Trinity Episcopal Church |
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Trinity Episcopal Church |
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Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
Psalm 22:22-30
Romans 4:13-25
Mark 8:31-38
The Collect of the Day
When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.” Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him, “As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.” God said to Abraham, “As for Sarah your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.” (Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16)
Irrational Love is Our Rationale Course
The Rev. Dr. Bill Stroop, Rector
As you know, I have an inherent love of biology and nature. I have always been fascinated by the world of living things, and the infinitely intricate web of relationships among all things in the natural world. I have been collecting and studying crawly things since I could walk. My mother used to dread opening the refrigerator for fear of what kind of creature I might have left half dissected in one of her pickle trays. As one who has studied and learned from nature all of my life, I have come to appreciate the extreme variety, beauty, and mystery of creation. I have long believed that the boundaries which seem to separate one life form from another are really very blurry – an idea that has begun to take root in mainstream biology today.
In the early days of biology, natural scientists developed organizational schemes to identify species. This was an important step in the development of scientific thought. Those of you who have children or work with children know that this kind of organizing activity is an early stage of the learning process.
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In biology, classification systems worked pretty well until creatures were found that did not fit the order that scientists had imposed upon nature. For example, mammals, like you and me, are routinely classified as creatures that have hair, are warm-blooded, and nourish their young with milk. Reptiles are classified as cold blooded animals with scales that usually lay eggs. The duck billed platypus is a meat-eating mammal which has fur and suckles its young, but it lays eggs like a reptile. It has webbed feet, an electrified bill that looks like that of a duck, and a tail resembling that of a beaver. Males have a poisonous spur on their hind legs that can kill a dog or cause excruciating pain to humans. When the platypus was first discovered, and its pelts were brought back to England, some people believed that they were Frankensteinian creatures sewn together from other animals. No one could imagine such a creature existed. Just like no one imagined that there were large saber-toothed marsupial cats, yet such animals roamed North and South America.[1]
This situation from biology illustrates what we humans often do in many aspects of life: we impose our human rationality on the diversity of God’s creation; we set our minds on human things, and not on divine things. We see the world through human eyes and not God’s eyes. In so doing, we categorize and order creation according to the human perspective, often unaware that our view of creation is subconsciously influenced by cultural, religious, and social values. We then cling to the artificial reality we invent as if it was holy writ, and pass our ideas to subsequent generations who inculcate them as something akin to God-given truth. This is how some oppressive social practices and distinctions between groups of people become fixed or institutionalized: black people always sit at the back of the bus, and women never become priests.
As both a biologist and a priest, I tend to view nature from a slightly different perspective. I have learned that nature is amazingly vast in its diversity. I have learned that just when I think I have grasped a small piece of truth, another piece of information will come along that causes me to reorder my thinking just like the platypus caused the relationship between mammals and reptiles to be re-evaluated. Over time, I have come to see the universe as an unfathomable mystery, rich in diversity, and even more exciting because of its complexity and immeasurable depth. It is not a place of categories, but a series of gradients. It is not a place of conservatives, liberals, or traditionalists. It is a place of seekers. This point of view enables me to live comfortably with provisional truths, theories that are likely to be disproved, and with categories that I know will change.
As a priest in the Christian Church, I recognize that we Christians are, by definition, people who must understand that change lies at the very center of our belief system. After all, what is resurrection but change? Jesus’ resurrection and transformation are the “origin and guarantee of human hope,” and indeed a source of hope for the redemption of the entire cosmos.[2] It is through Jesus’ new beginning as the resurrected Christ that we recognize God’s transforming power in the universe and in our lives. And that power is love. It is what enables us to love our enemies and achieve peace. As followers of Jesus, “we are called to be more interested in loving than in being loved, in caring for rather than being cared for. Whatever our lifestyle, it needs to be ordered by love. The heart and center of all life … is love.”[3] God’s love for us and our love of each other should be that which enables us to achieve the unattainable, like equality and justice. God’s love should be that which lets us offer our opinions, but withhold our judgments, so that we can truly treat all other with dignity and respect, and honor all persons. God’s love is what should guide us to deeper truths, and to change our hearts and minds.
But the kind of change Jesus addresses in today’s Gospel is not easy; it comes at a great cost. It means trying to see the world through God’s eyes; it means setting our minds on Divine things, and not human things. It means opening ourselves to the possibility that what we have been taught by our society, our church, our parents, and our teachers may be contrary to the Gospel, and therefore subject to examination and change. It means listening to each other and seeing each other as both a teacher and as a fellow sojourner.
It also means trusting God; implicitly and explicitly. Ninety-two year old Abraham had been promised by God that he would be the father of many nations (Gen 17:4) and that his descendents would be more numerous than the dust of the earth (Gen 13:16) and more numerous than the stars in the sky (Gen 15:5). Talk about an illogical and un-biological promise! Yet every action of Abraham from that point forward in his story reveals Abraham’s confidence that God would keep God’s promise to him. He knew that his life and the lives of his descendents would be forever changed.
Christians are called to be a people of radical transformation and change. We are called to live our lives in accordance with our Baptismal Covenant and in accord with the symbolic Eucharistic banquet we re-enact every Sunday in this holy place. Our church is called to become a place that opposes the classifications and distinctions of the ordinary world – the principalities and powers. We are called to create in this space and in our community a place where human values and self-proclaimed views of righteousness are turned upside down and each and every human being, regardless of social standing, lifestyle, ethnic background, or sexual orientation, is treated with the honor, dignity, and respect due by right of our Baptismal covenant.
There will always be disagreement over how we might individually perceive what is meant by the Kingdom of God and, perhaps especially, about how to get to that Kingdom from here. But, if we can remember that God is God and we are not, then we stand a much better chance of finding God’s kingdom and not confusing it with our own constructions. In the end, I trust in God’s love for us to guide us to that Kingdom in God’s own time. For I, like Paul, believe that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
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Psalm 22:22-30 Deus, Deus meus
22 Praise the LORD, you that fear him; *
stand in awe of him, O offspring of Israel;
all you of Jacob’s line, give glory.
23 For he does not despise nor abhor the poor in their poverty;
neither does he hide his face from them; *
but when they cry to him he hears them.
24 My praise is of him in the great assembly; *
I will perform my vows in the presence of those who worship him.
26 All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD, *
and all the families of the nations shall bow before him.
27 For kingship belongs to the LORD; *
he rules over the nations.
28 To him alone all who sleep in the earth bow down in worship; *
all who go down to the dust fall before him.
29 My soul shall live for him;
my descendants shall serve him; *
they shall be known as the LORD’S for ever.
O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ your Son; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
[1] The large smilodon is the more familiar mammalian saber toothed cat, which existed in North American up until about 10,000 years ago (the last fossil was found near Memphis, TN). But there were also large marsupial “cats” or thylacosmilids that inhabited South America from the upper Miocene to the late Pliocene. The saber-tooth morphology is an excellent example of convergent evolution, appearing in mammalian and marsupial lineages independently.
[2] John Polkinghorn. The God of Hope and the End of the World. ( New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 113.
[3] Morton T. Kelsey and Barbara Kelsey. Sacrament of Sexuality. ( London, England: Vega, 2002), 241.
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Copyright © 2009, William G. Stroop - All Rights Reserved.
5 March 2009
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