Foolish Behavior: An Epiphany Sermon

This sermon was given by Kellogg Fellow Emily Garcia on Sunday, 23 February at the Chaplaincy. The readings are available here. The image at left is an icon of Vasily the Blessed, a Holy Fool.

“If you think you are wise in this age, you should become fools so that you may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God” (1 Corinthians 2:18b-19a). Earlier in the same letter, Paul says, “[S]ince, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (1:21, 25).

The idea that some kinds of folly or madness conceal great wisdom is very old, and very widespread. In fact you probably know some of the classic figures—the jester whose jokes conceal truth, the wily trickster whose apparent chaos hides a deeper meaning, the Zen master whose well-timed whack or insult spills someone into enlightenment. If you’ve read Tom Robbins’ Jitterbug Perfume, or seen the cartoon show Avatar: the Last Airbender, or watched that great film, Shaolin Soccer, you’ve seen some variation of the wise fool.

But Christianity has a history too of what we call “Holy Foolishness”. The Desert Fathers and Mothers are known for their puzzling Words on which they prayed and which they gave to disciples and visitors. Holy Foolishness is most pronounced in the Orthodox Church, especially in Russia, from the fourth to the seventeenth century. The yurodivy (or Holy Fool) often wandered half-clothed, humiliated, and speaking in riddles or mixed-up images. They were bewildering; their madness was ambiguous; their weakness seemed absolute but they spoke bravely to the Tsars and others with power.

In the Western Church, St. Francis is the most well-known Holy Fool. We see him now through an ennobling rose-colored lens, and forget how absurd and apparently mad his decision would’ve been—to wander, to talk to animals, to compose poems as he wore very little and ate very little and preached to people who didn’t always listen. He called himself and his followers joculatores Dei, singers and players of God, God’s clowns.

And you know, being a monk or a hermit was originally—and is again today—often perceived as being a deeply foolish path to choose. Why would you give up so much? What’s wrong with you? what’s off about you?

Holy Foolishness often prompts this question: What's off with you? The answer is that God is what’s off—or what’s especially ON, God absurdly true and absurdly wise. The Holy Fool stands simultaneously in the center of her community, and on the margins of it, and shocks people into seeing the truth.

I think all our readings today are a little bit about folly—and about what an everyday holy foolishness might look like for us. For although St. Paul’s words have been most fully illustrated and explored by some of these blessed and bewildering figures, he wasn’t writing to an impressive elect—Paul was writing to the many people in the many house-churches in Corinth, and his words are for us too.

So how can we be holy fools?

This excerpt from Leviticus has some of the best examples from that book of the foolishness of God compared to worldly wisdom. Leave the edges of your fields, leave some of your vineyards—leave the edges of your hard work, your hard-earned food, for those who have nothing, who are foreign to you. And instead of meekly deferring to those who have power, or always siding with the weak, look closely and act with justice. It is easy to agree with these ideas but no so easy to regularly live them out. Worldly wisdom—common financial acumen, accepted business practices—argue very logically for different choices. This passage says, in effect: give generously, don’t take advantage of people or situations when you have the chance. Foolish behavior.

First Corinthians, too, is run through with a concern for folly and wisdom. Paul sees boasting as an ultimate example of the foolishness of the world. What leaders you follow, where you’re from, what you’ve done—most of us find that these are worth thinking about, talking about, valuing or devaluing. We make judgments about ourselves and about others based on these things. But over and over again, Paul demonstrates that the only thing we can and should boast about is IN the Lord, OF the Lord. The only thing worth knowing about people is that we belong to God. As Paul says, the world or life or death or the present or the future—all belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God. Imagine walking into a room—a seminar, a party, a meeting—and seeing each person first and only as belonging to God. Ignoring class, intelligence, social standing, appearance. Pretty foolish.

And isn’t our Gospel today about a foolish kind of behavior—behavior apparently without pride? The Jewish Annotated New Testament points out these foolish actions in the first paragraph are risky forms of nonviolent resistance. A slap on the right cheek assumes a back-handed slap—and we should respond with neither violence nor abjection. This move risks more pain—but might just shock someone enough to plant a seed of truth in their minds. Most people owned only two garments in that time; so, when being sued for one’s coat, giving away your other garment would, as the annotations say, “uncover the judiciary injustice.” You risk remaining completely unclothed—but you might make someone rethink their views. Roman soldiers at the time could conscript locals to carry their gear for one mile; to go a second mile is a peaceable protest. You risk exhaustion or an angry soldier—but you might shock someone into true wisdom.

