As a child, I was obsessed with a series of biography books found in my local public library. The books in this series had red covers and included biographies of everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Olympic athlete Babe Didrickson Zaharias, who was born in the same town that I was. I devoured these books, and relished their musty, old book smell. In my mind’s eye, I can still see that section in the library, my favorite place to visit in childhood summers.
And I still recall an image from one of those books, although I haven’t the foggiest idea about whom the book was written. I remember that the subject of this biography was an early American, probably living in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, most likely in a rural setting. And the scene from that biography which is seared into my memory is of a church service in what was probably an austere Congregational church. In that spartan religious setting, while attending a worship service, you were always supposed to keep your eyes directed towards the front of the church, presumably on the pulpit and on the preacher.
If, however, you had the audacity to turn around, say, to smile at a friend or check out who had just entered the door of the church, you would be chastised with a firm tap on the shoulder by a man standing at the back of the church wielding a long stick. I don’t know who this person was, although I imagine he was a sexton of sorts. In this church, you were never supposed to look behind you during the service. It was considered rude and a mark of bad behavior.
This image has stayed with me. I’m still hesitant to look behind me in church. But it occurs to me that maybe there was some hidden theological reality in that little red biography’s depiction of an early American church setting. Maybe the prohibition against turning around to look at the door of the church grew out of the piety of a particular brand of Christianity. If you can’t look at the door of the church or other parishioners in the room, then you can only look at the pulpit. You can only pay attention to the word proclaimed and the word preached. Your eyes are always and only on the front of the church.
Your eyes are decidedly not on other people. Not on your neighbor in the pew nor even on your parents who might be sitting next to you, and certainly not on the stranger walking in off the street. And for heaven’s sake, don’t ever look at the man holding the long stick. Does this speak to an individualistic piety that is more concerned with salvation and less attentive to the plight of those whose salvation is inextricably wrapped up with ours?
Such a piety is not mine, and such a piety is not typical of the Anglican tradition. Rather, our piety, our practice of being Christian, lies somewhere between two extremes. And in between two extremes we find the meaning of Christian love, agape love, that selfless, self-giving love exemplified by Jesus Christ in his life, death, and resurrection. Such Christian love takes root somewhere between the altar and the door of the church.
When pressed to name the great commandment in the law, Jesus invites us squarely into that holy space between the altar and the door of the church. Although Christians have for years erroneously tried to claim that Jesus was saying something radically new in this summary of the law, it’s more accurate to say that Jesus was trying to direct his audience back to the heart of the Law as he understood it and which he embodied in his own life.
Jesus brings us back to Deuteronomy, chapter 6, and the Shema, the commandment to the people of Israel to love the Lord their God with all their heart and soul and strength. The life lived in God starts by loving God. Even more than that, it starts with God’s first love of us. Hidden behind the Shema is that foundational love of God that takes us all the way back to the Book of Genesis when God called everything very good. To remember that love, keep your eyes on the altar.
But then, there’s a tap on the shoulder, not from a scolding stick but from the gentle hand of Christ who reminds us that while everything starts with the love of God, it doesn’t end there. It only begins there. Love your neighbor as yourself. Turn around, Jesus says, and look at the door. Look at your neighbor. Look at the stranger in your land. Look even at yourself. Without most people knowing it, Jesus has taken us back to the Book of Leviticus, chapter 19.
The injunctions in this chapter are concerned with love that’s formed in care of the neighbor. Don’t hold grudges. Don’t steal. Don’t lie. And while you’re at it, when you reap your harvest, don’t reap to the edges of your land. Leave some for the poor and the alien. Rather than fearing the foreigners in your land who might take your jobs, care for them. Keep your eyes on the door. But remember that first, your eyes were on the altar. They have to be on the altar first, because there you’ll remember that the Lord is God. The Lord is holy. And true love can only come from a love responding to the boundless love of God, who is holy, who is the saving Lord. Otherwise, any other notion of love will be false.
Somewhere between the altar and the door of the church is where true love starts to take on life in human flesh. That’s where it moves from the altar to mold lives of holiness to venture into the world to make that love concrete and visible. Its story begins way back when God created everything and then continued to shepherd God’s people from slavery into freedom. This love never stopped being love even when God’s people complained, grumbled, made idols, and turned away from God. That love was forgotten when people first began to look too long at the altar or too long at the door, and ultimately too long at themselves. People still forget such love when they fail to keep one eye on the altar and one on the door, because inevitably they end up looking too much at themselves. Inevitably, they become afraid.
When we lose sight of the altar, we become our own saviors. When we lose sight of the door, we become self-consumed and focused only on our own salvation. The Christian life starts with our eyes on the altar, where we see love given freely to us in the word proclaimed and the holy gifts of the Mass. But when our eyes are on the altar, and if we are paying attention, our gaze can’t help but shift to the door. The door is where we encounter the stranger. The altar is where we find love, not fear. If we start with the door, we will only see fear, because outside the church door, everyone seems so afraid. We must start with the altar, with love. And to walk in love as Christ loved us, our eyes must go constantly back and forth, between altar and door.
And when we lose our focus, which invariably we will, Christ offers us a saving tap on the shoulder. His tap is so very different from the punitive tap of the sexton in that biography I read as a child. Christ’s tap is always a reminder and expression of love, which is who he is. It’s the love summed up in that great commandment and the one like it. They are of one piece. To love God is to love the neighbor as we love ourselves, and to love our neighbor is to love God.
When our eyes are obsessively hungry for the Eucharistic bread but care nothing for the stranger lacking bread on the street, Christ taps us on the shoulder and reminds us to look at the door again. When our privileged guilt keeps our eyes too focused on those outside the door, Christ taps us again gently, inviting us to remember that the source of our salvation is the living word of God and the Bread of the Mass, which give us true life.
In this earthly life, we will always need the gentle taps offered by our Savior. He knows all too well our human tendency to drift to extremes rather than inhabiting that place in the middle. And so, constantly and lovingly, he taps our shoulders to call us back home.
A stopped clock is always right twice a day, so there was something right in that little Congregational church in early austere America. First, look at the altar. That’s where it starts. But there’s more, much more. Christ’s merciful tap on our shoulders reminds us that there’s a door opening into a world desperate for the stream of love coming from the altar. And our true home is that holy place somewhere between the altar and the door. It’s right here. To live and breathe as people of love, we must first start with our eyes on the altar, and then we see Christ anew: in the jobless foreigner in our land, in the lonely coworker, in the enemy who votes differently from us, in the one who has wronged us, even in our own selves. And because we have seen Christ when our eyes were on the altar, we can then see him everywhere.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost
October 29, 2023