Homily preached at Evensong at Christ Church
Greenwich, Connecticut
April 30, 2020 / Eve of St Philip & St James
John 12:20-26
In the Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Last Saturday night I fell asleep too early and missed a Zoom call whose cheerful topic was heroes. Who are your heroes? What makes you admire them?
I must admit that this question caught me up a bit short. My heroes really are few and far between. Mainly this has to do with my rather dim view of human nature, part of which I assume has to do with growing up in the 1990s, learning daily about the lurid and rather sad sexual adventures of the leader of the free world. Nothing and no one is sacred.
And yet, as Christians, we are asked to revere the saints, to think them worthy of especial honor and emulation. Tomorrow, the church commemorates St Philip and St James the Less. They are two of the minor apostles, to be sure. We don’t hear very much about them. But there are others about whom we perhaps know too much. St Peter denied our Lord, three times, right after cutting off the right ear of the chief priest’s slave! St Paul was cantankerous and opinionated. We have met our heroes, and they are not everything we might have hoped.
So what gives?
I think this question of heroes has come very much to the fore in recent years, and at the risk of sounding like a fogey, it inversely corresponds to the general collapse not of churchgoing per se, but of the disappearance of a kind of theological fluency. The basic Christian settlement is not that everyone is basically wonderful except for tiny occasional slips, but that we are all sinners in need of salvation. Not bad people, just imperfect and given to error. That view has fallen on hard times, despite being basically provable just by waking up in the morning.
And we so long to find the perfection of humanity! Our heroes, the people we know who are prominent, who have succeeded in their generations, seem like characters worthy of emulation, characters who hold within themselves the secret to what we ourselves lack. But no human can survive the scrutiny that demands perfection.
Wikipedia’s entry says that a “hero” is a person “who, in the face of danger, combats adversity through feats of ingenuity, courage, or strength.”[1] Those dangers can be spiritual as well. A hero may be admired for qualities of holiness and piety. But nowhere do these definitions suggest perfection, and as far as the heroes of the church go, the saints, I’m happy to say, are imperfect.
That doesn’t mean that they have nothing to teach us. Quite the opposite.
Near the start of Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, our hero, Frodo, and Gandalf the Grey have the following exchange:
‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo.
‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’[2]
Today we remember two apostles. We do not remember them because they were perfect. We do not remember them because they were loveable, or because they were the greatest. We remember them because they were faithful. With the time that was given them, they showed people Jesus. They pointed to the only hero worth worshipping, the only ever perfection of the human creature, and said, “follow him.” That’s our task too. We are not asked to be perfect. We are asked to be faithful, sharing with everyone we meet the love of God that is in Jesus Christ.
What will we do with the time that is given us? Which hero will we worship? And whom will we emulate, as we face the days ahead?
AMEN.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero
[2] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (New York: Ballantine Books, 1973), 82.