A Homily for Epiphany 4, 2007 Given in Trinity Cathedral, Miami
The Very Rev Michael J. Pitts
Jeremiah 1:4-10
1 Corinthians 14:12-20
Luke 4:21-32
It is so good to be here, escaping for a while the winter chill of Montreal. Thank you so much to Dean Caleb for inviting us. My wife Kyllikki (that is a Finnish name, if you are puzzling over it) and I are enjoying our stay, for her the first, for me the second visit to Florida.
The story in the Gospel of Luke, which we have just read, is the continuation of the story in last weeks Gospel. Seven days ago, I was interpreting this story in a very different situation. I was preaching at the final Eucharist in a church at the eastern end of the island of Montreal. Over the past thirty years most of the English speaking community in that part of town has left. The small group that are left there are no longer able to maintain the building, and so it has been sold to another Christian group, and the little Anglican community will worship in a chapel rented from the Roman Catholic Church. My theme was, therefore, that the community is more important than the building. But in my own mind and heart I felt some disappointment, as I do about a number of communities in our diocese, that we have often been unable to move beyond seeing our church as a chaplaincy to a declining English community. We have been unable to grasp the possibility of being part of God’s compassionate mission to the whole diverse, multicultural world around us.
My homily last week was part of some of my fringe work in our diocese. For the most part, like your Dean, I am the chief pastor in a Cathedral. Here we have to look at the gospel story in a somewhat different light, since in the case of a Cathedral, the building as such and all that it represents is important of itself. It is more than just the home of a community. Actually when I was made Dean sixteen years ago, I told some of my friends that now I was sure that God had a sense of humour. Up to that point, most of my ministry had been without church buildings, of which I had no great love. So now the Holy Spirit had set me in charge of a piece of mock gothic architecture which was recognized by Canadian authorities as part of the country’s heritage. She had not quite mentioned, and the cathedral leadership had not, by then, found out either, that it needed about six million dollars spending on it. So, between climbing scaffold in a hard hat and raising funds, I have spent quite a lot of time in the last sixteen years, thinking about what a cathedral is and should be in the twentieth and now twenty first century. I think not just today’s gospel, but all three readings have some interesting things to tell us about this.
Our first reading was the story of Jeremiah’s call to the ministry of prophecy. The way in which Christianity and the scriptures have been taught in the past has often led us to think of prophets as people who somehow peered down the tunnel of history and magically predicted events that would happen a thousand, two thousand or three thousand years later. If we actually take the time to read the prophetic books in Hebrew scripture, we find that is not at all the case. The prophets were fiery orators who interpreted the political, economic and social situation of their times against what they saw to be God’s intentions for his people. When they did look to the future, it was mostly the immediate future, when they warned of the dire consequences of the ways of life, politics and religion that the people and their leaders were pursuing. Now I believe that we need today a ministry of prophecy in the church. It is not however the kind of prophecy which is based in a literalist interpretation of isolated texts of the Bible, which always seems to support a particular political agenda. It is a prophecy which looks critically at our world situation, and looks at the basic Gospel values of love, compassion and empathy and seeks to inform people of where our basic thinking, orientation and agenda setting are not only incompatible with gospel values but also with the survival of humanity and our environment. Cathedrals, I believe have a vocation to be places of prophecy.
In Paul’s correspondence with the young church at Corinth, he is dealing with a dispute which was just as serious as the dispute in the church today. Basically, there were followers of Christ in Corinth who believed that they had a direct line, as it were, to God, which bypassed the apostolic authority of Paul, and was substantiated by the charismatic gifts, especially that of glossalalia, or speaking in tongues. Glossalalia, by the way, is not really the miraculous ability to speak foreign languages, as Luke understood it. It is the gift of an unknown language arising deep within the psyche, as it is still known in charismatic communities today. Aside from insisting on his own authority rooted in his relationship with the risen Christ and his preaching of the Gospel, Paul’s dominant answer to these Christians is that love which builds up the unity of the Body of Christ is a far more important gift than any which is used to separate Christians into superior and inferior, weaker and stronger. I think we can see that there are many themes here which are common to the disputes in the church today. In today’s reading from the Corinthian letters however, Paul introduces another element, which I believe is of the greatest importance.
What should I do then? I will pray with the spirit, but I will pray with the mind also; I will sing praise with the spirit, but I will sing praise with the mind also. [1]
One of the most distinguishing features of being human over against the rest of the animal world is our ability to think rationally, creatively and in an ordered fashion, both about the world around us and about ourselves. The use of the mind and rational thought has also been an important marker of the Anglican tradition. We have all, no doubt heard of the three legged stool of Scripture, reason and tradition. Richard Hooker did not actually come up with that phrase, as far as I have read his work, but it is a neat summary of On the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, which has always been a corner stone of Anglican self-understanding. The use of reason is especially important in our understanding and interpretation of Scripture. Particularly in the last two hundred years we have built up and enormous body of knowledge in many disciplines which helps us to understand what scripture is, and is not, both as it was written and as it has been interpreted in the Christian tradition. The literalist interpretation of a supposedly infallible scripture is not only a modern phenomenon in the church, with no roots in the tradition: it denies the use of the faculty of thought, and therefore denies our full humanity. Cathedrals, I believe have a vocation to be places of thought and learning, dialogue and discussion.
If Paul was dealing with disputes around the place of love, authority and though in the church, Luke’s community clearly had other matters on their mind. The destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70 of the Common Era sent shock waves from the Jewish communities of Judea and Galilee right across the word of Diaspora Judaism. Without a Temple at the centre of their world, the Jewish people we forced into re-defining themselves. At the same time there was a separation between communities which accepted Jesus as Messiah and those who did not. Two new religions, Torah Judaism and Christianity were struggling to be born. A key question in all this, which had been there since the time of Paul and his mission to the Gentiles was about boundaries. Who was inside and who was outside?
But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian." [2]
Whether Jesus himself had said this, or whether it is part of Luke’s story, is not, for me important. It is totally compatible with the whole Gospel portrait of the ministry of Jesus. For Jesus there were no boundaries. There were no outsiders. He eats with tax collectors and sinners, said his opponents. Jesus’ words and deeds recorded in the Gospels speak of a struggle to overcome all barriers which separate people from people. In the present disputes in our church we are in grave danger of loosing this basic gospel value. Cathedrals I believe have a vocation to be places of openness, diversity and welcome to all God’s children where none are excluded on any basis.
Today we are celebrating the sacrament of Baptism and this is always an occasion when we can all renew the covenant made in our own Baptism. I sometimes find the language even of the new services somewhat archaic. But I nearly always find that there are correspondences between the words of the Baptismal liturgy and the Biblical texts of the day. We looked at the role of prophecy: the parents and sponsors are asked, Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God? We looked at the role of thinking and learning in the church, and we shall pray that those baptized will receive the gift of an inquiring and discerning heart We looked at the importance of the gospel values of openness, diversity and welcome in the church: we shall promise to seek and serve Christ in all persons and to strive for justice and peace among all people, respecting the dignity of every human being.
[1] 1 Corinthians 14:15
[2] Luke 4:25-27