Ninth Sunday after Pentecost - July 21, 2024
Father Vincent Pizzuto, Ph.D.
St. Columba's Episcopal Church
Jeremiah 23:1-6 + Psalm 23 + Eph. 2:11-22 + Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
Grace to you and Peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I speak to you today in the name of the + Three-in-One and One-in-Three. Amen.
From the greatest of the cosmic galaxies to the most microscopic atoms in the universe; from the process of evolution to the long steady progression of human civilization; from the interpersonal to the intrapersonal: there is in all things an innate tendency toward balance.
The temperature of that hot cup of coffee I began sipping when I began this sermon is cooler now precisely because the temperature of the coffee is balancing itself with the average temperature of the room, in a natural process known as heat transfer. When our body temperature is out of balance because of a cold, flu, or infection, our immune system goes about trying to restore balance by attacking and flushing out the invasive enemy.
I remember years ago my friend Jeremy from New York called me out of the blue to ask if Fernando was my best friend. Of course, instinctively I wanted to say yes, but my response got caught in my throat. Why was I hesitating? What does that say about our relationship? Without waiting for me to think through a response Jeremy impatiently blurted out the answer: “The reason you are hesitating,” he blurted out excitedly, “It is because we choose our friends for how much they are similar to us, but we choose our life-partners because of how well they balance us.” “Spousal relationships are a unique category,” he said, “in which we innate seek out a life-partner who intuitively balances us in some way.” I couldn’t disagree and his explanation clarified so much of both the dynamics of my relationship with Fernando. That endearing little thing I noticed he did the first two weeks we were dating has now become a perpetual source of low-grade irritation.
Indeed, the universe and all it contains tends toward balance. This is no less true of human history, where social, political, religious, and ideological extremes have always culminated in a movement toward the opposite, a revolution against the status quo, and an attempt to restore political, social, or interior balance. Indeed, many interweaving theological strands of Christianity sees in God a great “Balancer” that we refer to as “the justice of God.” The One who rights the scales of inequality, who, as the Magnificat proclaims, “casts the princes from their thrones and raises up the lowly, who fills the starving with good things and sends the rich away empty” (Lk 1:52-53).
There may be few modern Christian theological traditions that have better developed this sense of God’s justice than Liberation Theology which came into prominence in Latin America in the 1960’s after the Second Vatican Council, in reaction to the social injustices and extreme poverty of the region. It was this movement that popularized the phrase, “God’s preferential option for the poor” based precisely on the scriptural attestation of God as a ‘just God’ in whose nature it is, then, to forever side with the poor, the outcast, the lowly, in order to right the scales of injustice: Here, now in this world – not just in hopes of a future world to come.
The readings today, themselves portray God seeking to bring about such balance in the time of Jeremiah: “Thus says the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock…and not attended to them. So…I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply.” (Jer. 23)
Or again, Jesus in today’s gospel finds himself so overwhelmed by the pastoral demands placed upon him, he sought, but in vain, a deserted place where he might be alone with his disciples in order to restore balance.
In his book, Jung and the Christian Way, Christopher Bryant provides an overview of Carl Jung’s own exploration of this innate balancing act that can be identified in the course of history and no less in the human psyche.
To this end, Jung employees an ancient Greek term from the 5th Century BC Ephesian philosopher, Heraclitus, expressed in the word enantiodromia, a term which literally means “running into the opposite.” Bryant explains, for Jung, “The human soul is moved by opposite needs and instincts, the tension between which makes for vitality and creativity.” (Bryant, 13 ff.) Yet, Jung was keenly aware of the fact that the European Enlightenment or so-called “Age of Reason” (as it were) represented a certain enantiodromia. That is to say, the Enlightenment was a direct response to what came to be seen by intellectuals of the day, as an oppressive Medieval worldview in light of the resurgence of knowledge from ancient Greek philosophy and science that began to pour into Europe in the 13th Century and later. Thus, the Renaissance, as precursor to the Enlightenment was seen as a liberation to thousands of intellectuals and thoughtful minded people.
Yet, while initially the founding fathers of modern science throughout the 16th and 17th Centuries had integrated a growing emphasis on the value of “human reason” they nevertheless overwhelmingly took for granted integral aspects of the Medieval world-view, such as the notion of God and God’s loving providence over Creation. In fact, it was this very assumption that motivated science to explore nature’s mysteries. It was, in other words, what we call in our community here, a study in the Big Book of Scripture. In other words, the scientific assumption was, by and large, that nature was itself revelatory of the Creator and thus worth exploring. It was not until the apparent triumph of 18th century rationalism, and a near whole-sale intolerance within modern science to accept any approach to reality beyond a staunch empiricism, that despite its astounding achievements has, according to Jung, brought about its own demise. Modern humanity is left floundering, profoundly hungry for a deeper spiritual awareness that the now-despised and unfairly disparaged Medieval church had, in fact, given to its people. While indeed the Medieval church so over emphasized the spirit even to the detriment of the physical world, as an unfortunate consequence, Enlightenment rationalism reduced “truth” only to that which conformed to reason. (Bryant, 12-13).
