When Divorce is not an option - Our collective hardness of heart
Oct 08, 2009
Rt. Rev. Gregory Rickel
"When Divorce is not an option - Our collective hardness of heart," a sermon given by the Rt. Rev. Gregory Rickel, Bishop of the Diocese of Olympia, Seminary of the Southwest trustee and member of the Class of 1996, given on October 8, 2009, in Christ Chapel
Job 1:1, :1-10 and Mark 10:2-16
O source of surrender, your whisper of peace is as close as our breath,
yet you have made us with bodies that reach beyond our own skin.
Gazing upon ourselves we are not right,
but in the face of another our eyes do glean hope.
For when we turn from exclusion and into embrace,
you are embodied in the world and the world in your body.
May we cease to put asunder what you have joined together,
for until we give way to your love there will be no peace.
That prayer was offered by one of the House of Bishop's Chaplains, Carol Wade, after a particularly tense session of the House at General Convention. I felt it was a keeper and that it fit here today as well.
These readings gave me pause. Where do I begin. I was reminded of a quote I read that was reportedly from the third Bishop of Olympia Stephen F. Bayne who once said. "I am rather like a mosquito in a nudist camp. I know what I ought to do, but I don't know where to begin."
These readings would clearly not be used to support the position, "if it feels good, do it." If anything they seem to point to the imperfectness, probably not a word, the imperfection in the human endeavor of living. One might sum that up by saying, it always looks better on paper. We definitely see the push and pull of two worlds, worlds as real today as they were then, skin for skin, dog eat dog.
The short story might be that good news is often bad before it's good, that sometimes what does not feel good is exactly what we need. Actually these readings are filled to the brim with every notion, complaint, debate, suspicion, reservation, concern, reluctance, ambivalence, that exists about the Church and this thing we call Christianity.
No doubt, here in the midst of these readings we have a rather alive and well tension which still exists among Christians, the tension between what Jesus and God said, and what Jesus and God does. Our offerings today remind us that circumstances and context often do require different responses from compassion. The real story here is not the specifics but instead what led to them in the first place, the hardness of heart, the lack of compassion, the inability to find equality in relationship. Gordon Swope, who once haunted these halls said to me while I was a seminarian here, "Orthodoxy is when your doxy and my doxy agree." We see this played out in our collective life when we are bold enough to say the Holy Spirit was at work because we got our way, and amazingly able to say the opposite when it doesn't.
I don't know about you but the Gospel seems fairly clear to me that sometimes the news the Holy Spirit brings does not seem good, and by the world's standards may never be good, but are we able to take in the fact that it might just be right. There seems to be an amazing unwillingness to accept the harder news as being news we might need to hear. CS Lewis himself had spoken out sharply about this passage, that divorce was wrong for a Christian, until he met and fell in love with a divorced woman. He then had to rethink, although he ran into many in the church, even some priests he asked to marry them, shocked at their unwillingness to do so, even though they were living up to his teaching.
But, considering those who are here today in this room, and looking at these readings, I wanted to look at this for what it means to the larger church.
There is a story from Patricia Hampl's Virgin Time where a professor takes a group of students to the Basilica of St. Mary of the Angels in Assisi, and in the crossing there is the Porcincula, St. Francis' favorite church. Francis lay down and died just a few feet from this little church. The professor has the students look up at the huge basilica now surrounding the little chapel and says, "that is Christendom." Then has the students touch the Porcincula and says, "this is Christianity." The heart if you will, with the "hardness" built around it.
Perhaps our call is to see how this plays out for us daily. I was in a bit of a debate with an older gentleman a few months back. His local congregation had to decide on a very bold possibility for its future which might include the church, the physical building, not being there. He argued many points and once he was simply tired of arguing he stated boldly, I don't want to do it because I intend to be buried at that altar. It was all I could do not to ask him if we could schedule that sooner rather than later!
But it points to a concern I have about us. While we say we welcome all, we want to change, we know we have to be different, many of our congregations and institutions sabotage at every turn anything that may challenge them. We operate in many cases as if the neighbors' right outside our door don't even exist. Even with all the talk of mutuality and community discernment I have to say I still run into folks that believe that candidacy for the priesthood is a reward for a particularly good Cursillo! I know I am being cynical, but I am thinking we might have to be in order to break out of this state we are in. And we would do well not to forget, before we get too high and mighty, that we are the very souls making up those congregations and institutions.
