Well, at least Duke won. I didn’t get much work done on the sermon last night, though. And this morning’s preparations were somewhat rushed by the fact that I remembered — in the shower, at 8:40 — that I was supposed to sit in on our 9:00 team-taught class on mission, culture, and gospel. Whoops!
What I cobbled together before mass this morning follows in the “extended” portion below. More important, however, my own wonderful bride returns tomorrow morning from her triumphant conference tour to Birmingham. I’m awfully proud of her, but I missed her, too. It’ll be good to be back together.
Now, on to the sermon:
Anderson Chapel of St. John the Divine, Seabury-Western
1 Corinthians 1:26-31/Matthew 6:25-33
February 5, 2004
I’m thinking about writing a bestselling novel; I can call it The Kildare Code, referring to the lost book of Gospels produced in the scriptorium over which Brigid ruled as abbess. The plot could involve the shocking, shocking revelation that Brigid the Irish saint, the Mary of the Gaels, shows remarkable resemblances to Brigid the Irish goddess of fire and fertility and poetry. The Church has been covering up, for all these years, the secret truth that Irish Christians venerate a Druidic deity; maybe we can throw in a subplot where Sinn Fein and the Ulster Union are racing to reclaim the relics of the saint, which were scattered at the Reformation.
Was there even a real Brigid of Kildare? Maybe some manipulative early Christians made up a non-existent heroine who just happened to have the same name as the goddess. Maybe they transferred to the fictive saint the attributes of the Celtic goddess, in order to win over the indigenous devotees of the Celtic Old Order. Maybe St. Brigid never existed.
And St. Paul reminds us this morning, that’s just the kind of thing God would do. Where the wisdom of this world teaches in the words of Shakespeare’s King Lear, that “nothing will come of nothing,” or in the words of Ray Charles that “them that’s got are them that get,” God’s calling takes up and transforms a world that extends from the least and lowest to the greatest and most mighty – and as Paul points out, God’s calling extends even to the things that are not. Moreover, God calls the least, the nothings, exactly to knock the stuffing out of the leaders. These nothings have nothing to lose, nothing to worry about, free as birds and beautiful as lilies, while we high-ranking Christians stumble along in the chains of pension funds, car payments, vestments, etiquette. God called nonexistent things – and then by grace, pulls us big deals along in the backwash.
Of course, that won’t work for the novel. The novel has to involve success, exotic secrecy, and ideally millions of dollars in royalty payments, not to mention a movie deal in which, I think, Nicholas Cage plays the role of the church historian who discovers the big conspiracy, escapes near-fatal traps, and ends up with the beautiful, slightly dim-witted, but resourceful Irish woman reporter. The novel is all about greatness, power, acquisition, and esoteric knowledge while Paul’s Gospel is all about serving, weakness, giving, and the plain candid gospel that God loves us, God embraces us with a grace that we can’t comprehend or control, God calls us into a ministry of and among nothings. That’s nothing: nothing but fire, nothing but fertility, nothing but poetry.
No glamor to that, but I can live without the glamor. I don’t fit that way of life anyway, I guess. I’ll have to settle for the God who is the source of my life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption. I mean, God’s gift was good enough for Brigid – if she really existed.