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| 4 Pentecost 2 July, 2006 The Rev. Robert C. Granfeldt |
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On any other Sunday of the Year, these lessons would probably call for a sermon
very different from what I have, today, and I hope you’ll spend some time thinking
about them and about what they say to us. But this day calls for a little different
perspective.
Not many weeks ago – on the fourth Sunday of Easter, to be precise – we read in the
Book of Acts, about the life of the early Church, when the community of Christ’s
followers lived as what I called “the first ever – and perhaps the ONLY ever – pure
communist society;” a community in which “everything they owned was held in
common.” “There was not a needy person among them,” the author of Acts told us,
and all was “distributed to each, as any had need.”
An idyllic way of life it was, indeed, but, alas, not a very durable one. The Church
changed very quickly, we know, and some have said it didn’t last because it couldn’t;
that that kind of utopian existence just isn’t realistic; isn’t human nature! I’m not
REALLY certain I accept that as an absolute. I think it’s a matter of scale, really. There
have been monastic communities, for instance, operating that way for centuries, and
very successfully – but only on a small scale – a purely local scale. Some exist today!
Nevertheless, as the Church grew and spread, that idyllic pattern changed.
By the time this morning’s Epistle letter was written, it had begun, to break down, but
hadn’t disappeared completely. Drought in Jerusalem had produced a problem of
hunger, approaching famine, and the Church in Jerusalem had sent pleas to its sister
Churches in Asia Minor to send food. The Church at Corinth, to whom Paul is writing,
was one of the more prosperous Churches, in the area, yet they’d been slow to
respond! So, here, Paul appeals to the example of yet other Churches, those in
Macedonia – an area which, itself, is poverty-stricken, but which has been MOST
generous! And he appeals, as well, to the example of Jesus Christ: who, “though he
was rich, yet for (our)… sake became poor.”
Here, though, Paul goes a step further than he had, before, explaining, “I do not
mean that others should be eased and you burdened, but that as a matter of equality
your abundance at the present time should supply their want, so that their
abundance may supply your want, that there may be equality.”
As a matter of equality, share. Share, that there may be equality. That’s a word that
doesn’t appear much, in scripture – in fact, Saint Paul is the only one who uses the
word! But the concept, at least, is inherent in the notion that all humanity is created in
the image and likeness of God!
So, Paul tells us, we are to share as a matter of equality; and we must share that there
may be equality!
Thus Paul proposes a principle: be generous, always, to those in need, that when the
time comes that it is YOU in need, THEY may be generous to YOU! And do so as a
matter of equality.
This, indeed, has always been the position of the Church. It has not always been
faithful to the principle, certainly – and at times, the Church (by which I mean the
institutional Church, the hierarchy and the clergy, themselves), while preaching
charity, has itself been guilty of avarice – as, in the Middle Ages, when the Churches
and Monasteries were centers of GREAT wealth in the midst of near-universal
poverty! And what charity WAS practiced tended to be on a small scale, and over
short distances. For most of Church history it simply wasn’t practical to go beyond
close limits of size and distance – there was no way it COULD be done! Yet the ideal
survived!
It survived, as an ideal, until for some odd reason something new happened. I don’t
pretend to understand the reason, or reasons; all I know is THAT it happened.
Sometime after the Reformation, the thinking of the Christian World began to catch
up with the principles – the doctrines – Paul had written about and the Church had
been espousing for 15 or 16 centuries. It began taking seriously that mankind is
connected – that, as one of our great Anglican writers said, “no man is an island,” –
and that what affects any person affects me!
But by now – the 16th, 17th, 18th Centuries – the world had gotten even bigger and
more complex than it had been at the inception of the Church, and if matters of size
and scale – of numbers and distance – had made the Paul’s principles impractical,
how much more was that true, now. Yet there was a growing awareness in the
Christian society – an awareness that we DO owe it to one another to care for one
another, and that only as abundance is shared can there be real equality! As the
Period called the Age of Enlightenment took hold and spread, many of its principles –
and all of its Humaneness – arose out of these same Christian principles, and GREW!
