Good Sheep

The familiar image of Jesus, the Good Shepherd [John 10:11-18], is a very popular one – even, it seems, in our modern, urbanized society, in which most of us are not shepherds and know next to nothing about sheep. What we do know, of course, is that the luckier sheep live to provide us with wool, while the less lucky sheep become lamb chops.

That, I suspect, may be precisely Jesus’ point in using shepherd and sheep language – precisely what makes Jesus so special as a shepherd. This shepherd lays down his life for the sheep – a somewhat unexpected reversal of roles, a reversal of roles which brings about a new kind of relationship between the shepherd and his sheep.

In most ancient pagan religious understandings, what above all distinguished the gods from us was the gods’ greatly envied freedom from death in contrast to our inescapable mortality. By becoming one of us himself and experiencing our human predicament by his voluntary dying, God – in Jesus – overcame this separation between God and us, and so reversed not just the traditional job descriptions of shepherd and sheep, but also the pagan idea that human beings exist, like sheep, simply to serve for the satisfaction of the gods.

It turns out, in fact, that God actually takes satisfaction precisely in this reversal. This is why the Father loves me, Jesus says, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. So an age-old separation has been overcome, and something new has happened in our world. A brand new connection has been created between God and us by the death – and resurrection – of the Good Shepherd, who accepted the limits of our mortal life in order to bring us, together with him, to something new beyond those limits.

Now that’s all well and good, but didn’t it happen such a long time ago? And not much really seems to have changed in the world, has it? Easter comes and goes, year-in and year-out, and it all begins to sound routine, doesn’t it?

But there was nothing routine, certainly, about Peter’s sermon in today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles [Acts 4:8-12], in the aftermath of the first post-Pentecost miracle, an amazing cure which Peter somewhat modestly calls a good deed done to a cripple. It all happened, Peter proclaims, in the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, whom God raised from the dead … ‘the stone rejected by the builders, which has become the cornerstone.” There is no salvation through anyone else, nor is there any other name under heaven given to the human race by which we are to be saved.”

What a claim! The sheer boldness of it – that humanity can be saved and that Jesus Christ is its one and only savior!

Recognizing the boldness of that claim and taking it seriously – making it our own claim – is what Easter time is all about. Admittedly, given the inevitable limits of our attention, it takes some effort to keep up that Easter enthusiasm – to keep it from wilting along with the Eater flowers!

And so we celebrate Easter for seven weeks, during which we read every day from the Acts of the Apostles – to recall the fervor of those first new Christians, who were transformed forever by the presence and power of the Risen Lord, experienced in the here and now in his word and sacraments. And we see how eager they were to share that experience with everyone around them – an eagerness we need to learn from, for each of us is being propelled by the power of the Easter story to trust in its power to transform the world. For, as Peter’s sermon makes clear, the universal power of Jesus’ name is not limited or constrained by any human failure to hear it.

Jesus himself says he has other sheep that do not belong to this fold. These also he must lead, and they will hear his voice. The Savior of the world calls all people to his Father, as he continually transforms the world through the uniquely saving power of his death and resurrection. In Jesus, God can now be found in every aspect of human life, in places and people where one might least expect, in situations which our limited imaginations may even turn into obstacles to God’s presence.

Our mission, the mission of the Church animated by the power of the Risen Christ, is to go beyond the limits of our imaginations, and become, like the otherwise ordinary people whose story is told in the Acts of the Apostles, effective witnesses to God’s saving power in our world through the death and resurrection of his Son.

And we have to do this together, as his Church. We can’t be spiritual without being religious.

Homily for the 4^th Sunday of Easter, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, April 29, 2012

Bad Religion

The late Tony Judt (1948-2010) was in many ways an archetypical European intellectual, with all the baggage - positive and negative - that goes with that. All the more interesting, therefore, was his observation - in his final book (composed with Timothy Syder), Thinking the Twentieth Century (Penguin, 2012) - that "the best people to ask about what's really going on are usually not the intellectuals but the journalists" (p. 298). So perhaps it is no surprise that what I think is one of the better books recently written on the state of American religion is not by a theologian or religion scholar but by a journalist - New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, author of Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (Free Press, 2012). No disinterested observer himself, Douthat serves up a rigorous analysis of the contemporary American Christian landscape and offers advice to both believers and their institutions.

