Sermon for Independence Day, transferred -- July 3, 2022
Matthew 5:43-48
Today, we’re celebrating Independence Day
(one day early) – not just a national holiday but a feast day on The Episcopal
Church’s calendar, too.
As you may have learned in Confirmation
class or our Discovery class, the United States and The Episcopal Church share
some parallels in their origin stories. In
both cases, the presenting circumstance was conflict – and lots of it. By 1787, the 13 new states faced differences that
had been obscured by the unifying force of revolution. Would the large states get to bully their way past
the smaller ones on policy questions?
Would white Americans be allowed to keep enslaving other humans – and,
if so, how would the enslaved people be counted in determining representation? You probably remember all this from high-school
civics class, but what we may not feel is the sense of division and conflict
that burdened the founders. Drawing up the
Constitution had the potential to be less like a committee meeting and more
like survival of the fittest.
Two years later, also in Philadelphia, representatives
of what had been the Church of England were meeting to figure out how to be the
Church of England when you’re not in England anymore. But their issues ran much deeper than simply
editing out the prayers for King George and the clergy’s oaths of allegiance to
the Crown. Their divisions were similar
to the ones playing out among the founders two years before.
There were two basic positions about how the
ex-Church of England should govern itself.
High-church leaders in the Northern states mistrusted popular governance
and wanted bishops to retain control. Many
of them had also been loyalists in the Revolution, something the patriots hadn’t
forgotten. At the same time, lower-church
leaders in the mid-Atlantic and Southern states wanted to do away with bishops
and hang onto the considerable power wealthy laypeople exercised in the
parishes of the South.2
In both conventions, church and
state, the conflict was about power.
And, in both conventions, that conflict was resolved through compromise. The people building a new government and the
people building a new Church chose to solve problems along with those
who opposed them, rather than vilifying them and seeing them as enemies. Now, what they created certainly wasn’t
perfect – especially the U.S. Constitution’s continuing slavery and counting enslaved
people as three-fifths human. Thankfully,
a revision process was built into the system, too. But both the American Constitution and The
Episcopal Church came into being because people who disagreed with each other
took on the discipline of listening, finding common ground, and compromising
for the greater good – even if what they built wasn’t perfect.
“Perfect” … that’s a word we heard in
today’s Gospel reading, too – and a scary word for those of us who are recovering
perfectionists. This call to be “perfect”
concludes a truly challenging reading in which Jesus tells us to love even
those we can’t imagine loving – our enemies.
Now, it might be easy for us to write off today’s
reading, thinking, “Well, that’s a nice idea, Jesus, but you’ve gone too far this
time. We all know we can’t be
perfect – it’s impossible. So, loving
our enemies can just fall into the category of a Scriptural bridge too far. If I can’t do it, why try?”
Sorry, but we don’t get off that
easily. The Greek word translated here
as “perfect” doesn’t mean error-free. It
means “whole, complete, [or] mature.”1 And working toward that kind of perfection, the
journey of growing into “the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Ephesians
4:13) – that’s definitely on our assignment list. In fact, you could argue that, for
Christians, it is our assignment list.
Striving for that kind of perfection was
also at the top of the list for the founders of the country we celebrate today. Being whole, complete, and mature as a nation
– forming a “more perfect union” – that’s the Constitution’s primary reason for
being. It says so, right there in the
Preamble.
So that journey of forming a more perfect
union, or the journey of becoming whole and complete and mature in following
Jesus – what does a journey toward perfection look like? I think the founders of our nation and our
Episcopal Church – maybe even Jesus himself – would say that becoming more
perfect starts with listening to the people you don’t want to hear. It’s the most fundamental way to honor the
humanity of someone you’re tempted to write off, someone you’re tempted to
dismiss as your enemy.
And listening is hard work. These days, it’s countercultural work because
we live in a nation of uncivil discourse.
