting to 490 and then ceasing to forgive, and that is the point.

The kingdom of heaven which has come near is like the king who has the unforgiving servant. The poor slave is in a bad way. He owes his master 10,000 talents, so vast a sum as to be unthinkable. My bible helpfully notes that a talent is worth more than fifteen years of labor. Which means that the poor slave would have to work for more than thousands and thousands of years to pay his debt off. It is another unthinkable, impossible number. And so the king forgives him his unthinkable debt and his reckless stewardship. It is an unforeseen, munificent act which takes no notice of the size of the servant’s sin.

It is impossible however to talk about forgiveness and reconciliation without talking also about sin. And so I’m going to do something slightly risky, because you haven’t known me for very long, and I’m going to preach about sin. If that makes you slightly uncomfortable, it should. The Church has never been very good at teaching or preaching about sin for most of its history. The Church has tended to shame and alienate people, to burden them with vast amounts of guilt, or to use sin as a method of exercising social control. And the Church has been explicitly sexist, racist, and homophobia in what it has label “sin”. People are justified when they start to get skeptical or antsy when the topic of sin comes up in church.

One of the main ways that the Church has failed when it comes to talking about sin is making sin into something which is all about the gossip pages: about actions, about acting wrongly or failing to act; about money, sex and power. Not only is that a minor part of sin, but it makes sin into a completely individualistic state. I sin by doing X. I repent. I am absolved. But sin is communal, it affects our nearest and dearest, our communities, the very fabric of our life together.

Yet we know that sin is present around us. We feel it in our own hearts and minds, and we see it in the world. There is evil in the imagination of our hearts, and when we look in the mirror when we are shaving or doing our makeup, what we see is (according to one theologian) “at least eight parts chicken, phony, slob.” We see it when we walk past the homeless man sleeping in the doorway. We see it when we watch the news and see the unremitting violence and cruelty of humans, one to another. Sin is abundantly real in our lives.

And so when we talk about sin today, I want to preach about sin not as the gossip pages kind: who lost their temper with whom, who is sleeping with whom, etc., but in the wider communal sense.

I want to tell you about a friend I made in Arizona, who taught me a good deal about sin. His name is Francesco, and he lived about a block away from us. He was a Native American man, in his fifties, and his life had been very sad. He was in prison for a time, for violence. He was a raging alcoholic who would get sick if he didn’t have a drink first thing in the morning. He was constantly fighting with his girlfriend and they were perpetually yo-yoing between being together and not. He used to mow our lawn, to earn a few dollars, generally when he wanted to buy a bottle of malt liquor. He’d come round on Saturday morning; I’d be drinking my coffee and he would be drinking a forty. As you might imagine he was not the most reliable gardener. Often he would mow part of the lawn, and then start drinking and half the lawn would go unmowed for another week.

As I got to know Francesco, I became aware of a divide or split as I experienced him. In the middle of his wreck of a life were all sorts of sins that he was living in and desperately needed forgiveness for (his drinking, his temper, his miserable relationship, his lying and stealing). But the context for his sin, the background to his wreck of a life was also sinful and it wasn’t Francesco’s sin: it was my sin and the sin of my culture and of my forebears. Part of the sin which was infecting Francesco’s life began when Columbus landed in North America. Part of the sin was the theft of his ancestors’ land and the destruction of his culture. Part of that sin was the underfunded education and the culture of violence, of alcohol abuse and of poverty that he grew up in. Part of his woundedness was communal and systemic and deep beyond the simple failures of individuals. Francesco is bound and captive to the sins of our age and culture.

Even as Francesco lives in the midst of abiding communal sin, we too live in deep webs and structures of sin and we desperately need God’s forgiveness and reconciliation.

It is sin, for us to make so much money and yet to have a quarter of the population in this country without health insurance.

It is sin, for us to spend vast sums of money for war and destruction, so that we can temporarily sustain a way of life which cannot ultimately survive.

It is sin, to live in a culture of increasing obesity and gluttony while millions around the world starve.

It is a sin, which is almost perfectly lifted out of the Gospel this morning for us to increasingly sink into national debt, while at the same time holding onto the debts of countries in the developing world; debt which is crushing and gut-wrenching, keeps millions in abject poverty and condemns many to premature and preventable deaths.

We are tainted by sin every time we turn on our cars, every time we invest in a company which participates in standard business practices, every time we buy a product. We even sin by eating food, which in this culture is overwhelming raised on vast corporate farms, doused with fertilizers and chemicals which pollute the planet, and harvested by migrant workers who are paid a pittance. When we eat we are feasting on sin, eating and drinking damnation unto ourselves. Our whole way of living is that sin which is ever before God.

We are trapped, as my friend Francesco is trapped; caught and drowning in sin, and the vastness and the systemic nature of our sin seems impossible to change.

But there is no economy in the Divine mercy. Although we owe ten thousand talents, although we go through everyday sinning profusely and unconsciously, yet still God is abundantly merciful and compassionate. The only way that we can avoid that strange, intense mercy and forgiveness is when we are unable to forgive in kind. When we grasp our fellow by the throat and insist on the pennies that we are owed.

Let us therefore go through our lives working for deep systemic change and casting forgiveness all about us. Let us forgive foolishly, recklessly, uneconomically; that our God and King not mistake us for the unforgiving servant but instead pour out upon us that appalling mercy and forgiveness.

Amen.