And finally, the time was ripe for something new to come along, something that, in the
most basic way, three thousand years of Judeo-Christian development had prepared
for. And at the beginning of the last quarter of that 18th Century, that “new thing”
made its first great appearance, inspiring and being followed by a second – and then
a third and fourth and fifth appearance, until almost all of the Christian World had
been transformed by it!
In that first instance, a group of men – formed by that Judeo-Christian tradition and
meeting not far from this place – in a document unlike any the world had ever seen,
echoed St. Paul in declaring that “all men are created equal”, and went on to state
that mankind is endowed by its creator with certain “inalienable rights” to be shared,
among which were life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!
A decade later, having won, by many bitter battles, the right to live out that
Declaration, ANOTHER gathering, including some of those same men, produced
ANOTHER document designed to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility,
provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the
blessings of liberty,” in the new land that had been founded!
And it took just two years before the revolution that was taking place had spread
across the sea – and a second nation came into being, based on similar principles,
this one adopting as it’s rallying cry, the words “liberty, equality, fraternity.”
And seventeen and a half centuries after the words of today’s lesson were written,
those words, and the teachings of the prophets, of St. Paul and of Jesus Christ, from
which they sprang, gave birth to the new phenomenon called Liberal Democracy!
It is fitting that these words of Deuteronomy and St. Paul are read at the end of June
– as we approach our annual observance of the writing of the Declaration of
Independence. Not so that the lessons can celebrate the Declaration – but because
the Declaration, itself, and the Constitution that followed it are themselves
celebrations of the words of Deuteronomy, and the Prophets, and St. Paul, and Saint
John, and the Gospels – and of Jesus Christ, himself.
Words that declared, long ago, that all are created equal, in God’s sight, and in his
love; words that declared long ago that the righteous are those who “open wide
(their) hand to (their) brother, to the needy and to the poor in the land… that there
may be equality”! Words that called forth this nation that we love and celebrate.
Words that we Christians must dedicate ourselves to, anew, each year in the – Name
of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
very different from what I have, today, and I hope you’ll spend some time thinking
about them and about what they say to us. But this day calls for a little different
perspective.
Not many weeks ago – on the fourth Sunday of Easter, to be precise – we read in the
Book of Acts, about the life of the early Church, when the community of Christ’s
followers lived as what I called “the first ever – and perhaps the ONLY ever – pure
communist society;” a community in which “everything they owned was held in
common.” “There was not a needy person among them,” the author of Acts told us,
and all was “distributed to each, as any had need.”
An idyllic way of life it was, indeed, but, alas, not a very durable one. The Church
changed very quickly, we know, and some have said it didn’t last because it couldn’t;
that that kind of utopian existence just isn’t realistic; isn’t human nature! I’m not
REALLY certain I accept that as an absolute. I think it’s a matter of scale, really. There
have been monastic communities, for instance, operating that way for centuries, and
very successfully – but only on a small scale – a purely local scale. Some exist today!
Nevertheless, as the Church grew and spread, that idyllic pattern changed.
By the time this morning’s Epistle letter was written, it had begun, to break down, but
hadn’t disappeared completely. Drought in Jerusalem had produced a problem of
hunger, approaching famine, and the Church in Jerusalem had sent pleas to its sister
Churches in Asia Minor to send food. The Church at Corinth, to whom Paul is writing,
was one of the more prosperous Churches, in the area, yet they’d been slow to
respond! So, here, Paul appeals to the example of yet other Churches, those in
Macedonia – an area which, itself, is poverty-stricken, but which has been MOST
generous! And he appeals, as well, to the example of Jesus Christ: who, “though he
was rich, yet for (our)… sake became poor.”
Here, though, Paul goes a step further than he had, before, explaining, “I do not
mean that others should be eased and you burdened, but that as a matter of equality
your abundance at the present time should supply their want, so that their
abundance may supply your want, that there may be equality.”
