To desire a better country

Proper 14C

“They confessed they were strangers and foreigners on earth, for people who speak this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of the land they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one.”

In the letter to Hebrews we heard today, the author alludes to the story of Abram, who believed God’s assurances and answered God’s call to go into another country. In return, he becomes the father of a new people—the people of God, the first citizen of new country conceived of entirely as a dream of God. The author of the letter tells the story of Abraham to comfort the Hebrews, amidst their own turmoil and persecution. In their fear and uncertainty they no doubt yearn for concrete and tangible safety. To be free from harm and persecution; to be warm; to be fed; to be clothed; to be together. 

They appear to be struggling, therefore, with the message that the things of this world do not matter at all, that they should not place their trust in anything that is familiar or comfortable to them, and that there is another country, on no map anywhere, waiting for them, on some date that is not on any calendar. 

There’s a problem in the dualism of both readings today. They are apocalyptic, anticipating a cataclysm between the earthly and spiritual realms.  We reject this dualism, allowing for the spiritual and earthly as both/and. We believe in the incarnational God that was first realized in Jesus, who showed us that God’s values of justice, and mercy require intrusions and disruptions to our human-created order—disruptions, in fact, that Jesus encouraged us to aid and abet. Not unlike the Hebrews, sometimes we would rather stay exactly where we are, trusting in what we know, drawing from experiences familiar to us. 

That’s why the the image Jesus uses of a homeowner’s care for his property is so provocative. He wants to illustrate what fortress behavior looks like on earth. If there is anything that symbolizes security in a concrete and tangible way, it is our household--so much so that we often refer to our homes as havens, or sanctuaries. 

While Hebrews makes clear that such status as a homeowner remains out of bounds for most people, for most of us in the Episcopal church, our context is of relative comfort. So using the compelling image of God breaking into our houses like a thief is to suggest a disruption that hits us literally and figuratively where we live. This isn’t Godzilla—smashing my West Elm sofa or your Samsung smart TV into bits. But it is a God who is challenging us to question the real and spiritual cost of our attachments. 

Jurgen Moltmann wrote that if make earthly possessions our heart’s desire, we will be disappointed.  They simply can’t deliver on that demand. “Only a love of God that has gone wrong deifies what is human and absolutizes what is worldly, thus destroying it,” he said.  

Trust is a mutual affair, he points out, and today’s readings are concerned with whether we reciprocate God’s trust in us. The Bible is full of stories that disconnect people from their familiar and trusted environments, calling them and place their faith instead in the things that God promises. Paradoxically, this kind of faith does not make their environment familiar, but alienates them from it. It loosens their hold on what they have, and its hold on them, freeing them to embrace the future and accept God’s promises. 

For trust in what we know binds us to the past and to the present. Another way of looking at trust is confidence, the ability to trust beyond what we know. The North Star of this trust is the future; this trust has the power to help us face challenges with openness, curiosity, and creativity. “In faith, trust in God does not mean the comfortable protection and safekeeping of our mother’s womb,” Moltmann wrote. “It means the risky freedom of the wide spaces and ever-new coming of God.” 

Now William Temple was someone who grew up steeped in tradition. Born in 1881 “into the purple,” as they say, he lived in Bishop’s palaces for most of his childhood. The father was Bishop of Exeter, and later Archbishop of Canterbury himself. The son followed, becoming a priest, then Bishop of York, then Archbishop of York, finally returning to Lambeth palace as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1942. 

I’ve never been to Lambeth, but I am assured it is--well, palatial--and rooted in things of the past. And there was not even a question in those days that the Archbishop of Canterbury would have come from the British upper class. The appointment is made by agreement between the Prime Minister and the British monarch, most assuredly of someone well known to them. Nevertheless, William Temple was to become a disruptor of the human-created order in England. 

You see, it seemed he had been paying attention. To Britain’s stultifying class system. A trickle-down system of charity rooted in patronage and rural parishes ill-suited to a country that was now urban and industrial. Despite meager social reforms, there were terrible slums, oppressive factories, child labor, and grinding poverty. He had come to maturity in the gilded age, where the gap between rich and poor was more dramatic than ever. Then, the carnage of the Great War, a stain on nations who claimed to lead the civilized world--and a great leveler of social classes. Then, the Great Depression, and the rise of fascism in Europe. 

