First-Year Sunday Service
By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D ’13
Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity
Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Sept. 1, 2024)
The familiar is not always comforting. Some of the things that we are familiar with here at Harvard and also here in this country and here in our world are quite discomforting. An election is approaching as Calvon said, and I think I can rightly say that presidential politics over the past 10 years is woefully familiar and woefully poisonous. That's not very comforting.
We are familiar with this war in Gaza, which is stretching on for 11 months. Provides little comfort to me. And we know that there are tensions and dissension and division here in our community at Harvard. We finished the year with them and it would be naive to think that they do not persist. Those are familiar things. And so we come here to this familiar church, we come to the word of God for a word of comfort and in the Gospel of Mark, instead we get this catalog of condemnations. This list of all the sins by which we defile ourselves and ruin ourselves.
Speaking of the familiar, those of you who have been listening to me preach for a few years know that I like to start my sermons complaining about the scripture for the day, and today is no different. But seriously, this one's rough. They come to him. Jesus gets into this argument with the Pharisees who want to ask why he's not following the traditions of their people, and he just lays into them and he lists ... He says, "It all comes out of you. It all comes out of your hearts."
And the James passage, it's got a glimmer of hope, but I'll get into why I don't like that one too. I'll start with Mark though. Mark, this list, all these things. "Don't worry about what's outside in the world coming in and defiling you," Jesus says. "Worry about how you defile the world with your theft and murder and adultery and licentiousness and folly and evil."
Passages like this have led Christianity throughout its history to become preoccupied with sin and that preoccupation with a kind of moral or spiritual purity has been the historical and theological grounds for all sorts of exclusions, all sorts of violences including anti-Semitism, which we see nascent in this passage with Jesus in an argument with the Pharisees here. Now, sin is real. I'm not suggesting that sin's not real. No one could look at the world around us and believe that sin is not real. But to abstract a teaching about sin like this from the larger message of God's love and God's mercy fosters Christianity as a purity cult where what we come to care most about is whether or not we or others are pure and we come to police the purity of ourself and others and we distract ourselves from the larger message, the greater message of the gospel, which is that God loves us even when we fail, even when we falter, even when we sin.
And I think that's my complaint with the passage from the letter of James as well. I love the definition of religion that James gives at the end of this passage. "True religion is the care for widows and orphans in their distress." Amen. But then James also says, "And to keep yourself unstained and undefiled by the world."
Again, this idea that the world itself sullies us, ruins us because the world is impure, the world is corrupt. This seems to be exactly the opposite actually of what Jesus is saying. And again, this idea that that which is outside of us can corrupt us and destroy us has been the rationale in Christian communities and in post-Christian communities for all sorts of violence, all sorts of exclusion, all forms of condemnation.
This preoccupation, this valorization of making ourselves pure or making our church pure or making our nation or our people pure is the root of so much evil and it's why these lessons bother me. We have them this morning because we share them with other Christian churches throughout the world. All the Protestant churches, the mainline Protestant churches and the Roman Catholic Church are reading this lesson this morning, and this is the message that we are receiving this morning, but I think maybe there's a different message they can give us.
Again, familiar things. Those of you who have heard me preach for a few years know that I like to follow the example of a Christian saint named Augustine whose feast day was this week and he said that God is love and so every word of scripture should reveal God's love. And so if you don't see it at first glance, keep looking. So here's my attempt to keep looking.
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Jesus says to those he's arguing with that, "You abandon the teachings, abandon the commandments, abandon the teachings of God to preserve your own tradition." What are these teachings that have been abandoned to preserve human tradition? One of the core teachings that Jesus has and that we have in the Christian tradition is this idea that God is love but also that God creates all that is out of love. "
That can seem obvious or meaningless, but it's actually important to describe what that means. God does not create everything first out of curiosity or boredom or something. And then once it has been created, God says, "Oh, that's nice. That's good. I guess I love that." That's not how God's creative love works. Rather, God loves and the love itself is what undergirds and grounds all that is. To exist at all, the Christian tradition says, is to be beloved of God. The two things go together. God doesn't decide God loves us after we show up. God loves us and, poof, we show up.
