Today’s we read the first of several stories we’ll be hearing
over the coming weeks about the prophet Elijah.
Elijah is a kind of folk-hero, and these stories are a lot like fairy
tales. I guess every tribe and nation
has stories about larger-than-life heroes of the past, except the difference
between Elijah and someone like Paul Bunyan, or Hercules, is that he does his
exceptional feats, not by virtue of super-human size or strength, but because
he speaks and does the will of God.
When Elijah engages in spiritual combat with the prophets of the Canaanite god Baal, Elijah, the last
prophet of Israel’s, stands by the altar that he has rebuilt from it ruins and
prays, “"O LORD, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel, that
I am your servant, and that I have done
all these things at your bidding.” And
miraculous fire comes down from the sky and consumes Elijah’s sacrifice, in
spite of the fact that it is completely drenched with water. And so we see that the Elijah’s God really is
God, and that Elijah is doing his
will. He isn’t the type of a great
warrior or a noble king, or even a wise teacher—he’s not really even the main
character in his own story. That honor
goes to the Lord, the God of
Israel. The Bible gives us terrific
stories about Elijah, but they are only part of the greater and more important
story of God and God’s people.
The centurion in today’s reading from the Gospel of Luke was
captivated by that great story. And here
again there is an extraordinary miracle—the healing of a young slave that
occurs at a distance, without Jesus ever touching or even seeing him. But, like in the Elijah story, the miracle is
not the main point. Instead, the main
point is the faith of the centurion in the God of Israel. He has learned about the faithfulness, and
goodness, and compassion of this God, and for his sake he has built a house
where the Jews of Capernaum can come together and hear the scriptures that tell
his story. And now he has heard of
Jesus, who comes like one of the prophets in the story, doing the will of God,
bestowing healing and reconciliation and forgiveness, and rekindling the flame
of love for God in the hearts of the people.
For the centurion, the news of the coming of Jesus awakens an impossible
hope—the faith that the promises of life and blessing and redemption that God
gives to Israel through the prophets also apply to him.
The centurion believes in Jesus, because he understands what
it means to have authority. Jesus, like
him, is one who receives his power from higher up, and that is what gives
authority to his commands. When the
centurion tells his soldiers or his slaves to do something, they do it, because
when he speaks it is as if the emperor were speaking. And he sees that the word that Jesus speaks
has an even greater power than that, the power of God.
In this way, the comparison that the centurion makes between
his authority and that of Jesus is also a contrast. According to the imperial ideology of Rome,
the emperor was God. The chain of
command of which the centurion is a low-ranking member is supposed to go all
the way to the top. It is supposed to connect
him to the ultimate authority that governs the world. But the centurion knows better. He knows that there is no one in his chain of
command that can give life at the threshold of death. He can’t order his slave to get better, and
it won’t do him any good to appeal to his higher-ups. He has to go to someone who is under the
authority of the real source of healing, and who really has the power to
save. He understands that the God of the
Hebrew scriptures is that source, and that Jesus of Nazareth is his servant.
One implication of Jesus’ response to the centurion’s faith
is that Gentiles are no longer excluded from the blessings of Israel’s covenant
with God. This was one of the radical
messages of the Gospel, and it still has power for us today. It helps us guard continually against an exclusive
notion of our own membership in God’s elect.
But for the most part we have long put behind us the idea that, as
Gentiles, we have no part in the covenant.
It’s not something we worry about, so that part of the Gospel message
doesn’t really mean good news.
But this other message that the centurion gives us, this radical
contrast between his authority and the authority of Jesus still packs a real punch. That’s because we live in a time when everyone
is worried about whose authority you can trust.
Whatever institution you look at—Government, business, the universities,
the military, the churches, the press—you see signs of deep demoralization,
corruption, retrenchment, and anxiety about the future. Even Mother Earth—the original symbol of
permanence, and solidity, and inexhaustible abundance—now seems unable to hold
up her own.
Memorial Day morning I was having breakfast with some friends
and friends of friends; people my age,
blessed with fine educations, beautiful children, good health, and
prosperity. So it was a little surprising
to hear one of them speak matter-of-factly about the imminent extinction of the
human race. It wasn’t surprising because
I haven’t thought about it myself—I used to worry about far more than was good
for me. It was surprising because it
reminded me of how my feelings about all that have changed. As the rest of us around the table made the
case for hope, sharing ideas about what it will take to save the world, I could
see clearly what a difference faith makes.
It’s not that I don’t see the predicament we’re in, or that I think it’s
going to be easy to turn things around, but that I can imagine the possibility
that we are living but one chapter in a much greater story, and that the author
of the story is God.
It’s what Paul wrote about in his letter to the Galatians: “the
gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive
it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a
revelation of Jesus Christ.” Now we
would be missing the point if we thought that the authority of the servant of
God depends on having a revelation like the one Paul had on the road to
Damascus. Or that it depends on
witnessing Elijah’s supernatural bonfire, or Jesus’ miraculous healings. Paul’s point is that when he had his
revelation, he woke up to see that God was writing a whole new chapter in the
story, and that he was to play a part. Having
a part to play in the story gave him authority, an authority that didn’t depend
on any human chain of command.
The example of Paul, like that of Elijah, like that of Jesus
reminds us just how much one servant of God can do. But one can’t do the will of God if one doesn’t
know what it is. And you can’t know what
it is if you don’t desire it, and actively seek it. This
is why St. John’s vestry has been studying the art of discernment, learning to ground
our decision-making in prayerful listening and conscious intention to seek the
mind of Christ. It is why we are a
congregation that reads the Bible, not in order to know how the story ends, but
because you can’t write a new chapter if you don’t know how the story
begins. It is why we sing chants and
hymns and say public prayers, why we sit together in silence, why we do Godly
Play, why we visit the sick and lonely, and feed the hungry, why we break the bread
and drink the wine. We do these things
because they nourish our faith, the faith to live our lives with authority, the
authority of servants of the real ruler of the world.
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