Sermon: The Courage To Change

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The Courage to Change

By Charles Rush

May 2, 2004

(Modern-day free translation of the scripture passages)

For everything we know about God's Word is summed up in a single sentence: Love others as you love yourself. That's an act of true freedom. If you bite and ravage each other, watch out—in no time at all you will be annihilating each other, and where will your precious freedom be then?

My counsel is this: Live freely, animated and motivated by God's Spirit. Then you won't feed the compulsions of selfishness. For there is a root of sinful self-interest in us that is at odds with a free spirit, just as the free spirit is incompatible with selfishness. These two ways of life are antithetical. Why don't you choose to be led by the Spirit?

It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or to be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on.

But what happens when we live God's way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard—things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments, not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely

lie asked me if I would say a word or two about St. Paul since our children are studying the life of Paul in Sunday School. Joy read earlier about Paul's dramatic conversion experience. He exhibited the wonderful, fearful, but finally adventurous ability to change as an adult.

It is not a virtue that we humans come by easily. I recall from physics class the First law of motion from Sir Isaac Newton that could be applied to plenty of people I've known over the years, as well as inert objects. Newton said, " Everybody continues in its state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line, except in so far as it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it." I'm afraid we religious people, led by a tradition-bound clergy, aren't much better.

The same thing, alas is true of most Christians as well. Bill Coffin once noted that 'most Christians use the bible the same way a drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination.' We can't blame them for this because (as Coffin also noted) the tradition bound conservatives in the clergy are always calling us to go back to some simpler, cleaner time, back to when gays were in the closet, back to when women were in the kitchen, back to when the Lords had all the power, back, back, back so much so that they are more worried about the origin of the universe than they are whether we have any future other than a nuclear tragedy.

The Church is not any worse than corporations, we are just older and have more interesting tradition to return to. But every established business and governmental agency suffers under the same dead weight of 'the way it has always been done'. John Gardner once observed, ' An organization must have some means of combating the process by which men become prisoners of their procedures. The rule book grows fatter as the ideas grow fewer. Almost every well-established organization is a coral reef of procedures that were laid down to achieve some long-forgotten objective.' How true it is.

We actually have a stained glass window in honor of St. Paul. He is depicted in one of the four smaller pictures in a window to the patron St. of Christ Church, St. Thomas, the doubter. We may be the only church I've ever been in that has raised skepticism to a virtue but it was a good call. In the long course of Church history, the intellectual skeptics like Galileo have been far less of a threat than the righteous inquisitors of every age.

You may ask what St. Paul called into question. The answer is his whole theological and spiritual tradition. And it was not easy for him either. By his own testimony, Paul tells us that he was a Pharisee of the Pharisee's, that he was deeply educated in the tradition. Pharisees have gotten a rather caricatured interpretation over the centuries because they are so often the foil for the teaching of Jesus. But we know that in the time of Jesus, the movement was substantive. The scholarship of the Pharisees was outstanding. Indeed, the great body of Rabbinical commentary that comes down to us in the Mishnah and the Talmud was born out of this group. Right around the time of Jesus there were two quite famous schools, one of Rabbi Shammi, the other of Rabbi Gameliel that sparred with one another in debate. It is likely that Paul was trained in one of these two schools. It was like Harvard and Yale going at one another in the early years, like Oxford and Cambridge in debate. He was one of the best and the brightest.

More than that, I speculate that he was probably pretty much like our young people who are educated in our finest schools. They are given over to a certain degree of independent thought but they are unlikely to be radical critics given the fact that they so amply work a system that spits out privileges and perq's to them with regularity. Of St. Paul, we are only told that as a young man, he persecuted the fledgling Christian movement. He was zealous enough to sign up with the Young Pharisees of his day and organize- not quite to get out the vote like our kids would do today- but to harass and verbally attack this threatening new movement. [I was on a college campus recently. One young Democrat was throwing a Frisbee. He had on a T-shirt that had a picture of President Bush on the front. Underneath it said, "A Mind is such a terrible thing to waste… Vote Democrat". A young Republican walked by took off this shirt, revealing his T shirt. On the front there was a print of the 'The Thinker' by Rodin. Underneath is said 'This is your mind'. On the back of his T-shirt, there was the Emblematic Donkey, the symbol of the Democratic party. Underneath it read, "This is your mind on drugs". I love that college repartee. Although, they are quite effective skwering each other. But they are unlikely to join the Anarchist party… because they go to Princeton. I used to say about the undergraduates at Princeton that they got so many opportunities and connections by the time they graduated that in order to fail in life they would have to work at it every day from then on. St. Paul was educated like that. He was in the main-stream for success. He had no need to rebel against his culture.

Until… until one day, he was on the road to Damascus, when he had a blinding spiritual experience. He never said much about what happened that day, except that he lost his sight for three days. But it was said about him that he met the Christ and that the Christ asked him, 'Why do you persecute me?' He left that encounter blind and proceded on to Damascus.

Meanwhile a Jewish Christian in Damascus named Ananias was moved in prayer to seek out Paul. This was not easy for him to do because Paul's reputation as a persecutor of Christians caused quite a bit of natural resistance. But Ananias goes finds Paul, sees that he is blind, prays for him and Paul's blindness is healed. Two enemies embody the reconciliation that the Christ was all about. It changed his life.

What is really amazing is that it changed his thinking on a moral and spiritual level. For many of us, making changes in our moral and spiritual thinking is the most difficult change of mind that we can make. Up til this point, Paul had been educated religiously to think that in order to be righteous, you had to withdraw from those who did not keep kosher. The Rabbi's used to say that the Talmud was like a hedge around them, to keep them from becoming defiled by the world, specifically the Gentile world. Indeed, today when you talk to the deeply Orthodox in Israel, you are immediately struck by the insularity of their world. The overwhelming association is with other deeply Orthodox Jews, they have some association with non-Orthodox Jews, and almost no personal contact with anyone else, Muslim or Christian or Secularist. That is because their focus is on maintaining purity in an impure world.

