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This is going to be a teaching sermon. At least I hope it is. I’ve preached a few of them before, to try to answer questions like, Why do Episcopalians kneel for prayer? Or why do some people make the sign of the cross, or genuflect before entering a pew? That kind of stuff. But this sermon is about doctrine, and the leading question for today is, “What does it mean to say that the Episcopal Church is catholic, part of Christ’s one holy catholic and apostolic Church?” It is a question I am often asked. Perhaps you have asked it. I’ll begin with another question: What do you see when you see the Church?” Do you see a human club of some kind, just another human association voluntarily organized by people around some common interest or worthwhile cause, along the line of the Garden Club or the Elks Club? There are literally thousands of wonderful organizations, created by human beings, that seek to foster or support this or that worthwhile interest or cause. Most of us belong to one or more, to service clubs which provide fellowship and benefits to the community. We belong to garden clubs committed to the beautification of the neighborhood, and to music guilds and art centers and nature clubs that sustain and promote an interest in the arts or nature. There are bridge clubs and chess clubs and tennis clubs that provide human fellowship and athletic opportunities. The list of worthwhile social organizations created by human beings to pursue an interest in the world we see around us is virtually endless. But I invite us this morning to consider the nature of the Church as we confess it in the Creed and in our prayers. “Almighty God,” we prayed just a few moments ago, “you have built your Church upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ being the chief cornerstone: Grant us so to be joined together in unity of spirit by their teaching, that we may be made a holy temple acceptable to you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.” The first and central thing to note in this prayer is that it is God to whom we address it; that it is God, not we ourselves, who has built the Church; and that the foundation upon which God has built his Church is the apostles and prophets, with Jesus Christ as the chief cornerstone. This is the belief of the Church catholic, that the Church is God’s Church, not ours. I’ve been reading Flannery O’Connor. She writes as a Roman Catholic, of course. But Roman Catholics don’t hold a patent on the catholic part of the faith, only on the Roman part, so her insights are applicable to Anglican Catholics as well. The great spiritual disorder of our day, she says, is blindness, the inability to see the whole of reality. This spiritual blindness is the human condition, of course, but O’Connor insists that it is a condition greatly exacerbated by our modern world, a world which would reduce all reality to what we see with our eyes and measure with our instruments. It is the inability to see by faith. The language of the Creed and of our prayer is not accidental. It is deliberate and significant. To confess the faith of the Nicene Creed is to see reality differently. The Creed expresses what we see by faith, that truth which the Church has taught in every place and in every age. To confess the faith of the Creed is to say that we look for reality beyond appearance. That is what the dogma of the Church, as found in the Creed, means. Now dogma is not knowledge in the scientific sense, O’Connor readily concedes. Instead, “dogma is the guardian of mystery.” The doctrine of Christ’s Church, of the Church created by God himself and not by us, is an affirmation which opens our eyes to the mystery of the reality of the ways of God in the world as it is in its fullness. It opens our eyes, in other words, to the story of our creation, our fallenness and sin, our redemption, and our destiny, a story unavailable in any institution of human origin. According to O’Connor, one of the effects of liberal Protestantism has been “to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer and vaguer, to [lead us to] depend on feeling instead of thought, and gradually to come to believe that God has no power. [The effect has been to lead us to believe] that [God] cannot communicate with us, cannot reveal himself to us, indeed has not done so, and [therefore to believe] that religion is our own sweet invention.” In other words, one of the effects of post-Reformation Christianity has been to turn the Church into a human institution, and to reduce God to human dimensions, to preach the Church of Christ Without Christ, as Hazel Motes does in O’Connor’s first novel, Wise Blood, which is to seek a new lower-case jesus to worship, a jesus we can understand and control. But “a God reduced to human dimensions,” O’Connor observes, ”is no God at all,” because “a God you understood would be less than yourself.” To worship a God you understand is to marry the spirit of a particular age, which is, as Dean Inge said, to claim the certainty of being widowed in the next. Writing to a friend who was struggling with his faith and his doubts (Cecil Dawkins), O’Connor says, ”We don’t know how the Assumption or the Immaculate Conception [or the other events of salvation history] were brought about, nor is this a matter for science in any way. Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom. According to St. Thomas [Aquinas], prophetic vision is not a matter of seeing clearly, but of seeing what is distant, hidden. ...Through its doctrines, the Church stands for and preserves always what is larger than human understanding. If you think of these doctrines in this sense, you will find them less arbitrary. “I think what you want,” she continues, “is a Church that can be ‘naturalized.’ If there were a scientific explanation for these supernatural doctrines, you could accept them. If you could fit them into what man can know by his own resources, you could accept them. If this were not religion, but knowledge, or even hypothesis, you could accept it. All around you today you will find people accepting ‘religion’ that has been rid of its religious elements. This is what you are asking, [and what the spirit of our age is asking: You are asking] if you can be a Catholic and [at the same time] find a natural explanation for mysteries we can never comprehend. You are asking if you can be a Catholic and substitute something for faith. The answer is no.” A catholic Christian, O’Connor points out, believes in the God of divine dimensions, not of human dimensions. A catholic Christian believes what the Church teaches about God and Christ, because he trusts that God “has revealed himself in history and continues to do so through the Church, and that he is present (not just symbolically) in the Eucharist at our altars.” None of this, of course, can be demonstrated scientifically. We know it by faith, because it is what the Church, the Church built by God himself on the foundations of the apostles and prophets, with Jesus Christ as the chief cornerstone, has taught in every age and place – that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, that he created us to be his people, created us to live God’s own life and mercy and justice in the world, but that in choosing our own way instead of his we fell from that life of grace and began to worship other gods, including our own religions, religions made by us in our own images, but that “when the time had fully come,” God sent his own Son to live among us, One who, in his death on the Cross, redeemed us from our fallen condition and remade us for our true destiny, “the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.” A catholic faith, in other words, is a faith received by grace which is “ordered to a new [and prophetic] vision.” To believe this Good News, as found in the Scriptures and summarized in the historic creeds, is what it means to say that the Episcopal Church part of Christ’s one holy catholic and apostolic Church. But can this be believed in the modern world? O’Connor asks. And her response is that “to see Christ as God and man is probably no more difficult today than it has always been, even if today there seem to be more reasons to doubt.“ Some doubt it, she suggests, because for them it may be a matter “of not being able to accept what [they] call a suspension of the laws [of nature, a suspension of the laws] of the flesh and the physical. But for my part I think that when I know what the laws of the flesh and physical reality are, then I will know what God is. We know [these laws of nature] as we see them, not as God sees them. For me, it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, [and] the resurrection which are the true laws [of nature, the true laws] of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, [and] destruction are the suspension of these laws.... [The catholic Christian looks] forward to a resurrection of the body, which will be flesh and spirit united in peace, the way they were in Christ, [because we see] the resurrection of Christ [as] the high point in the law of nature,” not as its suspension. “I [don’t] mean to suggest that science is unreliable,” O’Connor adds, “but only that we can’t judge God by the limits of our knowledge of natural things.” But “don’t expect faith to clear things up for you,” because “[faith] is trust, not certainty.” It is just that for those who would see reality as it really is, for those who would see the whole of reality and not just the part we can see with our eyes, “there always has to be left over that sense of Mystery which cannot be accounted for by any human formula.” Seen in this way, the doctrines of the Church – what the Church has always and everywhere taught about Creation, the Fall, Sin , Redemption, and Resurrection – is that this earthly life, while precious in itself, is primarily a preparation for what is to come, that this earthly life has meaning and significance beyond itself, hidden from physical vision, but revealed to the eye of faith. “The creative action of the Christian’s life,” in other words, “is to prepare his death in Christ” in order that he might live with Christ. Believing the Mystery of this Good News, as found in the Scriptures and summarized in the creeds, is also the reason the Episcopal Church, like all the Church catholic, is a sacramental church. We believe that life itself is sacramental. We believe that the physical, while significant in itself, is only part of reality. This earthly, physical life, while precious in itself, is primarily a preparation for what is to come. It has meaning beyond itself, hidden from physical sight, but revealed to the eye of faith. Just so, the sacraments of the Church, especially the Scriptural sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist, are “outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace, [sacraments] given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace.” “The inward and spiritual grace in the Holy Communion is the Body and Blood of Christ given to his people, and received by faith.” And the inward and spiritual grace in Baptism is, as St. Paul reminds us today, the new life that is available to those who have been “united with Christ through baptism in his death, and therefore united with Christ in his resurrection.” The sacraments, in other words, are sure and certain means by which, through the eye of faith, we see and accommodate to ourselves a spiritual benefit, a benefit provided not by a suspension of the laws of nature, but by the high point of those laws, which is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is why, as catholic Christians, we do not speak of the bread of Holy Communion with the “W” word. We do not speak of it as a wafer, as if it were ordinary bread, but as a “host” – from the Latin “hostia,” a sacrifice. In our Eucharistic prayer, we set that otherwise ordinary physical thing aside for something very important and special. It becomes for us a sacrament, an outward and visible sign that conveys to people of faith the Body and Blood of Christ, the high point of the entire story of reality, the high point of the entire story of who we are – the story of creation, fall, sin and failure and slavery, exodus, redemption and freedom and life, culminating in the Cross and Resurrection. Holy Communion is for us both the reality of the history of our sin and slavery and the reality of our hope of salvation and freedom, a real history and a real hope we consume as spiritual nourishment. That we affirm and rejoice in this Mystery is the reason Episcopalians are Catholics, part of the Church built not by human hands or ideas, but by God, the Church which he built “upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone.” So grant us, Lord, “so to be joined together in unity of spirit by their teaching, that we may be made a holy temple acceptable to you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.” Amen. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |