The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel's sermon for Eastertide Evensong brings together preteen questions about the Seven Deadly Sins, ancient Greek philosophy, Emmanuel Kant, the arts, and a very powerful set of very good friends. All to remind us who we are, whose we are, and how we live into it.

This evening's readings are:

Wisdom of Solomon 7:22-8:1

Matthew 7:7-14

Readings may be found on Mission of St. Clare

Officiant: The Rev. Barbara Ballenger

Preacher: The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel

Crucifer: Riley Prell

Director of Music: Tyrone Whiting

St. Martin's Vocal Ensemble: Krystiane Cooper, Alyson Harvey, Ross Druker, John Wentz, Martha Crowell, Jean McConnell, David Cybulski, Ralph West

Lectors: Leni Windle and Harry Gould

Liturgical Support: Cathy and Gary Glazer

Tech Director: Daniel Cooper

Altar Guild: Tina Bell

In the Same Breath

Sermon by the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for Eastertide Evensong

Sunday, May 2, 2021

Using readings from the Daily Office

[Introductory Music]

[The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel] Please join me in a spirit of prayer.

Blessed Creator God, we give you thanks for the gift of your Sophia, your wisdom that pervades all you have made with your love and your goodness. She reflects your eternal light. She is a spotless mayor of your workings. She passes into holy souls and makes us friends of God and prophets, for God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Well, welcome back to Evensong! Isn't this great? Except for the 16 layers of clothes I'm wearing, it's fantastic.

So, at our church, there is a junior high student who loves to engage me in theological and ethical discussions. I relish his engagement. Nothing quite tests a seminary education like a preteen. His favorite recent topic - drum roll please - is the seven deadly sins. Today he asked me the profound question, "Jarrett can you rank them in order from the worst to the least bad", certainly not the best.

"Which deadly sins are more serious than the others?" he asked. "That is hard to answer," I replied, "After all, they are all deadly. It's hard to get worse than that." So I asked him, "Which ones are you concerned about?" He replied, "Pride and sloth. Pride is just being proud of yourself," he said, "what is wrong with that?" "Well," I said, "Yes, that's very good. Here's how I think it works: healthy pride is in the middle. That is, when we mirror God's delight in us and our delight in ourselves much like Sophia, on the one end there is too much pride and on the other too little pride. It's on the edges where sin comes into play," I said. "Same with sloth. That's a fun word to use. Healthy leisure is in the middle that God delights in, on one side is too much indolence and on the other side of the spectrum we're overworking and addicted to our work."

He accepted this answer with a thoughtful look and I spared him the footnotes. You get the footnotes. What I taught him, and this is crucial to my sermon, comes from Thomas Aquinas. And before Thomas Aquinas it came from the great Greek philosopher Aristotle. Healthy Christianity has this long, healthy, happy history of productive relations with reason, philosophy, science, logic, and all the liberal arts and I want to celebrate that. I want to celebrate that connection at this evensong where we have a glorious passage from the Wisdom of Solomon and we have the Golden Rule from the Gospel according to Matthew. Let's take that Golden Rule and the categorical imperative as a place to start. "Act as you would want all other people to act towards all other people," says Immanuel Kant. "In everything, do to others as you would have them do to you, for this is the law and the prophets," says Jesus. "Using pure reason alone, the great philosopher arrives at the same truth as Jesus speaks from tradition and revelation. And I'm not the first one to point out that Kant setting out to strip away all tradition and revelation still manages to discover 18th century Protestant theology in the process.

For the attentive reader of the Bible, this should be no surprise at all. We know that God speaks the lean language of reason. God speaks the logos. God speaks the Sophia. God speaks in tradition, in story, revelation, science, poetry, and all the arts in the same breath. The name of that breath is Sophia, and she is celebrated as an emanation, an outpouring of God's inner life, in this gorgeous passage from the Wisdom of Solomon. Using the language of middle Platonism, the unknown Egyptian author who is masquerading in this book as King Solomon, lays out the gift of wisdom for an imaginary audience of all the world's leaders. So, not only does God's wisdom exist in everything, it's available to all people. Wisdom is God's voice speaking through all of God's creation, showing us order, purpose, meaning, and process. Ultimately showing us a loving God who delights in all that God has made. The whole world communicates. The world is intelligible to us. The world is impregnated with God's loving presence and we are part of God's communicating abundance as learners, listeners, explorers, thinkers, singers, worshipers, scientists, on and on. I love this so much because we have an image here of wholeness. An image that brings all parts of humanity together. Reason and knowledge are not merely for dismantling, they're not merely for disintegrating.

Stuck in the terms of stale 19th-century reductive rationalism, we can be caught thinking that when we take a car apart we prove there was no car in the first place, just a lot of parts. Stuck in a stale 19th-century debate we think science and religion are incompatible. We react to a reductive science with an equally reductive fundamentalist religion and we go nowhere. Stuck in 20th-century scientism we think knowledge is the sole province of the scientific method and while it is so abundant in truth, there's a more-than. There is room for more and there is this wonderful web of liberating, loving, communal wisdom we hear praised in the Wisdom of Solomon and gorgeous poetry.

Every spring I start flowers from seed under a grow light in my mudroom. Nothing fancy. My favorite flower is the morning glory. First, two leaves spring up and then two more come after that. By this week we have a vine growing at a rapid pace, two or three inches a day, that finds the nearest vertical structure and starts climbing it, at least in my mudroom, in a counterclockwise direction. I want to know if in Argentina it goes the other way. But that's the curiosity we're talking about here, right? The world is wonderful! What if it does go clockwise in Argentina? That is God's whimsy, I would say, and gravity and something else. It's all good, see? It all works together. Without eyes, this plant has no eyes, it finds this vertical support, searches out, grabs it and climbs it while reproducing cells at an astounding rate. I would love to hear the complete biological account of this plant behavior. I really do want to learn that and, and this is an and, I want to delight in it. I want to take joy in it and wonder from observing it and I want to thank God for it, all in the same breath. All in the same breath, the breath of Sophia, where all knowing comes together as God's mystery, spoken so we can receive it.

Now, you'll excuse me but we're going back to Kant. And I love Kant. He's hard to argue with, God forbid I would try. Yet he almost got it right. Almost. There's a more. You see, if you start off with a false dichotomy you end up with half of an answer, or less. When you split tradition and reason you lose something, something is lost. It is absolutely true that we owe to others what is owed to us. In our humanity, however we resist it, and we do, however we violate it constantly, reserving it for family and friends, reserving it for people we like and people like us, reserving it for local people and not people far away, and on and on and on, but here's what Kant misses: God owes us nothing.

God gives us everything without owing us one thing at all. This is grace. We are not entitled to God's freely-given forgiveness, or God's freely-given love, or God's freely-given son. Only through what God graciously gives us are we restored to live the grace of the Golden Rule. To live the grace of the categorical imperative. That is God's dream of wholeness that God breathes into us. God's dream of humanity reharmonized with creation and reason and every other way of human perception and discovery. God breathes God's reconciliation through it all. And her name is grace. And she is a very good friend of Sophia.

Amen.

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