As a matter of equality, share. Share, that there may be equality. That’s a word that
doesn’t appear much, in scripture – in fact, Saint Paul is the only one who uses the
word! But the concept, at least, is inherent in the notion that all humanity is created in
the image and likeness of God!
So, Paul tells us, we are to share as a matter of equality; and we must share that there
may be equality!
Thus Paul proposes a principle: be generous, always, to those in need, that when the
time comes that it is YOU in need, THEY may be generous to YOU! And do so as a
matter of equality.
This, indeed, has always been the position of the Church. It has not always been
faithful to the principle, certainly – and at times, the Church (by which I mean the
institutional Church, the hierarchy and the clergy, themselves), while preaching
charity, has itself been guilty of avarice – as, in the Middle Ages, when the Churches
and Monasteries were centers of GREAT wealth in the midst of near-universal
poverty! And what charity WAS practiced tended to be on a small scale, and over
short distances. For most of Church history it simply wasn’t practical to go beyond
close limits of size and distance – there was no way it COULD be done! Yet the ideal
survived!
It survived, as an ideal, until for some odd reason something new happened. I don’t
pretend to understand the reason, or reasons; all I know is THAT it happened.
Sometime after the Reformation, the thinking of the Christian World began to catch
up with the principles – the doctrines – Paul had written about and the Church had
been espousing for 15 or 16 centuries. It began taking seriously that mankind is
connected – that, as one of our great Anglican writers said, “no man is an island,” –
and that what affects any person affects me!
But by now – the 16th, 17th, 18th Centuries – the world had gotten even bigger and
more complex than it had been at the inception of the Church, and if matters of size
and scale – of numbers and distance – had made the Paul’s principles impractical,
how much more was that true, now. Yet there was a growing awareness in the
Christian society – an awareness that we DO owe it to one another to care for one
another, and that only as abundance is shared can there be real equality! As the
Period called the Age of Enlightenment took hold and spread, many of its principles –
and all of its Humaneness – arose out of these same Christian principles, and GREW!
And finally, the time was ripe for something new to come along, something that, in the
most basic way, three thousand years of Judeo-Christian development had prepared
for. And at the beginning of the last quarter of that 18th Century, that “new thing”
made its first great appearance, inspiring and being followed by a second – and then
a third and fourth and fifth appearance, until almost all of the Christian World had
been transformed by it!
In that first instance, a group of men – formed by that Judeo-Christian tradition and
meeting not far from this place – in a document unlike any the world had ever seen,
echoed St. Paul in declaring that “all men are created equal”, and went on to state
that mankind is endowed by its creator with certain “inalienable rights” to be shared,
among which were life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!
A decade later, having won, by many bitter battles, the right to live out that
Declaration, ANOTHER gathering, including some of those same men, produced
ANOTHER document designed to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility,
provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the
blessings of liberty,” in the new land that had been founded!
And it took just two years before the revolution that was taking place had spread
across the sea – and a second nation came into being, based on similar principles,
this one adopting as it’s rallying cry, the words “liberty, equality, fraternity.”
And seventeen and a half centuries after the words of today’s lesson were written,
those words, and the teachings of the prophets, of St. Paul and of Jesus Christ, from
which they sprang, gave birth to the new phenomenon called Liberal Democracy!
It is fitting that these words of Deuteronomy and St. Paul are read at the end of June
– as we approach our annual observance of the writing of the Declaration of
Independence. Not so that the lessons can celebrate the Declaration – but because
the Declaration, itself, and the Constitution that followed it are themselves
celebrations of the words of Deuteronomy, and the Prophets, and St. Paul, and Saint
John, and the Gospels – and of Jesus Christ, himself.
Words that declared, long ago, that all are created equal, in God’s sight, and in his
love; words that declared long ago that the righteous are those who “open wide
(their) hand to (their) brother, to the needy and to the poor in the land… that there
may be equality”! Words that called forth this nation that we love and celebrate.
Words that we Christians must dedicate ourselves to, anew, each year in the – Name
of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
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| Calvary Episcopal Church, Rockdale |
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