​13 March 2022
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
2 Lent
 
“God of our weary years, God of our silent tears,
you have brought us this far along the way.”
 
            I’m taking as my text today words we haven’t yet heard, at least today. They are from the Eucharistic prayer that we will pray in a few moments, which is taken from the Lutheran Book of Worship.
            My reason for doing so is I want to talk about the theme of God Matters, and they are especially appropriate to that, as I hope you’ll see.
            God Matters is the title of a book of essays by the English Dominican theologian, Herbert McCabe. The title is an intentional play on words: it is both about matters pertaining to God (using “matters” as a noun), and it is about why God matters to us in the first place (using “matters” as a verb). In short, his thesis is that the things of God make a difference in human life.
            Now, this is not quite a farewell sermon, but I want to explore that statement in relationship to a question that has been a big one for us here at St. Michael’s over the last several years: Does God matter in politics? And I want to start with my great intellectual mentor, Rabbi Abraham Heschel.
            Now, Heschel is best known for his social activism: marching at Selma to advocate for civil rights; or standing in front of the White House to protest the Vietnam War. But he was a rather unlikely candidate for such a role. Theologically he was quite conservative, emphasizing the importance of God’s self-revelation at a time when a lot of theologians (especially Jewish), would have preferred a more logical, rational account of God.
            In fact, Heschel was sometimes accused by his detractors of adopting a radical political agenda, primarily to catapult himself out of the relative obscurity of a rigorous Jewish theologian. Nothing could be further from the truth.
            For Heschel, his political activism was the inevitable consequence of his theology. He passionately believed in the dignity of every human being, each of us being created not only by the same God, but in that God’s image. To Heschel, a human being is nothing less than a symbol of God, so any act that denigrates another person is a blasphemy against God. The fact of racism, therefore, he found to be spiritually intolerable. Likewise the act of war. And such regard for human dignity is what allows us to say not just that the war against Ukraine is a geopolitical crisis, but a moral calamity.
            In a piece on Heschel in First Things, David Novak writes, Heschel saw racism to be an issue of the denial to a group of Americans the basic dignity that is the right of every human person. Thus Heschel writes: “There is a form of oppression which is more painful and more scathing than physical injury or economic privation. It is public humiliation.” Racism, in other words, was in Heschel’s eyes wrong not because it violated a secular idea such as the equality of all human beings before the law, but because it violated the religious idea of the dignity of all human beings before God.
            Novak tells this story to illustrate the point: In September 1963, about four months before Heschel uttered his condemnation of public humiliation (in his book, The Insecurity of Freedom), I was in Lumberton, North Carolina, as a student-rabbi, leading Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services for the one small synagogue in town. I remember walking to the synagogue early Yom Kippur morning from the rooming house where my wife and I were staying. It had rained heavily the night before, and the gutters in the street were full of mud. Approaching me on the narrow sidewalk from the opposite direction was an old black woman, toothless, dressed in a faded calico dress, a ragged straw hat on her head, and tennis shoes with holes in them on her feet. Her head was bowed. And when she was about twenty feet or so from me, she stepped in the muddy gutter to let me pass.
            “Doesn’t the Torah teach,” Novak asks, “that it was I who should have humbled myself before her age? But to that old black woman, I did not represent the Torah or basic human decency. To her I represented centuries of those who have publicly humiliated her people.”
            Heschel’s call for social justice in the face of racism went beyond the liberal call for a just society. Like Martin Luther King, Jr. (another prophetically minded political activist), Heschel understood that God’s justice could only be found in a more loving, compassionate, inclusive community. Equality is not enough.
            But Heschel goes further. If God’s justice is to be found in such a community, then God is in need of us to help bring it about. Such community does not come into being just by the wave of a cosmic wand, but by the active engagement of real human beings in striving to bring it into being. And this leads Heschel to a really radical idea: for God to be God, God needs us. Citing a rabbinical teaching that we strengthen—empower—God to the extent that we comply with the Divine Will, Heschel goes a step further to say that to the extent that we fail to comply with the Divine Will, we diminish God, so that God is not fully God to us.
            That was the theological source of Heschel’s politics: the political arena is where human beings either work toward enacting and fulfilling God’s vision for the human community, or it is where we block and diminish it. The idea that politics and faith ought to be separate, therefore, was unthinkable—any more than the idea that life and breath can be detached.
Heschel summed all this up with one of his signature aphorisms: “Either God is of supreme importance, or God is of no importance.” That is, if we human beings separate off some part of our life and say that God has no place there, or has nothing to do with it, we are essentially saying that God is of no real importance to us in any aspect of our lives. If God is the creator and ruler of all things, then for God to be God, all things must be a part of God’s rule.
So what has all this to do with our upcoming Eucharistic prayer? Well, the phrase, “God of our weary years, God of our silent tears” obviously invokes that hymn of the Civil Rights era, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” And it goes on to assert pretty clearly God’s role in every part of human life—with an urgency that no prayer in our own Book of Common Prayer quite does. And by invoking that embeddedness of God in human affairs at the very beginning of the communion prayer, we are asserting that we are living in continuity with the Christ whose presence we are calling into our midst: the Christ who teaches the way and pattern of God’s vision of community. It has been said that Judaism is not a doctrine but a life, a continuation of the lives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Sarah, Leah, Rebekkah and Rachel. I would like to think that something similar could be said of Christian faith as well: it is a continuation of the life of Jesus, who because God matters, left no part of the lives of his followers untouched—whether personal, spiritual, economic, relational … or political. As Herbert McCabe puts it, “The life of Jesus is nothing other than the life of God projected onto our history, and enacted sacramentally in our history, so that God’s story becomes our story . . .” Every part of it. Amen.   
           

