Proper 15C: Brother Sun, Sister Moon--The Family of All Creation
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark
Proper 15 Year C
The
Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector
At
the beginning of Luke’s Gospel, we hear those famous words that Jesus will,
“guide our feet into the way of peace” (1:79). And near the end of Luke’s
Gospel the resurrected Jesus appears among the rag-tag group of followers, eats
broiled fish, and offers a benediction of peace—“Peace be with you.” Indeed,
Luke’s Gospel has been called the Gospel of the Poor, but it could equally be
called the Gospel of Peace. What in the world then are we to make of Jesus
telling people in our passage for today that he doesn’t come to bring peace,
but division? Jesus seems to have lost the thread and gone off script. The
teleprompter is on in the fritz. Or is it?
The key thing to recognize in this passage
about Jesus bringing fire to the earth is that these are the fires of baptism.
In baptism, something dies and something rises. Something gets burned away so
that something new can emerge. And what dies in the baptism of fire and the
Holy Spirit that Jesus brings, is the old self that we were talking about a
couple of weeks ago, the false self that seeks its ground everywhere but in
God—in power, possessions, and prestige, in safety and security, in the
frenzied cultivation of affection and esteem, in the high vigilance maintenance
of power and control. In baptism, when we go under the waters, that whole way
of seeing and being in the world is washed away. That whole picture of life is
burned up in the purifying fires to make room for a new way of seeing and being
in the world—a way of seeing and being that sees with the eye of the heart, the
boundaryless eye of love.
Where the old self saw in terms of those who
are insiders and outsiders, clean and unclean, those on the top and those on
the bottom, the new self is called to realize and live from the
boundary-crossing love we see manifest in the person and world of Jesus Christ,
the one who touches the untouchable, listens to those rendered voiceless, eats
with all manner of unsavory characters, and welcomes in the spirit of radical
hospitality. Now needless to say, the kind of love, the kind of undefended
vulnerability we see enacted in Jesus’ life and mission and into which we are
called as a Cathedral community whose doors are always open and whose light is
God and God alone, that kind of love makes people nervous. And if it doesn’t,
it should!
Remember in John’s Gospel, when Mary and the Beloved
Disciple are sitting at the foot of the cross, Jesus says to Mary, “Woman here
is your son,” and to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” This is something far
more profound than Mary becoming the Beloved Disciple’s foster parent. It
signals an entirely new way of thinking about family. The old family was
constituted according to bloodlines, inheritances, family trees, and 23 &
Me DNA results. That whole way of conceiving family is reconfigured on the
cross. That whole notion of family dies on the cross and a new reality of
family emerges—a family where each of us is knit into the entire fabric of
creation—a family where we are kith and kin with the entire created order.
Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO of blessed memory used
to talk about the spiritual journey as moving through different stages of
consciousness into union and communion with God. One of those stages was what
he termed, “mythic membership consciousness.” He writes, ““Over identification
with the group is the dominant characteristic of mythic membership
consciousness. When we derive our identity from the social unit of which we are
a member, we give the group unquestioning loyalty. The sense of belonging to
something important gives us feelings of security, pleasure, and power.”
Now the trouble with this, of course, is that
we’ve made the group and its belief system—ethnic, religious, political,
social, familial etc.—the source of our primary identity. And that’s fine, as
long as we don’t stay there. If we do, we risk making the group our God, and
blinding ourselves to the reality that who we really are is to be found in God.
We make an idol of our membership in a particular group and use that as way of
separating the wheat from the chaff, the sheep and the goats. We use our
privileged insider status as a way of deciding who’s with us and who’s against
us.
The spiritual journey, walking the way of love,
putting on the mind of Christ, seeing with His eyes and touching with His
hands, is about moving past our various over-identifications and deepening our
trusting surrender to God as the true source of beauty, goodness, and truth,
the fount of all wisdom, the relationship where true happiness, joy, and peace
resides. If we can’t let go of mythic membership, then we can’t surrender to
God. And that’s the death, the fire, to which we are called in the life of
Christian discipleship: “Woman here is you son. Here is your mother.” The new
family, with no insider or outsider, is founded at the foot of cross. It’s not
that family trees aren’t important, but that they aren’t the whole picture. Our
true family, our real brothers and sisters include everyone, everywhere,
throughout time and space.
The communion of saints, that great cloud of
witnesses of which the author of Ephesians writes, is chock full of these
dramatic reconfigurations of family. Remember St. Francis stripping naked in
front of his father in the market square? Remember how in the
dilapidated Church of San Damiano, God spoke to Francis from the crucifix,
bidding him to repair the church. Francis took some bolts of cloth from his
father's warehouse, sold them, and delivered the money to the priest who lived
there to pay for the repair of the chapel. Pietro, enraged by his son's
extravagance, brought a complaint against him, which was resolved in the public
square of Assisi. When the bishop gave Francis the money and advised him to
return to his father what was his, Francis declared, "My Lord Bishop, not
only will I gladly give back the money which is my father's, but also my
clothes." He stripped off his clothes, placed the money on them, and
standing naked before the bishop, his father, and all present, announced,
"Listen, all of you, and mark my words. Hitherto I have called Pietro
Bernardone my father; but because I am resolved to serve God, I return to him
the money on account of which he was so perturbed, and also the clothes I wore
which are his; and from now on I will say, 'Our Father who art in heaven,' and
not 'Father Pietro Bernardone.'" The crowd wept in sympathy, and the
bishop covered the naked and rebellious youth with his own cloak.
Francis, of course, is one who later sings in
his Canticle of Creation of “Brother Sun” and “Sister Moon.” He sings of
“Brothers Wind and Air,” and “Sister Water.” He hymns to “Brother Fire” and
“Sister Mother Earth.” That moment of stripping naked in the marketplace, that
death to identifying solely with his wealthy, biological family as the true
source of who he is, gives birth to an all-embracing kinship with all of
creation and the most Christ-like life since Jesus. Mythic membership has
fallen away and sees a brother and a sister everywhere he turns—Cambodians,
cockatoos, and calla lilies.
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