Bp Sumner
Mon, 03/20 09:12AM · 14mins
Quick clarification, though. Early in the service, the thurifer brought me two batteries to put in a pack. I am not a robot. I am a human being. Don't worry, I don't work on batteries. That'll happen someday. Someday it'll all be robots.
Not yet, but I want to greet you on the fourth Sunday of Lent, which is in the church's mission calendar is called Laetare Sunday, which means rejoicing. Sunday was a time you were supposed to relax your Lenten discipline a bit. Refreshment Sunday. Also called Rose Sunday. Also called Mothering Sunday. Lots of names. Mothering Sunday from the ancient church when you would go back to the cathedral where perhaps you were baptized.
And in the 19th century England of Charles Dickens, it was when children who worked in the factories were allowed to go home and see mom or Grandma. When I was a curate, Daniel's age, we had lots of parishioners who were from northern England, from Hull, and they had a tradition that the curate had to eat a flat dry bread called a seminal cake. That is one tradition that has happily faded away. Amen.
In the name of God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen. Once, while teaching a class, we got into a discussion about whether people in the class were either/or people or both/and people
I don't know which one, you would say on your first impulse to that question, question, which are you?
One hand went up and the student promptly said, professor, I am both a both/ and an either/or. At which point I realized, wow, you really are a both and and.
But the more I think about her answer, the more I wonder if it can't be taken in another way.
Maybe what the student was saying is that in certain circumstances, I'm an either or, and at other times I'm a both and. And it depends.
So then the question is, when should we be which and why? It I ask this because it's Lent. And in Lent we've heard the Ten Commandments. We say the confession of sin.
We use the Litany, which talks about all manner of human distress. In the old days, we would read the exhortation to make sure that we had cleansed our heart for Easter. All of this is included in what was meant by a holy Lent, but it all comes under the category of law. Now, in the letters of St. Paul, law is contrasted with gospel, which means good news. Law being the requirements of God, and gospel being what Jesus Christ has done
for us freely, forgiving our guilt, taking away our shame, promising us eternal life all the things we cannot do for ourselves.
So this morning I want to think about law and gospel, how we put those together with the help of our student, who gives us two tools either/or and both/and. Law and gospel, they are different, says the New Testament, although it's easy sometimes to get them confused or mixed up.
My ancestors in New England were Puritans, which is a way of saying that they sometimes turn gospel into a lot of law, into something burdensome, as Jesus says in the gospel.
But there is a problem on the other side, too. At the beginning of the letter to the Romans, St. Paul caricatures someone who says if God gives grace to sinners, maybe I can sin more and get more grace.
To which St. Paul responds, by no means. My point is that when it comes to law and gospel, we can fall off the teeter totter either way, either too much law or not enough.
So let's go back to the beginning, that student of mine. I am both an either/or and a both/and.
And as Christians, let's try this out. I'm first of all an either or, so that in my life I can be a both and.
For Christianity begins with an either or. The house is built on rock or on sand. Jesus gives us an either or. In the gospel Sermon on the Mount, it's an either or encountering Jesus Christ, who gives us salvation freely and in no way dependent on us turn toward God.
It is all God's work, and you and I are pure recipients. It's either or, it's all God or.
You and I have missed the mark. And that is really what today's gospel is about. The man born blind meets Jesus, and as a result, he is given his sight. It is a real physical healing, though.
In the Gospel of John, spirit healing always follows. Physical healing points towards spiritual healing. Because as we hear in the gospel, Jesus is the light of the world. To meet the one who created us and now redeems us, nothing else we could do rises to that. Heart. That is all. God beginning to end, all gift, all grace.
To be sure, in today's gospel, the theologians come along quickly, asking questions about the origins of sin, the nature of the Sabbath, the nature of obedience. The questions aren't wrong. But if we mistake God's work in saving us with our own efforts, than we do get off the track. That's an either or. The passage wants to put that moment at the center when the man born blind encounters Jesus Christ and has his eyes
opened. That one moment is what the passage is all about, and all the human struggle and confusion swirls around it.
This one thing I do know, says the man with his eyes opened. I once was blind, and now I see words. Quoted by John Newton in Amazing Grace.
When I was a little boy, my father liked to listen to a radio program by Paul Harvey. He actually started it in World War II. It was called The Rest of the Story. Whatever story you thought you'd heard, paul Harvey gave you the last chapter.
And it's like that with us, too. Christianity is either or, all grace. But then you and I struggle day and week by week to live our Christian lives. And there we need God working through us as well as upon us in word and sacrament, in friends, in our neighbors, in our prayers as we struggle on.
And there the law does come into play. For we struggling pilgrims need guideposts and bumpers. In the theological tradition, the Law did three good things.
First of all, because the kingdom has not yet fully come, we still need police and courts and administrators and lawyers. Those are vocations, too, for an ordered, life ordered world.
And we need the law held up to our faces to remind us that we can't do it on our own, that our obedience to the Sermon on the Mount is imperfect, to say the least.
And third of all, law in the form of the prayer book, in the form of rules of life. It's a nudge, an encouragement, a challenge to what would otherwise be human inertia.
When it comes to the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey said, we do need God working through law, too. Law and gospel. I've been teaching this semester at course at Baylor in Waco and in the theology department. One of the theologians has a sign on his door and it says, your efforts will be of no help to your salvation before God. And then it goes on to say, but they might help your neighbor.
Law, gospel when it comes to salvation, it's all God. But our own efforts, with God's help, may be of help to our neighbor.
I want to close with a personal story which is headed in the same direction. In the late 1980s, I was the vicar of a number of Navajo congregations in northeast Arizona. If you've ever driven to the Grand Canyon, you drove through my old parish.
I once took a group of lay leaders in a ministry class on a field trip to Gallup, New Mexico. We visited the house of the Roman Catholic Missionaries of Charity who were a women's order. In blue linen saris, like their founder, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and they were truly luminous. They were remarkable.
Like her, they worked humbly, serving the least and the lost on the streets of Gallup, particularly those who suffered with alcohol. It was impressive. But in the van, on the half
hour ride home, my students had a different view, one that was validated by the fact that they knew some of the people who were helped and a few of them were their relatives.
Why don't they make their own beds? Why don't they have a schedule for cleaning up and doing chores? Isn't that therapeutic, too?
It was a surprising, although fair, question, it's really a question. What's the real nature of love? Isn't love sometimes gift and sometimes accountability fair enough?
But that diminutive Filipino Mother Superior leading. That house, serving the least, she was to me a symbol of Jesus Christ himself, who washed the disciples feet, ate with sinners, promised the dying thief at his side eternal life. She was, for a moment, a sacrament. of Jesus to me. As I watched her, she had taken the better part. She knew the one thing needful. And she was a window on the Grace of God without conditions extended to prodigal children, you and me.
And that's the either/or part. And this symbol was, in all of its beauty and shock. As the reality of Jesus grace to us always is. But just the same, we then have to live our lives out. And God's love is sometimes gift and sometimes accountability. And we do need to struggle about what our best strategy for moving forward may be. That's the both ends from the voice of my students in the van that evening, all of us struggling in flawed imitation to respond to the unilateral divine love which all of our loves accepts.