Monks

Propers: The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 27), A.D. 2016 C

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The early followers of Jesus left everything for Him. They set out to wander the Holy Land, far from friends and family, hearth and home. The Gospels stress how Peter and Andrew, James and John, dropped their fishing nets the moment that Jesus called them, immediately walking away from their fathers, their boats, and their livelihoods. They come across either as incredibly brave or as recklessly stupid. Sometimes a bit of both.

This is not to say that they abandoned their loved ones. The Apostles stayed at the house of Peter’s mother-in-law in Capernaum. Philip famously raised four daughters in the faith. Paul commends missionaries who travel together with their wives. And the jarring abruptness of those call narratives is mitigated by the fact that several of the Apostles had met Jesus earlier as disciples of John the Baptist, and also the fact that being apprenticed to a famous rabbi was a great societal honor rarely extended to humble fishermen, let alone infamous tax collectors. Little wonder they jumped at the chance.

Nevertheless, theirs was a great leap of faith: to set out on a three-and-a-half year journey, wandering about without possessions, completely dependent upon the charity of others; to risk not just poverty but persecution, crucifixion! Yet even they often doubted. Even they were called by Jesus, “O ye of little faith.”

A man whom I greatly respect has been working on a translation of the New Testament, and the last two years of wrestling with the Greek, immersed in the time of the early Church, has brought into stark relief, for him, just how different we are from those first followers of Christ. The early Christians lived lives of radical faith, and often suffered for it. Gladly! They treated money like dynamite: as something powerful, something that had the potential to move mountains, but also something fraught with danger, something that was foolish to accrue. A pile of money was like a pile of explosives. Only a fool would fill up his barn with it, and not expect devastating results.

The first communities of Christians sold their possessions, gave their money to the poor, and kept all things in common. Many of them eschewed marriage so as to focus entirely upon the Kingdom of God. In other words, they were monks. We, on the other hand, view the accumulation of wealth not as a danger but as a necessity. We have houses to buy, children to educate, retirements to plan. Money is our insurance, our safety, our security. And if we have a little left over, we give to the needy, one hopes. But we seem to lack the radical faith, the reckless faith, of the Apostles, of those early Christians who left it all behind to follow Christ.

And this troubles the man I mentioned, that translator whom I respect. As it ought to trouble us all.

Of course, those early Christian communities never could support themselves. Jesus and the Apostles were dependent upon the funding of wealthy patrons, notably a group of well-to-do women. He never asked them to leave everything behind. And while some were unable to follow Jesus because they could not bring themselves to give up their wealth, others were eager to do so yet were told by Him to stay where they were and to preach the Good News in the daily lives they already had. As for the early Church in Jerusalem, described by the book of Acts as holding all things in common, they soon ran out of money, and we find St Paul eliciting donations from churches throughout the Roman Empire in order to support the broke church in Jerusalem.

So, yes, there have always been monks, people who left behind everything to follow Christ. But those monks have always been reliant on the generosity of those who did not leave everything behind, who continue to work faithfully in the world. And this is an ongoing tension in Christianity, because money is dangerous—but also necessary. You can’t feed the poor if you’re broke.

We can see this pattern play out several times through our history. The Church, once poor, grows wealthy. Reform movements—monastic movements, such as those of St Benedict and St Francis—return the Church to the humble simplicity of her origins. But then those very monastics become victims of their own success, growing fat and rich over time, so that another round of reforms is needed. For modern examples of this, look to the Mennonites, the Amish, the Old Apostolic.

500 years ago, the Rev Dr Martin Luther, himself an Augustinian monk, tried to break this cycle, not by destroying the monastery, but by turning each and every Christian home into its own little monastery, with the father and mother as “bishop and bishoppess” of the household. He tried to show us how the everyday ought to be holy, how a father changing diapers in faith could be more pleasing to God than all the psalms chanted in all the monasteries throughout all the world. Christ in our homes, as they say.

This was the great ambition of the Lutheran movement: to try to reconcile these two strains of the Church; to bring together those who leave everything behind to live out a radical faith in Christ, with those who toil faithfully to support both the needs of the Church and the needs of our society. The means to accomplish this is to be the Christian household, the faithful family, called to bring holiness into everyday life. The Crusades merged monasticism with the warrior elite; the Reformation seeks to merge monasticism with the common man. Only time will tell whether this 500 year experiment ultimately proves successful.

In our Gospel reading this morning, the Apostles ask Jesus to “increase our faith,” more literally, “Add to our faith!” Pour it into us! And Jesus answers with what almost seems to be sarcasm: “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed,” He tells them, “you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea!’ and it would obey you.” I’m sure that resulted in some befuddlement.

Faith, it would seem, is not something that can be quantified. You cannot add to or subtract from it as though it were an equation or a bank balance. We cannot say that the one who has left everything behind to pursue the Kingdom of God has more faith than the one who is only just beginning to dare to wonder. Judas, after all, left everything behind to follow Jesus and ended up betraying Him; while the pagan Roman centurion who oversaw Christ’s Crucifixion was the first to confess, “Truly this Man was the Son of God!”

It’s not about how much faith we have. It’s about the one in whom we place our faith. Money, no money. Home, no home. Family, no family. All that matters is Jesus. All that matters is the promises He’s given to us. Luke’s Gospel presents discipleship as something very straightforward, basically four steps: (1) Don’t cause another to sin; (2) Forgive and forgive again; (3) The tiniest amount of faith in Christ is sufficient to move mountains; and (4) Discipleship is not about reward. Just do it.

These are by no means easy demands, but they are accessible to everyone everywhere. You don’t have to be a monk to follow Jesus, though I do believe the world would be a much healthier and happier place were there a lot more monasteries in it. Be faithful. Be humble. Live out the Kingdom as best we can with the gifts and the time given to us. And leave the rest to God.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.