In boarding school, one of Temple’s teachers encouraged students to spend their summers in the London slums. This experience was one of several that exposed him to experiences he simply couldn’t unsee. First, he couldn’t unsee the poverty and misery, and the structural barriers that kept people from rising out of it. 

Second, he couldn’t unsee that the ordinary people he encountered were made in the image of God as surely as he was. Above and beyond their material needs, Temple saw that poverty and class barriers robbed them of the dignity of participating in and contributing to their communities. 

Finally, he couldn’t unsee the distant, ineffectual role of the Church of England in light of these concerns. The Church was inwardly focused, spouting a bland public morality concerned largely with gambling, sex, and drink. As Hitler came to power, its position was a detached pacifism. The Church was a fortress, disinclined to work with other Christian denominations, and across faiths. It was reflecting very little light into the world. 

And so, Temple acted. He made all of England his parish. He reached out to people in unprecedented ways. He offered others a seat at his table; he wrote articles in popular magazines, and had his own BBC Radio broadcast. Never lofty or distant, he took up approachable topics such as:  What Christians Should Do Now. He set down principles for Christian social action–affordable housing; education for all children; a sustainable income for all; sufficient leisure; a voice for every worker in the workplace. He used his platform to influence social discourse, as a convener, moderator, preacher, and teacher. He formed the first Council for Christians and Jews and inveighed upon English leaders to take in Jewish refugees. For all this, it’s a wonder that the conservative prime minister Winston Churchill chose him to be Archbishop. No doubt it was because in one of his broadcasts, he called for England to join the war against Hitler. It is said that popular opinion in Britain changed overnight.  

William Temple, London. Source: Getty Images 

He was a tireless worker and neglected his health, but was known for his boundless energy. And, for his faith. An attendee at an ecumenical convening he hosted wrote that the deepest impression Temple left was not his considerable intellect, or keen understanding—but his holiness. Reinhold Niebuhr said of him, “few of us have known any person whose life and personality were so completely and successfully integrated around love for Christ as their focus and crown.” 

I have no doubt that Temple’s confidence to forge into unchartered waters came in part from his privilege--his sense of himself as one among a class of men who were ordained to lead. But I think it was primarily that he came to share the dream of God. He heard the call, he grasped his privilege, and he set out to use it, for he desired a better country—not for his sake, but for others. He died in 1944 and was mourned as “the People’s Bishop.”  I believe William Temple singlehandedly pivoted the church’s consciousness of itself as an actor in the world and in relation to social justice.     

Richard Spencer talks of faith eluding those who would tame it, by art or by dogma. It is “not a thing or reality that exists in itself outside the human heart,” he wrote. “It is an action of the human heart, an inclination of the deepest part of the soul. It is the behavior of someone who allows God to be God... It is a sureness in the soul, not that things will probably work out as we planned them, or ‘as they should,’ but that behind and beyond everything there is a God who is good and trustworthy.”

Christians who think of Satan as the “god of this world” depreciate the world; and those who think of heaven as the realm of God are preoccupied with heaven. We seek the reality that lies behind the symbols.  Like William Temple, we open our eyes to the stark contrast between the unfulfilled reality of this world and the dream of God, and we seek to reconcile the two. Perhaps the dreamed-of homeland is not another world, but one that with God’s help, we realize here. We hold our gifts and our possessions lightly; we use them as salt, and light, and leaven, and we find ourselves where we belong—that is, in the service of Christ’s disruptive work in the world, not knowing always how, or when, or if we will effect God’s vision in our own lifetimes, but knowing most assuredly that the heavenly country Christ is working for the completion of God’s loving rule everywhere.

Prepared originally to be preached as a guest at St Michael All Angel's Parish on August 10, 2019, in conjunction with a visit as William Temple House chaplain. The visit was cancelled due to the tragic death by suicide of a parishioner on Saturday. My heart still breaks to remember that awful day. May her soul rest in peace and rise in glory.

Lectionary:  Genesis 15:1-6; Psalm 33:12-22; Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16; Luke 12:32-40.