Sermon October 8, 2017 - Fr. Cunningham

             There was something of a trend over the last twenty years or so in the world of popular culture that had to do with telling a well-known story from the perspective of a different character within the story.  One of the most famous of these was the musical Wicked, which told the story of The Wizard of Oz from the perspective of the wicked witch.  Some of these adaptations have been entertaining, others not so much, but I won’t bore you with my literary criticism.  Instead I bring this up to simply point out that sometimes in stories there are characters that we either forget exist or simply see as a means to an end.  The Wicked Witch exists to be wicked just as the Big Bad Wolf’s raison d’etre is to be big and bad and a wolf. 

             And because you figured I would eventually get to something from the Bible this same thing can be said of out parable today.  The parable of the wicked tenants is generally looked at as concerning two groups – the tenants and the landowner, with the landowner representing God and the tenants the chief priests and Pharisees.  The moral of the story is that those whom God has left in charge have not been doing a very good job and as a result will not inherit the kingdom of God.  But I want to take a moment and instead of focusing on the main characters to look at the characters that are thrown in to make the larger point and those are the three groups of people that the landowner sent to the tenants – the first and second are a group of slaves while the third is the landowner’s son.  From the little information we are given one or two of the slaves are beaten, one or two are stoned and at least two slaves and the son are killed.  Now, I don’t want to enter a creative writing contest so I am not going to start fleshing out these characters, but rather, instead, want to focus on the shedding of innocent blood.  All three groups that went to the tenants were not doing anything wrong or even out of the ordinary; they had been given a routine job, which was to collect the rent.  But as a result of the wickedness of the tenants they ended up losing their lives.  And with events like we have had this past week in Las Vegas this is not something just found in fiction.  People who were doing nothing wrong or even out of the ordinary were killed in Las Vegas.  And when things like this happen the human impulse is to ask why.  Why do people doing nothing wrong or even out of the ordinary suffer and die.  Our brains are ill at ease when the cause and effect do not seem to work. 

If someone gets drunk and smashes their car into a telephone pole we will mourn the loss and see it as a waste of a life, but still we know why it happened – there is a straight line from the action of getting drunk to the tragedy of crashing a car.  But that is not the case with the slaves, or the son or those who went to the concert in Las Vegas; there was no action on their part that should have led to their death.  And so when things like this happen we move from seeking human explanations to seeking divine explanations.  The question becomes how did God let something like this happen?  If God loves us why would he not stop this senseless evil?  In one sense the “why question” is easy to answer.  We can say that we live in a fallen world and that in this fallen world God has allowed for free will and that free will often results in wicked and evil behavior.  However, I am not sure if this is really getting to the heart of the question.  For at times when great tragedy has struck, logical explanations always seem a little trite.  I mean it is true that more people die from bee stings every year than die from mass shootings, but does that do anything to help a grieving parent or spouse?  Acts like the terror in Las Vegas tear at the very fabric of our society because they are so unfair and so unjust that the answers as to why will not satisfy.  And so in many ways when we ask the question of why there will never be a satisfactory answer because actions like this go against what is good and noble and just.  They reveal something very wrong about the world and the loss we feel points to something deeper within us.

            Many of you probably know the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  He was a German Theologian and Pastor who was killed for his part in a plot to try and assassinate Hitler.  In one of the letters he wrote before his execution he wrote this concerning the loss of a loved one and the pain that we feel:

Nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love, and it would be wrong to try to find a substitute; we must simply hold out and see it through.  That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time it is a great consolation, for the gap as long as it remains unfilled, preserves the bonds between us.  It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; God doesn’t fill it, but on the contrary keeps it empty and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain.

            This is an interesting way of looking at tragedy and loss.  The pain is part of keeping alive our former communion.  And while I realize that he is talking about someone we personally knew and loved I do think it speaks to us about mass tragedies.  Because when he says that the pain keeps alive the former communion I think it can also be used to address the communion we share as human beings - what is sometimes referred to as our common humanity.  The senseless destruction of human life causes pain because something of humanity has been killed.  A creature made in the image of God is no more and that causes a tear in our common relationship. 

