Reflections from Saint Paul's Church

Anglican Identity - Part V
One of a series of sermons on the roots and character of Anglicanism, this sermon was delivered at St. Paul's Church, Salem, on Sunday, 19 February 2006.

We live in an interesting tension in our culture. On the one hand, we have the "I’m OK, you’re OK" syndrome that has, as one of its side effects, the tendency to minimize the reality of sin. We are encouraged to accept ourselves and one another just as we are. We want affirmation, not judgment, tolerance for our differences, whatever they may be, rather than standards that may challenge us to be something different, perhaps something more. And when someone is found to be truly dysfunctional, so far outside the bounds that our usual tolerance simply is not possible, we may resort to a claim of victimization. The murderer’s defense is that he was temporarily insane, or he was raised by abusive parents, or was in some other way a victim, and so he is not responsible for his crime–it is not his fault. That is one side of the tension.

But at other times we see no inconsistency in demanding major accountability and judgment. We are indignant at corporate fraud at WorldCom or Enron and we want the crooks to be punished; we are offended by Bill Clinton’s infidelity and we want him to be impeached; we are outraged at the crimes of terrorists and neighborhood gangs and we want them to be caught and executed or at least locked up for ever. My sense is that we tend to condemn sin when it affects lots of people or is committed by powerful people or by people who threaten us personally. But we become more sympathetic when we see something of ourselves in the sinner or in his situation.

There is an ad running on TV currently for a new spin-off of the Law and Order franchise. In the preview clip a young Assistant District Attorney is prosecuting a teenaged boy for the brutal murder of his own brother. The father of the boys says to the prosecutor, "Do you enjoy sending children to prison?" Of course, he is acting as any father might act, trying to protect his son, but what he is asking is that the boy not be held accountable. I haven’t seen the episode, so I don’t know the whole story. I am not saying that there could not be mitigating circumstances. Nevertheless, I think the situation is illustrative, not only of the tension in our culture, but of the tension we all carry within ourselves.

The TV program is fictional, but we can easily understand what a father in that situation might be going through. Of course, he would believe that murder is wrong. He would also be distraught that one of his sons was dead, the victim of murder. At the same time, he would not want to believe that his other son could be capable of murder of any kind, let alone the murder of his brother. It is not so much a case of justifying the crime as of being unwilling, or perhaps unable to believe that a crime was committed–even when the facts are transparent.

I think it is likely we have all been in this kind of situation–not dealing with murder or committing murder, but being in a situation which is just totally out of character. We all know, or at least think we know, the difference between right and wrong and we genuinely want to do what is right. So, if it should happen that we find ourselves acting contrary to what we know and believe, we are surprised at ourselves and can hardly believe what we have done. We may even find ourselves looking at the deed as an outsider and wondering how it could have happened. This deed is not the way we usually behave, not the way we think of ourselves as behaving. Then, since we can hardly believe it in the first place, we go into denial. Either we deny responsibility at all or we try to convince ourselves, as well as others, that it really did not happen or that there were mitigating circumstances which either justify the act or remove the guilt.

In the end, however, that is the problem: guilt. We cannot get away from the sense of guilt, particularly when our behavior has injured someone else in some way. We may, at least for a while, go on our way in denial; we may rationalize and justify the act intellectually; we may even repress the memory of the deed, but the problem is that we all have consciences. I do not begin to know how the conscience is formed, but I have never known anyone who did not have one. I have known people whose consciences were poorly formed or immature, people who do not seem to feel a lot of guilt, but I have never known anyone who had no conscience at all. As they say, there is honor even among thieves.

So, it is not surprising to me that Jesus looks at a total stranger in today’s Gospel and says to him, "My son, your sins are forgiven." It was not just that Jesus knew that we are all sinners. He saw this man who was paralyzed and totally dependent. He might have thought, as you and I might think, that what the man needed most was to be healed. But Jesus saw him differently, as Jesus sees all of us differently. Jesus understood that there is something that we all need even more than healing. We need forgiveness. We need to have our guilt taken away. I am not always OK. You are not always OK. We cannot always just continue as we are. And sometimes we need help from the outside. That truth is at the very heart of the Gospel. We are all broken in some way. We are broken morally; we are broken emotionally; we are broken physically; we are broken by sin, and we yearn to be made whole, to have our guilt taken away. And that is what Jesus does.

In fact, he does it in two ways. The first is the one we see in today’s Gospel. Clearly, forgiveness is more than just a word. When Jesus forgives it is a powerful action. And Jesus proves that he has the power to forgive by backing it up with physical healing. The paralytic did not need to be healed physically in order to be forgiven. We can be sure that when Jesus spoke the word of forgiveness, the man knew that whatever guilt he had carried was gone. That made him whole spiritually and that was the most important thing for him. But the skeptics needed proof and so Jesus also healed the man of his paralysis. Nevertheless, forgiveness was the greater of the two gifts Jesus gave to the paralytic. Healing is a wonderful thing, but there is little use in being physically perfect if our souls are broken. When Jesus looked on the paralytic, he connected with him and gave him the spiritual wholeness which he also gives to us.

Forgiveness is an incomparable gift. It truly takes away our past sins and erases the guilt we rightly feel but cannot remove on our own. But there is a second way of dealing with guilt. It can only come after that initial experience of being forgiven, but it is an equally important gift.. Receiving forgiveness allows us to enter in to a new way of dealing with guilt in the future, and that is by avoiding it in the first place. We can, by God’s grace, avoid guilt or, rather, we can avoid sin and grow in righteousness, rather than wallow in guilt. To do that, we must learn to choose the right–but how can we do that?