Before he gets to analyze our contemporary "heresies," however, the first half of Douthat's book summarizes how we got to where we are today. It's a familiar story - familiar certainly to those of us old enough to have lived through it or historically aware enough to appreciate how our past was different from our present. It's the familiar story of a "Lost World" of confident, evangelizing, post-war American Christianity and its largely self-inflicted decline. Douthat's "The Lost World" examines four successful strains of post-war American Christian experience - Mainline Protestantism (personified by Reinhold Niebuhr), Evangelical Christianity (represented by Billy Graham), Roman Catholicism (exemplified by Fulton Sheen), and African-American Christianity (de-marginalized by Martin Luther King, Jr.). From there, the familiar trajectory is traced, as most major American Church groups suddenly stopped growing and entered a period of unprecedented decline (as they frantically aspired to remain relevant by accommodating to the culture they were meant to convert). Thus, even while popular interest in the things that religion had traditonally been about continued, religious institutions seemed to abandon their role - with predictable consequences for both religion and society. Douthat lauds the Evangelical-Roman Catholic rapprochement which resulted as a creative reaction to these devleopments, but also highlights the pitfalls: "all the ecumenical cooperation in the world wasn't a substitute for vigor on both sides of the Protestant-Catholic divide." Whereas "both the Protestant Mainline and the Catholic Church were strong cultures in 1950s America - capable of making their presence felt in the commanding heights of American life," today's "mainline has drifted to the sidelines of American life, Catholicism's cultural capital has been reduced by decades of civil war, and Evangelicalism still has the air of an embattled subculture rather than the confidence of an ascendent force."

In the second part, Douthat discusses four "heresies" that have come to dominate contemporary American culture and America's still ostensibly Christian religion: "heresies" he calls "Lost in the Gospels" (a fashion for finding a "real" Jesus prior to and apart from the historical Church), "Pray and Grow Rich" (an uncritical reconciliation of Christianity with prosperity), "the God Within" (a pyschologized, self-absorbed religiosity, what Philip Rieff famously warned against in his 1966 classic, The Triumph of the Therapeutic), and finally "The City on the Hill" (our contemporary - on both sides - uncritical reduction of religion to political ideology). What all these "heresies" have in common - the goal of all heresies, according to Douthat - is "to extract from the tensions of the gospel narratives a more consistent, streamlined, and noncontradictory Jesus," in contrast to Christian orthodoxy's "fidelity to the whole of Jesus."

Douthat identifies "four potential touchstones for a recovery of Christianity, each of which has both possibilities and limitations. The four are "the postmodern opportunity" (the possibility of confronting globalized rootlessness, widespread skepticism, and religious relativism as the Church has successfully confronted such forces in its past), "the Benedict option" (a limited withdrawal from engagement with the world on the model of St. Benedict's monastic response to the Roman Empire's collapse), "the New Chrsitendom" (the growth of Third World Christianity and its impact on the American Church through immigration and missionary activity), and, finally, "an age of diminished expectations" (a crisis-induced reassessment "that's willing to reckon with the ways that bad theology and bad religion have helped bring us to our present pass").

Douthat concludes with an exhortation to the kind of individual and communal faith that can animate what he calls "a Christian renaissance." The first is a faith that is "political without being partisan," which frees Christians to embrace different political positions, while being open to the Gospel's challenge to every ideology. He recalls how not that long ago "America's leading Evangelical politician was the antiwar environmentalist Republican Mark Hatfield, and one of its leading Catholic officeholders was the pro-life Democrat Sargent Shriver. Secondly, "a renewed Christianity should be ecumenical but also confessional" and offers Timothy Keller (The Reason for God, 2008) as a model. Thirdly, "a renewed Christianity should be moralistic but also holisitic." By this he means not downplaying Christianity's moral demands in the area of sexuality but also not acting as if there were only one, rather than seven, deadly sins - and not exclusively emphasizing "minority" cases (e.g., homosexuality) while neglecting, for example, "the heterosexual divorce rate, the heterosexual retreat from marriage, and the heterosexual out-of-wedlock birthrate."

