Saturday of the Twenty-sixth Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 460

At that very moment he rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, “I give you praise, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike.

Christianity began as a movement among slaves, aliens, and the impoverished. It was essentially an underground movement in plain sight. It survives still because it offers hope to those who can find no worldly reason to hope. They see few opportunities for social, financial or personal upward mobility.

Surviving the fall of the Roman Empire and recognized for its vitality, our religion has often been co-opted by the powerful of this world. Using some of its virtue to support their regimes, they built a "Christian" civilization to span Europe and the Americas, with inroads into Africa and Asia.

Simple monotheism, like Islam, can bring together many distinct peoples. Where religious differences divide they can recommend a harmless banality, "There is only one God." 

But that form of monotheism has little use for "Trinitarian monotheism," especially because the doctrine of the Trinity insists upon the equality of God the Son to God the Father. Kings, emperors, dictators, and slavers are not given to sharing power in the Trinitarian manner of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. They cannot imagine an obedience that is not enforced with a whip. This is why the Roman Emperor Constantine supported the Arian heresy, which taught that Jesus was a demigod, a deity but of lesser authority than the Father. Constantine saw himself as the father of the empire, and all others were his subordinates. 

Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues endorsed those teachings of Jesus which conformed to principles of good government: rationality, equality, and deism of a singular all-powerful god. Any religious teachings like the Trinity that defied rationality, they believed, were obviously untrue and untrustworthy. The United States would depend upon a standard set of reasonable teachings, universal education, and conformity. Political parties could resolve their differences without resorting to civil war.
But they found no use for the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus in his form of Christianity. These stories could not be integrated into an "enlightened" philosophy. Why would a God disregard his own divinity and choose the humiliation of a slave? Why would the Lord of Glory descend into hell? It made no sense.

Despite this co-opting of Christian faith, the Spirit of God continues to gather the "childlike" to the Lord. 

Critics sometimes prophecy the imminent demise of the Church because its doctrines fail to generate support in the entertainment media, and its governing principles seem out of step with the times. They recommend, sometimes urgently, that we change our "policies" about marriage, abortion, and sexuality in general. They predict a resurgence of membership if these teachings -- which we admit are of secondary importance -- are overhauled. 

But these well-meaning advisers do not understand the sustaining genius of the Church, which is neither our teachings nor our marketing. It's not even our ability to animate and excite people to heroic action. Rather, the genius of the Church is the Holy Spirit, who is God. Some of our leaders are truly talented and a few are charismatic. Some of our teachings offer insights that seem to resolve ancient, insoluble dilemmas.

None of that matters unless the Spirit animates our desiccated bones. We do not resurrect ourselves. God's spirit mends broken vessels of clay and fills them with grace. If few of our twenty-first century congregations are slaves, many are impoverished and some are displaced immigrants. These are the vast body of the church. If they seem, in the view of the foolish, inarticulate and unschooled in the ways of the world, they are nonetheless the incarnate presence of God in our world. Hounded and harassed by a culture that despises simplicity, they keep their eyes fixed on Jesus. (More often than not, they cannot be bothered with criticism of their faith.) The bishops of our church are well aware of these faithful persons and thank God daily for them.