The Fifth Sunday after Easter, Commonly Called Rogation (May 22, 2022)

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.

In the 1950s, there was a cult called The Seekers led by a woman named Marian Keech. This cult taught that on December 21, 1954, a UFO would arrive and take this small group of fortunate people to safety while the rest of the world perished in a disaster. There was a psychologist who infiltrated the group to study their dynamics named Leon Festinger. Of course, December 21, 1954 came and passed. No disaster occurred and no UFO came and picked them up. You would think that this would be the end of the cult, right? Not quite. The group revised their prediction, insisting it would come on Christmas Eve that year. Of course, Christmas Eve came and went: No disaster; no UFO. While some members did abandon the cult and lost their beliefs, a good number of them did not and actually grew in evangelical fervor, arguing that their cult’s belief and faith saved the world from disaster. Based on his experience with the cult, Leon Festinger came up with a term we hear frequently: cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is a psychological stress stemming from contradictory beliefs and behaviors. We see plenty of examples of this in every day life. Most people would say they should clean up after their dogs; yet, the same people may decide not to clean up after their dog if they run out of bags or something. Most people know eating healthy and exercising is good; yet, many choose the unhealthy burger or to watch TV instead of being active. Most people also know that smoking is bad for us, yet they still consume them. Cognitive dissonance often produces one of two reactions. The first reaction is what we might call rationalization and occurs when we self-justify (I ate a salad for lunch so I earned this Big Mac for dinner). The other reaction is confirmation bias which is when we avoid circumstances or data that might challenge the inconsistency.

Cognitive dissonance can occur in many arenas with varying levels and degrees of consequences. Yet biblically, the New Testament authors tend to identify cognitive dissonance, at least in a moral sense, as one of the symptoms of sin. We can think of the agonized father who cries out to Jesus in Mark 9:24 “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.” In Romans 7, St. Paul anguishes over the cognitive dissonance he finds within himself: “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.” And finally, we see cognitive dissonance yet again in our reading from James this morning: the cognitive dissonance that allows some to just be hearers instead of doers of the word. Cognitive dissonance really is psychological phenomenon to describe what Christians have known fro two millennia now: that the soul feels drawn to God while the flesh grapples with concupiscence.

What James wants us to see is that the task for Christians is to move past this cognitive dissonance; we cannot be a people who merely hear the Gospel; instead, we must be a people who do the Gospel.

To help us grasp the negative implications of cognitive dissonance and find a way out of it, James offers us two portraits: the portrait of a hearer only and the portrait of a doer. To explain the hearer, he employs a metaphor: a man who sees his face in a mirror and then walks away, instantly forgetting what he looks like. If you look at yourself only to forget, it is true futility; what was the point of looking in the first case? It is futile to be a hearer instead of a doer. It’s like hearing a sermon or reading a theological book and not putting it into practice. In that case, why come to church at all or put in the work to read if it’s not going to put into practice? Even more profoundly, if you have been baptized, you are a Christian who has been regenerated by the Holy Ghost and raised to a new life. But what if you don’t put that faith into practice and it has no effect on your lived life? Because at that point, you’re not just ignoring baptism, you’re explicitly rejecting it, like Dcn. David said: there is no neutral.

James then gives us an example: if you say you’re a religious person but you can’t keep your tongue bridled, then your religion is in vain. Bridling the tongue means not lashing out in anger or using your tongue as a mechanism of harming others. We’ve seen the harm this brings recently in the ministry of Mark Driscoll, the multi-site megachurch pastor whose church of thousands was irreparably fractured in large part because of his unbridled anger which led him to treat other image bearers reprehensibly. So what is the point of sitting in a pew or reading, or doing Bible Study if it doesn’t change us from the inside-out? James here picks up on the Old Testament prophetic critique of empty religion. Isaiah told the people of Israel: “Bring no more vain oblations; Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth: they are a trouble unto me.”

So the hearer stands for those who do not allow themselves to be changed by the grace that is given to them. They are one of the bad soils in the parable of the sower. In response to their cognitive dissonance, they either rationalize or bury their heads in the sand by ignoring their glaring inconsistency.

On the other hand, James gives us the portrait of a Doer: “But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed.”

The perfect law of liberty is God’s law which sets the ideal for human flourishing. The whole Law is distilled in the dual principle love God with all your heart, soul, and mind and love your neighbor as yourself. This ethical posture of love works itself outward into the particular circumstances we find ourselves in: “Love worketh no ill to his neighbour” because “love is the fulfilling of the law.” So there is a paradox here: the law is freedom because it is what we were designed for; biblical freedom is not getting to choose between a given number of alternatives but to be what one was made to be.

So we resolve cognitive dissonance by “looking into” this law of liberty. The Greek word here is translated in other places as “stoops down and look into.” The word is used in only two other contexts in the New Testament: first when the Disciples and Mary “stooped down and looked into the tomb” of Jesus and second in 1 Peter 1:12 where Peter says “the angels desire to look into” the Gospel that is preached by the Church. in both instances, there is a peering into a beautiful mystery. And so we peer into the mystery of the law of liberty not as neutral, distant, third-party observers, because then we’d just be seers instead of doers and cognitive dissonance would remain. Instead, we peer, meditate on, and internalize that law of liberty and incarnate it in our lives. The example for James is practical and two-fold: if you are truly practicing religion, it means caring for others, particularly those on the margins because when the world treats some as disposable, the Christian insists on their inherent dignity and acts accordingly. Paired with that, the true practice of religion involves remaining unspotted from the world, not allowing external forces to distract us away from our calling to holiness.

So here is the question: what is the source of cognitive dissonance? The answer is that experience we all have where the spirit is willing and desirous to obey God while the weakness of the flesh wills what is opposed to God’s laws. The hearer is the one who, rather, than submitting and finding freedom from the law would rather dwell in psychological stress to gratify their lusts. The doer can break free from cognitive dissonance because their action aligns their whole selves to God’s will and tames their fleshly passions. So the only solution to cognitive dissonance is “further up and further in,” it’s to give one’s whole self to God; it’s to internalize his perfect law of liberty.

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.