            These days I think pain may be harder to deal with than at other times because modern science has solved many of the problems of pain and led us to expect that there is something that can make it go away.  But what of the pain that will not go away?  What of the pain that cannot be quickly solved?  In many ways it is a reminder that all is not well with the world.  I once heard the story about a person discussing with a friend that they would not fly because of the front-page stories about airline crashes.  The friend replied that this is exactly the time to fly, when those stories cease to make the front page is when it is time to worry.  What the friend ,of course, meant was that if crashes became routine than they would no longer be on the front page indicating that travel is much more dangerous.  The fact that we are outraged and grasping for answers shows something of God.  God the Father had to watch his son crucified, he knows what it is to stand by helplessly and watch evil happen.  The heartbreak that we feel is the same as God feels and it shows our link to the creator and sustainer of the universe. 

             And so when we ask why, I don’t think that we really want the answer because that does not make the pain go away, but rather the reason we ask why is us reaching to God who dwells in us.  It is showing what brokenness and sinfulness look like to God and by extension to us.  It is a reminder that we don’t want to live in a world where people merrily gun down total strangers.  It is a call to look to something greater to something beautiful.  In the coming weeks we will probably learn more of this shooters motivations, just as this morning we learned why the tenants killed the slaves and the son, but understanding motivations is different from justifying evil.  Evil should never be satisfactorily explained because if it is we have lost the fact that we are made in God’s image.  Hurt and sorrow are painful markers within us that tell us that humanity was created for something greater, to be in communion with God and to follow in his ways both now and forevermore. 

Sermon Oct. 1 2017-Father Cunningham

            I think that most people would agree that they don’t like politics.  And what I mean by politics are not the basic pieces required to govern a society, but rather what I am talking about is the seediness of the whole process - the tearing down and destroying of those with which we disagree.  When we think political and what we don’t like about it we often think of the scheming people whose sole job it is to see that their person wins and that the other person loses.  Of course, if it’s our guy who is being built up we may have warmer feelings for the process, but let’s leave hypocrisy out of this discussion.  Politics can often be summed up by reworking one of Jesus’ statement – it is pointing out the speck in your neighbors eye while saying the log in your own eye either does not exist or is someone else’s fault.  The politics that people do not like is really self-centeredness dressed up to appear respectable. 

            And that brings us naturally to today’s Gospel lesson, which among other things reminds us that Solomon was right when he told us that there is nothing new under the sun.   The basics are this:  The Chief Priests and Elders come to Jesus and ask him by what authority he is doing these miracles.  Most likely they were not genuinely curious, but were trying to trip Jesus up so they could let everyone know what a bad guy he was.   Jesus does not answer but instead asks them a question about the baptisms that John the Baptist performed and whether those were heaven sanctioned or just something that man did.  Then the text records, “And they argued with one another, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say to us, ‘Why then did you not believe him?’ But if we say, ‘Of human origin,’ we are afraid of the crowd; for all regard John as a prophet.” So they answered Jesus, “We do not know.” And he said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.”  And so I guess you could say it ended in a political stalemate with the Chief Priests and Elders not willing to have their reputations tarnished in an attempt to tarnish Jesus’ reputation. 

            But let’s make this a little more about us.  As best I know none of us are High Priests or for that matter political strategists who appear regularly on television, but rather we live more sedate, quiet lives.  And so it is not an unreasonable question to ask what all of this has to do with us.  We are not seeking to destroy an opposition candidate or Jesus as the High Priests want to do today, rather we just live in the day in and day out.  But here is the thing, we do not need to live high profile lives to engage in political behavior.  Anytime we seek to make ourselves look better or someone else look worse we are engaging in political behavior. 

            Something that has been getting a bit of press lately in terms of political alignments and general discord in this nation and the world has to do with the internet.  The theory is that the internet in bringing people together has actually pushed them further apart.  What they mean by this is that it is fairly easy in the world of the internet to only go places that reinforce our belief system and avoid those which do not.  So, for example, if I am a Republican or Democrat I can get my news only from sources that share my political views and read opinion pieces only from those who share my outlook on life.  The theory is that as people are more easily able to interact exclusively with their own kind they eventually lose any frame of reference when dealing with people who do not agree with them, because they really only know other points of views filtered through their own points of view.  As a result there is more distrust between groups and not much conversation.  The “other side” is viewed as more caricature than actual person.  And so the interactions that do happen are more often of the artillery shell variety.  That is we lob something into their camp and they lob something back.  And in such an environment the temptation to be political in the same way we see the High Priests and Elders becomes much stronger because we don’t really have to interact with those we oppose.  And since we do not know the other person, we can seek to destroy them without feeling bad or even having to acknowledge their humanity.    