My own field of study in Historical Critical Methodology, whose modern methods of interpretation are indeed products of the Enlightenment is itself a result of this overly rational approach to truth. Until the Enlightenment the Bible was a revelatory landscape unto itself: if you asked “What is Truth?” you would find it in the pages of scripture. With the introduction of HCM, biblical truth was sought not in the pages of the Bible but in the extent to which biblical texts could be proven to confirm to history outside the Bible itself. Thus, the value of biblical truth became reduced to the extent that biblical claims could be verified by something external to scripture itself: Namely, historical observation. Thus, the fundamental question guiding biblical interpretation was no longer, “What does it mean?” but rather, “Did it really happen?”
The resulting demythologization of scripture: stripping away all sense of miracles, mythology, and references to the supernature in order to attain a purer more historically verifiable and rationally palatable engagement with such primitive texts resulted in the extreme forms of biblical fundamentalism that continues to thrive into the 21st Century claiming a kind of radical biblical inerrancy where every syllable must be true or none of it is. This, let me be clear, is a modern invention and not how even the ancients with all their scientific naiveté would have understood the revelatory value of scripture.
Thus, we are living in a time in which a tension of opposites is not in fact, supporting a milieu of “vitality and creativity” but is so far out of balance that we are left wondering whether there is indeed a “center” that will, or can in fact, hold, amidst the extremes. Or has society gone so far off the rails – the extremes become so dire – that we are witnessing a final and uncontrolled descent of human civilization into a new Dark Age. The reality of this threat was already deftly and poignantly identified by William Butler Yeats in his 1920 poem “The Second Coming” in which he writes:
"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The ‘best’ lack all conviction, while the ‘worst’
Are full of passionate intensity."
The Center cannot hold. Or can it? That is the question.
The reductionism of empiricism and rationalism by their very nature are all but incapable of recognizing the deep intuition that the “whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” An intuition that is itself dismissed by this same scientific empiricism as irrational and without ultimate value. The gross imbalance of this Pigeon-holing, this compartmentalizing, this rationalistic reduction of the greater whole to the sum of its parts, has infiltrated every aspect of modern society: from science to politics, from race relations to the environmental disaster we now face, from the break-neck pace in which conservatism is evolving into virulent forms of nationalism and liberal politics is quagmired in a new form of intolerance and dogmatism all in the name of insisting upon an unqualified personal freedom.
Summarizing Jung, Bryant puts it this way:
“The human soul is moved by opposite needs and instinct, the tensions between which makes for vitality and creativity. But if one of these opposed tendencies is allowed free rein so as to exclude the other, then sooner or later or revulsion sets in to restore the balance and the situation is reversed. For example, people in society want both order and freedom. In a healthy society these two opposed needs are held in creative tension. But if either is pressed too far, by a kind of pendulum swing, it will bring about its opposite. To go all out in removing every restraint on individual freedom will in the end lead to the suppression of freedom under some form of dictatorship. For people will find the anarchy of unlimited freedom, in which everyone does what is right in [their] own eyes, so intolerable that they will be ready to welcome authoritarian government with enthusiasm.” (Bryant, 13).
I doubt there is anyone among us who does not hear in this citation an apt description of our times. While the tendency, indeed the social and political pressure of our times demands that we pick sides, that we choose a tribe, a political candidate, an ideological world-view equally intolerant of the other. I believe the Gospel is calling us in these times to become radical centrists. That is to become agents of unity by intentionally holding opposites in creative tension in a society whose wheels are flying off their axils.
The Gospel is summoning us to radical centrism. By this I do not mean to suggest a call to mediocrity or lukewarm compromise, but to borrow a phrase Fr. Andrew adopted for his series on Anglican Studies, the Gospel, rather, calls us not to compromise but to a greater comprehension – indeed a kind of “radical comprehension” or ‘inclusion’ of what opposing political and ideological tribes would otherwise dehumanize or exclude. To that end, let us be reminded that among the unique contributions of Anglicanism to Christian tradition is precisely the attention given to the via media, or “middle way,” forged as we were between the tensions of the continental protestant reforms and Roman Catholicism. The upshot is a tradition that is neither ‘protestant’ as such, nor Roman, but rather “reformed Catholicism” always seeking to maintain a balance between the ancient traditions and structures of the church universal, while incorporating aspects of the Reformation which themselves sought to balance extremities of Roman Catholicism at the time: particularly around abuses of authority.
If the Center is not holding it is because there are not enough radical centrists holding it. Not enough Christians placing the Gospel call to love without condition before their otherwise deeply held Philosophical, political, or ideological worldviews; it is because there are not enough of us doing the hard work of refusing to dehumanize our ideological opponents; not enough of us exploring how our own political and ideological positions are in fact fueling extremes on the other side of the political and ideological spectrum.
The history of the cosmos, history of the world, the history of human civilization is a history of seeking balance. In the months ahead, in what will undoubtedly be among the most politically divided time in our nation’s history, let it be our intention to introduce a new kind of radicalism to those that are tearing us apart: one that tenaciously humanizes the perceived other, one that adamantly and refuses to reduce the whole to the sum of its parts and one that tenaciously holds the center in the one and only excess that needs no balancing because it is indeed the Center of all things. And that is love.
+ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Artwork: Community "Oneness" by Lorraine Almeida (used with permission).