Serpent & Dove

Propers: The Third Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 11), AD 2023 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

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

I send you out as sheep amidst the wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.

I feel like we often get that backwards. American Christianity seems to me to prefer being wise as doves and innocent as serpents. Nonetheless, these are our marching orders. This is how Christians comport ourselves within the wider world. We are to be discerning, intelligent, understanding, aware. Thus with eyes wide open, and no naivete, we are to choose the proper path regardless of the cost. We are to do the right thing, to the best of our ability, for love of Christ and neighbor.

“We have peace with God through Jesus Christ,” according to St Paul, “since we are justified by faith.” Now let’s be clear on what that means. Faith is not works, though indeed it’s difficult to separate the two, as the latter shows the former. We do not earn the grace of God—indeed we cannot, lest it wouldn’t be grace. We are not saved by what we do; we’re saved by Jesus Christ; keeping in mind that salvation from sin does us little good should we return then to living as slaves.

Neither is faith belief. And here’s the tricky wicket. Our culture, Western Christian culture, and especially those of us from Protestant traditions, often imagine that we are saved by right belief, by being correct. It’s why we put such emphasis on Councils, Creeds, and Confessions. We tend to think that if we simply check the right boxes, choose the proper denomination, that then will save us. Mind over matter, right?

Clergy such as myself are especially susceptible to this. We like to live in our heads. We have so many years of theological training that our reflex is to treat everything as a theological problem: that if we just say the right things about God, teach the right things about God, then everything else will work itself out. What can I say? When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. And I’m not denying the crucial importance of theology, the crucial importance of truth. But none of us are saved by right theology. None of us are saved by mere belief.

We are justified by faith, and faith is so much more than what we say or think or do. Faith, my brothers and sisters, is trust. That’s all it is. Faith is trust; not in institutions, should there be any left we have yet to pull down; and not in dogmatism, brute fideism, in answers that cannot be questioned. No, faith is trust in the faithfulness of God; trust that He is the Beautiful, the Good, and the True; trust in the depthlessness of all His love for you.

And even this, mind you, is not a work that we do, not a faith we produce. It is the work of God within us, the Holy Spirit poured into us, through Word and water, bread and wine, Body and Blood. We are saved by God’s faithfulness toward us. And because the promise of everlasting life, the promise of forgiveness, the promise of salvation, liberation, and resurrection, depends entirely upon the grace of God in Jesus Christ, we can trust it absolutely. Even doubt has no bearing upon it.

We may fail Him a thousand times a day, but God will never fail us, never leave us, never abandon us, come hell or high water, come lash and thorns and nails and spear, the Cross and Holy Sepulcher, all the way to hell and back. Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. That’s the faith. That’s what we trust. And even the trust itself is God’s work, not our own. Thank Christ.

But peace with God is war with the world. Not because God hates the world, mind you. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son … that the world might be saved through Him.” Yet by the same token, in the same Gospel, people “preferred darkness to light because their deeds were evil.” So it remains today. On the one hand, we have the faith that never fails, the abundance of hope and heavenly joy, the peace of God that passes all understanding. On the other hand: “I send you out as sheep amidst the wolves.” Quite the paradox.

We go out professing faith and love, the forgiveness of sins in Jesus’ Name. And we are hated for it, persecuted for it, martyred for it, just as Jesus was before us, and is again within us. We murdered Him in our sin. And for 300 years following the Resurrection, others murdered us in theirs.

I think we vastly underestimate the impact that three centuries of persecution had upon the early Church. History tells us that it was more sporadic than consistent. Scholarship points out our hagiographic tendency to exaggerate. Yet for generations, the culmination of Christian faith, the climax of a life spent proclaiming Christ in word and deed, was martyrdom, was public execution. And people had to make sense of this. Christians had to make sense of this.

What did it mean that faith in Jesus Christ—that trust in the faithfulness of God—so often resulted in suffering, in mourning, in trauma and in loss? I guess we shouldn’t have been surprised. I mean, the preëminent symbol of the faith is a tool of torturous execution. The whole notion of Christianity is that nobody’s perfect, except for this one guy, and we killed Him. Not only do bad things happen to good people; the worst things happened to the best person of all. A gospel of love earns you a cross of cedar.

That’s why Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel says, “I send you out as sheep amidst the wolves … you will be dragged before governors … you will be hated by all because of my name.” But you are to love them anyway, to love them as I love you. Likewise St Paul, writing to the Christians at Rome, affirms: “We boast in our hope … but we also boast in our sufferings … because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” Paul would be beheaded at Rome.

They knew what they were asking. They knew that those who are called to be Jesus for the world will be treated as the world treated Him. Eyes wide open, folks. Wise as serpents, innocent as doves. We are called to love as Jesus first loved us. And that hurts. Love always hurts, because it entails sacrifice, putting the good of another before our own. Yet that very love, that very sacrifice, will save the same world that kills us, save the world that Jesus loves, and every soul upon it.

Now, after those 300 years, a miracle occurred. The Romans were having a civil war, as Romans tend to do. And the general who won, the warlord who became Emperor, had a dream before the final battle, a dream of Jesus Christ. Constantine was his name. He was a pagan and a killer, and he remained a pagan and a killer all his life, right up to his Baptism on his deathbed. But he legalized Christianity. He ended the age of martyrdom, and inaugurated Christendom.

Christendom’s a funny beast. It’s the idea that the Empire that killed Christ, and that slaughtered the martyrs, can now make peace with Him; that it’s okay to be an empire if the Emperor is Christian. And what a mixed bag that turned out to be. I mean, the Christians at the time thought it a wonder, a miracle of the highest order, that Rome, even Rome, had converted to the Christ. And bishops and priests and deacons, no longer cut to pieces, gained civil authority, imperial authority.

Who can blame them for their relief? As much as we could criticize, quite rightly, the troubled marriage of Church and State, and the corruption of the former by the latter, nevertheless it ultimately produced human rights, abolition, modern science, all manner of goods that we now take for granted, as part and parcel of secular humanism. But Christendom now has fallen, for better and for worse.

We no longer live in a society that claims to be Christian while operating as an empire. And so the twenty-first century starts to look surprisingly like the first. I don’t think we’re going to be martyred anytime soon. Let’s not be dramatic. But the days of cultural Christianity, of checking a box on the census, are dead and gone. Casual Christians are streaming out the door and faith now requires commitment. It requires sacrifice. It requires a deep and abiding trust in the faithfulness of God.

And this is no bad thing. American Christianity has always been far more American than Christian, and I for one am glad that it’s no longer the default. That marriage was never going to last anyway—Christ and the Emperor indeed!

Hear me, Christians: You are saved! Not by works, not by belief, not by an act of the will, but by the grace and love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord! And what does salvation look like? How do we live out our liberation? In peace, hope, and joy! In faith in God’s faithfulness! In loving God with all we have, and our neighbors as ourselves. Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Be sheep amidst the wolves.

For we are again a priestly people. And together we are Christ for this world.

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

 

 

 

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