Easter 6, Year A: Everybody Worships

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark

Easter 6, Year A

The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean and Rector

The Greek Orthodox Bishop Kallistos Ware is fond of reminding us that more than anything else, human beings are worshipping animals--Homo adorans. More than tool makers, more than thinkers, what makes us truly human, what feeds us on the journey of becoming truly human human beings, is worship. And the interesting thing is that as worshipping animals, human beings always worship someone or something. We don’t have a choice about worshipping, but we do have a choice about what to worship, about whom to worship. And what we worship matters, because the powerful thing about worship is that over time we come to resemble more and more that which we worship.

            When the boundary-crossing love of Jesus is at the center of our lives, when we dispose ourselves to God in Christ through the Holy Spirit (“Into your hands I commend my Spirit” “Let it be with me according to your word”) and allow ourselves to be built up by him and with him and in him, we gradually become a little bit more like the love we see revealed in Christ. When Jesus is worshipped as the chief cornerstone, we slowly, slowly, slowly start to resemble in our unique, unrepeatable human lives what it looks like for Love to live it’s life through us.

            And, of course, the  opposite is also true. If we worship power we’ll spend our lives worried about someone who is more powerful than we are coming along  and knocking us off our ant hill. If we worship certainty and security we might be able to pull it off for a little while, but then something like the COVID-19 pandemic emerges and “all that is solid melts into air,” as Karl Marx writes. Worship our good looks and there will come a day when those crow’s feet around our eyes are no longer able to be concealed. Worship our intellect, and we’ll have to face the inevitable time when our faculties aren’t as sharp as they once were--the book titles don’t come as quickly, and friends’ names trip on the tip of our tongue. Simply put, what we worship can either bring life, freedom, joy, gratitude, and thanksgiving, or it can hollow us out from the inside. Everybody worships, but what we worship makes all the difference between an abundant life well-lived, and what Thoreau calls so hauntingly calls  a life of “quiet desperation.”

            Episcopal priest and liturgical theologian James Farwell, likes to tell the following story to illustrate this point. 

A young man, an unsavory type, falls in love with a saintly young woman. Knowing that she will not so much as look in his direction, he slips into the vault of the town cathedral, dons one of the masks of the saints used in the annual town festival, takes on the demeanor and behavior of a saint, and begins to woo her. Surely enough, over time, she begins to fall in love with him. As the relationship flowers and deepens, the young man’s scoundrel friends finally become envious of his success with the saintly young woman and, one day, out of sheer spite, challenge him in the center of the town square, in the presence of his beloved, to take off the mask and reveal his true identity. Dejected, knowing that all is lost, he slowly removes the mask… only to reveal that his face has become the face of the saint.

This isn’t so much a boy meets girl, boy gets girl story as it is a fable that reveals the path of transformation that takes place in true worship. We become what we worship. That’s why the important thing about the Eucharist is not so much what happens to the bread and wine, but what happens to us--that we through our prayer, reading scripture, worship, service and prophetic witness become a people of mercy, and loving-kindness, a people who flow out for others like the prophet Amos’ waters, “[L]et justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (5:24)

            In our passage from Acts, Paul is standing in the Areopagus preaching to the Athenians. And what does he say? That everybody worships. That everyone has a matter of Ultimate Concern as Paul Tillich says. “Athenians,” Paul says, “I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.” Paul honors the religious impulse in the Athenians. He celebrates the natural human desire for worship and their fleeting glimpse of “the More.” He pays attention as he’s walking through Athens, and even quotes one of their own poets back to them-- “For we too are his offspring.” This is hardly the finger-wagging fire and brimstone evangelist who scolds his terrified listeners into believing.

Paul starts with the Athenians just as they are, listens to their stories, but then he begins to flesh out (literally) the picture of the “unknown god,” who cannot be contained in shrines, who isn’t made of gold or silver, or stone, who transcends even our ability to fully and finally capture Him in art or imagination. Paul is carefully and compassionately revealing for the Athenians the danger of worshipping shrines, gold, silver, stone, even art. And what is the danger? That we worship the thing, rather than the living reality to which it points. That we look for the peace, joy, and happiness for which we are made in the wrong place, someplace other than in God and God alone.

I was wondering, if Paul were walking through one of our cities, what altars, what idols, he might notice. What would he make of our shopping malls, those monuments to consumerism, those glass and steel and concrete altars to getting and spending? What would make of our tribalized national discourse where the ability to listen across party lines, to actually hear the voice of the other as other, is in shockingly short supply? What would he make of a century of near constant war and the military-industrial complex? What would he make of people willfully ignoring health recommendations designed for the common good in favor of self-styled personal freedom? What would he make of the huge disparity between haves and haves nots in this country? What would he make of the mess we’ve made of this fragile earth our island home?

That’s one way Paul’s speech to the Athenians can illuminate our contemporary moment. Paul beckons us to examine our idols. Paul asks us to examine where we’ve substituted--often unwittingly, often unconsciously--the peace, freedom, happiness and implicatedness in the lives of others that is the life of Christ,  for something else, something that makes us a little less human, something that makes is a little bit less like the community of love God is actively fashioning in Christ through the Holy Spirit. And Paul reminds us that it all inevitably comes back to knowing where to look for the rest for which our restless hearts yearn. 

Somehow, we as human beings, are always looking “out there”--in power/control, safety/security, affection/esteem--for the happiness that comes from being built up in Christ. The journey of these fifty days of Easter, of learning what it means to be an Easter people who live for and from the life of the Risen Christ, is really about gradually dismantling that outward search through the dizzying funhouse of mirrors that is life lived in pursuit of power, possessions, and prestige and learning to abide in and with the one who already abides in and with us.

That’s the truly Good News of the Gospel--that we are never left as orphans: alienated, isolated, fearful and alone. God doesn’t leave us comfortless, but comes to us in the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, the Advocate, the One who Walks Alongside. We don’t have to go anywhere to find this life-giving reality. We don’t even really have to “do” anything except give up the hubris of thinking that our efforts will somehow enable us to reach the place where we actually already are and grace abounds. “Though indeed,” Paul writes, “he is not far from each one of us.” And by “not far,” Paul means closer than our self, closer than thinking, closer than our breath, closer even than consciousness itself.

The great 14th century female mystic and poet Lalla puts it this way, “I have travelled a long way seeking God, but when I finally gave up and turned back, there He was, within me.” Those idols of which Paul speaks, trick us into looking “out there” for what has already been freely given. Those idols, when worshipped, trap us in cycles of fear, scarcity, lack, and loneliness. Those idols make us forget our neighbors, or worse, see them as inconvenient threats to doing whatever we please. The call of the Gospel is always to come home. To give up, turn back and find Him where he always was. To rest. To receive and live from the gift. To come home to the one who has made His abode in us and abide in him that we might be built up in love and be that boundary-crossing, bridge-building love for others.