A Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent
Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22
On January 23rd, 404 A.D., Augustine delivered one of his longest, wittiest, and, certainly, angriest sermons. As was usual for him during this season of his life, he had come from Hippo to Carthage, a leading city of the Roman empire and the center of African Christianity, at the invitation of Aurelius, bishop of Carthage. Aurelius, a dear friend and the leading bishop in the province, had asked Augustine, who himself by this time had been a bishop for almost a decade, to give the sermon at one of the services dedicated to the celebration of the popular Spanish martyr, St Vincent of Saragossa. But on the day of the feast, January 22nd, as Augustine began his prepared remarks, some in the swelling crowd demanded he move the pulpit closer to them, out from the apse and near to the altar in the center of the basilica. After some rowdy back-and-forth, he refused, and suddenly stepped down without having delivered his sermon.
The next day, after Aurelius had spoken, Augustine began his remarks by accepting responsibility for “yesterday’s disturbance.” “I was as much to blame as you,” he says, “and even more, because of my responsibility to you.” Nevertheless, he moved quickly to insist that what he and Aurelius had asked had been anything but unreasonable: “So the only thing we were asking was that those few people who were pressing on the altar railings would have the goodness to move up to the spaces next to the place where we were speaking. Was that a very big thing to ask? But that’s just what they refused to listen to, and the disturbance followed…”
Later in the sermon, he lets loose his rebuke, speaking not about “them” but to “you”:
I’ll tell you, to put the fear of God into you, not to make you fall… Don’t let disobedience seem to you just a slight sin. Certainly, I’ll tell you straight out. It would have made not the slightest difference whether you listened from here or from there; that there was space enough near us for a crowd to fill, both I knew and you also knew. What did your opposition spring from, your refusal to come over here, but solely and simply from your obstinacy? … If you don’t obey in a slight matter, are you going to obey in a greater one? Haven’t you read what the Lord said, ‘Whoever is faithful in a small matter is also faithful in a great one; and whoever is unfaithful in a small matter is also unfaithful in a great one’?
As he develops his apology, Augustine makes it clear, quite impertinently, that only his “master,” Aurelias, had either a reason or the right to be offended. And he explains, even more hilariously, that he did not ask for permission to come down from the pulpit because he believed he knew what had to be done and trusted instead in Aurelius’ forgiveness. In his own words, “Of course, if I had consulted him and he had forbidden me, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything now but obey. I would have been obliged not come down. So, I preferred to ask his pardon afterward for coming down from the pulpit without consulting him or his instructing me to, rather than not do what I thought should be done.” Augustine also remarks, almost off-handedly, that it was not his idea to place the pulpit in the apse in the first place. Clearly, then, in North Africa, as now, in Middle America, it was better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission.
Having “cleared the air,” Augustine declares his intentions for the day: he means to give the Carthaginians a lengthy talk—on obedience, believe it or not. Rhetorically, this forces him into a difficult spot, not primarily because of the previous day’s drama, but because of the ongoing trouble with the Donatists. As Paul Griffiths explains:
Faced by a disobedient congregation in Carthage, and with the Donatist difficulties very much in mind, Augustine … must preach obedience, but must do it in such a way as to validate the disobedience of the martyrs; he must affirm the importance of obedience to the state, but not in such a way as to call into question the subversive refusal of such obedience characteristic of both Catholic and Donatist martyrs; and he must distinguish the obedience he requires of his congregations from that required of theirs by Donatist bishops.
Even if you aren’t terribly familiar with these details, you can easily imagine how hard it must have been for Augustine, under strained circumstances, to talk gracefully about obedience. You can imagine it so easily because the same is more or less always true, no matter who talks about it, or where or when they do so. It is hard to say anything truly life-giving about obedience. In some circles, it has become almost impossible.
On April 9, 1968, a Pentecostal pastor, Calvin Bacon, attended Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. In July, Bacon’s reflections were published in his denomination’s magazine, The Pentecostal Evangel. In those reflections, Bacon admits that “the American Negroes had not been treated right.” But he does not hesitate to condemn King’s methods of resistance: “I can’t say I fully agreed with his ‘nonviolent civil disobedience.’ Nonviolence, yes. But I wasn’t sure our definitions were the same. Civil disobedience, no: I knew the Scriptures state that we were to submit to our rulers.”
Bacon remembers asking himself a series of questions at the end of the service: “Why all the trouble? How long will such violence last? Who is responsible? What is the solution?” And he also recalls that a passage from Scripture occurred to him on his drive home, a passage about obedience: “Let as many servants as are under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honor, that the name of God and his doctrine be not blasphemed” (1 Tim. 6:1). In the light of this text, Bacon came to a certain conclusion: “Civil rights legislation and government spending cannot, I believe, meet the basic needs of the ghettos, but the gospel can.” Tragically, “their ministers are now preaching social revolution instead of the gospel of Christ’s saving power.” So, all that is left is to “find some way to help our black neighbors spiritually—through gospel preaching and Bible teaching.”
