Beyond Belonging

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany, February 16, 2020 by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty.

Alfred North Whitehead was undoubtedly a genius. With Bertrand Russel he co-wrote the monumental but little read classic of symbolic logic, Principia Mathematica. He went on to become the father of what we now know as process theology. But regarding the Bible, he was wrong on at least one count. “The total absence of humor from the Bible,” he wrote, “is one of the most singular things in all literature.” I couldn’t disagree more. The Bible is full of jokes. Or at least darkly comic situations where it’s almost impossible to suppress a rueful chuckle or sudden self-recognition in the stories of other people.

One of my favorites takes place in 1 Kings where Solomon assembles the elders in order to dedicate the Temple. The ark comes in, the tent of meeting comes in, the holy vessels come in. Sacrifices are offered. The cherubim spread their wings. And when the priests come out of the inner sanctuary they can’t see anything. The whole Temple is filled with a cloud. The whole Temple is filled with the Glory of the Lord. And, it says, “the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud.” The priests run out the doors gasping for breath because there is too much God in the Temple! Hear what the Spirit is saying to the Church!

Paul, too, is a pretty funny character. Three weeks ago, when we were just beginning his First Letter to the Corinthians we came across that passage is beside himself with exasperation. He writes, “each of you says, “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apollos,” or “I belong to Cephas,” or “I belong to Christ.” Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one can say that you were baptized in my name. (I did baptize also the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.) Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, the spark that kindled the wildfire of gospel across the ancient world, who baptized probably more people than anyone in history, is thanking God that he didn’t baptize these dullards. Or maybe he did. He can’t remember. 

OK. It’s not Comedy Central, but there is some humor there isn’t there? The Corinthians have taken baptism, in which we die to our individual identity and become pledged in solidarity to one another and all of creation, and turned it into a badge of status, a marker of membership. My baptism is better than yours na-na na-na boo-boo. The sacrament dying to our old ways of securing our identity and arbitrating who’s in and who’s out has ironically been turned into yet another way of reinforcing that very identity, that notion of “us” and “them.”

In today’s portion of the First Letter to the Corinthians Paul is still banging away at this. He can’t let it go. It drives him absolutely crazy that the light that enlightens the nations (the gentiles) and the people Israel, has been turned into a yardstick for determining insider and outsider, haves and have nots. “For as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving according to human inclinations? For when one says, “I belong to Paul,” and another, “I belong to Apollos,” are you not merely human?

When we say, “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apollos,” are we not merely human? Merely human. What a phrase! Paul is reminding us that belonging to one group or other, pledging allegiance to this versus that, traps us into something less than the fullness of our calling which is to be without boundary, without dividing line, without a sense of “us” versus “them.” We are one in Christ Jesus, but so often we circle the wagons, hide ourselves away from our kin, and huddle up in fear with people who look and sound and vote and worship like us.

When we peg our identity on belonging to some human-created group or organization, the irony is that we actually aren’t fully human. We’re merely human. We cling to membership and privileged status as insider of a particular group--family, country, religion, political party--and we open ourselves to manipulation by monarchical, dictatorial and authoritarian forms of persuasion. But to be on the spiritual journey, to journey into love, to learn to be without boundary, requires the gradual dismantling is this limited sense of identity. Who we are is neither slave nor free, Jew nor Greek, male nor female. 

The life of discipleship--daily prayer, weekly worship in community, staying closely in companionship with the person of Jesus as he is revealed in the Gospels, serving others in the spirit of sacrificial love--calls all that into question. Slowly, slowly, slowly, it dawns on us that who we are is not derived from membership in something merely human--some group, some family, some church, some political party. Who we truly are arises from someplace else entirely. It’s not of human origin. Who we truly are burbles up as sheer gift--the gift of our gratuitous belovedness. It’s not that we love God, but that God first loved us (all of us). We are loved into loving--a loving that that sees not “Paul” or “Apollos,” not “us” or “them” but the true nature of every person and creature we encounter--Christ playing in a thousand places. 

If we think back to life in the Corinthian house church to whom Paul is writing, it’s easy to see that fear, competition and rivalry are rampant in the community. When they bump into each other in the market they don’t greet each other with a kiss, but with suspicion. Are you one my team, or are you someone I have to be wary of? Perhaps a contemporary analogy might be to the French Resistance when it was being infiltrated by the Nazi spy networks. Nobody trusted anybody. Fear reigned. Behind every encounter was the possibility of betrayal. True meeting of the other as other, true welcome of the stranger as stranger, was replaced by a cold, measuring, assessment of to whom this person really belonged.

So that kind of mindset, in the language of Deuteronomy, is really the way of death. But what’s the alternative? What might it mean to “choose life” instead?” What is the way beyond the merely human “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apollos” kind of dualistic, binary, thinking? Rowan Williams, in his masterful little book Being Disciples provides us with a different way forward.

He writes that the basic disposition of the disciple,of the one following Jesus down the Way of Love, is one of attentive, listening, expectant, awareness. When we live in this way--openness to the possibility of God working in and through each person and situation we encounter--we ask a different sort of question from, “Are you with me or are you against me?” 

It can’t be said too often that the first thing we ought to think of when in the presence of another…. Individual or… community is: what is Christ giving me through this person, this group…. ‘What is Jesus Christ giving me here and now?’ Never mind the politics, the hidden agenda, or anything else of that kind; just ask that question and it will move you forward a tiny bit in discipleship. Can we live in a Church characterized by expectancy towards one another of that kind? It would be a very deeply biblical and gospel-shaped experience of the Church if we could (9).

Instead of suspicion and fear driving an encounter, the question that Williams wants us to ask--”What is Jesus Christ giving me here and now?”--nudges us into a place beyond belonging where our attention is not on human allegiances, but on what God is doing in and through this encounter. So often, our experience of others is determined by our attachment to preferences, likes and dislikes. We hold tight to what we like and push away what we don’t. The trouble is when we hold on, our fists are clenched, unable to receive the what further gifts God wishes to bestow. And when we pull back or push away in aversion to what is, we huddle up in little room and miss the fact that we are always standing in the courts of Lord (Psalm 84).

Williams’ question, “What is Jesus Christ giving me here and now?” is a beautiful little question we can ask ourselves at different points throughout the day. At dinner with our friends. In an interminable church meeting. After a contentious phone call with the cable company. On a walk. In the midst of illness, or in the wake of a heart-rending loss. And the trick is not to try to answer the question too quickly, but just to sit with it, to let it question you. What happens is really astounding. We move, over time, from a posture of grabbing on or avoiding to an open-handed acceptance of God as God is in the sacrament of the present moment. We start to live from a place of giftedness and gratefulness. Not a happy clappy gratefulness that plasters a smile over our suffering. But a salty, seasoned gratefulness that catches a glimpse of the beauty, goodness, and truth of God even in the midst of difficulty. Asking the question wakes us from our ruminative slumber and  open us to the possibility, the reality, that surely God is in this place and I did not know it. That God is near. That all is held in the loving gaze of God who whispers, “Do not be afraid” in our anxious ears. The great Sufi poet Rumi writes of this in his poem, “The Guest House,”

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
For some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.