The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
June 24, 2007

Proper 7 - C
Zechariah 12:8-10, 13:1
Galatians 3:23–4:7
Luke 9:18-25

At the baccalaureate service at Colorado College this spring John Riker preached the sermon, and in it he likened being graduated from college to Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The graduate, having successfully completed his course of study in the familiar and cozy paradise of college, is cast out to test his wings in the world, with the hope that his experience in Eden has helped to prepare him for the larger world of work and personal responsibility and of moral and economic judgments.

Like our expulsion from that earlier paradise, the womb, being cast out of home and school is a shocking experience, but it is necessary if ever we are to become the mature human persons God hopes we will become and if ever we are to make the choices for love and for each other God created us for.

And that, insists Rabbi Harold Kushner along with John Riker, is why God expelled us from Eden. The apple was just a setup; God knew all along that we had to taste it. Gestation, either physical or educational or moral, can last only so long. When the time has fully come, the world beyond the nest simply has to be engaged, and responsibility assumed, if the gift of life is ever to be lived in its fullness the way God intends it. Like mom and dad, the divine Parent cannot shelter us forever.

So we are cast out of Eden, out to make our way on our own. And it is as good, God knows, as it is necessary.

We are not totally bereft, of course. Gestation had its purpose. We have learned some things along the way. We call them rules or laws: Don’t eat that apple. Eat this food, not that food. Do this, don’t do that. Keep the Sabbath Day holy. Do not cheat, do not murder, do not steal. And the laws serve us well, up to a point. The law is our teacher, St. Paul reminds us. And it is good.

But the law can carry us only so far in life. And as Frederick Buechner observes, ”even as [a] father laws down the law, he knows that someday his children will break it, as they need to break it if ever they’re to find something better than law to replace it.” In Eden, you see, there were full bellies and there was plenty of R & R, but there were some things essential to human life that were missing. There was no purposeful work and there were no meaningful relationships, because there was no need for achievement and there was no possibility of love. There was only the obedience to law, and law cannot command love where no love wishes to be offered and paid for. Nor can faith or hope be experienced where there is no need for them.

So Adam and Eve ate the apple, and now we find ourselves in the larger world instead. We find ourselves in the Church, lost in the wilderness somewhere east of Eden, casting about for something to save us. And we remember Eden, where everything was decided for us. Maybe the Book God gave us upon expulsion can save us, we think, and we consult the Book. But we find that over time the laws were added to and multiplied and have become more complex, and what served us well on one mountain failed us on another. So we find that God’s law book, like a college textbook, while helpful to a point, is not sufficient, because now we are on our own! Even with the book, we have to decide where to go next. “How shall we live?” is the question that dogs us everywhere.

So we become sinners, heretics in particular. Now heresy is not what many people think it is. Heresy is not believing something that is wrong or false. The word “heresy” comes from a Greek word that means to choose, and the sin is in the choosing, together with the way in which the choice is made. Heresy is the human habit of choosing one truth – one part of the Book, for example, perhaps a particular truth of the Book that you’ve come to know and value and that helps you make sense of the part of the great, mysterious world God has cast you out into – and insisting that everything hangs on that particular truth, regardless of anything else. The sin is not in the truth the heretic affirms, but in his elevation of that particular truth over other truths that are nourishing to the body of Christ. Heresy is the human habit of missing the forest for the trees, the sin of taking one’s eye off the whole in order to worship a beloved part.

So we develop the habit of choosing which laws to follow while ignoring other truths that don’t seem to confirm the view of life we’ve become partial to. We’ve become particularly fond of tithing dill and cumin, as Jesus points out, while ignoring the weightier matters of the law, and when heresy is pushed to the extreme it can lead to schism, to the sin of self-righteousness, a sin against charity. This is what William Willimon meant last week when he reminded us that “some of us sin in our sinfulness, [while] others of us sin in our righteousness” – that we can become so focused on how right we are about dill and cumin that we can say, as Simon the pharisee said about the sinful woman last week, that we have no need of her.

And therein we find our lostness in the world east of Eden today. The Episcopal Church insists on its interpretation of the Book, and says to its brothers and sisters in other parts of the world, ”We’ll use the freedom we now have to do what we want to do; we have no need of you.” And then a parish here and a parish there reads the Book differently and says to the Episcopal Church, “We’ll use our freedom to create another church; we have no need of you.” And pretty soon you have real schism, that sinning in one’s righteousness that would deny the Cross of Jesus its power.

