Last After Trinity 2022
Share in suffering like a good soldier of Christ Jesus.
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It will come as a shock to many of you, hearing this perfect RP accent, that I am an American. Not only that, I am an Episcopalian, which is what Anglicans tend to call themselves when they want to make double sure that everyone knows that they are not English.
After the American War of Independence, the churches that had until very recently been outposts of the Church of England found themselves with a bit of a problem. You see, there weren’t any bishops in America after the war, they had all been called back to England, and according to the traditions of the Church, priests can only be ordained by bishops. What is more, being ordained in the Church of England, the national church, meant making oaths of allegiance to the Monarch, which was, to say the least, awkward in the circumstances.
Faced with a crisis of clergy, the newly-independent Episcopal Church turned to the Episcopal Church of Scotland, which, for reasons of history and the peculiarities of the crown of the United Kingdom did not require any such oaths.
As a side note and a matter of heraldic trivia, this debt to the Scottish church is honoured in the crest of the Episcopal Church, which includes the English flag of St George and the cross of St Andrew, the Scots freeing American clergy to make their vows only to God and not to any earthly authority.
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The making of oaths has never been uncomplicated for Christians, even going back to the days when St Paul was writing to his fellow missionary Timothy.
The first Christian communities drew members from every stratum of Roman and Mediterranean society: slaves and merchants, manual labourers and bearers of civic office. One group that was excluded by definition, however, were soldiers.
Not only was the Way of Christ’s peaceful kingdom deemed incompatible with the violence that was inherent to a soldier’s work, but the oaths of obedience to the Emperor that allowed a soldier to draw his salary were understood to operate in diametric opposition to the Christian’s primary loyalty to God in Christ.
There was a compelling simplicity to this arrangement in the first centuries of the Church: as a fringe religious movement that was no longer welcome in the land of its birth and was considered suspicious by the authorities and the religious establishment, the affirmation of only one Lord, Jesus Christ bore a moral and spiritual clarity that fired the earliest Christian communities.
Unwilling to submit to any other authority than God’s the first Christians faced occasional persecution from the Imperial powers and frequent disadvantage as they were unwilling to participate in the civic sacrifices that bound together life in Roman cities.
In this context, Paul’s words of encouragement to ‘Share in suffering like a good soldier of Christ Jesus’ carry the ironic, subversive force with which they were first intended. In those first generations of the Church, it was easier to understand how the language of soldiery and kingship bore a weight inverse to that when they were used to describe the imperial legions and earthly monarchies: the king to whom Christians look is a crucified and defeated man whose non-violent, reconciling love proved stronger even than death itself, and the soldiers that this king commands are peaceful communities bent on the triumph not of arms but of that same reconciling love that would draw all the world into its embrace.
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Anyone who knows a bit of history will know how long that commitment to peace and non-violence would last. Like all human institutions, however inspired by the Holy Spirit or called to a higher way of being, the Church would find itself, like all of us, enmeshed in tangled webs of power and identity.
Anxious to unite his fragile empire, Constantine would employ the network of Christian churches to do just that, by legitimating the Church and bringing inside the halls of power. And, while it would hold the fractious kingdoms of Europe together providing something approaching law over the centuries following the fall of that empire, in time, all in the name of spreading the Good News of Christ crucified and resurrected, the Church would not always have access to the moral clarity of the earliest Christian communities, or, worse, it would be all too clear about the wrong things.
A lot like you and me. Good intentions and flawed people making good decisions and bad decisions, until we find ourselves wondering what to do in the messy world.
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And there is no easy way out. Despite the best efforts of Christians through the centuries, there is no undoing history, only repenting and repair, and the hope that comes from the emergence of something beautiful and new.
Whether it is the divided loyalties of faith and nation or the tensions between work and family, or simply the unknown tangles that lie within each of our hearts, it is tempting to wish for a simple solution, and such simple solutions have been peddled by people inside the Church and out.
But if we return to Paul’s letter to Timothy, who like him was trying to figure out in those early days of the Church how to be a follower of Christ in a messy and complicated world, we find nothing simple. Instead we find hope.
Share in suffering. Work hard. Not because in this way we somehow earn salvation, but because by putting ourselves in the way of serving others, by shaping our lives in the form of Christ who lived and died for friend and strangers, we will find life. We will become that love which reconciles and repairs. And like a golden thread, weaving through a tangled web, our lives might show something beautiful to the world.
By faithful service our lives may not suddenly become simple, but they will be filled to overflowing with love. That love which orders the world, which, as Dante says, moves the Sun and other stars.
Amen.