But we did some of that hard work of listening here last year, offering
a class on civil discourse and then a series of listening sessions. Parishioners with vastly different points of
view came together over six evenings not to debate but simply to listen to each
other’s perspectives on racism, immigration, gun violence, inclusion of LGBTQ
people, and care of the environment. We
asked participants not just to name their positions but to talk about their
core beliefs, ethics, and values. We asked
them to share the dreams or ideals that informed their positions, or maybe the
fears underlying them. And people did it
– they took the challenge of being vulnerable both in their sharing and in their
listening. I think the folks who came
found it to be a great experience.
And now, we’re going to try it again. In this moment, we find the day’s national and
local events presenting us with a need to listen like maybe never before. The topic du jour is abortion. Not only has the Supreme Court overturned Roe,
but the half of us who live in Kansas have the responsibility to vote in a few
weeks on Amendment 2 to the state constitution, which would specify that the document
contains no right to abortion. So, on
Thursday, July 21, we’ll offer a listening session designed by members of our Advocacy
Discernment Committee, including past junior warden and professional counselor
Ann Rainey, and me. We’ll follow basically
the same model we used in the series last spring. We’ll share the vision for this exercise and set
some ground rules. Then you’ll be invited
to speak for a limited period of time, maybe three minutes, to share your
perspective on abortion policy and, specifically, Kansas’ Amendment 2. Now, I know this kind of experience, even
just me talking about it now, might be triggering for people who’ve had to
wrestle with whether to end a pregnancy.
But know this: There won’t be debate. There won’t even be discussion. What there will be is a space for holy
listening, for honoring the point of view and the full humanity of people who
think differently about a tremendously important issue.
I’d like to start that process now,
actually, with a little modeling. I want
to share what I would say if I were getting up to speak at this listening
session. It’s something I can share
simply because of my experience in this heartbreaking and beautiful role of priest
and pastor. So, here goes:
I don’t have particular expertise about
abortion or reproductive autonomy. I’ve
also never had to consider the issue personally, so that’s a perspective I definitely
can’t speak to. But one of the things
that grieves me about the abortion debate, and most of the rest of our public
discourse, is the way we reject nuance.
We are much more comfortable living in the land of “this or that,” of “right
or wrong.” And I think this obstructs our
journey toward becoming whole, and complete, and mature – as individuals, as a Church,
and as a nation.
Over the past two years, I’ve talked with three
couples who were considering ending a pregnancy not for any of the reasons often
presumed in the abortion debate – not as contraception, or because of financial
limitations, or because of the drastic changes a child brings into your
life. Instead, these families were
considering ending a pregnancy because testing had revealed that, once born,
the baby would not survive more than a brief time. The problems included genetic anomalies causing
critical organs not to develop fully. In
each case, the parents had to weigh the consequences of carrying to term a
child who would not live long at all, and then compare that with the tragedy of
choosing to end their pregnancy. None of
the couples considered this lightly, and each was devastated by their situation. The couples made different choices, two
ending their pregnancies and one carrying the fetus to term. But they had the ability to exercise the choice
that they had discerned God was leading them to make. In my view, public policy that doesn’t take
into account situations like these is public policy that needs to listen to the
nuance of lived experience, especially now that we know so much about a baby before
it’s born.
Well, there you have it – one example of what I hope will happen in our listening session on July 21. And I hope you’ll consider taking part. Alongside the Fourth of July fireworks and music and hotdogs this weekend, I think listening to people who completely disagree with us is a great way to celebrate the American experiment of representative democracy – and to celebrate the American experiment of The Episcopal Church. As Abraham Lincoln said of us at Gettysburg, so we are living now: We are a “nation conceived in liberty” but “engaged in a great civil [conflict], testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”3 And so, my prayer is that we would choose to keep pressing toward perfection, toward being whole, and complete, and mature, guided both by our Savior’s voice and “by the better angels of our nature.”4
- HarperCollins
Study Bible,
1868 (note).
- Hein, David,
and Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr. The Episcopalians. Westport, CT:
Praeger, 2004. 52-54.
- Lincoln,
Abraham. “The Gettysburg Address.” Available at: https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/gettysburg.htm.
Accessed July 1, 2022.
- Lincoln,
Abraham. “First Inaugural Address.” Available at: https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/1inaug.htm.
Accessed July 1, 2022.
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