A Homily for the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

This sermon was preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty on July 14, 2024, the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 10B.

This morning, both Amos and John the Baptist present us with powerful examples of speaking the truth in love to craven, self-serving power. In Amos’ case, it’s to Jeroboam and the Temple in Bethel. The temple and the office of “King,” like all human constructions built to serve and honor God inevitably lapses into idolatrous concern only for itself. Institutional maintenance, and personal power and status holds sway and the widow, the orphan, the stranger and the alien in the land go unnoticed, unserved, unloved while the rich get richer and poor get poorer. In John’s case, of course, it’s his admonishment to Herod that lands him in hot water resulting ultimately in that gruesome Salomé Sashay: the danse macabre with John’s head on a platter. But on a larger scale, John is pointing to intimacy with the person of Jesus Christ as the embodiment of the true temple, the temple without walls that is grace-saturated relationship with Divine Love as the ground of being. Turns out if you’re in the Temple business and the King business being told that the Temple isn’t the Temple and the King isn’t the True King ain’t great news. It’s perplexing, not just for Herod, and humans find it easier to control, manage, banish, or kill divine perplexity than sit with it, to listen into it without agenda.

Now prophets are not mere soothsayers, as if we could get lucky numbers from Amos to play in the Powerball. Prophecy, like all aspects of the Christian life, always begins with a clear-sighted diagnosis of the present state of affairs and a laying out of the consequences of continuing to follow this deluded course of action. The prophetic transformation (“let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream,”) is worked by grace after first accepting life as it is. We can’t heal from an illness we don’t know we have! We can’t serve someone we don’t see! “Carry on along down this present road,” say the prophets, “and it’s likely not to go so well for you, Israel!” And it is always Israel–the entire community, the common good–that is the concern, never just the individual, or a certain class of individuals. We go, as the Orthodox say, to heaven in each others’ pockets. There are no “individual” Christians: that’s an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms.

It’s from this clear-sighted diagnosis of mischief (following our own ways and ignoring God and our neighbor) that fresh, live-giving alternatives open up. Prophets, inspired by the Holy Spirit, are gifted with the means of imagining new ways arranging community life–words that remind us that the world could be otherwise: a community of beloved children of God chosen since before the foundation of the world who know themselves as kith and kin of one another in a joyful mutuality of giving and receiving love in all its various forms.

The interesting thing, though, is to ask the question–where do these prophets get this perspective? What is patently obvious is that prophets are always the very least likely candidates; setting up shop in the wilderness outside of the strictures of town and temple, eating locusts and wild honey, or spending your days as a herdsman and dresser of sycamore trees are not usually ways to go about winning friends and influencing people. Amos’, “I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son,”  and John’s, “I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal,” are the sine qua non of all prophecy. We think of prophets as talking a bunch (which they certainly do), but it always begins with openness, receptivity, and unencumbered listening: “I will listen to what the Lord God is saying, for he is speaking peace to this faithful people and to those who turn their hearts to him.” Prophets are those who pray their way (or better are turned and prayed) into experiential encounter in the good and broad land where mercy and truth kiss in the person of Christ radiantly unbidden, out of nowhere, like water from a rock.

Anglicanism is first and foremost not primarily a system of doctrines and beliefs, but a grace-disciplined way of seeing and being in the world shaped and nourished by daily prayer, dwelling on God’s word, and receiving the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist. While other denominations confessionalized and pinned down hair-splitting intricacies of doctrine, Anglicans established basic patterns of baptism, daily prayer, and Eucharist and gave people the bible in their own language. Our theology emerges out of worship, out of intimacy and encounter with Love. We trust that those simple holy habits and dispositions cultivated by grace through faith day after day, Sunday after Sunday, year after year are sufficient. We’ve learned the hard way that having God too pinned-down leads to having our neighbor pinned down–squirming and wriggling on the sharp point of how we know they should be. Bloody certainty. The little space prayer opens for God to get at us–laying gently aside our requirements and demands (being no prophet nor prophet’s daughter)--opens up the possibility of recognition of blessedness. The word appears three times in the first sentence after the grace wish in the Letter to the Ephesians. Blessed… blessed… blessed. Gift… gift… gift. Grace… grace… grace… from the get go!

The apparent “poverty” of the prophets–how they don’t fit our ideas about what goldly folk look like–is the very means by which the word of the Lord is made richly known. The prophets’ apparent weakness is the source of God’s power and blessing working in and through their herdsman hands. Prophets are simply those whose lives have been stopped, stilled, turned, opened, and ushered into grateful reception of the lavish grace of God showered upon all. Prophets are those who from that stilled place–not the earthquake, not the fire, not the wind–respond in thought, word, and deed from the experienced reality of a spiritually-infused universe in which all things are gathered up in Christ.

This is what imbues both Amos and John with a kind of unshakeable courage that simply cannot be cooked up by human means. They know–in experiential and non-conceptual encounter with the Living God in prayer, scripture and sacrament–that no ruler, bratty belly-dancing daughter, conniving mother,  prison cell, or even the henchman’s sword, can separate any of God’s chosen, adopted, heired, and inheriting children from the love of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit. You can’t bind John the Baptist. You can’t simply lop off his noggin and pretend to get back to business as usual. Amos and John both know in their very bones what each of us is called to know in our very bones. Listen to Paul’s words from his Second Letter to the Corinthians: “We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see--we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.” That firm foundation is who we come to know in Christ, who was and is and is to come.

It’s easy to think of prophets like Amos and John as freaks of nature with special abilities and then just throw in the towel. Little do we realize that the same spirit that animated their witness and ministry, is at work in our midst, feeding, healing, prompting witness to the last, the lost, the least, and the left behind and calling forth new and merciful social arrangements of what Bonhoeffer calls our “life together.” What is the way to this peace that passes understanding? Where are we to find the temple after it's been razed? After all the tables have been turned over what/who remains? Can you show me the way to the temple not made with hands? In the midst of all the chances and changes of this world, where, in whom, is the stability to navigate this thing we call human life with a modicum of grace to be found? Having the right thoughts about God between our ears? Performing our way to holiness through good deeds that are mostly about ourselves and fulfilling our unmet needs? If it’s not what we know and not what we do, what is it?

This peace–that can’t be bound, that can’t be silenced, whose head cannot be severed and that even a state execution on a cross outside the city walls cannot destroy–is to be found in relationship, transformative, experiential encounter with the Living God–seeking God where God wills to be found–in our humble, understated Anglican habit of putting ourselves in the way of love, of remembering who and whose we are through fidelity to daily prayer, scripture, Eucharist, and serving others. Keep it simple. Come undone in love. Be plumbed by love. Let yourself be loved into loving others until there’s just love. And don’t be surprised if what comes out of your mouth ruffles a few kingly feathers and you find justice rolling down, righteousness streaming forth hiddenly from your sycamore dresser’s hands… you who know better than anyone that you are neither a prophet nor a prophet’s child. 

Maybe Gary Snyder put it best in a little poem he wrote while living 15 years in in Japan: 

You be Bosatsu

I’ll be the taxi driver

driving you home. 

At once very Japanese and very Anglican! You be the fancy pants spiritual athlete doing it all perfectly. You be the fine-toothed comb theological finagler. You be the flashy embodiment of wisdom and compassion. That’s all a little rich for my blood. Me? I’ll make sure you get home safe, to the praise of His glory. Amen.