We have got to question if we have hidden our heart with the façade designed to make it more comfortable for ourselves, .....as long as we feel OK, it must be right. This lack of self reflection is a deadly road for us, because it sets up this hardness of heart, the blindness which keeps us from the world.
This past winter my family and I got back into snow skiing and believe me I had not been on skis for 15 years so it was quite a sight. When I finally thought I had mastered it again, I headed to the ski lift and got on with a snowboarder that had to be about 25 years old. He and I lived up to the social contract in the Northwest, not talking to one another, "the ride is short, we do not have to pretend to be long lost friends, let's just get through this shall we?"
But, fortunately, the ski lift suddenly stopped, something that usually quickly resumes, and it didn't, and so in our nervousness, we began talking and he asking where I was from, (you know my accent still gets a lot of notice among all those Fins, and Swedes!) Well finally, he got to the inevitable question, one I just really still, am a bit nervous about, especially when you have someone trapped on a ski lift, 40 feet above the mountain. He asked, "So, what do you do?"
Now, I have been known to answer this by saying, "I am in sales." But, I decided to go ahead, I told him, "I am a Bishop." "What's a bishop?" he asked. I replied, "I have no idea, I am still trying to find out myself!" And then we had a good conversation that ended with this, him saying to me, "you know, I don't have anything against Christianity, or Christians. In fact, I don't know one religious person. No one in my family, no one in my life, I just don't know anyone who is. But what I see of it does not sound like anything I have heard it is supposed to be." He seemed to know the heart but was not able to see it through the façade around it.
I probably should not tell you all this, but Mondays are my day off, and on that day my wife and I have a routine. We both get on the water taxi or the bus and ride into downtown Seattle so we can sit at the bar at our favorite restaurant. It has great food and all of that, but more than that, we know all of the servers, and we know the bartender especially. He has become a friend, a good part of our life. We met the first time we were there. My wife and I were enjoying a glass of wine when he came by to ask if we wanted another. I told him I was thinking about it. He said, "hey, go ahead there aren't any priests around here!" And he walked off. When he came back I had my business card strategically placed on the table. He still has it. We developed a good friendship. I sat at that bar one day and talked to the person next to me, who told me that he just felt that Christianity, it seems, had forgotten who it is, that they seem to fight more with each other than helping the world. Even the Pope said not too long ago, no one wants to come to a Church that is angry and divided.
Well, that is our Church, the snowboarder, the bar mate, the bartender, that is where we have to be. They are not to be dismissed as the great unwashed, the unenlightened, ignored as irrelevant. They are exactly why we exist.
Everyone in this room has heard this sermon a million times! We all know this intuitively and yet it is so very difficult to put into action.
We are in perhaps one of the largest shifts in identity and beingness the Church has seen in at least 500 years. We will not be like we are today for very much longer. You, here in this place, study to lead this Body in that change. The Faculty and Board work to see that change.
I am more and more seeing this as a time to discern what must come along with us, and I do believe there are things very well needed, very ancient, our heart, like the Porcincula, but it will also mean leaving some things behind, and that is the hard part, giving up being "buried at the altar," peeling back the façade.
I am convinced the metrics are all going to be different, what we measure, what we choose to put energy toward. I am worried, because I see us instead mired in skin for skin, dog eat dog, being right. Something has to give. This is not the example that will lead souls to follow the Way. It is instead a way of setting up our own comfortable nest, which is not what we were called to do. It is our hardness of heart, in these days.
We cannot simply dismiss each other. Making this seminary a place where that vision of the Church can exist is no small thing. It will take some of the boldest and gutsiest decisions ever.
This Gospel, and the story for Job for that matter, is not a story of some other time. It is not, even, a story about divorce. It is a story about how we approach the inauthenticity between what we say, and what we do, in how we expect the world to live, and how we live ourselves. This story is about us. It is about our blindness that comes from the façade we put around our hearts, individually and collectively, in order to be comfortable, sometimes even to be decisive, to be right, at the expense of losing the world, and maybe even our very souls.