            I have this rather bizarre history and it has to do with three friends of mine.  It probably says something terrible about me, but the thing is there are three people in my life whom upon first meeting I could not stand – and really the feeling was mutual.  But later these three people ended up being three of my closest friends.  And in all three cases the way we ended up becoming good friends was because we had, through various circumstances, to spend a lot of time with each other – one was a roommate, one was in my fraternity pledge class and one I ended up on a long trip with.  It was in the time spent together that we realized that our impressions of each other were not correct and that we rather enjoyed each other.  But for this to happen we had to actually be together. 

            The interaction we have today in scripture was not an interaction based on each other’s common humanity but was rather an exercise in point scoring.  The High Priests wanted to trap Jesus because they had decided that they did not like him.  So they decided not to get to know him but rather to use words to further their agenda.  And that is the thing in getting to know someone, in becoming friends with someone, we cannot force it.  It cannot just be our idea but involves both people.  Friendship involves us being vulnerable and trusting the other person to not exploit our weaknesses.  Political interactions on the other hand seek to exploit weakness for our own gain rather than share in them and grow closer to the person through that.  But it is really no way to live.  Political life is a life lived between fear and vindictiveness.  It is a life that seeks to push away and destroy others.

            Fortunately for most people in the Episcopal Church they do not have to deal with the brokenness that has happened within Anglicanism in the past ten or fifteen years in this country, but I am not so fortunate because I work at Nashotah House.  We serve both students from The Episcopal Church and those from various jurisdictions that are deliberately not in the Episcopal Church.  As a result we fairly regularly get accused, by those on the outside, of being both too Episcopal and too not Episcopal.  For example this past week we had the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church come for a visit – which all sounds rather painless.  An Episcopal Bishop comes to an Episcopal seminary, but because of the tribalism rampant in North American Anglicanism it was not.  We were accused of abandoning the faith by some, accused of heresy by others and if the internet is to be believed many were openly hoping that we would shut down.  This is how we enter into discussion nowadays.  We find something with which we do not agree and hope that we can make it potent enough to kill the other person or, in this case, institution.  The demand for blood sacrifices has never gone away.  And since this instinct has been around for so long I am not sure that it will ever go away, but that does not mean that we have to participate in it.  And so the next time we are mad at someone we don’t know it might behoove us to take a step back.  To not make it personal and maybe do something crazy like follow one of Jesus instructions which is to “love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.”  It may make us draw closer to God so that we may be his both now and forevermore. 

May 21, 2017 - Fr. Cunningham

         There is a question that is often asked concerning the validity of Christianity, which is bandied about now and then by both believer and non-believer.  And that question has to do with those who die who have never heard the Gospel message.  The problem that those asking such a question believe they have identified is that if salvation is, as the Baptists might say contingent on us accepting Jesus Christ as Savior in our hearts, what happens to those who have never heard of Jesus and are therefore unable to accept him?  For it would seem unfair that those who have never heard of Jesus to then be condemned before the great judgment seat of Christ.  I have to say that for some reason this question has never really troubled me a whole lot for at least two reasons.  The first reason is not terribly pastoral – well actually it’s not pastoral at all but rather has more of a Mr. Spock like quality to it.  And that answer is what does it matter.  The truth of something is not dependent on how many people have heard it.  In other words if you have never heard that Canberra is the capital of Australia is does not mean that there is something iffy about the proposition.  Canberra being the capital of Australia is not dependent on a 10th Grader in New Prague, Minnesota being aware of that fact.  But of course that reasoning is not warm and fuzzy especially for those who have never heard the Gospel and it does not solve the seeming unfairness of the impetuous behind the question.  But the other reason this has never bothered me a whole lot is more warm and fuzzy.  If someone is saying that there is inherent unfairness in the way God has ordered the universe than it sets up a scenario where we feel that God might need a little instruction from us on how things should work.  But since we worship a God who sent his son to die for us miserable sinners why should we be worried that God might not be sympathetic to someone who has never heard the Good News of Jesus Christ.   It seems our concern is that God would suddenly start acting like a midlevel bureaucrat who has discovered that you did not check box 3c/a on your building permit and now you will now have to live in a house without toilets.  If the crucifixion shows us nothing else it is that God goes to some very extreme measures to be in communion with us.  How exactly salvation works out for those who have never heard of Jesus I do not exactly know and fear that speculating too much might bring me into some sort of heresy, but I do think that Paul’s discussion with the Athenians from this morning’s reading in Acts reveals something of how this all occurs for those who have never heard the Gospel. 

