The Fifth Sunday After Easter (May 5, 2024)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

One thing I love about having kids is that they are fascinating studies in anthropology and sociology. Our boys are at that age where they’re learning right and wrong and the importance of obeying mommy and daddy even when they may not want to. There are times when each of them are given specific instructions and they choose to disobey. And we always talk about this: “Why did you grab that toy from your brother?” “Because I wanted it.” “Was that a good choice or a bad choice?” “A bad choice.” Unfortunately, this is not a phenomenon unique to young children. All of us do this all the time: we know what we’re supposed to do but we don’t do it. We know we should put down the doughnut, stop smoking or drinking, or whatever habit we rationally understand may be bad for us. But it is really hard to do those things because we want them. This is called cognitive dissonance and it happens to us all the time. We hold mutually exclusive claims and live with the discordance by turning a blind eye to the contradiction. This is a result of original sin. Adam Eve would not have had this kind of cognitive dissonance initially. But the effect of sin is that it makes us strangers to God, the world, and ourselves. And so today, in our propers, we see the importance of the integration of ourselves into unity with God, the created order, and ourselves.

At the heart of Nicene Christianity is the idea that there is one God and three persons. This is a thin line to walk because it’s possible to slip into a kind of modalism that says the three persons are really just God appearing in different forms: sometimes he appears as Father, other times as Son, and other times as the Holy Spirit. That’s a heresy. on the other extreme, it’s possible to slip into a kind of tritheism that conceives of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three separate deities. Some Christians, in the way they explain the Atonement fall into this trap because the way they explain it makes it sound like Jesus saves us from the Father: God was so angry at us, but at the last moment, Jesus pushes us out of the way and says “Take me instead!” This is reading our own cognitive dissonance into the life of God: the Son and the Father are of different minds. But what the Church teaches is that the persons of the Godhead are so intimately connected that they share a singular will. We are not saved from God; we are saved by God who sent the Son to take on flesh and soul in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. In our Gospel reading today, Jesus makes it clear that he is sent by his Father and returns to him. He was sent in the Incarnation, what we celebrate at Christmas, and he returns to him at the Ascension which we will celebrate with Bishop Chad on Thursday. Returning to his Father’s side as victorious, the Son now acts as an intermediary: “I will show you plainly of the Father,” he says, something he can do because he and the Father are one. At a different point in the high priestly prayer, Jesus uses this unity between Father and Son as the template of unity for the Body of Christ: “That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.” So we can say that the life of God is the foundation of all unity.

In our Old Testament reading from Ezekiel, we see a kind of cosmic unity being achieved. The prophet Ezekiel is looking forward to a Davidic King who would bring about a kind of cosmic harmony. The world, as we experience it, groans with expectation for deliverance from the futility to which it has been subjected through our sin. And so the prophet anticipates a future when the people will not be plagued by evil beasts: we might find a correlation here with the image of the lion laying down with the sheep. This is a world in which there is no food insecurity because “the tree of the field shall yield her fruit, and the earth shall yield her increase.” The various parts of creation are operating in harmony with one another. But perhaps most importantly of all, this anticipated Davidic King will renew the covenant the people have with God. And this means Israel will be safe from their enemies. Of course, the King being prophesied here is Jesus Christ and it shows us that when God orders the world, there is a cosmic harmony.

The problem is that chaos and disunity don’t just exist “out there.” In fact, most of us probably encounter that cacophony “in here” more than anywhere else. Sin makes us anxious. As St. Augustine (whose feast day is today, though it’s superseded by the Sunday) says, “Our heart is restless till it rest in thee.” But in our epistle today, we see a solution to this problem of being divided against ourselves: “Be ye doers of the word, and no hearers only, deceiving your own selves.” Here, St. James is inviting us to move beyond cognitive dissonance. We have to hear the word in order to do what we’re called to do; but just because we hear it is no guarantee. Hearing is not enough without action; or, as St. James says elsewhere, faith without works is dead. To demonstrate this point, he uses a vivid metaphor: imagine there’s a man who goes up to a looking glass, sees himself, walks away and then forgets who he was. Lady Philosophy tells the medieval philosopher Boethius that his problem was not that he had been banished and imprisoned by the king; it was that “you have wandered away from yourself, or if you prefer to be thought of as having been banished, it is you yourself that have been the instrument of it.” We forget who we are called to be which results in a kind of cognitive dissonance in which we become exiled from ourselves. One example St. James highlights here is the use of the tongue: if you claim to be religious and don’t bridle your tongue, than you’ve deceived your own heart and your religion is in vain. According to James, the tongue can be used for great good: it can be used to talk to others, build relationships, speak words of encouragement. But it can also cause great damage, like a small spark among stubble can create a big flame. Control of our tongue speaks to the integrity or wholeness of a person: they say what they mean and mean what they say. They’re not two-faced or of two minds. The person who can control their tongue is at unity with themselves. A second metric St. James provides that demonstrates whether one is unified is to “visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” These seem like two rather unconnected things, but I think they are related. They represent two poles or tendencies: one of them is a more active proclivity, to visit the poor and marginalized, to do good works. This is what is often characterized as the active life. The other pole, “to keep oneself unspotted from the world” is a more contemplative posture that seeks to maintain one’s purity. Both of these are good things, but too often we pit the active and contemplative life against each other. What St. James is saying is that as human beings, we were created for both: we should be in the world doing good things for people in need; but, we should also be able to take time to be with God, to make sure that we are aligned with his will. The goal is unification, to be whole, to live in a harmony with God, creation, and ourselves.

Our Collect for today is really a reworking of what St. James is saying: “Grant to us thy humble servants, that by thy holy inspiration we may think those things that are good, and by thy merciful guiding perform the same.” God wants all of us. He doesn’t just want our interior life, he wants our external. Today is Rogation Sunday. Rogation comes from the Latin word rogare which means “to ask.” Typically, this is a day when intercession is made in the form of litanies. For us, it’s an opportunity to ask God for us to become further integrated in him, resolving cognitive dissonance. It’s what we see in our collect this morning, that by his holy inspiration, we may think those things that are good and by thy merciful guiding may perform the same. Our goal is to be unified in our desire and action; to have that Word ingrafted in us that is able to save our souls.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.