He Sits in the Midst of the Soul in Peace and Rest

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Second Sunday after Christmas, January 5, 2020 by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty.

Herod is nervous. Fearful. And, as it says in our Gospel, “all of Jerusalem with him.” Fear is contagious, and the little child born in a manger is striking fear into the hearts of everyone. What’s going on? It’s a story as old as time. Human beings, when confronted with love come among us, boundary-crossing love that reveals itself as the embrace of the last, the least, the lost, and left behind, shakes things up. And the powerful elites, the ruling classes who benefit from the existing social order and reap its rewards, don’t like things being shaken up. The way things are, in their minds, is just fine. This Jesus, even as a baby with a strange entourage of Wise Men from the east, is a rabble-rouser who threatens to spoil the good thing Herod and his gang have going.

Rowan Williams, in his reading of the crucifixion, writes that “When love comes into the world we kill it.” So wedded are human beings the existing order of things with its attendant insiders and outsiders, clean and unclean, those on the top and those on the bottom, that we will do anything to preserve it. In today’s Gospel, we see that the world of Herod and those gathered about him, is already plotting to dispose of Love come among us, even in the form of a baby. Jesus hasn’t even begun to turn things upside down—he hasn’t healed on the Sabbath, or eaten with sinners and tax-collectors—yet in this child, Herod perceives an existential threat and is determined to eradicate it.

That’s the great temptation of any institution—to think that it’s primary purpose, its meaning for existence and the primary end for which it exists—is self-preservation. Institutions—schools, governments, churches, synagogues, mosques—often make the mistake of thinking that perpetuating the institution is what the institution is about, and in the process institutions lose sight of where God is calling them go, and who God is calling them to be. And losing sight of this vital fact is really determined by what’s at the institution’s heart—fear, or love.

Herod’s world pivots around fear and the maintenance of power. And what we see is that when fear, scarcity, and lack are at the center, the institution’s leaders are fearful. You are what you worship, what you place at the center of your life. Herod’s slaughter of the innocents is a grim reminder of this very simple spiritual truth. Fear begets fear begets scapegoating begets violence. That’s the ruthless calculus of cause and effect that God in Christ through the Holy Spirit comes to reveal to human beings, and to undo in the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

If Herod’s regime presents us with a vivid portrait of what it looks like to have fear and power at the center of our lives, Jesus’ life and ministry provides us with its polar opposite.  It takes the disciples a while to get this (indeed we could ask ourselves if they ever really got it at all). James and John arguing over who’s the greatest. Disciples acting like bodyguards when the little children want to see Jesus, or trying to hush blind Bartimaeus when he calls out from the roadside. Slowly, slowly, slowly Jesus is schooling them in love. Slowly, slowly, slowly Jesus is training them radical welcome, indiscriminate hospitality—that they might see with his eyes, hear with his ears, touch with his hands, and plant their feet where Jesus stands. Slowly, slowly, slowly, Jesus is modeling what it looks like for a rag-tag group of followers to love, not fear, at its center.

The flight into Egypt is intimately tied to this new configuration that we might call the Beloved Community. Carried in the arms of his parents, the infant Jesus flees into Egypt. He escapes the old regime in order to re-enter Israel and inaugurate an entirely new way for human beings to gather together. God through Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt under Pharaoh and gifted them with a new identity—not as brick-makers for Imperial power whose worth as individuals is determined by how much they produce—but as beloved children of God whose intrinsic value, whose dignity is unassailable, an ontological non-negotiable given by virtue of being fashioned in the image and likeness of their Creator.

God, through Moses, teaches the Israelites about the Beloved Community. He teaches them about caring for the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the alien in the land. But by the time of Jesus, the Temple has become another self-perpetuating institution. It’s become, in the image-bank of Gospel narratives, a withered tree that is no longer bearing the fruit of love, justice, kindness, and mercy. So Jesus, the New Moses, inaugurates a new exodus, and founds a new kind of Temple—not founded in buildings, adherence to the law, or allegiance to the institution, but founded in love, the love of which He is the perfect embodiment.

So what we get in today’s Gospel, is the very beginning of that project. What we get is the first glimpse of what it might mean for a community to be gathered not in fear, but in love. What we get is an inkling of what it might mean for the Church to have Jesus, and Jesus alone at its center. Time and again, the disciples and those who follow Jesus down the Way of Love get hoodwinked into thinking that the new temple Jesus comes to found is out there—a geographical location, with revolving doors, a presidential penthouse on the top floor, and corner offices for all his closest confidants. When Jesus tells the disciples that the Temple will be thrown down stone by stone he’s speaking not as a demolition expert but as embodiment of Divine Love who’s reminding us that the true Temple is not “out there” but in the depths of the heart, at the very ground of our being. Julian of Norwich writes,

I saw the soul as large as if it were an endless world, and as if it were a blessed kingdom; and from the properties I saw in it I understood that it is a glorious city. In the midst of that city sits our Lord Jesus, true God and true man, a handsome person and of great stature… He sits in the midst of the soul in peace and rest… Through all eternity Jesus will never vacate the place he takes in our soul… for in us is the home most familiar to him and his everlasting dwelling.

Herod thinks that it’s in the maintenance of his kingdom by ordering everything according to his fears that he will enjoy the happiness for which he is made. But that’s the great illusion that Jesus comes to undo. He reminds us in his person and work that the happiness for which we seek has already been gifted to us. The outward pursuit of power/control, safety/security, affection/esteem always leaves us hungering for more, always feeling like we are a day late and a dollar short. It’s in turning to the One who is already seated in the soul in peace and rest, and living from that peace and rest, living as that peace and rest (even in the midst of activity) that the freedom and joy we yearn for starts to flower in us.

“Acquire the Spirit of Peace and a thousand souls around you will be saved,” wrote St. Seraphim of Sarov the Russian saint of the 19th century. That’s the charge of the Gospel—that we become acquainted with the peace and rest that has been enthroned in our souls and live from that place. That’s the new regime that Jesus comes among us to found. That’s the new community of love he comes among us to found. It’s not a Kingdom founded on an abstract principle, but on a personal encounter with love at the center of our being that is who we truly are.

When we get to know the One who is love seated at the center of the soul, the One who will never leave, those other stories, those Herods and Pharaohs who bang around in hearts and minds slowly, slowly, slowly lose their steam. We make an exodus from whom our parents, teachers, nation have told us we are into that good and broad place, the place of freedom, the place of accepting our acceptance as beloved children of God—beloved children, who have acquired the spirit of peace, messengers of the new kingdom, the beloved community, where Christ is seen in everyone—the widow, the orphan, the stranger, and the border-crossing family we’ve learned to welcome and embrace as the Holy Family.