And if we think about creation that way, if we think about the world that way, if we think about all that is that way, if we say that all that is, is beloved of God, then that frames this list of sins that Mark gives us differently because things like theft and murder and pride and licentiousness, what they do fundamentally is ignore the belovedness of others. They turn others into objects for our use or our domination or our exploitation. That which is good, that which is beloved of God, we turn it into something else and that is what Jesus is telling us to do. To love the world or at least to recognize how much God loves it and not to reject it. The danger is not that we will turn away something that would sully us. The danger is that we would fail to love something that God loves already.
It's a little trickier this time. It's also how I want to read this message from James, where James says you have to be unstained by the world. That seems pretty straightforward. The world is going to mess you up, James seems to say. But the Greek word, which is translated as world here ... Again, I like my Greek. The word which is translated as world here is the word “cosmos.” And cosmos does mean like the universe of the world, but actually it's defined alongside its opposite. The opposite of cosmos is chaos. Chaos is disorder. Cosmos is the world's order.
So what James is saying here is keep yourself unstained by the order of things by the way this world is ordered. And the way this world is ordered, we know, and I am sorry to say, is too often along lines of exploitation and domination. The way the world is ordered is that we often ignore and neglect orphans and widows, which is why the opposite of the world's order James tells us is to care for the needy in their distress. What's actually at stake for James as for Mark's Jesus is the world's fundamental basic belovedness. What's at stake is our moral and spiritual and Christian obligation, therefore to love it or at least to recognize that God loves it, even the parts we don't like, even the parts that we fear, even those we to exclude or despise.
And when we read the lessons this way, if we begin with our fundamental commitment to God's love for us and for all that is, then these lessons become maybe exactly what we need to hear this morning because then these lessons do speak directly to the evils of our politics and our wars. They do speak to our dissension and division. What would our politics, what would our conflicts, what would our arguments look like if we regarded none of our opponents as hateful, none of them as despised, if we regarded each and every one of them as beloved of God?
Now I want to be clear. Regarding them as beloved doesn't mean that we have to regard them as good because again, God's love for us is not about our purity or about theirs. I am not saying that we cannot regard others as wrong or as reckless or as dangerous or as cruel because many times they are. And when they are, we must say that they are. What I'm saying is that we have to ask a different question. We have to ask not whether our opponent is good. We have to ask what our response to them would look like if we forced ourselves to reckon with God's love for those who are wronged and God's love for those who are reckless and God's love for those who are even dangerous and cruel. What would it mean if we truly reckoned with God's desperate and unending and infinite love for all of it, for all God's children?
What I'm saying is that the real moral and spiritual question is not whether we should love our enemies. I think it's clear that we must. The question is how we ought to go about trying to love them. What's the best approach by which to love them while also managing to keep ourselves and our neighbors safe? And I'll tell you, I don't know the answer to that question. I taught a class on it in the spring and I see some students from that class in this sanctuary and they will tell you I don't know the answer to that question. I know it's the right question. I don't know the answer. Maybe it's because I'm a preacher, not a policymaker.
But I can tell you this. If we truly reckoned with God's love for all, we could not resort to a vicious and a reactionary politics like that we see in our presidential politics. We could not resort to a politics that demonizes migrants and minorities; both ethnic and sexual minorities. If we truly reckoned with God's love for all, we could not resort to the kind of retaliatory violence that inspired the horrible attacks of October 7th and also undergirds the continuing horrors of the military response to October 7th.
If we truly reckoned with God's love for all people, we would care not only for widows and orphans. We'd also care for immigrants and strangers, for refugees and prisoners. We would care for the ill and the deprived and the despised and even the despicable. If we truly reckoned with God's love for all, then in our arguments and our disagreements, including on this campus, we would have to acknowledge our opponents as humans full of grief and despair and confusion and fear just like us, just like we are. And then we would have to do our level best to speak our truth, not only with righteousness, but also with love.
It's a new year. So much awaits us in this new year and so much of it will be good, I am sure. This is a special place full of special people and incredible opportunities. So much of what awaits us this year will be good. Some of it will be bad. That's the way things go. We don't know what will happen. There's so much we don't know about what will happen in the next two months, in the next nine months, in the next year. I certainly don't know what will happen and when it happens, I don't know what we'll do, but I do think I know what Jesus wants us to do. Jesus wants us to love. To do what we do with love.
Pray with me this morning that we will find the courage to have it done.
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