Bacon’s convictions about authority and obedience, which he no doubt believed were simply “biblical,” align not with the law of Christ but with the spirit of Jim Crow. Leaving MLK’s funeral—MLK’s funeral!—the passage that comes to his mind is one that requires slaves—slaves!—to honor their masters so that God’s name is not blasphemed. The hard truth is, he could hardly fail to come to such conclusions, because, as a man of his times, his imagination had been shaped most deeply by what Kosuke Koyama called the crusading mind. The even harder truth, however, is that these beliefs about authority and submission, dominant in Bacon’s time, continue to hold sway not only in our hearts and minds, but even in our bodies. So, if we’re honest, we have to admit that it’s virtually impossible for us, as Americans, to talk about obedience truthfully and lovingly. And not only because we’ve inherited a Christianity deeply compromised by complicity with white supremacy. We’ve also internalized the myth of redemptive violence, which makes us praise some acts of disobedience as not only licit but blessed, and makes us condemn the same acts as illicit and cursed whenever they’re done by others we’ve been conditioned to fear as our enemies.
On January 6th, 2021, as you no doubt remember, a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., disrupting the congressional process formalizing President Biden’s victory. As you know, these insurrectionists presented themselves as patriots even as they mounted their attack on democratic principles and the symbolic center of their own government. Even more absurdly, some Christian ministers in the hours that followed used the story of the temple cleansing, which we heard today, to justify the mob’s insurrection. If we did not know it before, we surely cannot deny it now: these contradictions lie at the heart of what makes American Christianity what it is, at least in its dominant forms, and they split the conscience of everyone formed by these expressions of the faith, expressions which came into existence in the first place primarily in order to validate the notions of obedience and disobedience necessary to sustain the ideologies of national exceptionalism, racial supremacy, and sexual hierarchy. There is, without a doubt, a “wisdom” in these forms of Christianity and the social orders they serve. But it is exposed as nonsense by the glory of God revealed in the inglorious execution of Jesus. To cut to the chase, then: inasmuch as we are good American Christians, we have no hope of telling good obedience from bad, because we have not yet learned the first truth of our faith, the truth of the cross: “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (1 Cor. 1:25).
In his sermon to the Carthaginians, Augustine cleverly appeals to Jesus’ example. He tells his hearers they are not expected to “kindle the sun, make the moon run its monthly course of waning and waxing, cause the stars to shine from the sky…” or to “… open the eyes of the blind, crack open the ears of the deaf, drive off the fevers of the sick, raise up the flesh of the dead.” But they are expected to obey their bishops, he says, because in this way they obey God. Jesus obeyed the Father as his equal. But he also obeyed his mother. And while many bristle at being called a slave, Jesus gladly took that title for himself. And he made himself not only the slave of the Father and the slave of his mother but also the slave of all—“including even you.”
Augustine mischievously parries an anticipated objection: “Somebody will say, ‘My bishop should follow my Lord’s example, and serve me as my slave.’ I’m telling your graces—let those get the point who can—if he wasn’t serving you as your slave, he wouldn’t be giving you orders.” And in the closing lines of his sermon, which he admits has taken far too long, Augustine reminds his hearers how Christ, as the disciples’ slave, commanded them to fetch from the nearest village the foal providentially kept for them. His reading of the story illustrates what he takes to be the essence of Christian obedience:
What is this foal, tied up in the village over against them, on which nobody had ever sat, what can it be, but the people of the nations tied up in the devil’s chains, and nobody had ever sat on it because it had never carried any prophet? It’s untied; it’s fetched; it carries God; it’s ridden by the Lord; it’s directed by the Lord along the way; it’s admonished by the Lord with a whip. Both by those who complied and fetched the foal was obedience displayed, and by those who let the foal go the moment they heard the Lord needed it… Which are you, my brothers and sisters? Which do you want to be: the ones untying the foal, or the foal? You dare not claim for yourselves the role of those the foal was united by; it was the apostles who did this. This is the role of men in charge, the role we ourselves have to sustain with whatever strength the Lord is pleased to grant us—with total, anxious vigilance; it’s in this role that I am speaking to you. You are the foal. Be obedient to those who are leading you off to carry the Lord. Of course, my dearest friends, you must reflect on the manner in which the disciples untied the foal and led it along to the Lord. They were leading it, and it was following them; I mean, they weren’t dragging it, while it was digging in its heels. And yet, because we are talking about our service, our being your slaves, when the disciples were leading the foal to the Lord, they were really, in fact, being the slaves of the foal. That’s how we too act as your slaves, when we lead you to the Lord, when we teach you obedience and admonish you. If your weakness wasn’t being served in this way, you wouldn’t have come to listen to us today.