Preached by the Rev'd Andrew Ashcroft

14 September 2008

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Sometimes, when I am bored and channel-surfing, I’ll stop on the station which is showing a television evangelist preaching and watch for a few minutes. More often than not, the evangelist is preaching to thousands of people, wearing a $2,000 suit, and generally the message is something like this: “God has a plan for your life, and if only you will follow that plan, you will be happy, you will have good things happen to you, you will have good relationships, and you will probably have enough money, as well.”

It is not a bad message. It sells well. It draws in thousands and thousands of people. There is only one slight problem. The Scriptures are full of examples of people who follow God, who do the works that He sets before them, and their lives are shortened, they are mocked, excoriated, and isolated. Their lives get worse because of what God asks of them.

Which should, if we are being honest with ourselves, make us feel slightly uncomfortable. Somehow it doesn’t seem right, or fair that by being open to God, we get punished. “The way it should be,” we say to ourselves, “is that people should be rewarded for doing the right thing.” That is the way it works in the wider world. Why doesn’t it work that way with God?

There is, it seems, a different system of logic operating when it comes to the divine.

Think about our Gospel this morning. Peter is back to his old trick of attempting to fit both feet into his mouth. He was doing quite well there for a moment. Years of hanging around with Jesus have finally begun to penetrate the block of wood that Peter keeps where his head should be and finally last week we heard Peter get the right answer. After some subtle prodding from Jesus, Peter comes up with the answer that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ of Israel, the one that they had been expecting for all those long years of bondage and exile. So when Jesus starts to speak to his disciples about what it means to be Messiah, about his coming crucifixion and death and resurrection, Peter in his new role as the head of the class pulls Jesus aside to give him a lecture.

Peter is looking for a political figure, a Messiah who can restore the fortunes of Israel and cast out the Roman overlords. He looking for a leader who can swoop in, restore the balance, right the wrongs, make his people great again.

(If this is sounding vaguely familiar, it should, we are in a charged election year, and Presidential candidates are set up as political, power saviors, much in the way that Peter wants Jesus to be.)

Jesus rejects that vision of Messiah, of Savior, utterly and harshly. He says to Peter fiercely: “You are not on the side of God, but of men.” He does not want to be the King of the Jews. “My kingdom is not of this world,” he proclaims while standing trial for his life, and indeed it is not. In rejecting what Peter and the disciples want for him, Jesus opens up and points to a great divide in the world. There is the way of humankind, the way of political structures, of wheeling-and-dealing, of success rewarded, of brute power and thinly veiled violence, and there is the divine way, the pouring out of innocent blood, the utterly foolish.

If Jesus was operating as a political messiah, he would have gathered a team of savvy advisors (not rough fishermen); he would have put together an exploratory committee composed of members of the Sanhedrin; he would have hired pollsters to take the temperature of the masses. He would have gone around, holding town meetings in the swing towns, not wasting time in that backwater Nazareth. He would have courted the religious leaders and the wealthy, and his sentences would be as subtly vapid and nuanced as ever a politician could make them, rather than the rough, raw rhetoric of “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”

Jesus will have none of running for Messiah. To run for Messiah would be to enter into the logic of the world, and he has not come to enter into that logic, but to destroy it.

There is a divine foolishness which winds through the world. It is not just Jesus, as he sets his face to Jerusalem and goes down to meet his ignoble death. There is a divine foolishness in choosing Israel, in choosing Moses and David, in choosing the prophets who begrudgingly speak God’s words, and all of this is foolish because God chooses the most inefficient and flawed people and families and tribes to bring about His purposes in the world. The divine logic is such that a carpenter becomes the Lord of All, death becomes redemption, failure the only means of triumph, poverty a blessing.

Even here, even today, we can see this divine logic at work. Even here, God chooses the foolishness of this place, of St. Mark’s to bring about that glory which is being revealed to us. It is foolish by the standards of the world to think that by feeding 150 people soup on Saturdays, we as a parish will have any effect on the societal structures which result in poverty, homelessness and hunger. It is foolish to think that what goes on at this altar, in complex and medieval ways, has anything to say into the iPhone, Internet culture which passes so swiftly outside our doors. It is foolish to think that by adopting St. James-the-Less as a mission, we can have any affect on the deep blights of racism, classism and poverty which inhabit areas of our city, our country and the world. It is foolish to think that by preserving this parish for the next generation we will have any effect in stemming the growing secularism which is creeping over our culture.

But we follow a foolish God. We follow a God who works in the small things, the inefficient places, the people who are difficult and unwise, the ludicrous, the pyrric, the more-than-a-little-bit mad. We follow a God who doesn’t take the path of least resistance, but the path of greatest resistance. We follow a God who was foolish enough to pick us and place us here, with all that we need to completely alter our city and our world, and who expects us to be foolish enough, to be mad enough to know that it cannot be done, that the obstacles are almost insurmountable and to radically, powerfully, set about doing it anyways.

Would that I could tell you, like the television evangelist, that we will be happy and wealthy and long-lived for attempting these foolish things that we are called to do. But I think it unlikely. Often, to do the works of God is to become a lightning rod and a stumbling block and an offense to many. Yet still we must do what we are called to, for in the divine logic there are only two options: lose our lives for God, or lose our lives trying to preserve and extend them. Either way, we lose our lives.

God chooses what is foolish to shame the wise; He has scattered the proud, he has exalted the humble and meek, He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.

Let us be equally as foolish as God, as we work to speak into and bring about the redemption of the world. Amen.

Preached by the Rev'd Andrew Ashcroft

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia

August 31st, 2008