            Paul this morning says to the Athenians, “I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.”  Paul then goes on to give a description of who God is and gives a brief overview of the God’s interaction with humanity.  He ends it all by saying, “From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us.”  It is a rather interesting discussion.  Paul starts by saying that the people with whom he is talking have a concept of God, but do not know who he is.  He then proclaims who this unknown God is and then appears to say that part of God’s plan was that certain people would not know him but would “grope for him” almost like trying to find a light switch in the dark.  Or put another way Paul is saying that God has given us clues of his existence in the world and a drive to find him.  Those in Athens today had gotten to the point of realizing that there was something more, there was a God they could not identify who undergirded the universe, but that is all they knew.  And so Paul comes along and proclaims the identity of this unknown God.  The way Paul explains things is somewhat akin to how an archeologist might work.  For example let’s say an archeologist is digging in Peru and unearths something like a vase or a drinking vessel.  From that bit of knowledge they begin to construct a narrative about what the people who produced such an object were like.  Similarly God has produced a world and through clues left here, people begin to construct a story of what this God must be like.  Which gets us back to the original question of those who have not heard about God. 

            Paul argues and I would agree with him that the world is filled with evidence about the existence of God or as the poet Gerard Manly Hopkins put it, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.  It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.”  Reflections of God’s nature are everywhere in this world.  We might see it on a walk through nature, or in the faces of our children or in a benevolent act.  God is everywhere if we just look.  But in many ways this can be a difficult task because our God is the God who as the Prophet Isaiah tells us was not in the earthquake or the fire but rather in the still small voice.  God is everywhere, but he is not always the brightest and shiniest and so it takes deliberate action.  But let’s return again to those who have not heard the Gospel message – can they also hear the still small voice?  And the answer to this question is yes.  Paul today recognized in the Athenians that they were desperately seeking God, but did not have the God revealed knowledge to grasp what they were seeking and so Paul names it.  Now just to be clear this is not universalism which posits that all people go to heaven but it rather demonstrates the wideness of God’s grace.  If God can forgive us sinners who should know better, it seems that there is also room for those who are seeking the goodness that is God, but have not heard the Gospel.  God has placed signs of his existence into the very fabric of creation.  People are of course free to ignore it just as those who have heard the Gospel message are free to ignore it, but what Paul suggests that those who have not heard the Good News are still capable of having at least a rudimentary understanding of God. 

            But I don’t think we can leave it at just that for there is also something that this understanding requires of us.  You notice that when Paul discovered that the Athenians were earnestly seeking God he did not walk away and tell them to keep up the good work, but rather invited them into a deeper relationship with God through his Son Jesus Christ.  If we look at people being unaware of the Gospel as God’s problem it sort of lets us off the hook, but it begs the question about what the point of being Christ’s body if spreading the Good News is not in there someplace.  For those of us who have found the truth we should want to bring others into that truth.  And I know this wounds an awful lot like evangelism, which scares us Episcopalians, but Jesus did kind of tell us to “Go therefore and make Disciples of all nations.”  And so while there is room in God’s grace for those who through no fault of their own have never heard the Gospel that does not allow us to ignore them.  Our charge just as it was two thousand years ago is to spread the Good News of God in Jesus Christ so that we may know him and make him known so that we all may be his now and forevermore.