The irony of faith
Philocrites : Liberal Religion : Sermons 1.20.03 From a sermon preached by Christopher L. Walton at King's Chapel in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 27, 2002. From that time Jesus began to proclaim, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." — Matthew 4: 17 (NRSV) The summer after my first year at Harvard Divinity School, I came to work at King's Chapel as a tour guide. Tens of thousands of tourists on Boston's Freedom Trail visit this church each year, and it was my good fortune to see this place through visitors' eyes, day after day. No matter how familiar the building became to me, the visitors responded to this place and to its story in ways that challenged what I took for granted and renewed my vision. They showed me what I had not seen on my own, and their questions provoked and delighted me — so I returned for a second summer, and a third, often worshiping here on Sundays and discovering in this place and in its traditions a reliable and challenging faith. Of course, many of the visitors marveled at the pulpit. Children were disappointed that I couldn't let them go into it — and so were more than a few visiting ministers — but they were intrigued by the function of the sounding board above me. I told the children it was an 18th-century microphone, but standing under it today and knowing how it is anchored to the ceiling, I also appreciate how it serves to humble anyone standing beneath it. I'm very honored to be here today. Having loved this place since my first visit almost seven years ago, I begin this sermon grateful to you and to the ministers of this church for your stewardship of this exceptional place, and to the many visitors from around the world with whom I came to see it as a symbol of rich and extraordinary complexity. Emerson said that true education doesn't come to us by instruction; instead, something provokes us, and we discover the truth for ourselves. King's Chapel has become for me both a sanctuary and a parable, a place where I find renewal and spiritual provocation. What did those visitors see? What did this place provoke in them? In some cases, not much. One man walked in with his video camera already in position; he ignored the guide who greeted him in the vestibule and walked briskly through the sanctuary, never once removing the camera from his eye before walking back out onto Tremont Street. I wonder what he thought back home, watching his videotape, experiencing his own vacation second-hand! Certainly, for many Americans, a visit to Boston and to King's Chapel makes history tangible in surprising ways. "George Washington sat here" has a marked effect on young and old alike, especially if that's not something he did in your hometown. One young man, a native New Englander, showed up early one Saturday morning; he had graduated the year before from Boston College, but said he had never been inside the historic buildings downtown. "I don't know why I've never been here before," he said, and he peppered me with questions about early American history, seeming surprised by his own interest. Somehow, finding himself wide awake early on a Saturday morning, he had stumbled into King's Chapel and become fascinated with a subject that had bored him in school. Sometimes, King's Chapel has that effect on people. The building also challenged and sometimes even threatened visitors. Some expected a church to be full of stained glass and religious images, and more than once a visitor expressed surprise that the building was a church at all: it seemed too plain. But others experienced the building as opulent, worldly, insufficiently Protestant, perhaps. Oddly, on several occasions an adult would ask what kind of church this was, and on learning that it was a Unitarian church would immediately escort the family out onto the sidewalk. I came to realize as well that simply being in this sanctuary reawakened painful or complicated memories for many people who hadn't been inside a church in years. King's Chapel inspired, frightened, delighted, and flummoxed people from Milwaukee, Dublin, Tokyo, Sao Paolo — all over the world — all in the course of a single day. And then there were two women who showed me how powerfully this place addresses those who have ears to hear or eyes to see. One woman spent the better part of an hour here, sitting quietly by herself in a pew, reading the prayer book. "I'm a Unitarian Universalist," she told me, "because I couldn't find another church where I felt genuinely accepted as a lesbian. But I felt that I had to give up Christianity by becoming a Unitarian Universalist. I had never heard of UU Christians." She smiled, but there were also tears in her eyes. She told me that encountering King's Chapel that afternoon felt like a miracle, a work of grace. Sometimes we tour guides laughed a little at tourists and their ways, but sometimes we also saw how tourism can become pilgrimage, how sightseeing can become vision. The second woman was fascinated by the monuments on the walls. Near the governor's pew is a monument to Thomas Newton. "This monument was installed by this man's great-grandson," she said, and she read the inscription at the bottom: "under a sense of obligation to the memory of a distinguished relative and eminently worthy man." "He didn't know him personally," she said. "He put up this monument to hold himself accountable to one of his ancestors!" — and I liked that way of thinking about these imposing monuments. Although many visitors come to King's Chapel to see a relic of a bygone era, oblivious to its ongoing role as a house of worship, many other visitors, like these two women, came to King's Chapel and found lively inspiration. Last week, our friends across the Public Garden at the Arlington Street Church auctioned several pieces of communion silver to help pay for the long-overdue renovation of their beautiful church. The silver cups were early works of Paul Revere, and they brought a handsome price. Another Unitarian Universalist congregation, the United First Parish in Quincy, auctioned its 18th-century communion silver last year to pay for extensive repairs needed to keep their building standing. Many have commented on the poignancy of selling historic symbols in order to finance contemporary needs — symbols that, in most Unitarian Universalist churches have ceased to be meaningful. There is irony in this story for us at King's Chapel. This congregation gave its original communion silver as a gift to a fledgling Church of England across the river in Cambridge back in the colonial period, and later, when the British evacuated Boston during the American Revolution, the minister of this church fled to Canada with the second set of communion silver; happily for us, the communion table was too heavy to take. But here, where we don't still have the ancient vessels, communion has remained a living, meaningful tradition, the event itself and not the utensils being the focus of our attention. When the past becomes an heirloom and no longer provokes