February 9, 2025 Sermon

St. Anne’s Episcopal Church - Damascus, MD

February 9, 2025

Fr. Jon Musser, Rector

In the name of Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Have you ever had the experience of being on the top of the world, having everything or having achieved everything you’d set your eyes on, and yet still somehow in some way feeling a void or an emptiness? I recognize that I am making this out to be some grand and melodramatic thing, but in truth I suspect most of us have had some sense of this phenomenon even in more mundane circumstances. The great achievement that feels somehow hollow, or the material acquisition that just doesn’t fulfill us in the way we expected it would.

I feel like this is an often unacknowledged or under-acknowledged element of our Gospel passage today. Our attention can be drawn to the miracle of the fish or the eventual reaction of dropping everything to follow Jesus, but I think it’s important to put the two together and find the in-between space: that moment that Simon, maybe presumably Andrew too (he’s only mentioned once in the whole of Luke’s gospel), James, and John are all at the absolute pinnacle of their professional success. Who knows how much this haul of fish might have brought in for them and their families; and yet! They drop everything and walk away. They  are so radically transformed by the experience that they abandoned their greatest success in the moment of its achievement. Now, the question I posed rhetorically has a kind of… let’s say melancholy to it - a disappoint in the moment of success - that seems absent in the text we hear today, but I think the truism that nevertheless remains is that this: that this worldly abundance, this great success, is immediately is unmasked in the shallow, fleeting joy that it brings. And it presents us with an opportunity to ask of ourselves how can we too abandon the fickle joys of the world - even those that bring us great meaning and fulfillment for the greater and more lasting joy of the kingdom of God?

This morning I want to play with some sense of the juxtapositions we find in our readings today. Thematically, we have some similar tensions playing out between Isaiah, 1 Corinthians, and Luke. In each juxtapositions play out between humility and power, grace and service, things of the world and things of the kingdom.

Our passage from Isaiah 6 is Isaiah’s initial vision of God’s in-breaking presence at a time of great tumultuousness in Israel. As the great Old Testament scholar JJM Roberts observes, “Isaiah assumed that God had founded Zion/Jerusalem, lived in it, and hence would ultimately save it. Nevertheless, since the holy God would not live in a moral slum, a morally defiled Jerusalem must be purified by judgment before the city could be saved.”

Broken obedience had given way to distance and disconnection. God was inaugurating the reclaiming his people and his city, but this reclamation required return and transformation. The blessing brought forth humility, and the humble of heart became the vessels through which the coming kingdom was announced.

In all three of our narratives today, the place of transformation - the inbreaking of grace -  begins with brokenness and humility

“Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” says Isaiah.

“… as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.” Says Paul “9For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. 10But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain.”

“Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” Proclaims Peter, to which Jesus replies, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.”

Each of these occurrences might seem to be - in the old parlance of summer camp / mission trip / retreat weekend lingo - that proverbial mountain top experience - the height of human engagement with God, and yet in each moment, the encounter with God immediately calls forth great humility, awareness of brokenness, and an invitation into new life.

In talking about all of this with you all this morning, I want to introduce a theologian that you all are going to be hearing A LOT from in the next few years. And, lest you think I’m making a political statement here, please rest assured that I have gone through this cycle before and frankly come back out of the desert to the oasis of his knowledge every six or seven years.

William Stringfellow was a lifelong Episcopalian who was born in 1928 and died in 1985. He was a lawyer and lay theologian by background - which simply means that he did not have official theological training - but his prolific career and intense concern for 1) biblical engagement, and 2) resistance towards the powers and principalities of this world - led to his being such a profound voice in Christian circles that academic theologians have now becomes scholars of his work.

Stringfellow grew up with working class roots in Northampton Massachusetts, and achieved the great honor of attending Bates College in Lewiston Maine, which was the country’s premier college for rhetoric and debate at the time. After graduating, he earned a scholarship to continue his studies at the London Schools of Economics and then eventually earned a law degree at Harvard University. But none of these achievements gave him a lasting sense of fulfillment, and so in 1964 he moved into a tenement slum in East Harlem and became a street lawyer. However, even from his law school days he was more interested in theology and would very often only do law to the point extent that it would allow him to operate as a theological change agent in the world around him. Eventually, his entire career would become focused on matters of theology, frequently over and and against worldly concerns of law and institutional stability.