Finally, Douthat insists, "a renewed Christianity should be oriented toward sanctity and beauty." He concludes: "Only sanctity can justify Christianity's existence; only sanctity can make the case for faith; only sanctity, or the hope thereof, can ultimately redeem the world. ... To make any difference in our common life, Christianity must be lived - not as a means to social cohesion or national renewal, but as an end unto itself."

Cuckoo Day

Today is "Cuckoo Day" - an old English observance marking the migrating birds' return from further south. Since the Evangelist St. Mark has for centuries also been commemorated on this day, the cuckoo became a symbol of St. Mark (along with the more familiar - and much more majestic - lion).

Farther south (where presumably the birds had long since returned) a dog was sacrificed on April 25 as part of the ancient Roman Robigalia festival, focused on protecting the spring and summer crops from mildew. One of ancient Rome's several spring agricultiral festivals, Robigalia featured major (4 horses) and minor (2 horses) chariot races. With triumph of Christianity these races were transformed into the Rogation Procession - the "Greater Litanies," as they came to be known. Ancient peoples appreciated their dependence on the natural seasons and the harvest. The change in religion redirected the focuus of people's prayers to the true Creator God. But that didn't change their dependence on nature or their need for a successful harvest or the value of ritualizing that on traditonal days.

For centuries, the "greater Litanies" were faithfully observed  on April 25 (along with the "Lesser Litanies" on the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday before Ascension Thursday), until abolished by Paul VI. We hear a lot today - and rightly so - about climate change and its devastating effects. Perhaps a rationalized late 20th-century Roman Liturgy's abandonment of such reminders of our connection - and dependence - on nature wasn't such a smart idea, after all.

Remembering Moderate Politics

I have just finished reading Geoffrey Kabaservice’s Rule and Ruin: the Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party: From Eisenhower to the Tea Party (Oxford University Press, 2012). Its strongly worded - indeed polemical – title tells us where the author comes down in his evaluation of that history. It is, however, a very good history of the modern Republican Party and – by extension at least – of American party politics in the half-century plus since World War II, with particular emphasis on the earlier period. That, of course, is the era my Boomer generation so well remembers and – more than just remembers – the era so many of us were fundamentally formed in. Dividing time into decades is artificial, of course; but it works. So I would divide that period into the peaceful and prosperous decade of the 1950s, followed by the tumultuous and exciting but ultimately catastrophic 1960s, leading directly to the onset of national decline in the 1970s. (That decline would go into apparent remission somewhat in the 1980s and 1990s but then become almost inexorable in the first decade of the 21^st century). From the way Kabaservice tells the story, Moderate Republicanism’s fate fairly parallels that larger trajectory of American political time.

The development of the Conservative Movement in the 1950s as a reaction against Eisenhower, its subsequent takeover of the Republican Party with Goldwater in 1964, and the movement’s various new waves in each of the subsequent decades is a familiar story and one which has been often told. However, I don’t know of any telling of it that has been so focused and in such detail on the corresponding collapse of what had previously been the moderate Republican mainstream. Given that, as recently as when I studied American Politics in graduate school in the 1970s, it was still taken for granted that American political parties were inevitably more or less broadly-based coalitions, the novelty of the current situation (in both parties) cannot be overstated.