much more than nostalgia, it is time to consider letting go. Our friends at the Arlington Street Church and in Quincy, burdened with overly-valuable neglected symbols, made a wise choice by acknowledging what they do value. They are also being honest about what they have long since given up. Should members in those congregations rediscover the spiritual vitality of sharing a eucharistic meal, they may find it easier to do now, disentangled finally from the safe deposit box and the legacy of a symbol drained of its meaning. To have a living tradition is to be vitally engaged with its symbols, drawing on them to understand and shape the present without being captive to the interpretations of our ancestors. Although religious people are often earnest to a fault, I believe that one legacy of liberal Christianity — a heritage shared by this church — is the recognition of what I will call "the irony of faith." It is simply this: faith requires accountability to inherited symbols, to tradition, but it also requires accountability to lived experience, to the world we share now. To live with this kind of faith is to live in a kind of dynamic tension. The 20th-century theologian James Luther Adams liked to say, "An unexamined faith is not worth having." Why? Because, he said, it will prove unreliable and dangerous, either shielding us from what we need to confront or arming us with false confidence in our own righteousness. It is painful and instructive to watch Cardinal Law confront decades of denial and misplaced confidence in abusive priests, a tragic story by no means limited to the Catholic Church. The religion was not so much the problem here as the unwillingness or inability to confront what was really happening. Religious leaders who fail to make their faith accountable to what is really happening in the world are practicing an unexamined faith. Anyone too sure that religion is automatically good for you must wonder at the nature of Mohamed Atta's faith, or at the deeply alarming stories about the ready supply of suicide bombers in Palestine — but the phenomenon is not limited to extremist versions of Islam. One hundred years ago, the psychologist and philosopher William James observed that "spiritual excitement takes pathological forms whenever other interests are too few and the intellect too narrow." ("The Value of Saintliness," in The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, 1902, Modern Library edition, page 333.) Fanaticism can generate mystical intensity, but it can also burn like sunlight through a magnifying glass. But we can live an examined faith, one that acknowledges that we do have multiple interests, competing loyalties, and an investment not only in what is rich and profound about the symbols and traditions we have inherited, but also in the ways in which the holy Spirit continues to break forth in human creativity and natural growth. The irony of faith is that it names a condition of engagement, a way of actively dwelling in religious symbols. It is not a roadmap to heaven; it is certainly not a prescription for martyrdom. God does not want such things from us. It is instead a window thrown open to the good world God is making. Consider this morning's reading from the New Testament. Listen for the ironies that mark the beginning of Jesus' public ministry: "Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee." The reading begins with bad news. Then, Matthew interprets Jesus' move from Nazareth to Galilee as the fulfillment of a promise in Isaiah — but the promise is ironic, too. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light," Matthew quotes, "and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned." This is good news, but this isn't the obvious thing to say about the arrest of John the Baptist, or even about Jesus' move to Galilee. At the time, those who took comfort from John's ministry in the wilderness must have felt hopeless indeed. He was now in jail, sitting quite truly in the shadow of death. And then, in the very next verse, Jesus begins to teach, and in his one-sentence sermon, we confront irony once again: "Repent," he said, "for the kingdom of heaven has come near." Something unwelcome and all-but disastrous happens — John is arrested — and Matthew sees in this and in Jesus' response the fulfillment of a messianic promise. More than Luke, Mark, or John, Matthew is keenly interested to see how the events of Jesus' life reflect and fulfill biblical prophecies about the Messiah. You might say that Matthew looks at recent events and interprets them in the light of his ancient but living tradition. But Matthew is doing more than applying traditional symbols to present realities; he is also transforming the tradition. One irony of the early Christian texts is that they maintain deep continuities with — they are deeply rooted in — the Jewish Bible, but they also reinterpret and remake the meaning of that Bible. Now, when we read the book of Isaiah, we hear the echo of Matthew — and the echo of Händel's Messiah, and the echo of our own experience. And then Jesus combines two kinds of statements and launches his ministry. "Repent" — a command, or an invitation, perhaps even a warning, to change — that's the first part — followed by a two-edged sword: "The kingdom of heaven has come near." There is a threat here, the judgment of God against the wicked — a divine response to Herod's unjust treatment of John the Baptist — but the threat is also a proclamation of hope, translated sometimes as, "for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." Jesus' message offers an opportunity to confront what is real in our lives. To repent is to turn around; it is to wake up. I suggest that it is also to take stock of what is fruitful and what is deadening in our lives; it is a way of seeing our contemporary world with honesty and courage and confronting what needs to be challenged. And Jesus also offers resources that help. One theologian suggests that the meaning of "the kingdom of heaven is at hand" is: "the reign of God is available." For those who hear the invitation to faith, though they sit in darkness, though they sit in the shadow of death, grace and courage are available to see what is true, to love what is just, and to walk humbly with God. To paraphrase William James, "The symbols we stand by are the symbols we need and can use, the symbols whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another." (The Varieties of Religious Experience, page 324.) The discipleship to which Jesus invites us does not ask us to abandon what we know or who we are or even, in some sense, what we do — for Jesus invites Simon Peter and Andrew and James and John, who were all fishermen, to fish with him. Faith does not call us to abandon the world; it calls us to open our eyes, to expand our vision, to turn around, and to take hold of the creative resources God offers us even now for the renewal of creation. Return to Sermons
Philocrites | Copyright © 2002 by Christopher L. Walton | clwalton at post.harvard.edu |