This foolish behavior seems humiliating, without pride—but that’s not it, it’s just that the pride and confidence come from somewhere DIFFERENT. Our dignity does not come from boasting, from social standing. Our foolish dignity comes only from our safe and certain identity in God’s love. An absolute certainty of God’s love for us, gives us an absolute freedom.

And in fact the second half of this Gospel reading assumes a boundless love which is hard to imagine. It’s hard to imagine, because none of us has it—our hearts are simply too narrow, and only when God pours his love into them can we love our enemies, and love those who don’t love us.

This love as we’ve seen it in God is itself foolish. St. Francis, the Yurodivy—all began as an imitation of Christ: young Jesus of Nazareth, who up and left his carpentry work, wandered around with hoodlums and weirdos, scratching his fleas and saying things that didn’t always make a straight kind of sense. Young Jesus of Nazareth, who made a fool of himself before the religious leaders and political authorities, and ended up dead. –And then, folly of follies, wasn’t dead at all.

God’s love is a very foolish kind of love. Surely it is foolish for the force and mind and heart behind existence itself to love such a weak, finite, individual person. It is foolish for perfect Truth and complete Understanding to love a person who cannot even know or understand themselves. It is foolish, but it is true.

Faced with this foolish love, we are called to locate our identity in it—to find our dignity and confidence only in this. And THEN, we’re called to see others the same way: to look at the world through God’s same lens of foolish love.

O Lord, you have taught us that without love whatever we do is worth nothing: Send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts your greatest gift, which is love, without which our lives and actions are empty before you.

Showing Up

Jenny is on the Board of Trustees and an alumna of the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard. She is now on staff at Harvard and volunteers with Harvard Interfaith Prison Education (HIPE). Here, Jenny reflects on her first earlier this winter to the prison. 

Ironically, on my first trip to a prison, I worried about being judged.

I had signed up for Harvard Interfaith Prison Education (HIPE) a few weeks earlier, and there was some fear mixed into my decision to participate. My life has been one of great privilege, and it was hard for me to imagine what I could offer someone who had had to face challenges greater than I had ever encountered. I half expected my mentee to call me out on it and ask me why he should bother to talk to me when I couldn't have even the smallest inkling of what his life was like.

He didn't, of course. He was far happier to see me than I would have ever thought I deserved, and that turned out to be just one part of an attitude that was frankly amazing to me.

We get so many harsh presentations of prison and prisoners in popular culture. I'm sure many of them have at least a partial basis in reality, and I fear that some of them don't come close to the terrible conditions many prisoners face. But that harshness, however much it might exist in is life, did not exist inside the man I met.

It's not that he was cheerful about everything. He didn't try to make his life seem perfect. But it became clear from everything he said that he has been making use of all the resources available to him to try to build the best life he can. He takes classes and studies with fellow inmates and requests books from the library and works out and referees the prison basketball league. There is a lot of potential for life in prison to become empty, but he has managed to fill it.

It is a joy to be at the disposal of someone who is looking to see what good he can get out of a situation. To him, our visit became not something to be picked apart and found inadequate, but another source of value to add to his life. There were gaps between us -- in experience, in living situation -- but they were gaps he wanted to bridge, not use as a weapon.

It drove home to me some of the things that tend to hold me back from helping people. I tend to be a perfectionist; it's what led me to Harvard in the first place. And there is something to be said for trying to help the best we can, for training ourselves to serve others better, and for stepping back to examine our service to make sure it's as good as it can be. But there's not much excuse for holding back because we're worried about being judged and found not up to the task. Those are the times when it's most important to show up, do what we can, and possibly end up changing someone's life for the better.

An Epiphany Sermon: Going Deeper

This sermon was given by the Chaplain, Revd. Luther Zeigler, on February 16, 2014, at the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard.

There is a version of our faith that goes something like this:  The Old Testament is about “law,” while the New Testament is about “grace”; the Old Covenant is an oppressive system of rules, while the New Covenant liberates us with the gospel of love; the former world is governed by a vengeful judge who wants nothing more than to trip us up for failing to conform to his requirements, while the New Jerusalem is overseen by a God full of mercy and forgiveness for every last one of us.  And at its worst, this tendency to insist upon a sharp contrast between the old and the new has led to a pernicious caricature of Judaism as a particularistic and legalistic tradition from which the more generous and universalistic religion of Christianity saves us.