By most accounts, I think William Stringfellow is often viewed today as a person of the left and a historical relic of the liberal elitist era of mid-century Christian progressivism, however in truth he was always much more complicated than that and was as stridently concerned about the Kingdom of God above all else, and time and time again again he called people back to a focus both on humility and grace and the places of death in the world into which the  in-breaking Kingdom of God comes. In reflecting on his time in New York City he once observed (apologies for the language):

I was working as a lawyer in East Harlem. In that urban context with death institutionalized in authorities, agencies, bureaucracies, and multifarious principalities and powers, slowly I learned something which folk indigenous to the ghetto know: namely, that the power and purpose of death are incarnated in institutions and structures, procedures and regimes—Consolidated Edison or the Department of Welfare, the Mafia or the police, the Housing Authority or the social work bureaucracy, the hospital system or the banks, liberal philanthropy or the corporate real estate speculation. In the wisdom of the people of the East Harlem neighborhood, such principalities are identified as demonic powers because of the relentless and ruthless dehumanization which they cause.  During my years in East Harlem, I became sufficiently enlightened about institutionalized death so that death was no longer an abstraction confined to the usual funereal connotations. I began then and there to comprehend death theologically as a militant, moral reality.

This is what I mean about him being complicated. I suspect almost everyone one of us squirm at at least one of those categories or institutions being called a demonic power of dehumanization, but there we are. Stringfellow doesn’ just leave us hanging though. He offers a constructive turn. He continues:

…The task is to treat the nation within the tradition of biblical politics—to understand America biblically—not the other way around, not (to put it in an appropriately awkward way) to construe the Bible Americanly. There has been much too much of the latter in this country’s public life and religious ethos. There still is. I expect such indulgences to multiply, to reach larger absurdities, to become more scandalous, to increase blasphemously as America’s crisis as a nation distends.

For something written over 50 years ago, this observation has some incredible prescience for this present moment. I think the question before us today, is what is the constructive turn for us in the immediacy of this time? One of the truths that I think we have to acknowledge is that a significant majority of Americans, no matter how they vote, feel that things are not well. Poll after poll has found that no matter how much of a shining city on the hill we may idealistically view ourselves - like Isaiah, the majority of us have been looking around for some time and saying, things don’t seem right. To frame this question biblically, I think we are at that point where we are asking ourselves: with all the riches and material wealth of the world, why are we left unfulfilled? Why are we still longing for something more? And the answer is clearly before us: we have lost our sense of biblical politic - we have construed the bible americanly.

Let me give you one example that I really really struggle with. For over a decade now, I have been involved in work intimately related to international development. The connections and intersectionalities between institutions of Anglican international development and USAID alone are myriad, to say nothing of other development organizations and work. I have been absolutely gutted by the way the funding lapses have impacted initiatives and efforts that I have long supported. And frankly I, along with some other Christian leaders with whom I would vehemently disagree, am outraged. This moment creates strange beadfellows. And yet… and yet just two days ago on Friday, I was completely caught off guard, brought up short, by an article run in the Living Church magazine which interviewed two of our cousins in the Anglican Church of Kenya.

Archbishop Jackson Sapit, the head of the Anglican Church of Kenya - one of our sister provinces in East Africa - had some incredibly challenging words of admonition to us in our context here. Speaking of the USAID disruption, he said,

“It should have been done gradually, especially for critical areas like health, until we have the capacity to support ourselves… but let us be disrupted so that we think properly and manage our resources properly.”

And then later in the article professor Wandia Njoya 

“I think the lesson here isn’t Trump or insane U.S. liberals. It’s that we must learn,” she said. “Please, Kenyans. We must learn about the world. Only we can develop our own countries. The commitment of the American empire is that we don’t. We have to understand this fundamental truth to understand why the U.S. needed this monster called development aid.”

And that just makes me cringe. I am so uncomfortable reading that because it's so violating what good I thought we were doing in this world - the ways in which I saw the work of this kind of initiative to be the work of the Kingdom and I'm not saying that it isn/t  things are not always so black and white and very often very frequently we can be brought up short even when we think we are doing the things As we acknowledge and live into the anxiety the uncertainties that were Even as the structures and institutions of the world around us falter fall or transformed that in the midst of that that we might see the kingdom warful that we might recognize In This Moment call to reorient ourselves ever or biblically in a world that is so correct of a Biblical Witness and may we have the humility to step back to reorient ourselves things of the Kingdom be the prophetic witness and voice of God's love of God's compassion God that may make us humble that may present us with opportunities and experiences hold on I'm almost done And to turn and follow our Lord and do this next phase of life in the name of the father and of the son and of the Holy Spirit amen