July 21, 2024 • The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
The Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity • Paris, France
Text: Ephesians 2:14: “For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.”
Let me begin by congratulating all of us for being here this morning. Especially all of us who made it here from the Left Bank today. If you are joining us from the comfort of your home this morning—and some of you may be doing that from right here in Paris—you may be looking forward to all the pageantry and excitement of the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics, which will take place here on Friday evening. But we who are living here, well, it’s a little different for us. The good news is, our cathedral is right near the heart of all the action. And the bad news is, well, our cathedral is right near the heart of all the action.
I know that I am among friends when I preach to a summer congregation in Paris in the midst of the siege of the Olympics. But I must confess to you, friends, that I don’t much like what it is I have to say this morning. I do not necessarily have comfortable words to offer you today.
Now having said that, I need to say as well that just because I don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s wrong. On the contrary, the more I have prayed with these texts in this moment the more I have felt compelled, and just maybe convicted, by the message I find in them. The job of the preacher, any preacher, is not always to provide you with assurance or affirmation. Yes, it is true that God’s love is unconditional and accepting, but that is not the only truth. If it were, we probably wouldn’t need church.
I don’t mean to be mysterious. Let me start with the Collect of the Day that we prayed together. You are a dedicated congregation of church-goers, so you know that every Sunday just after we offer the song of praise we focus on a particular prayer by which the church offers to guide our prayers for the whole week. Here was the collect of the day that Dean Harlan led for us this morning:
“Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom, you know our necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking: Have compassion on our weakness, and mercifully give us those things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask….”
Okay so, God is the fountain of all wisdom—we can accept that. We have needs that God knows; okay, that’s all right. But then…we live in ignorance? Hmm. And then this: “Have compassion on our weakness.” And what’s worse, there are things we need that we can’t see and aren’t worthy to ask for.
Does any of that feel comfortable?
We are the Episcopal Church. We don’t really have a reputation for preaching to you that you are ignorant, weak, blind, or unworthy. That’s not quite our brand. We preach acceptance, affirmation, welcome, inclusion. Something feels off here. Maybe this is some other church’s prayer.
If you set aside your defenses for just a moment, though, we can glimpse the outline of truth here. Maybe we’re not prepared to acknowledge the depth of our own weakness, our own blindness, our own ignorance. But when we look out at the world, it’s hard to argue that there’s not a lot of it around. And just possibly some of it is ours.
My learned young friend Dr. Jordan Hylden, who is a priest on the staff of Saint Martin’s church in Houston, recently published these words: “I have no doubt a certain, not insignificant, proportion of my theological and political beliefs are wrong. I just don’t know what those are.”[1] That is the beginning of wisdom, so long as you start there and don’t stay there.
So what exactly is our weakness? What exactly is the weakness that God knows we need God’s compassion on, and God’s grace to overcome? What are the beliefs we fervently hold that are wrong?
There is a profound and revealing clue to this in what we heard this morning in the second lesson, from a letter that was probably written by a follower of Saint Paul to the new churches in and around Ephesus. The writer of this epistle is struggling with the limitations of mere words to express the world-changing significance of the life, death and resurrection of Christ, and not just for those of us in the church.
There is a before-and-after schema here, the world before Easter and the world after Easter. In the world before Easter, we are fundamentally divided. The epistle we heard this morning talks first about the most familiar of those divisions, the division between those who were part of the Jewish community and those who were basically the rest of the world, seen from the Jewish perspective.
Abraham’s children had the covenant code and the witness of the prophets as both the substance of and the testimony to their unique relationship with God; and the rest of the world did not. It was the most fundamental kind of division between human communities. You were either inside, or outside.
But of course that was not the only division that this early church would have known. There was the division between those who were citizens of Rome, and the vast majority of people in the Roman Empire who were without rights, without dignity, and without the protection of any law.
There was the division between the hundreds of ethnic and religious communities within the Empire, of which the Jewish people were only one. Those of you who are students of the history of Rome will know that there were even deep and dark divisions between different clans of power within the Empire itself. The world was a divided place.
The blazing insight of the Christian faith, the claim of the Christian gospel, is that all of that has been swept away by the victory of Christ over sin and death. That’s what our epistle is arguing this morning. Because by that act of love beyond comprehension, Christ has revealed something about God’s fundamental intention in creation that we had utterly lost track of: That we are, and are meant to be, one humanity. God has created us to be a single people in infinite variety of expressions, united in and by our love of God.
Now, let us admit here that we sometimes have difficulty in the Episcopal Church talking about the reality of sin. We sometimes have difficulty in our church grappling with the reality, the necessity, of the cross. We got a lot of art in our museums out of it, but we struggle with the idea of the cross as an atoning sacrifice for our sins, not least because we struggle to find the language to talk about sin at all—even here, in Europe, the part of the church where language is our specialty.
But here’s the truth revealed to us this morning: The evidence of our sin, the testimony against us, is that the sacrifice of the cross has the power to destroy the walls we have foolishly, and selfishly, built to divide us—and yet we have not accepted the consequences of that in our own lives. Because the testimony of our civic life is that we are still divided—more divided than ever.
And that it isn’t because the fact of Easter was insufficiently powerful to make a change. It is because we have not been sufficiently willing to accept it for what it is—to accept the demands it places on and the surpassing hope it gives us as disciples. We would rather luxuriate in our differences than join with others in our common humanity, following that simple idea that first and foremost we’re supposed to love one another.
That is no less true in France or in Germany or in Italy or in Georgia than it is in the United States. We are divided. What is more, and what is worse, we are contributors to that division.
I don’t mean by this that we are somehow part of the forces of extremism that are tearing down the institutions built by generations. I don’t mean by this that we buying into the narratives of suspicion and denigration that are used by some to make us hate others—refugees, and migrants, and the poor, and the vulnerable. We know that those are out there, and we resist them.
And yet we treasure, we cling to, the things that make us distinctive—that set us apart, or so we believe, from the rest. We love the things that make us different, and we are more likely to define ourselves in terms of those than in terms of our common humanity, much less our shared bond with all the baptized.
The great French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu described this deep tendency of ours in his classic work Distinction.[2] Bourdieu was persuaded that the power differential between classes in society was maintained and strengthened by the symbolic violence of distinctions of taste. Said in different words, the way that the wealthy both create and perpetuate the idea of their privilege is by insisting on the importance of what distinguishes them—luxury goods, the latest fashions, a certain taste in music. Louis Vuitton down the street is the perfect expression of that baseless claim.
Those claims of distinction, those are the little bricks that get built up into the dividing walls we willingly build between ourselves.
Here’s the hard part, church—we are no less susceptible to this than anyone else. We love being just a little different, and when we are reminded that there is a wider world and a wider church we are part of, we plead our distinctions to preserve our differences. And that is exactly how we fail to take up Christ’s offer of becoming—here’s what the text taught us—“one body through the cross, putting to death that hostility.”
I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard here, and in virtually every other congregation we have, “well, maybe that’s how it’s done elsewhere, but we’re different.” And maybe we are different. But you know, we’re actually not that different. We are part of something larger than ourselves, that has a claim on us—a claim we often reflexively reject.
I’ve often said that I learned more theology running a behavioral science laboratory than I ever did in seminary, because it was in the lab that I learned the profound truth that when it comes to human fallibility, there are no exceptions. We are all equally vulnerable to cognitive biases—even the people who study behavioral science.
Now, of course, some forms of difference are healthy and good. We are about to welcome the world here in Paris for the Olympics and the Paralympics, amazing and moving demonstrations of human athletic ability. All of the competitors have set themselves apart somehow simply by being chosen to compete on behalf of their country.
Athletic competition celebrates exactly the right kind of difference-making. There is a long literature exploring sports as a vicarious and less-violent form of national rivalry. There’s a reason why the weeks of the Olympics were traditionally a time of truce in wars. It was a time to focus on the right kinds of difference—difference in athletic capability, itself a reflection of God’s gifts.
But our desire for distinction isn’t healthy. It deceives us, more often than not. It lies at the root of our justifying discrimination against people who differ from us, for any reason. That is our enduring weakness. Those are the beliefs we get wrong. And that is the error that creates and amplifies, over and over again, the echo chambers of hostility dividing us, and gets in the way of our taking up our full part in God’s work and God’s mission.
God has chosen to make us diverse and different. That is a gift and a blessing. But God has intended those differences not as meaning-making on their own, but as a lens through which we can see the common bonds of humanity that unite us into a single beloved community—the community in which we learn that we can only find God’s truth through our collective contemplation.[3]
So we cheer on individual competitors, but collectively we admire and praise the glory of human capability. We delight in our cultures and our languages, but we give thanks for them as expressions of the single humanity we share. We value the distinctiveness of our own story as a parish, but we tell that story as one small part of the larger and wider church we are bound up with, a single household, with Jesus Christ himself as the cornerstone.
The whole world is coming to us this week. May God give us the wisdom to remember that our highest distinction is our common life as God’s children, and our greatest calling is to love with equal compassion and encourage with equal hope those who are far off and those who are near. Amen.
Sources
[1]. Jordan Hylden in Amber Noel, “Conversation Across Difference,” The Living Church (online edition), 16 July 2024; accessed at https://livingchurch.org/news/conversation-across-difference/
[2]. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (tr. Richard Nice). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984.
[3]. The idea of a community as the true locus of discernment is drawn from Josiah Royce, and particularly from his The Problem of Christianity (1913). “A community constituted by the fact that each of its members accepts, as part of his own individual life and self, the same expected future events that each of his fellows accepts, may be called a community of expectation or…a community of hope” (Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 248; quoted in Parker, Kelly A. and Scott Pratt, “Josiah Royce”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2022/entries/royce/>. Note that Royce’s notion of the “beloved community,” frequently drawn upon in contemporary discourse, was understood as ideal of Royce’s notion of human communities beyond realization in lived experience.