A close reading of Matthew’s gospel – and of the Sermon on the Mount in particular, from which today’s reading is taken – tells a rather different story.  Let’s summarize where we are:

In chapter one, through the deceptively boring device of a genealogy, Matthew gives us the first hint about Jesus’ identity:  this child is descended directly from the family of Abraham, through King David, and born of a virgin, in fulfillment of the prophecies of Isaiah. Then, in chapter 2, we hear how God’s messengers protect the infant messiah from the scheming of a jealous and murderous imperial king, just as the Hebrew prophets Micah and Jeremiah foresaw.  We meet John the Baptist in chapter 3, who is portrayed as the new Elijah, preparing the way for the very messiah so long-awaited by Israel.  Chapter 4 finds this beloved Son driven into the wilderness for forty days, repeating the exodus of his forebears, to be tempted by the forces of darkness just as they were tempted.  And then, like Moses, who gathered and led a people out of bondage, so too does Jesus call a community of disciples out of the captivity of their impoverished lives to be a renewed people.  And thus, we come to where we are today:  chapter 5, the famous Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus, the new Moses, teaches his followers what God commands from a mountaintop.

There is no mistaking in Matthew’s carefully constructed narrative that Jesus’ life and teaching is in complete continuity with the covenantal relationship established by God with Israel through Abraham, Moses, and David.  And lest we doubt this, Jesus tells us right up front in verses 17 and 18 of his sermon:  “Think not that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets:  I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.  For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.”

This is an enormously important key for unpacking everything that follows in his sermon because here Jesus takes off the table any understanding of his words that would view them as displacing Torah.  Whatever the antitheses offered by Jesus in today’s gospel text may mean, they plainly are not “replacement commandments” for an old, arcane, and outdated Mosaic law.  Rather, Jesus is calling us into a deeper understanding of this very same Torah.

Torah, as today’s lesson from Deuteronomy and our Psalm remind us, is not so much a dusty set of laws as it is a way of walking in relationship with both God and neighbor.  The Hebrew people understood these teachings not as a legalistic burden, but rather as a living and breathing guide for shaping their communal behavior so that the nations of the world might see in them what the God of Israel looks like.

Torah is thus more like a constitution for living in community as a faithful people than it is a code of individual ethics for the purpose of achieving personal goodness.  As post-Enlightenment Westerners, we are trained to view the world in individualistic terms, each of us discrete Cartesian egos, responsible for our separate destinies, encouraged to be self-reliant and self-sufficient.  These are the virtues the West celebrates.  Yet, this distorted focus on the individual, and his or her right of self-determination, is decidedly unbiblical.

For Jesus, like the Hebrew tradition from which he emerges, keeping Torah is not primarily a personal matter, and salvation is not primarily an individual project.  Torah is, rather, a revelatory expression of what it means to live together as God’s children, and through Torah God redeems not individual souls but a faithful community.  And, just as the Torah was not given by God to Israel to produce a collection of heroically righteous individuals, so too would it be a mistake for us to understand Jesus’ antitheses in his Sermon on the Mount as an effort to one-up Judaism by creating a super-righteous band of personal followers. 

The teachings of the Sermon on the Mount are, rather, a divine commentary on Torah intended to draw us as a community, as the gathered Body of Christ, more deeply into the nature of God by revealing the fundamentally relational character of God’s will for us. 

Let me illustrate this point by exploring just one – the very first – of Jesus’ antitheses.  Jesus says:  “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not murder, and whoever murders shall be liable to judgment;’ but I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment.”  He continues:  “So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.”

Plainly, Jesus keeps the traditional prohibition on murder in tact; but he goes deeper, insisting that it is not enough to understand God’s will for us merely in terms of what we are to avoid.  We instead must see what lies at the source of human conflict – the angers and resentments we often harbor toward one another and that can eat at our soul.

Jesus’ words recall not only the sixth commandment, but also the foundational story of Cain and Abel that underlies it.  Jealous that God favored his brother Abel’s offering over his own, Cain allows his anger to swell.  Though warned by God that sin is “lurking at his door,” Cain gives in to the anger, and rises up against his brother. And so, murder enters the world through Cain’s unbridled anger, and our relationships with God and each other lie shattered.

We come into a world, this story teaches us, where rivalry is the norm and people take revenge upon one another.  From the beginning we learn to blame others for whatever is undermining our place in the universe.  We make those others scapegoats, sacrificing them in order to restore our identity and status.  This is the human cycle of violence.