​6 March 2022
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
I Lent
 
Jesus said, “One does not live by bread alone.” (Luke 4)
 
            This past Thursday was the day the church commemorates the lives of John and Charles Wesley, two brothers who sparked a revival in the 18th century Church of England by their zealous preaching, hymn writing, and experience of conversion. In their enthusiasm, they practiced a very methodical pattern of piety, from whence the Methodist movement takes its name.
            How ironic, then, that the day before this commemoration, our parishioner J. F. should bring into the church office a communion cup that has been passed down through her family since the days it was used by John Wesley himself  in the Union Chapel, Bury, Lancashire, England. And there it is, sitting on the altar!
            The wonderful thing about artifacts like that is that they remind us that these saints we read about were real human beings, very much like ourselves. Just as we take communion here today from vessels laid out for the purpose, so did he and his community from that very cup—not another one, but that one!
            And being reminded of just how human John Wesley was is especially helpful in his case for getting a feel for the nature of his religious enthusiasm. He was, to put it bluntly, a mess. He had a couple of humiliatingly awful love affairs, his missionary work in Georgia was a bit of a disaster, he was openly mocked in the streets, and he made several really bad judgment calls (such as deciding to ordain ministers himself for his missionary work) which effectively put an end to his membership in the Church of England. As Rowan Williams puts it, “His life is a record of what many have seen as muddle and silliness, false starts, disastrous misjudgments, and wrong turnings.”
            So how did such a fool as that spark a global movement that today comprises come 40 million people around the world, 7.2 million of them in the United States, making it nearly 5 times as large as our own denomination?
            Perhaps the most obvious clue comes from his last words on his own deathbed: “The best of all,” he said, “is God is with us.” It seems that from the very chaos of his life, he had come to the deep realization that it is not we who finally weave our lives together into a meaningful whole, but God. As Williams says, “He knew he was a fool, that his life was a mess; but he set that to one side, because the imperative he felt was to preach what he could only have learned in his folly—that God is to be trusted.”
            Now, that seems to me like an important point for us here at the beginning of Lent. It is easy to lapse into thinking that this season is all about penitence and abstinence—but viewed through the lens of John Wesley’s life, I think one might reframe that a bit to say that Lent might better be thought of as being about learning to accept and receive the gifts God has to offer. To paraphrase Jesus, just a little bit, “One does not live by ashes alone.” That is to say, however useful fasting and self-denial may be, they should not cause us to lose sight of the fact that God’s underlying intention is to bless us, not to accuse us.
            In my experience, Methodism (the movement founded by the Wesleys), has a particular gift of emphasizing the blessedness that comes from knowing Jesus. The theological word is “sanctification,” but beneath that very big word is a more straight forward meaning: doing good. Methodists talk a lot about the “means of grace,” the ways that God gives to us for learning what it means to do good. At the end of the sermon, we are going to sing a good, sturdy Wesleyan hymn (written in this case written by Charles, one of some 6500 that he wrote!). You’ll notice that for Lent, it’s quite celebratory: the refrain is “Lift up your heart, lift up your voice! Rejoice, again I say, rejoice!”
            But if it is true, as John Wesley said on his deathbed, that we have every reason to trust God, to entrust our lives to God, confident that God will hold them in trust for us so that at the end we will not have lived without purpose and meaning, then those are words worth singing in any season. We can entrust our future to God, knowing that God sees us whole and complete, where we may see ourselves only in fractured and scattered pieces.
            And just this kind of trust, it seems to me, is the deeper meaning behind the story of Jesus’ temptation, about which we read this morning: the devil gives Jesus opportunity to trust in all manner of things other than God, but Jesus returns again and again to the simple truth that “all our hope in God is founded” (as another hymn puts it, this time of German rather than English origin):
 
All my hope on God is founded;
God doth still my trust renew.
Me through change and chance God guideth,
only good and only true.
God unknown,
God alone
calls my heart to be God’s own.
 
Thanks be to God for John and Charles Wesley: misfits, evangelists, saints, people.
 
Amen.