Homily preached at Evensong at Christ Church
Greenwich, Connecticut
April 6, 2020 / Holy Monday
John 12:1-11
In the Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The writer Casey Cep published a piece in the New Yorker at the end of March, as the coronavirus restrictions were coming into full force. Like your preacher, Cep holds a master’s degree in Divinity from Yale. Unlike your preacher, Cep was a Rhodes Scholar, giving her the distinction of being one of the few divinity graduates to have been a Rhodes Scholar. But never mind that.
Here is what she writes:
Worship has always been a time when I felt myself turned outward to others. There are many definitions of sin and as many preachers willing to expound on them, but I’ve always liked the one that Martin Luther borrowed from St. Augustine: incurvatus in se. If to sin is to be turned in on one’s self—a thoroughly modern and anthropologically astute idea—then worship is one obvious antidote. I’ve certainly experienced it that way. Church is where I go to be reminded that the world is full of other people, and that their needs and desires are every bit as urgent and real as mine, and not just of those gathered in the sanctuary but of those around the world.[1]
Worship is a term that usually leads to come confusion in churches. I have been in countless conversations—in this and many other churches—where the liturgical services rendered to God and the acts of mercy and charity that we render to others are seen as competition for the attention and resources of the faithful.
That’s a false dichotomy, and it did not begin with us.
We hear Jesus address this old fight in our second lesson this evening. “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” On the one hand, as people with hope, we worship the Lord who died and rose again, asserting the final victory of God over the forces of evil and death. That’s Jesus, and that’s the good news. That’s why we’re here tonight, and gathering over cable and fiber optic to pray and give praise to God is part and parcel of our Christian life. It is one way of reminding ourselves that God is God, and we are not.
And yet Jesus’ saying that “the poor will always be with you,” is not a get out of jail free card to self-indulgence. The poor of many stripes will always be with us, and our worship goes hand in hand with our obligations to the less fortunate. But context here matters: Jesus is speaking to Judas, who the text notes doesn’t care at all about the poor. Judas is in this for his malign reasons, and Jesus reminds us not to be railroaded by those who use the poor as props, who would shame Mary’s beautiful and heartfelt offering to her Lord.
I don’t know whether Casey Cep had this in mind when she wrote the article, but “worship” is not just something that happens in a church building, or on our computer screens. The word translated as “worship” in the New Testament connotes a spirit of piety and reverence on the part of a person or community, and this is not just a liturgical or ritual thing.[2] It also describes acts of justice and charity.[3] “Worship,” therefore is not just anointing Jesus’ feet with expensive perfume; it is also tending to the poor who will always be with us. Worship necessitates a 180° turn away from ourselves and toward God and our neighbors, which is the same motion.
One of the awful things about our current situation is that we are isolated. Many of us are fortunate to be with our families, but whether with our families or alone, we are cut off from the normal connections with and amongst friends, neighbors, co-workers, classmates. Isolation makes us uneasy, but not merely because “we are social creatures”; our physical distance from one another is a kind of embodied expression of the spiritual wasteland that is sin. And grief is a good response. Grief, and anger. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve found myself shouting into the telephone over the past couple of weeks. Cheryl, I’m sorry about that, by the way.
In these times, God does not ask us to be perfect, and that’s good, because perfection is not within our grasp.[4] What we are asked to be is faithful. Faithfulness is about the whole disposition of the self; faithfulness is a 180° turn away from grief and fear and sorrow and shame, and toward God, whether in the service that happens inside the church or the service that happens outside the church.
Casey Cep is right: worship is the antidote to the isolation of circumstance and of sin. To worship therefore is to move excurvatus ex se, from the self, outward. If you are here tonight, via whatever medium, you have already begun that movement. May it continue—with God’s help—in each of us this Holy Week as we move toward the Cross, the grave, and the resurrection that we await on Easter Day.
Amen.
[1] Casey Cep, “The Gospel in a Time of Social Distancing,” New Yorker, March 29, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/news/on-religion/the-gospel-in-a-time-of-social-distancing
[2] John 4:20, 12:20; Acts 8:27, 24: 1
[3] James 1:27. See also: Andrew McGowan, “Worship and the ‘Mission-shaped’ Church,” in Ancient and Modern: Anglican Essays on the Bible, the Church, and the World (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2015), 183.
[4] The word that usually gets rendered into English as “perfect” in Matthew 5:48 is τέλειοι, from τέλειος; the sense of the word is not perfect as in “flawless,” but “having reached its end, i.e. complete,” which is the sense of τέλος, and by extension “perfect,” or “perfect of its type.” Mature or complete are equally fair renderings.