Yet, Christ teaches us in his sermon, and shows us with his life, that into our vengeful world has come One who is utterly benevolent, who is not in rivalry with anything or anyone, and who transforms everything from within, including altering human motives and desires.  He is the pattern who changes everything about what it means to be human.

Thus, the kingdom into which Jesus calls us requires more than a mere promise not to murder one another.  We are invited to go deeper, to uncover the anger in our hearts, to confront our resentments, to diffuse the hostility, and to be reconciled with one another – and all this before we can ask for reconciliation with God. 

And so for centuries the Church has in its liturgy placed penance, the confession of sin, and the exchange of the peace – in a word, the practice of reconciliation – immediately before the Eucharistic feast.  Before we come to the Lord’s Table to share in Christ’s love for us we are urged to show that same love to each other.  The passing of the peace, as we call it, is more than genteel politeness, more than a half-time show of hospitality; done faithfully, it is the opening of our hearts to each other in preparation for receiving Christ’s own body and blood. 

Jesus’ teaching about murder and anger – like his teaching about divorce and lust and deceit and swearing oaths – are centered on the quality of our relationships.  Our God is a God who cares deeply about our relationships, and desires those relationships to have the same health, vitality, and purity as does His relationship with us.   These are not commandments intended merely to guide our external conduct, but commandments designed to change our hearts.

Christ’s call to be free of anger and malice, to rid ourselves of the distortions of lust, and to live without deceit or pretense, can seem impossibly hard.  And, but for God’s grace, it would be.  The good news, though, is that the Christ who gives us these commandments, and calls us into this holy life of community, is the very same Christ who assures us that He will chase down every lost sheep, and welcome home every prodigal son or daughter, when we lose our way.  He invites us to be faithful witnesses of the Kingdom he describes and embodies, even while he knows that we will from time to time stray from that vision.  And for this we can be forever thankful:  that while Christ is constantly calling us into new and healthier ways of being human, as he does today, he is at the same time loving us just as we are.  Thanks be to God.

"We love because he first loved us": A Morning Prayers Homily

Alice Kenney is a senior at College and the Vice President of the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard. She gave this homily at Morning Prayers in Appleton Chapel at Memorial Church in the Yard.

A reading from the first letter of John: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.  Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.”  About ten verses later, John writes, “We love because he first loved us.”  I have recently come to regard this final verse as the foundation of my religious identity.  I now believe that whatever love I can offer others is always a reflection of God’s love for me and for each one of us. 

            For most of my life I spurned God’s love, skeptical that He could care for someone as messed up as I was.  This was partially the result of misreading Jesus’ commandment to “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  Somehow I understood him to mean “love your neighbor more than yourself,” or even “love your neighbor at the expense of yourself.”  I am not surprised that I distorted Jesus’ words in this way.  After all, we don’t often see Jesus take a break, and the stories of great Christians tend to be about women and men who gave everything they had in the service of others.  Until about a year ago, I believed that unless I was constantly putting others’ needs before my own, I was selfish and unworthy of being loved.  I began to love and idolize the wonderful person I thought I could be, if only I tried hard enough, and to feel completely disgusted by the un-martyr-like person I actually am.

            This need to be a perfect practitioner of charity spread to other realms of my life, so that even morally neutral subjects such as performance in school and my level of extracurricular commitment became ways for me to criticize my value as a person.  I also came to believe that eating anything that might compromise my health (perhaps by clogging my arteries with cholesterol, or bringing unnatural chemicals into my body) was a selfish waste of earth’s precious resources and the body God had given me.

            My concern with healthy eating ultimately became an eating disorder that plagued me in various forms from when I was 9 until I received adequate treatment in January of 2013.  Though eating disorders are sometimes mistakenly thought of as a result of a superficial preoccupation with physical appearance, church history is full of female saints, such as Catherine of Siena, who used bizarre food practices to indicate their dedication to saving humanity.

            The problem is, beating myself up for procrastinating from an essay or eating slightly too much became a very time consuming obsession.  I was walking on egg-shells throughout my existence, constantly afraid I would mess up.  And when I did mess up, which became increasingly often, it was so hard to get back on track, and I took to wallowing in my failures.  All the worry and guilt took up a lot of mental energy, and ultimately my effort at self-denial became a rather egotistical occupation.

            Another issue was that instead of celebrating my friends, I became strangely jealous, both of their accomplishments and their problems.  Everyone else, it seemed, had it all together.  Even when they struggled, it was always for some very legitimate reason, such as illness or another person’s mistreating them.  When I had trouble, it always seemed to be my own fault.  The words of the Psalms, and other parts of the Bible that are meant to be reassuring, always just made me feel guiltier. There was nothing I needed protection from except myself.  I had managed to convert a message that was meant to spread love in the world into a vehicle of self-hatred.

