Receive with Meekness the Implanted Word

A sermon preached by Father Dwight D. Duncan, ssc, Rector, St Matthias, Dallas, Texas
7 September 2003 - The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Year B, Proper 18)

Scripture: James 1:21: "Receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls."


What a great exhortation for us to receive this day from God through his disciple James, in our second lesson. It is just the right word for us to hear as we begin another intensive nine-month period of education on Sundays and weekday evenings. And we have seen this summer how important the Church's teaching ministry is, for in actions of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church we have glaring evidence of what results from its lack.

I would be absurdly simplistic if I did not say that the sources of our plight in the Episcopal Church and in all the Churches of the western world were not complex and involved. But there is an element of these sources which is primary. That element is this: a lack of knowledge of authentic Christianity by Christians themselves. This lack is due to two things, at the very least:

The first is a failure on the part of theologians, seminary professors and parish clergy to teach God's people NOT their own opinions, but the basic affirmations of Christianity: that which for 2,000 years now has been believed to be the Christian Faith. This, after all, is what a priest is ordained to give his people: not his opinions, but the Church's Faith.

While this may be too much to hope, since it does require humility for persons to dispense the Church's Faith rather than their opinions, yet it could be hoped that teachers would first clearly and without prejudice present what has been believed before presenting their personal opinion. Sadly, this rarely is the case.

The second cause of this widespread lack of knowledge of authentic Christianity is the laziness, the unwillingness even, of laypeople to enter into the labor of being taught.

What this has produced is a situation where people are making decisions in church councils when they themselves don't know or don't accept the basic tenets of the Christian faith. When you have a leading lay deputy to General Convention say that one goes to Convention to find out what the Church believes, then you know you are in trouble! Obviously, this person has not heard, or has rejected the fact that Christianity is nothing if it is not a revealed religion. It is a religion of the Word, a Word to us from the God who loves us.

Orthodox Christianity celebrates this fact. Our minds, because of Sin, are so clouded that on our own we can have no saving perception of what is real and true. Instead, we have distorted and shadowed understandings of reality, or we even reject the fact that there is such a thing as Absolute Truth, that there are principles built into creation which make it operate well, which, when violated, will muck things up. And we have and do violate these principles and we all are paying the price for it.

Seeing this mess and loving us, God comes to us speaking a Word ... indeed en-fleshing the Word in Jesus, revealing to us himself, and his will for us, and his way for us. God has done this so that if we will allow ourselves to be grasped by his Word, and will work with his help to be conformed to it, we might be saved from destroying ourselves and the rest of creation. Thus, we hear through St James this day, "Receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls."

BUT this means we need to be taught the Word, don't we? Teaching of the Word has to be done and the teaching of the Word has to be received. Oh, that all priests were as concerned about this part of their ministry as is our brilliant former Curate, Fr Douglas Anderson. How proud I was of him seven years ago at the diocesan convention of October 1996.

I had put a resolution before Convention which affirmed biblical, orthodox theology and standards. It was defeated: 45% for, 55% against with a fair sum of the "against" coming, per usual, from the clergy. During debate a leading layman of the diocese arose in opposition, saying he really had no idea what biblical, orthodox Christian theology and standards were. During a break, Fr Anderson, always concerned for the salvation of souls, went up to him, gave him his card, and said, "You don't know what the Catholic Faith is? Give me a call. I'll be happy to meet with you regularly to share it with you."

To be blunt about it, we western Christians collectively have been doing a shoddy job of this for far too long. In seminaries and in parishes what has been passed off as education has not been the simple, humble presentation of the Word, but opinions of the Word, critiques of the Word, revisions of the Word, or more immediately exciting things like pop sociology and psychology.

I know whereof I speak. I've been in those parishes. And I was prepared for the priesthood in that seminary of the Episcopal Church which was considered to be the intellectual one, but which turned out to be nothing more than a playing field for making up one's own religion. It both rejoices and terrorizes me that my discovery of and conversion to orthodox Christianity from the revisionist humanism I embraced when I entered seminary may well have never occurred if not for one thing: assigned to me as my faculty tutor was the only professor who knew and believed simple, apostolic, mere Christianity ... the priest who I, along with the rest of the community, derided as "the believer."

Yes, we theologians, seminary professors and clergy are at fault for the problems which now beset the Christian community in the West. But laypeople are at fault as well.

• You have tolerated and allowed inadequate teaching in your parishes.
  
• Too many of you have preferred to spend time with things which tickled your fancy more than knowing the Faith and applying it to your lives.
  
• Too many of you have been unwilling to make the sacrifice of your time and effort to be a student in the household of God. This is the case even here, in a parish where a lot of time and energy is put out by your priests, lay catechists and teachers to make available to adults and children a banquet of opportunities to grow in the knowledge and the practice of God's Truth.
  

The consequence of these failures is that people remain either ignorant of or at infantile levels in their comprehension and living of the Christian Way. We become victims of our culture, as St Paul said, "... children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the cunning of men, by their craftiness in deceitful wiles."

The wonderful and humorous mercy of God is shown in that even the most banal course in Christian Truth taught by an uninspiring and perhaps none too bright teacher who yet loves God and his kingdom can help transform its participants into the likeness of Christ. Such a course from such a teacher will have in it something of the light of Christ, and that light radiates through the most drab garments into any soul desiring to receive it.

If we who belong to Christ are not seeking to grow into his mind and culture, then we are failing our Lord AND the human cultures in which he has placed us. He has placed us in these cultures to be their leaven, and this we cannot be unless we are leavened with his healthy mind. We see well in the "Church-of-today" what happens to Christians who are not being leavened with Christ's mind: They become society's Play-Doh, soft, shapeless, spineless, compliant, pliable, deaf, dumb.

Both the source and solution for the problems extant in the Episcopal Church and all the churches of the West are the same: you and me, in what we are or are NOT doing to receive into ourselves with meekness the Word of God and to endure the struggle of conforming our lives to it. My prayer and my labor for you is for us to be an outpost of the Word in an increasingly alien environment. My hope is that this will be your prayer and labor as well.

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