Augustine’s playfulness lightens the burden, or at least shifts the weight. But it does not quite set us free. He is right, of course, to say that God’s mastery is to our good. And he is right to say that Jesus, as God living the human life, acted both as master and as slave, first and last. But he seems unable, or unwilling, to accept how Jesus’ enactment irrevocably revolutionized these roles. Whatever is right about it, then, Augustine’s reading leaves the impression that Christ’s readiness to take on the form of a slave in effect assures the appropriateness of slavery as an institution. But it comes nearer the truth, I believe, to say Jesus took the form of a slave not only to dignify humility and service, but also to overcome mastery and domination and to heal the humiliations they inflict, revealing once-for-all how inhumane it is for one human to own another, and how blasphemous it is to regard others as in any sense inferior or unworthy. Christ in his life and death does not secure our social orders or our systems of authority: he calls them into question, exposing their pretentions as absurd, delivering us from their showy claims on our allegiance. And he calls us to embody an altogether different obedience, which he ordained and enacted, the obedience not of servility or coercion, but the obedience of perfect mutuality and shared flourishing, covenantal reciprocity and common delight.
Needless to say, Augustine was not alone in his mistake. To this day, we continue to ignore the fuller implications of the Gospel, to resist the fulfillment of Jesus’ Spirit-baptized project. For the most part, we, no less than the Christians in ancient Carthage, insist on obedience only insofar as it fixes our way of life, guaranteeing our security against those whom we fear or our superiority over those whom we despise. To our shame, our sins are no different from our forefathers’. Like them, we celebrate the power of authorities we like, and denounce the authoritarianism of authorities we dislike. When it suits our arguments, we appeal to what we insist is the plain reading of texts like Romans 13. When it does not, we contend for more nuanced interpretations. Many of us disregard the Ten Commandments, which we heard today, unless and until their breaking touches our lives. Others of us, caught up in the bloodlust of the culture wars, tokenize or weaponize them. But Lent calls us to return to the obedience that Christ ordains and models for us, the obedience that frees us for freedom, releasing us from subjugation and empowering us to intervene on behalf of those who are oppressed.
Augustine was not wrong to call the Carthaginians to obey their bishops; our obedience to God necessarily takes the shape of submission to human authorities, not only in our churches and our families, but also in our societies. And he was not wrong to warn them about the dangers of disobedience. But if we leave it there, we have done nothing—or at least not enough—to contradict the line of thinking that led some to condemn MLK’s civil disobedience as unscriptural and allowed others to use the story of the cleansing of the temple as justification for sedition and violence. We need to catch the spirit of Augustine’s sermon, the playfulness of it. As he knew, we need to be careful not to take ourselves too seriously, especially when we’re lecturing others about obedience, and even more especially when we’re lecturing them about obeying us! But we also need to say something he did not: our obedience is good only if it is a share in God’s, because only God’s obedience frees us for freedom.
In the opening meditation in his Large Catechism, Robert Jenson insists God’s laws are not alien or onerous for us, but vital and revitalizing. Make no mistake, he says, God does intend for us to be “faithful rather than questing, pious rather than neglectful, communal rather than autonomously individual, chaste rather than liberated, helpful to the fabric of community rather than harmful to it, mutually pleasured rather than covetous.” But we must not think this intention is imposed on us against our desire or to our harm. On the contrary, they constitute our good.
Today’s Psalm expresses exactly this truth: “The law of the Lord is perfect and revives the soul… The statutes of the Lord are just and rejoice the heart” (Ps. 19:7-8). Thus, when God’s will is most perfectly done, we are most fully ourselves. So, Herbert prays:
O let thy sacred will
All thy delight in me fulfill!
Let me not think an action mine own way
But as thy love shall sway,
Resigning up the rudder to thy skill.
This is the wonder of God’s infinite, generative humility: our obedience, whenever it is true, turns out to be nothing less than a sharing in his sovereignty, a participation in the everlasting dominion by which all things are called into being and drawn into perfection. Whatever else we say, we have to say this clearly: our obedience neither pleases God nor appeases him; it does not earn his favor. No, God requires our obedience because only in submission can we be awakened to reality, attuned to the deepest truths of our existence. When we obey, therefore, we find that our obedience is itself a gift, a favor from God, a joy that draws us up into God’s transfiguring delight in us, assuring us of his devotion to us. And this, in the end, is why Christ obeyed, and took the time to learn how to obey: so that he might create for us a way to become for others what he is for us and for God.
