It’s said that with age, people mellow. Youthful arrogance is transformed into more flexible humility. Rashness is tempered by thoughtfulness, impatience by patience. Those who were firebrands for a particular cause in their 20s choose their words and battles more judiciously in their 70s.
In my early twenties, I moved from Texas, where I’d lived my entire life, to Connecticut. In my youthful arrogance, I considered it a liberation and an escape from insularity. I then spent four years in New York City, soaking up its culture, riding high on its electric busyness, and quietly feeling sorry for those who had to live in other less sophisticated places. I relished being around people who, on the whole, thought as I thought and voted like I voted. I was a member of a parish that echoed my social values as well. It was very comfortable and very affirming, and it felt good.
But then at age twenty-eight, I moved to Washington, DC, and immediately realized that I was in a different milieu. I quickly learned that the people in my circles at church and work didn’t necessarily vote the way I voted. They didn’t always agree with my opinions. I had to check my tongue and speak with greater discretion. Life had gotten much more complicated, and I became frustrated, even angry, with that messiness. I even thought that I had made a mistake by moving away from New York City. I worried that I was regressing and undoing the progress I had made since moving to the northeast.
Just a few years after relocating to Washington, DC, I found myself sitting at a table with the vestry of my parish. The vestry was there to sign off on my candidacy for ordination. One by one the vestry voted, and each person said yes until one person said no. I sat there as he explained why he had voted in that way. He didn’t believe that openly gay persons should be ordained. But he also told me that he respected my education and my qualifications. He had no qualms about my academic suitability, just with who I was. And I took great offense.
I later discussed my impressions of the vestry meeting with the interim rector of the parish, a retired bishop. I expressed to him how angry I was that the vestry member had voted no in that meeting. And I’ll never forget how the kind, wise bishop responded. He looked at me, smiled, acknowledged my feelings, and then said, “But he said it in the most loving way, didn’t he?”
It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. In my spiritual immaturity, I wanted him to side with me, to say that it was unjust of that vestry member to vote no and tell me in front of the whole vestry that I wasn’t suitable for ordination. But over a decade later, I’ve realized how wrong I was in that moment. When I could have welcomed with genuine love, if quiet disagreement, the challenging opinion of a brother in Christ, I reacted resentfully, at least inwardly. But why? That vestry member didn’t yell at me. He didn’t tell me I was going to hell. He wasn’t mean or rude. He wasn’t trying to sabotage my ordination process. His one vote didn’t even change the outcome. That man was simply being honest about his own beliefs, and he was trying to speak the truth in love.
It's probably only the gift of time that enables us to hear the truth spoken in love and to speak the truth in love. We could argue about what is truth, but let’s say for just a minute that truth, as it’s referenced in the Letter to the Ephesians, might refer to what a person in good faith perceives to be the truth. There is, of course, an eternal truth that is objectively so and independent of our fallible understandings of truth, but we often can’t fully comprehend that truth. It eludes human wisdom because it lies only in the mind of God. There are, in fact, times when we believe ourselves to be speaking that truth, but on this side of the eschaton, we will never be speaking it perfectly. How can we?
And yet, neither is the Letter to the Ephesians arguing for a relative truth, where you speak your truth, and I speak mine. As we follow Jesus, we strive for the truth, and at the same time, if our perception of how that truth is manifested in our lives is always imperfect, then it’s possible for each of us to aim for the truth in good conscience and still miss the mark somewhat. And this takes us to a very gray place, where the demands of Christian community require us to exist together in love as we struggle to grasp the truth, even while each of us presumes to know it or tell it. In that ambiguous, uncomfortable place, we must exist with those who are trying to speak the truth that can sound very different from the truth we are trying to speak, even as each of us does so in good conscience.
The Letter to the Ephesians seems less concerned about defining truth, apart from the revelation of God in Christ, and more concerned about human relationships in the body of Christ. Whoever wrote this letter, whether Paul or someone writing as him, must have been around the block more than a few times. The author must have understood that it’s hard to grow up into spiritual maturity until we’ve experienced the frustrations and disappointments of life and been significantly humbled, like Paul was. He was, after all, a firebrand in persecuting Christians and later found himself preaching the Gospel to Gentiles while also trying to stay in conversation with the Jews. He never gave up on that conversation. It’s hard to grow into a mature Christian until you’ve been in dialogue with those who question your most deeply held convictions and possibly question your very identity.
To grow up as people of faith, we need the Church. The Letter to the Ephesians may, in fact, provide a very good answer to the question we’ve been exploring on Sunday mornings in our book study. Why go to church? Why? Because the Church is the place in which we learn to live together in unity, peace, and love. The Church demands that to be the Church we strive for a higher calling even while our roots grow deeper into the earth. The Church is the place where our diversity of perspectives and variety of gifts demand that we rely closely on one another to discover unity. The Church is the place where peace exists because tensions and conflicts have been wrestled with, not avoided, and where love abides because the health of the body is more important than personal comfort. The Gospel tells us that strength is found in lowliness, meekness, and patience with those who push all our buttons. We have grown up when we can sacrifice our own certainty and sense of superiority for the sake of the unity of the body of Christ.
We need the Church because she calls us to a constant truth that surpasses the instability of the world in which we live. It’s a world that’s capable of so much good but is often governed by wily voices that dupe us into self-righteousness and binary certitude. In such a world, we’re told that we should silence the voices who disagree with us or at least ignore them. We’re told that progress is far better than patience. We’re told that those who think differently from us simply need to be converted to our way, and for those of us in the know, it’s our job to help them see the error of their ways. Is it any wonder that there’s so much division among us?
And so, we need the Church more than ever. We need the Church as she implores us, just as the author of Ephesians implored the residents of Ephesus, to strive for a better way as revealed in Christ, to grow up into spiritually mature adults. We need the Church to teach us the gift of time and patience. We need an open space for tense words that are still spoken in love. We need room to lovingly agree to disagree.
The place where the mettle of the Church is tried and tested is in the Mass. Our actions in the Mass are the litmus test of whether we’re really Christians or simply self-righteous hypocrites. At the Communion rail, if we’re truly seeking a better way and if we long to speak the truth in love, we let Christ speak his truth into our lives. We kneel beside others who color different bubbles on the election ballot, and together we stretch out our hands and receive into our very bodies Truth himself. At that moment at the rail, Christ is the only thing that matters. We serve together in ministry with others not because we necessarily like or agree with them, but because in love, we agree to act out of our shared belief that Christ himself is the source of our actions, not our own personal convictions. We share Christ’s peace every week, even with and especially with those that challenge every ounce of our patience, because that peace is not ours to control but Jesus’s gift to receive.
And the greatest paradox of all, is that when we become prisoners of the Lord, just like the author of Ephesians, we become truly free. We’re free because we’re released from the slavery to self and human ideology into the glorious freedom of abundant life in Christ. And what a marvelous gift that is.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
August 4, 2024