July 14 2024 Jesus’ Third Way

Rex McKee

Jesus’ Third Way

Homily for St. John’s Episcopal Church by Lisa Wiens Heinsohn given July 14, 2024

The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, Mark 6:14-29

I was born in 1969, at the tail end of a tumultuous decade that included the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy, the last two just months before I was born. Growing up in southern California, I attended a Baptist Church where I also went to school, and I was fairly insulated from the events of the world outside. I was six years old when the Vietnam War ended, and never heard my parents or my church talk about it or about the massive cultural changes happening across the country. But all of that was in the air I was breathing. That made me unconsciously separate faith and my personal life from public life. Public life felt very far away from my everyday life and concerns, especially since I am a person who has privilege others do not.

I hear from some of you that you wish I would almost never speak about public events, and I hear others of you say you wish I would speak about them far more often. But I have come to believe that it is a deep mistake to fail to address our public life from within our faith community. We are not separate from what is happening in our world. Instead we can address it from the unique gifts of the Way of Love.

Recently Stacy Walters sent me a New York Times opinion piece published in May called “The Authoritarians Have the Momentum”.[1] Author David Brooks shares his view that the central struggle in the world today is between liberalism and authoritarianism, between those who support democratic values and those who don’t. I’m guessing the roughly half of the country who will likely vote for Donald Trump in November would not see things this way. But Brooks explores why he thinks the authoritarians are on the upswing, in the United States and elsewhere. He says this:

Liberal societies can seem a little tepid and uninspiring. Liberalism tends to be non-metaphysical; it avoids the big questions like: Why are we here? Who made the cosmos? It nurtures the gentle bourgeois virtues like kindness and decency but not… some of the loftier virtues, like bravery, loyalty, piety and self-sacrificial love… The great strength of the authoritarians who oppose liberal principles, from Trump to Xi to Hamas, is that they play straight into the primordial sources of meaning that are deeper than individual preference — faith, family, soil and flag. The authoritarians tell their audiences that the liberals want to take all that is solid — from your morality to your gender — and reduce it to the instability of a personal whim. [2]

So how would we come at this from the perspective of the Way of Love? As our Bishop Craig Loya has often said, our faith is never partisan, but it is always political. Our gospel story from today is precisely a story about how faith intersects with the public sphere. Our church’s namesake John the Baptist publicly criticizes the Rome-appointed leader of Galilee, Herod Antipas, for marrying his brother’s wife. It ends up getting him killed in a sordid and gruesome story that could just as well be an episode of Game of Thrones.

But what’s fascinating about the story from today’s gospel is the context in which it comes up, what has happened just before it. Jesus has just sent his twelve apostles out to heal people and to proclaim the good news of the reign of God, which is directly countercultural to the bad news of oppression and the Roman Empire. And by sending his apostles out, Jesus’ teachings and healing become exponentially well known. John the Baptist had been beheaded some time before that, but the story is not told until Herod hears of Jesus’ increasing reputation and concludes with no small amount of guilt that Jesus is John the Baptist returned from the dead. In fact it is after John is killed that Jesus sends the Twelve out to heal and proclaim a different reality, a more ultimate reality, than the one in which they are oppressed and suffering.

What does this mean for us?

Last night my teenage daughter was having her birthday party when the news about the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump began to come in. I will admit I didn’t sleep much. I will admit that I feel fear for our country and what the dominant worldview is producing—increasing political violence and hatred, blame and intolerance. But I will also say this. Jesus’ Way of Love was born in just such a time. The more it was crushed, the more it grew. It grew because it does not respond to violence and hatred with more violence and hatred, but with love and the insistence that we will seek and serve Christ in all persons. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King said that hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.

It may be that liberalism, democratic values, are uninspiring because they are mostly about process and fairness and equal opportunity. They mostly look horizontally and leave the metaphysical to the private sphere. This is where we come in. Although we’ve talked at St. John’s about how the church needs to change, one thing does not need to change. We are following Jesus’ Way of Love together – we are learning to embody love together. To put love into action. To refuse to demonize anyone ever. This doesn’t mean we can’t speak truth to power. It doesn’t mean we have to be codependent milquetoasts who have to roll over and play dead. Not at all. We can follow Jesus’ nonviolent Way of Love just as Archbishop Desmond Tutu did in South Africa, as Martin Luther King did in our own country. We can model a third way. It may cost us something. It certainly cost John the Baptist, and Jesus, their lives. But they gained their souls, and set off a shock wave of love, joy, and healing that continues to this day.

The polarity, the duality, of today’s public life is imploding under its own weight, like a black hole that is caving in on itself. But we are not of this dualistic worldview in which “we” are the good guys and “they” are all bad people. Although the distortions of empire and colonialism have deeply impacted our religion, the spirituality of love transcends that. And if we go past mere humanistic niceness toward self-sacrificial love—if we go past what is convenient and what we personally prefer in order to live in alignment with the love of God—we can do what liberalism never will. If what we are doing here is more than a polite social club with great metaphors for ethical living, we truly can experience and convey an alternative to the increasing violence all around us.

How does this work in practice?

To begin with, we cannot give anyone what we don’t have ourselves. Jesus’ Way of Love is about recovering our innate goodness, dignity, our truest selves which are made in the image of God. Jesus’ Way of Love is about releasing all that binds us and prevents us from living our soul’s purpose, from using our unique gifts to benefit the interdependent web of life that we belong to. The more healing we receive, the more we can become agents of healing for others.

When we do connect with God’s Spirit within us, with the divine that is both the essence of our own souls and also utterly transcendent, we can model Jesus’ Third Way. We can sacrifice convenience to consume less and honor the earth. We can sacrifice self-righteousness and cultivate relationships across every kind of difference. We can offer generosity and forgiveness where it seems not to be deserved, simply because this is how Jesus operated, and because we hope others will do the same for us when we have committed wrongs, we are in denial about. We can refuse to demonize anyone ever, because the light of Christ exists within every person, without exception. We can stand firm against hatred in general by loving in the particular.

This fall we will be offering a series about how to live as people of faith in this political climate. More information about that series will emerge around the beginning of August. We will be delving deeply into our values as those who follow Jesus’ Way of Love, looking around us, and identifying actions we can take before and after November 5. We will take the long view because we are part of a much longer story, a story that transcends this country and this century. We are part of a story that includes sacrificing for the greater good. We are part of a story in which Jesus is a healer and charges his disciples with the vocation of healing. We will continue to connect deeply with the earth, since we will not protect what we do not love, and we will not love what we don’t intimately know. We will learn from the earth and all her creatures as a corrective against the distortions of empire and colonialism that are still found in parts of our tradition.

We can pick up where liberalism fails, because we do have a cosmology, we do have a community and the living presence of God’s Spirit, and each of us has a beautiful and unique role to play for the good of the ecosystems to which we belong.

Let me conclude by asking you these questions. Can you see and feel your divine and beautiful truest self? If not, can you ask God for help with this, and then be looking out for the answer that comes? How can you embody love and divine light today, for yourself and the life around you? Together let us learn and model Jesus’ Third Way, Jesus’ non-violent Way of Love. Amen.

[1] David Brooks, “The Authoritarians Have the Momentum,” in New York Times, May 16, 2024, accessed July 14, 2024 at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/opinion/trump-liberals-authoritarians.html

[2] Ibid.

10am Service