February 28, 2010 at St Mark Church in Norman, OK
Genesis 15: 5-12,17-18 + Psalm 27 + Philippians 3: 17-4:1 + Luke 9: 28-36
It’s about glory, and not just about Jesus. What happens on that mountain provides for those present a glimpse of what they might hope for themselves. If you wanted to sum up the work of Jesus on this earth, it was simply to restore us to glory; to give us the glory of being a chosen race, a holy people who live in the presence of God. That is what happened to Jesus on that mountain top; he came into the presence of God. His mission was to take us there. Yet the truth of the matter is, there is work to do. One look at the human condition, the human family, and it doesn’t look to glorious much of the time, and we know what keeps us from glory: Sin. All of us are engaged to one degree or another in a personal, ongoing battle with sin and vice. We are seeking glory. Yet, sin is in the way. Although anger doesn’t make most of us murderers, our lust doesn’t make most of us rapists, and our greed and envy do not make most of us outright criminals, together with gluttony, arrogance, and sloth, there isn’t much glory and those who have to live with us are miserable. Our failure to live up to the glory that is ours is as tragic as the unhappiness our evil causes.
There is a social dimension to all of this as well for which we are responsible. It works its way through our commerce our entertainment, and our whole culture. Pride, greed, and anger profoundly influence domestic and foreign policy. If we truly had generous and compassionate leaders who were imbued with the value of social stewardship rather than greed and ambition, we would not have tolerated the corporate scandals we have endured in the last ten years. “Every deadly sin fuels harmful social phenomena: lust-pornography; gluttony-substance abuse; envy-terrorism; anger-violence; sloth-indifference to the pain and suffering of others; greed-abuse of public trust; and pride-discrimination.”
These sins are about what it means to be human and humane, not about what it means to be perfect or “holy.” As long as there is any trace of them in our lives, we are less that human and less than what God has made us to be. We are far from glory. This is basic stuff. It concerns the core of what we are, of what we can become, and most importantly, of what we should aspire to be. We should be in glory. In the end, the question of what we want to be has an answer most of us would quickly give: happy. We want to be happy, but happiness is not dependent upon physical or material pleasure. In fact, it is often hampered by it. Our culture teaches that pleasure and possessions are happiness with the result that pleasure is often substituted for happiness and meaning in life. No glory there. When a crisis comes along that pleasure cannot resolve a secular person runs to the psycho-therapist. It is not so for us. We have a treasure of wisdom and tradition, teaching and revelation that leads us to a life of virtue and balance, holiness and joy; that is glory! It is not that pleasure is inappropriate, but that it comes from character and virtue, and a right relationship of one’s self to others and to God. That is where we shall find pleasure, and that pleasure leads to glory.
“If we do not take seriously our capacity for evil, we are unable to take seriously our capacity for good.” There will be no taking credit for the good that we do if we fail to accept the blame for the evil. So, I am inviting you to spend three nights this week reflecting upon “The Seven Deadly Sins”. Unlike our bodies influenced by our genes; our souls, our spirit, and the lives they animate are free to be shaped by our choices. We can choose to be whole. We can choose glory. There is more and better in us than we have chosen to become. Accepting the fact that we sin is a summons to life.
We are always inventing gods. It seems to be a characteristic of our age and perhaps every age. The god most popular this day is a god who does not demand much of us, is certainly not a god that punishes, although we don’t mind a reward now and then. The sentimental god of most sappy religious pop music is a god that just pats us on the head like grandpa and sends us on our way. With a god like that, there is certainly no need to trouble one’s self about the devil but there’s the trouble. The devil’s best trick is to convince us that there is no devil.
We recognize evil in others, but if we ever want to see the face of sin, we must look in the mirror. All we see in others is it’s reflection from ourselves. The honest among us know that what we always criticize first in another is the very thing we dislike in ourselves. Sin is our secret from others. Only we know where and how deeply it has taken root in us. Saint John says: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”
When we recognize and confess that sin and our inclination toward it is a part of our nature, and that we alone will never wholly eradicate it, there is at least something for us to do in our lives that will not in the end seem just futile and absurd. We can make sense of our lives because the existence of evil presents us with moral choices, and in making those choices, we form our character. We have been given our nature, but we choose our character. When we say someone is a good man or a good woman, we do not suggest that they are people in whom there is no inclination to evil, but rather that they are people who have wrestled and still wrestle with it and never give in because their quality and their goodness comes from the struggle. Those people are truly noble. Glory is theirs.
“Morality is like art, said G.K. Chesterton, “it consists of drawing a line somewhere.” We live in an age in which no lines seem to be drawn at all, or those that have been drawn are being erased. In my 67th year of life and my 41st year as priest I have come to recognize that an unhealed wound, a kind of sinful restlessness, afflicts humanity and robs us of glory.
Almost four years ago someone gave me a copy of the newly translated Don Quixote. I’m reading it, but it’s slow going. I tried many times over my years in College to read it and gave up. This new translation is more to my liking and I may throw a party when I finish it in the next week or two! In this classic piece of literature I recognize the Knight Errant’s vain search for the impossible dream as my own. Millions of people appear to be looking for the ideal marriage partner, the perfect child, the utopian community. Some disappear into a world of alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling, or violence in an attempt to calm their restlessness, to satisfy a need that they cannot name. I am a Bruce Springsteen fan. “The Boss” wrote a song that describes our age when he sings: “Everybody has a hungry heart.” I think we are hungry for glory, hungry for the life we should have had by God’s will and God’s original plan for us. But we have traded our glory for something else, and sin is the consequence. Our hunger is for God and the glory that comes from being in God’s presence. The glory of Jesus Christ came from his willingness to suffer and in obedience to the will of his Father. Calvary was no short – cut to glory. There isn’t one. We will have no glory from a short-cut either. We cannot fill ourselves with things that do not satisfy, that do not fill us or lift us or hold us up. Yet we fool ourselves into thinking it is possible. As a result, our humanity has lost much of its real glory and beauty. It is less and less a mirror of the creator. That’s what is going on in this Gospel – on that mountain top. Those apostles saw the glory of God, the glory of God in humanity. It is possible, it is desirable. It is God’s will to have God’s glory revealed in human nature; not just his Son’s, but in all of us. I want to propose to you that if we can take our sinning seriously, we might at least find that we can be interesting again, and so can life itself, and then we shall find glory.
I invite you to give three evenings this week for the sake of the truth and glory; three evenings in this church for the sake of life itself, your life. Tonight we shall reflect upon Pride and Envy, tomorrow night Anger and Sloth, Tuesday night Greed, Gluttony, and Lust. I’ve saved the best till last! I hope to see you again for prayer tonight night when we might begin to consider how it is that we satisfy our hungers and our thirst, because “everybody has a hungry heart.”