But Jesus did not send the sinner away! Jesus had much need of her, and he pointed Simon to a possibility of life lived in the wilderness that Simon seems never to have considered. Jesus showed Simon a woman who loved much because she had been forgiven much, and this makes me wonder if the story of Simon and the sinful woman, mediated by Jesus, doesn’t make a timely parable for our life in Christ today outside of paradise. For fortunately, God has given us yet another gift for life east of Eden. It’s called grace, the possibility of life lived in love, with the help of faith and hope.

Christ’s Church, you know – and I know this is going to shock some of you – Christ’s Church is not something we “join” the way we join the Rotary Club or the Boy Scouts. Christ’s Church, the Body of Christ, is a gift to us, a gift God has provided for the living of life beyond Eden.

At one time, Paul reminds us, we were descendants of Abraham, Abraham’s children and heirs of the covenant of the law, but when the time had fully come, God expelled us out of Eden into the world of grace. “When the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, in order that we might attain the status of sons.... To prove that you are sons, God has sent into our hearts the Spirit of his Son, crying, ‘Abba, Father!’ You are therefore no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir by God’s own act,” not by anything you did.

In other words, at one time, through the covenant with Abraham, we were related to God as though we were hired hands who tried to live in obedience to God’s law as if by rote. But now, through Christ, God has adopted us into his own family, an adoption we acknowledge and receive through faith in Christ.

“The law, as Paul sees it, is a human effort to get into God’s good graces,” Willimon says in a sermon on this passage, a human effort “to get right with God, to belong. How on earth could sinners like us expect to do that? You can’t work hard to become someone’s child.... The only way you can join a family [you weren’t born into] is by being adopted. ‘There is no longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or free, no longer male or female, [no longer circumcised or uncircumcised, no longer insider or outsider], for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.’” That adoption is what happened on the Cross.

What happened on that Friday afternoon at Calvary, Willimon reminds us, was that God chose us. “We who acted like nobodies became somebodies. We were adopted. Jesus stretched out his arms and embraced us, all of us. I’m special only for that reason. I was adopted, made part of the family. And you’re special, too, for that very reason, and I ought to treat you as special. You have been adopted. None of us has any special distinction, when it comes to one another, other than that, [sinners though we are], we’ve [all] been adopted.

In Jesus Christ, “God does not anywhere say to us, ‘Now if you do this and do that, then I will love you, save you, bring you home.’ Rather, in Christ, God says to us, ‘I have come to you, have sought you out, have found you, so that I might bring you home, might make a place for you in my house, might set a place for you at my family’s table.’”

“Some children are just born into a family,” the mother told her son. “You are different. You are special. We chose you. You are adopted!” That’s what Jesus has done for you on the Cross. All you need to do is acknowledge it and claim it. Everyone else is adopted, too. Not just you, but everyone else is special to God, chosen of God. That is the first and great grace that is ours through baptism. And the second grace is like unto it: Now, as a son, as a daughter, you have the power to treat everyone else that same way. That’s what the Resurrection of Jesus has done for you. And these two graces, taken together – your own specialness to God, and the power to treat everyone else as special to God – are what Jesus is talking about when he tells us that “anyone who wants to be a follower of mine must renounce self, and day by day he must take up his cross and follow me.”

With this good news, with this message of grace, why, then, do so many people insist that it must somehow please Jesus for some of us sinners to send other sinners away? It’s because of our sin of heresy, often accompanied by schism.

What kind of Messiah do we identify with? That’s what Jesus asks us today. And what does Jesus mean when he says that if we want to be his disciples, we must take up our crosses, day by day, and follow him? What he means, I suggest, is that since God’s Church is God’s gift, not some kind of club we create, there really is no way out of the family of God, that God’s Church is catholic whether we like it or not, whether we every acknowledge that truth or not, and whether we ever learn to live lives of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control and actually grow up in Christ or not.

Buechner, like lots of people, has observed the similarities between Alcoholics Anonymous and the Church.

“Alcoholics Anonymous, or AA, is the name of a group of men and women who acknowledge that addiction to alcohol – [like the addiction to heresy and schism] – is ruining their lives. Their purpose in coming together is to give it up, to lose one life in order to save their real lives, and [to] help others do the same. They realize they can’t pull this off by themselves. They believe they need each other, and they believe they need God. The ones who aren’t so sure about God speak instead of their Higher Power.

“When they first start talking at a meeting, they introduce themselves by saying, ‘I am John; I am an alcoholic. I am Mary; I am an alcoholic,’ to which the rest of the group answers each time in unison, ‘Hi, John. Hi, Mary.’ They are apt to end with the Lord’s Prayer or the Serenity Prayer. Apart from that, they have no ritual. They have no hierarchy. They have no dues or budget. They do not advertise or proselytize. Having no buildings of their own, they meet wherever they can.