            One day my best friend told me that God loves me just exactly how I am, regardless of anything I do or say or think or fail to do or say or think.  This, he reminded me, was really the message of Christianity.  It took me a while to actually believe my friend.  How could God love me when I was so bad and so wasteful of all he had given me?  I felt sure that my friend didn’t really understand the extent of my depravity.  I figured I had him fooled, just as I had the rest of the world, and maybe even God, fooled too.

            But my friend was right.  God does love us unconditionally, and we are called to respect His love and accept it.  After a year of focusing on taking care of myself, and embracing my best friend’s loving kindness, I feel so much more connected to other people.  I can admire my friends without feeling jealous, and I have the energy to reach out when one of them needs a hand.  Recognizing God’s deep and very real love for me has given me a foundation from which to more activity love others.

            Let us pray:  Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross, so that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace.  Help us to recognize your love, and welcome it, so that we might then radiate love out into the world. Amen.

"It gathers to a greatness"

In the midst of this cold Boston winter, we've been blessed with a few days of bright sunshine and clear blue skies. Our Kellogg Fellow can't help but be reminded of this, one of her favorite poems by one of her favorite poets, Anglican-turned-Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889).

Hopkins' view of the world includes both the grandeur God saw when he said "It is good," as well as the tread, smudge, and smear that humanity has left upon it. But for all this, "the Holy Ghost over the bent/World" still breathes . . .

God's Grandeur

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;	5
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;	10
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

The Intersection of Love and Social Justice

Abi Strait is the new 2013-2014 Micah Fellow at ECH!  She comes to us from Wisconsin via Lutheran Volunteer Corps in Delaware, where she worked at the Ministry of Caring. As a Fellow in the Life Together Program, she'll be splitting her time between ECH and our mother-parish, Christ Church Cambridge. 

Luther and I have been working with Harvard students and the Harvard Chaplains over the past few months to plan an event in remembrance of Martin Luther King Jr. The event is scheduled to fall this year on Friday, April 4 - the anniversary of King’s assassination in Memphis.

Between planning for this, and the fast approaching of Valentine’s Day, I’ve been reminded of something I read by King regarding the intersection of love and social justice. This February 1957 article ‘Nonviolence and Racial Justice’ written by King was sent to me by a friend this fall. I’d like to share a section of it, entitled ‘The Meaning of Love,’ here:

“In speaking of love at this point, we are not referring to some sentimental emotion. It would be nonsense to urge men to love their oppressors in an affectionate sense. ‘Love’ in this connection means understanding good will. There are three words for love in the Greek New Testament. First, there is eros. In Platonic philosophy eros meant the yearning of the soul for the realm of the divine. It has come now to mean a sort of aesthetic or romantic love. Second, there is philia. It meant intimate affectionateness between friends. Philia denotes a sort of reciprocal love: the person loves because he is loved. When we speak of loving those who oppose us we refer to neither eros nor philia; we speak of a love which is expressed in the Greek word agape. Agape means nothing sentimental or basically affectionate; it means understanding, redeeming good will for all men, an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. It is the love of God working in the lives of men. When we love on the agape level we love men not because we like them, not because their attitudes and ways appeal to us, but because God loves them. Here we rise to the position of loving the person who does the evil deed while hating the deed he does.

“Finally, the method of nonviolence is based on the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice. It is this deep faith in the future that causes the nonviolent resister to accept suffering without retaliation. He knows that in his struggle for justice he has cosmic companionship. This belief that God is on the side of truth and justice comes down to us from the long tradition of our Christian faith. There is something at the very center of our faith which reminds us that Good Friday may reign for a day, but ultimately it must give way to the triumphant beat of the Easter drums. Evil may so shape events that Caesar will occupy a palace and Christ a cross, but one day that same Christ will rise up and split history into A.D. and B.C., so that even the life of Caesar must be dated by his name. So in Montgomery we can walk and never get weary, because we know that there will be a great camp meeting in the promised land of freedom and justice.

“This, in brief, is the method of nonviolent resistance. It is a method that challenges all people struggling for justice and freedom. God grant that we wage the struggle with dignity and discipline. May all who suffer oppression in this world reject the self-defeating method of retaliatory violence and choose the method that seeks to redeem. Through using this method wisely and courageously we will emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man's inhumanity to man into the bright daybreak of freedom and justice.”