Sermons by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Sermon Preached At General Seminary on the Feast of James of Jerusalem
During the Fall Colloquium on the Proposed Concordat with the Lutherans
Bishop Paul V. MarshallOctober 24, 1996
Seventeen years of doing parish work while also teaching, have made me very much aware of how irrelevant many working clergy find the academy. Those years of teaching have also given me a very clear picture of what the average professor thinks of the intellectual capabilities of bishops, jointly and severally. So I stand here perhaps freer of illusions about my potential impact than your average alum invited back to Chelsea to preach after having obtained some small rustic notoriety. I am glad to have been invited nonetheless. Those remarks will do double duty, serving to get things started, and also providing the totality of my midrash today on our gospel lesson about prophets and their home towns. Now I would like to direct your attention to James the Just, caliph, bishop, and martyr.
James of Jerusalem is hardly what you would call a big winner in the hagiographical sweepstakes. To this day, he is deprived of his mother and family by some who cannot believe that the Theotokos would enjoy a normal married life. So James, whom early Greek inscriptions unblushingly term the "brother of God," has in much of the West become God's cousin, several times removed. Due to the efforts of some to have him keep his distance from the family back in Galilee, churches don't even agree on how many Jameses there were in Jerusalem and environs, and this confusion has the further result of having other people project onto any James who is mentioned all of whatever they conceive of as "legalism." None of this is very enviable. I would almost rather be Jerome.
Despite the murkiness that surrounds James of Jerusalem, he really is a very important figure to be celebrating at a time when so much in the church is uncertain, so let's consider the council Luke describes as taking place in Jerusalem. As the church remembers the story, Paul was in town early getting ready for the showdown, kissing babies, calling in old debts, and politicking for his theological program. And Peter, bless his heart, seems to have been busy furiously rearranging deck-chairs on the Edmund Fitzgerald, almost willfully unaware that church business would never be as usual again. And over this first convention of God's fissiparous faithful our James had to preside.
Just having that convention meant risk to James and the Jerusalem church. Until now they had been a zealous but homogeneous little band under a patriarch who was related by blood to the founder, a happy band of what we call Jewish Christians, people enjoying the best of both covenants. That group's life was seriously threatened by new developments. The character of the church was changing forever; religious, social, and economic power in the church were moving to new and non-Jewish centers as what they had simply called "the way" started to become world- wide, or at least, multi-national, Christianity. It didn't take the Witch of Endor to see that approval of the Gentile church that Paul represented meant the end of much that James and his community cherished. His greatness lies in his abetting the end of the comfortable, the end of what he knew and was used to, because he recognized that the God whom no temple or tomb could contain wasn't the prisoner of sociology or tradition either. It would be underrating James in the extreme to believe that he did not recognize the implications of the soft and generous words he spoke at the council.
Given Luke's take on it, after the council of Jerusalem's decision to go multicultural, we might well consider the fall of the city to the Romans and later to the Moslems as anti-climax, as far as the emerging shape of Christianity was concerned. It is James whom the church remembers as the leader with the courage to validate the demise of what he was used to for the sake of God's future. It is James whom we remember as stabilizer and reconciler in one of the first of those awkward moments in history when the church struggles to find itself.
Listen again to part of the collect, as we prayed that the "Church may give itself continually to prayer and to the reconciliation of all who are at variance and enmity." When we hear those words, two fairly unsubtle applications of James' story suggest themselves. First, remembering James as I have described him, provides a hint to us that as uncomfortable as the Concordat may be for the reality we have built ourselves, it may well be one of several jumpstarts that the American mainline needs to get chugging along again, and that alone makes it worth the effort, worth the sacrifice of the familiar. Most of my generation remains unconverted, and we know empirically, that they really are not "attracted" to church in any numbers by our midday cultural events, they are not driven to flee the wrath that is to come by our social pronouncements, nor are they stunned into seeking God by our quiet good taste. The Concordat has had us, at least, talking about the Main Thing as the Main Thing, in terms simple and direct. That suggests that there is hope that in that dialogue's wake we will again say the gospel in words clear and compelling, without discarding the cultural events or social prophecy, but recognizing them as the fruit of, not the substitute for, our proclamation that Jesus is Lord.
The second observation is much more difficult to get right, for me, at least. It is the part of the collect that speaks about reconciling those who are "at variance and enmity." We Episcopalians seem to be poised on the brink of a great civil war, a war that will be fought on many fronts, should it ever begin. People often seem so tired of banging their heads against what they perceive to be walls, that interest in reconciliation seems to be drying up. It is almost as if people are saying of it, well, we've tried that stuff, at least 68 times 70. Look at what's going on. To people on the right, it can look as the though the left is about to put forward a canon that is an ill-disguised bill of attainder against four bishops, an action that sets a dangerous and unanglican precedent indeed. On the other hand, those on the left may feel great shock and grief that some on the right have already said that they are no longer in communion with certain bishops and priests, charging them with having abandoned the Christian faith, when in fact all they have done is taken a stand on moral issue. And off we go for another afternoon. What would James do, once he got over the temptation to get in some strangling after all?
This is where facile answers are useless. Everyone believes that they are defending truths, even defending the dignity of persons. There is no obvious Jerusalem formula for us, and it is not certain that one will emerge at Philadelphia.
But in the meantime there may be some things to do. This is a place that quite appropriately hones minds and develops theological precision. But there is a choice in how one brings one's intellect to bear on the church's challenges and problems. This observation does not take much explication, beyond pointing out that people do the most damage when they think they are right. Don't ask me how I know this.
What we still must ask, over and over, is whether the ecclesiology from which we operate is community-based or issue-driven. Community-based or issue-driven. The answer to that question determines how we behave the rest of the time. It is fairly clear which choice James made; how clear is it to anyone who overhears our rhetoric? Do they detect the accent of a praying community or the rancor of those who have decided to give up on community. Generations ago, before any of us were born, the decision was made that this seminary in Chelsea Square would be a community of prayer before it would be a debating society. Take advantage of that reality; I wish I had given it more attention during my time at GTS, and I very much hope that you don't come to feel a similar regret.
Of course, the annoying thing is that all told, James' posture, prayer and reconciliation, contains no real carrot other than virtue. Beyond that, it maddeningly combines a minimum of self- aggrandizement a with maximum of risk. And yet it is that to which the collect says we are called, echoing the Baptismal Covenant's insistence that we respect "the dignity and freedom" of everyone we encounter.
James apparently had to learn that attitude, at least the risk part. You recall from Mark's gospel that Jesus' brothers and sisters once formed a task force for reasonable, non-controversial religion to force him to shut him up. His rather monofocussed and uncompromising gospel was nothing less than an embarrassment, and one that brought dangers more real than imagined. And what could be more embarrassing or dangerous in those days than to have your brother the religious nut, publicly executed? So we are reminded in the second lesson today what the core of James's faith was: encounter with the resurrected Christ, the same Christ we encounter in scripture and the breaking of bread, the same Christ who wants to be present to us each day, our brother too, who both made good and knows how to share all he has accomplished with his sisters and brothers.
Taking the risk of being part of a praying community rather than a combatant in ecclesiastical logomachy gone nuclear, is a decision one makes many times a day, and often is only bearable when we remember that the church's treasure is not in words alone, but the Word (and all our little words) made flesh. That center stands to preserve us no matter what institutional shifts and personal loss of status or power we must endure for the sake of opportunities for healing the rifts in world Christianity, and for ever-deepening community with our fellow Episcopalians. And the more that we cling to the center that James knew and that we celebrate in this meal today, the freer we will be to receive and celebrate whatever new future comes as God's great gift to us.
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