In the past 60 years, the US has had three successful Republican Presidents – Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan. (By contrast, I would venture to say, there has been only one comparably successful Democrat – Bill Clinton). Eisenhower and Nixon – and even, but to a much lesser extent, Reagan – governed moderately. Kabaservice emphasizes that the merit of Moderate Republicanism wasn’t just facilitating compromise (which is what it sometimes tends to get reduced to when its absence is lamented today) but real programmatic political substance. in Indeed, one of the merits of this book is to highlight the important part played by Moderate Republicans in advancing much of what we retrospectively see as a progressive agenda – especially in the area of Civil Rights. In 1972, the New York Times acknowledged that Nixon’s centrist administration had “narrowed the gap between the two major parties.” At the same time, what Kabaservice calls “Nixon’s rhetorical conservatism, his willingness to polarize the country around controversial social issues” had a long-term contrary effect. The story, of course, is much more complicated than that and Kabaservice’s book deserves a full and careful reading.

One area where I think the author's analysis deserves further development, however, is precisely that of impact of our growing social-cultural-moral divide. Those “controversial social issues” of the late 1960s and early 1970s were serious and divisive, but not nearly so as the subsequent complete breakdown of any possibility of some kind of fundamental moral social consensus in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade, after which political (and religious) polarization escalated to levels that are not only very high but from which it is hard to imagine either side ever retreating.

Remembering Romulus

According to tradition, the city of Rome was founded on this date, April 21, in the year 753 BC, by twin brothers, Romulus and Remus, whose father was Mars, the god of war. According to one version of the legend, the twins were abandoned in a basket on the banks of the Tiber whereupon Tiberinus, the river god, made the basket catch in the roots of a fig tree that grew in the Velabrum swamp at the base of the Palatine Hill. The twins were found and nursed by a she-wolf and fed by a woodpecker, until a shepherd named Faustulus discovered them and took them home, where he and his wife Acca Larentia raised them as their own children. (The ancient Velabrum district is now the site of a venerable Roman church dedicated to the martyr St. George, S. Giorgio in Velabro, the station church for the Thursday after Ash Wednesday).

As adults, the two are supposed to have argued about which hill to build on – Romulus preferring the Palatine and Remus the Aventine. When Romulus began building his city wall on his hill, Remus ridiculed his brother’s work and then ominously jumped over the wall, belittling his brother’s accomplishment. I had always been taught that this was an act of brotherly spite, suggesting the weakness and perhaps the indefensibility of Romulus' Palatine city, and that Romulus accordingly killed his brother out of injured pride. In my Causes of Saints class in Rome this past winter, however, I learned that Remus' action also constituted a sacrilege, in that the walls delimited the sacred space of the new city, separating the sacred from the profane. The two interpretations reinforce rather than contradict each other, but the second one amplifies the event's significance in the context of a pre-modern sacral society. In any case, Romulus responded by killing his brother - thus determining the new city’s name! In time, of course, Rome would become the greatest city in the world, the capital of the greatest empire the world had ever yet known.

According to legend, Romulus ascended to heaven in a storm and became a god. Soon after, according to the Roman historian Livy, he supposedly appeared to a prominent roman and said: "Go, and tell the Romans that by heaven's will my Rome shall be the capital of the world. Let them learn to be soldiers. Let them know and teach their children that no power on earth can stand against Roman arms." (Even ib ancient times, it was widely believed that Rome's first king had actually been murdered by the aristocratic Senate, and that his divinization was a clever cover-up to appease the common people).

To that same city, some 8 centuries later, came two men, Peter and Paul, brothers not by blood, but by their common faith in Jesus Christ, who had called them to be apostles. The Christian community they found in Rome was small, socially and politically insignificant - an easy target when the Emperor Nero needed scapegoats to blame for a destructive fire in the year A.D. 64. Among those who gave their lives as witnesses to the Christian faith in that initial Roman persecution of the Church were the apostles Peter and Paul.

The old Rome, founded on this date – powerful pagan Rome, founded on the murder of one brother by another - was, for all its grandeur and admittedly great accomplishments, still just a human city like any other, a warring conqueror city to be conquered in turn by other warring conquerors. The new Christian Rome of Peter and Paul ultimately conquered the old Rome, but in a new way. The powerful pagan Rome, founded on the murder of one brother by another, was itself conquered by the faith that empowered the brothers-in-Christ to die together as witnesses to a new and better way of life.