“Nobody lectures them, and they do not lecture each other. They simply tell their own stories, with the candor that anonymity makes possible. They tell where they went wrong – [the story of the life they now seek to lose] – and how day by day they are trying to go right – [the story of the life they seek to save]. They tell where they find the strength and understanding and hope to keep trying. Sometimes, one of them will take special responsibility for another, to be available at any hour of day or night if the need arises. There’s not much more to it than that, and it seems to be enough. Healing happens. Miracles are made.

“You can’t help thinking that this is what the Church is meant to be, and maybe once was before it got to be Big Business. Sinners Anonymous. ‘I can will what is right, but I cannot do it,’ is the way Saint Paul put it, speaking for all of us. ‘For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.’

“’I am me. I am a sinner.’

“’Hi, you.’

“Hi, every Sadie and Sal. Hi, every Tom, Dick, and Harry. It is the forgiveness of sins, of course. [It is, to return to Willimon’s language, the bearing of one another’s burdens. It is, the adoption of others by those of us who have ourselves been adopted.] It is what the Church is all about.

“No matter what far place alcoholics end up in, either in this country or virtually anywhere else, they know that there will be an AA meeting nearby to go to, and that at that meeting they will find strangers who are not strangers, to help and to heal, to listen to the truth and to tell it. That is what the Body of Christ is all about.

“Would it ever occur to Christians in a far place to turn to a church nearby in hope of finding the same? If not,” Buechner concludes, ”you wonder what is so Big about the Church’s business.” (Whistling in the Dark: An ABC Theologized, pp. 4-5)

The cross is a sign of our identity. It’s a sign of the family we’ve been adopted into, a sign of our commitment to those we belong to as family, as the family of God, and whether we like it or not the power of the Cross reaches across all the lines we draw and beyond all the holy huddles we invent.

I suspect it’s the same with you as it is with me, that you don’t always feel like being a dentist or a lawyer or a shopkeeper or a mother or father. And I’ll bet you don’t always feel like being a disciple of Jesus either. You’re unsure about what you believe. Maybe you really felt something when you first became a Christian; you really felt very close to Christ. But over the years your enthusiasm has waned, including your enthusiasm for all this adoption business, especially when it involves your doing your share of the burden-bearing work for those who are new or different or hurting among us, when it involves your doing your share of helping others to know that they are special because they are adopted, just as you were.

But you get up, you put on your Sunday best, you come to church, you open your prayer book and say your prayers, you sing the hymns, you hear once again the story of God’s love, the story of how God adopted you, the story of how Jesus walked the way of love and the Cross for you and how he invites you to walk that way with him and with others, and by the end of the morning you know once again that walking that way with Christ is the real you, the you you want to be, the life you want to be saved for.

Piaget says that “play is the serious business of childhood.” Children “make believe” they are adults. They dress up like adults, dress up like mommy or daddy, because one day they want to grow up and be adults like mommy or daddy. That’s the way it is with our adoption, and with our worship on Sundays and throughout the week, and with all the things we do together as church. We are baptized; we bring ourselves to church; and, in church, in the liturgy, we playfully, but seriously, experiment with what it’s like to “put on Christ,” to wear Christ in our lives together outside Eden.

These external rituals of family life, regardless of how we feel at any one point, are an important part of who we really are, an important part of our identity. On Sundays, and then during the rest of the week as well, we go out of our way to say, “Hi, John. Hi, Mary,” whether we feel like it or not. And, like children, we act our way into a new way of being. And, one day, we find that we are a new way of being.

And out there in the world beyond church we do what we’ve learned and practiced at church. We make time for a fellow worker at the office who is down on his luck, whether we feel like it or not. And we make time for some ministry that helps to provide decent housing for the poor, or that struggles for justice for the oppressed, or that brings hope for the mentally ill or distressed, whether we feel like it or not. Or we stand with someone who has been wronged, whether we feel like it or not. We take time to pray for those who would send us away, or who would remove themselves from the fellowship, and we make time for a friend or a neighbor who is ill or lonely, whether we feel like it or not. And day after day we take time we don’t really feel like taking to be a father or mother; we take time to really listen to our children’s lives and to share with them and model what we believe is important, when we feel like we’d really rather be doing something else. And so, day by day, we act out what it’s like to “put on Christ,” to wear Christ in our lives.

This, I suggest, is what Jesus means about losing one’s life in order that he might save his life, what he means when he says that whoever would be his disciple, whoever would be like him, must take up his cross daily. Because love is not a feeling; love is a commitment made in the world east of Eden.

Who feels like taking up a cross anyway, any day? I doubt that Jesus felt like taking up his cross that day on Calvary. But taking up his cross is who he was, and who he practiced being. And the family of the Cross is the family he adopted us into and the life he gave us the power to live, day by day, this side of paradise.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.