Within a couple of years, Paul totally changes his focus. In light of the reconciling salvation that he had known in the Christ, he starts off on the first of three mission trips to establish Christian churches in the Roman empire. He went to what is modern day Turkey, then to northern Turkey, then to Greece. In these trips, he met some Jews but mainly he built his churches out of Gentiles, those whom he had been taught his whole life to regard as 'unclean'.

As I said, Paul was a considerable intellect. In light of the reconciling power of love, he rethought his whole theology. He gave us the first book of theology in Christian history, the book of Romans. In that book, he tries to explain the significance of the death and resurrection of Jesus, he explains the relationship between Gentile Christians and Jews who do not accept the Christ, he comments on how we should live under authoritarian government, and how we should deal with the regularly recurring suffering that comprises this life. It was unlike any book that had been written by the Rabbi's that educated him. He broke some new ground. It is difficult to overstate the influence that book has had on Western history, particulary in theology.

St. Augustine read it, wrote a commentary on it, and shaped his own considerable theology in response to it. 1000 years later Martin Luther wrote a commentary on it, let it deeply influence him, and much of the Reformation was shaped in dialogue with that book. Likewise, a similar thing can be said of the other great Reformer John Calvin. The greatest theologian in the twentieth century, Karl Barth, also used that book as the primary source for the development of his thought. Through the centuries, theologians and thinkers have been in dialogue with St. Paul. The scope of his influence is vast. How many of us at mid-life are willing or capable of rethinking some of the fundamental moral and spiritual teachings that we were raised with? It was an enormous undertaking on a personal level, to rise to the occasion and do it.

We are told that at one point in his life, he went to Athens, the home of philosophy. There at Athens, there was a hill just above the Parthenon, named Mars Hill. It was a kind of Hyde Park for philosophers and thinkers of all sorts. You've probably seen the ordinary men and women that get on their box in Hyde Park in London and give speeches on the weekends on whatever subject concerns them. Sometimes they draw a crowd, sometimes they are just hooted down. Mars Hill is still there and you should go visit it if you go to the Olympic games, just outside the fortified gates that protect the Parthenon in Athens, above the Agora. There men would hold forth on matters of philosophy. Paul, the day that he was there, decided to give the Athenians a speech. He was very creative and clever. He began his speech by saying that as a visitor to Athens, one cannot help but be impressed with the spirituality of the people, the sheer number of temples that adorn the city. In fact, he noticed that they had one Temple dedicated to the Unknown God, whoever they might have omitted from the pantheon of gods in the heavens. Paul stopped and said, that God I come to tell you about today, and he went on to give a speech on the love of God that we have known in the Christ. There he was speaking to the very people he had grown up to believe were apostates or just hopeless. He spent so much time with these Gentiles that he even signed all of his letters with his Greek name Paul, rather than his Jewish name Saul. What a transformation took place in him.

Paul went on to write Philippians, Ist and 2nd Thessalonians, Galatians, 1st and 2nd Corinthians, all on the life of the church. And I'm glad that he did. They aren't filled with esoteric theology for the most part. They are reflections on what is important day in and day out. Paul grew as he wrote them. He began to understand that genuine spirituality resides in our life together. It is not as heroic as ascetics that fast and pray for hours a day, days on end. It is not as esoteric as the philosophic discussions that Socrates and Plato had on essence and substance in formal and material existence. The life of reconciling love is more concrete than that. Indeed, most of St. Paul's letters are reminders that we have to check ourselves because we are so petty; we are so banal; in our intimate circles of family, friends, and church, we act like children too often. No, one of the real spiritual challenges is to daily live as people of compassion, people of forgiveness, people of understanding and tolerance, people who spread peace and make for reconciliation. One of my favorite lines from St. Paul is 'work out your salvation amongst yourselves'. That is the good news, the disturbing news. The face of Christ for others has to reflect through you. You are all God has to work with. On the other hand, God is apparently very patient.

So Paul says, in our scripture this morning, 'free yourself from the compulsions of selfishness… We know what happens when we live God's way? God brings gifts into our life, like fruit appearing in an orchard- things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates all things and all people. We are loyal, we don't have to force things, we are directing our energies wisely…

In passages like these, Paul got it. Spirituality is about becoming warmly humane, pliable. That is the point. And I have come to see over the years what courage that really takes to open ourselves to the humane dimension. It is much easier for us to continue in the uniform motion of the straight line of our habits and routines, civil to others that we encounter on the way. It is much easier for the intellectuals among us to retreat to the library of the dead whom we can interact with on our terms and whom we can easily find a quote to sneer cynically at the dim wits that lead our world. It is much easier to keep myself in shape and find my own zen inside myself.

People are messy, they aren't consistent, you can't control them, and when you let them in they can hurt you, disappoint you. But there is something beautiful about all these sweaty, needy, longing people around you. I was at a family gathering a few years ago, all 18 grandchildren, mostly small children were running. I'm with my mother-in-law, aged 75, standing in the middle of the room, when we had one of those melt down moments. A couple of kids collided began crying, the next thing you know we had 6 people just all crying, needing to be picked up and held. I had a couple. Nana had one, was consoling another. I said to her, 'controlled chaos'. She said, 'yes, but the good kind.' I like that 'controlled chaos, the good kind'. I think St. Paul would like that image of our life together as well. It's not perfect, far from it, but there is a beauty to our chaotic quirkiness, a warm humanity to it. Maybe we can be a blessing to each other after all. Amen.