Some people like to boil it down to a question of following the rules. I spoke about this briefly several week ago. We do indeed have rules: we have the Law of Moses, the Ten Commandments, the Summary of the Law, and lots of rules made up by good people in the centuries since the Bible was written down. Following the rules sounds easy enough, but the truth is that we resist it all the time, and with good reason. When rules are set before us as obligations, when obedience is seen as not as a choice but as a requirement, that has a very negative effect. We don’t like it. And the reason we do not like it is that it takes away our freedom. Freedom is very important. It is a gift from God. We have always had it, and it is essential to realizing what it means to be fully human, but in our brokenness we have never known how to use it.

The importance of freedom is not in any natural benefit that freedom provides. After all freedom gives us the opportunity to make bad choices–choices that may be morally bad, and choices that may harm us. Freedom in and of itself is neither good nor bad. Rather, the value of freedom is in a particular opportunity it offers. You see, first and foremost, freedom is about relationships. We cannot enter into genuine relationships if we are not free. The relationship between a master and a slave is not a free relationship and it is not a genuine relationship. The master has all the choices, the slave has none. That is not a relationship.

In the same way, the Church does not regard a marriage as valid if the partners do not both enter into the relationship freely. It is a false relationship if one person is forced into it. It is a false relationship if one person controls the other person or controls the relationship in any way. And this sacramental relationship is the model for all truly Christian relationships. In fact, as St. Paul tells us, it is the model for the greatest relationship we can hope to have, a relationship with God. But, as with our human relationships, we cannot have a true relationship with God if we are not free.

Preachers like to talk about obedience. Obedience is the way many see their relationship with God. And it is true that we are called to obey God. But obedience is not what we usually make it out to be. Obedience is not about following rules. Obedience is about listening. That is what the Latin root of the word obedience means: to listen. People who are in genuine relationships listen to one another. And in the process of listening, really listening, really hearing one another, they come to understand and become more and more united with one another. And that is the goal of our relationship with God: to be united with him.

Obviously, our relationship with God is not a fully equal relationship. Divinity and mortality are hardly equal. And yet, God has not only created us with freedom as an essential quality of what it means to be human, God has freely taken on our humanity in Jesus Christ, in order that we can choose to enter into relationship with him. And in that relationship, as we grow more and more into perfect union with him, we listen, we obey, we even follow the rules, but we follow the rules not because we are obligated to, but out of love–because we desire to.

The rules are not really rules. The rules are a description of the order of creation, a kind of blueprint for the way this world is supposed to work. When everyone lives by the rules, the whole contraption starts to run more and more smoothly. When we do not listen to one another, relationships break down. When we are more interested in our individual freedom than in obeying, listening to the other, society is fragmented, relationships are broken, and people are hurt–and guilt abounds. When we declare our freedom from God, instead of freely entering into relationship with God, the order of creation begins to fall apart, and we become enslaved to sin and death.

In our relationship with God, we do begin by choosing to follow the rules simply as rules. We accept the fact that God has given them and we freely choose to make them part of our lives, just as many athletes begin their training by accepting the discipline designed for them by their coaches. But the athlete who excels is one who has long since stopped thinking of training for his sport as a discipline. The best athletes do not follow a discipline, they live it, incorporating it into their daily lives for the pure joy of it. Just so, we Christians begin with the rules because we are not yet mature enough to see the wisdom and mercy and purpose behind them. But as we enter more and more deeply, more and more freely into the mystery of God’s relationship with us, the rules become part of us, as God himself becomes part of us.

St. Paul tells us that he is no longer under the Law. He speaks of the Law as being a kind of tutor which he has outgrown and which we are supposed to outgrow. Left to our own devices, we may use our freedom poorly, selfishly, sinfully. So we begin with the Law as a tutor which helps us to hear God more clearly. This is a choice, a free choice, that enables us to enter honestly into relationship with God, not out of fear of punishment, not out of a desire merely to please God, but out of the sure and certain hope of knowing him more fully and entering more and more perfectly into union with him. One of the remarkable things about this is that we may sometimes find that we are free to bend the rules and even break them. We have the freedom to do this and it is not rebellion. In fact, breaking the rules may sometimes be the highest form of obedience. But be careful, this is not a license to sin. Rather, it is the highest kind of responsibility– responsibility to God which is acted out in a responsible freedom that we can begin to know when we give ourselves entirely to the mystery of God in us.

This is the Anglican Way. This is one of the principal things that distinguishes us from other Christian traditions. Ours is a tradition that particularly values freedom in a conscious and unique way–responsible freedom. This way is deeply rooted in our understanding of the Incarnation. God became man in Jesus Christ and gave himself freely to us so that we would be able to give ourselves freely to him. And, as the ultimate act of freedom, Jesus Christ freely gave his life on the Cross. It was in the freedom and infinite generosity of that gift that he was able to overcome death. Death is the ultimate slavery. Death is the enemy of freedom. The dead are not free, unless they are in Christ. But if they are in Christ, they are not dead. Those who are alive are not truly alive unless they are free, and we are not truly free unless we are in Christ.

The Very Reverend Gary W. Kriss

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