Romans 8:12-25
The opening weekend for the 1987 film “The Princess Bride” was arguably a disaster. It cost around $16 million to make, and brought in a fraction over $200 thousand in the U.S. and Canada. Of course, ticket prices were a lot lower then, but so was the cost of making the film. It would go on to be a modest success during its cinema run, taking in about $30 million worldwide, but those numbers do not tell the whole story, for more than three decades later, many of us can quote lines from the film, for the 1987 script based on William Goldman’s 1973 novel was simply brilliant, and you can find t-shirts, home décor, and memes aplenty based on the movie. Just search Etsy. It is a priceless intellectual and cultural property.
The cast was star-studded, including Billy Crystal as Miracle Max, called on the revive the seemingly dead Westley, which brings us to one of those classic lines: “It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.”
The Roman Empire was mostly dead at the start of the Common Era’s fourth century when Constantine and Licinius signed what came to be known as the Edict of Milan, granting religious freedom in the regions they controlled. This was a crucial moment in the history of Christianity, for there had been widespread persecution in the preceding years.
In the pop-history version of the story, Constantine has a vision of a cross and becomes a Christian himself. This is late propaganda. Like all warlords and powerful men, what Constantine worshipped was Constantine, and his engagement with a growing Christianity was self-serving. Some things never change.
The Edict of Milan also marked an important turning point theologically, for while the early church had spent most of three centuries fighting over the faith, now it was in the interest of the state to resolve these battles, for they were not confined to councils and venomous epistles, but often spilled out into mob violence. So rulers became arbiters of doctrine, arbiters with troops, as partisans fought over and fabricated new ideas and beliefs, like how Father, Son, and Holy Spirit could be three persons and one God, of one substance, using words in ways they had never been used, or how Jesus could be both fully human and fully God at the exact same time. Among those bitter disputes was what came to be the heretical view that Christ was less than the Father and the first created thing, as well as the opposing ideas that Christ was more human than divine or more divine than human, neither being deemed acceptable.
The holy is beyond our knowing, and Hebrew scripture calls us to a theological humility, but that didn’t stop the ugly fights of that age, fights that were to the contestants a matter of eternal life or eternal damnation.
The conflicts slowed down a bit after the Council of Chalcedon in 451, called by the Emperor Marcian and issuing a famous statement declaring Jesus fully human and fully God and leaving no one fully satisfied or even sure of what that meant.
There were councils that came before and councils that came after, schisms and slaughters.
I’ve recently spoken about the Zurich Reform, so critical to the Congregational tradition, and the leader of that Reform, Huldrych Zwingli, a man who believed in theocracy, albeit Reformation theocracy, who supported the execution of leaders and followers of the competing Anabaptist reform, a man who died on the battlefield when the Swiss cantons still aligned with Rome attacked.
It is no wonder that some of us have risen above the bloody-mindedness of our ancestors, come to our senses, and decided that maybe we shouldn’t kill each other over obscure points of doctrine and dogma that can never be proven. We extend to one another the grace we know our loving God extends to us.
But in our turn away from dogma, in our inclination that became a decision to be a non-credal church, to focus on “practical Christianity,” I fear we may have lost something important, a loss reinforced by the inwardness of institutionalism. And what we have lost, I fear, is spirituality, is the personal piety that was so important to the very people who helped us throw off the chains of the past.
In traditional Christian thinking, justification is God’s saving act on behalf of the sinner. Many understand this saving act as being the murder of Jesus by the combined forces of religion and government in the year 30 C.E. Others see the saving act in the incarnation itself, in the holy choosing to experience creaturely existence. For many, justification is the status quo, something that already happened at the crucifixion, but that only becomes applicable in our lives at the moment of conversion. We’ll just skip over irresistible grace versus shades of Pelagianism as silliness for another day.
The debates about justification still leave us deep in the weeds of the unprovable, of trying to trap God in a box of words that fit into human understanding, and sometimes into human patterns of vengeance, and I’m just not that interested in that.
I am interested in what comes after justification, which is sanctification. If it sounds like Sanctuary, there is a reason. The words share a root with sacred, which means something that is designated and set aside for a holy purpose. Sanctification is the process of the Christian becoming more holy.
And again, we can find incredible, as in not credible, interpretations of sanctification as something the divine does to passive humans, the puppet master God pulling the strings of humans who have neither free will nor agency, but that god is not our God, for our God is living and our God is love and love does not control, love liberates.
God’s part of sanctification is a continuous call, is the constant holiness that surrounds us, is the living story we tell of a man who challenged a Pharaoh, of a man with so much love that he made broken lives whole, who was executed but would not stay dead, for as it is written in the Book of The Princess Bride, “Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.”
Ours is the living story of a persecutor who had a change of heart in a moment of blinding truth on the road to Damascus, of saints and sinners sitting in First Presbyterian deciding they cannot pretend that slavery is okay, in saints and sinners sitting in this very room deciding climate change is real and we must do better, for God, for ourselves, for this beautiful living spinning wonder we call home.
God does God’s part, but we have to do ours. Prayer de-centers us and reminds us that we did not call ourselves into being, and that we are not the final answer. Studying scripture and our Christian tradition reminds us that the faithful are ordinary people just like us, that they often know defeat, but that love wins in the end. Our radically open table reminds all that there is room for everyone.
It is easy for us to do. We are do-ers, and I believe in the “do justice” part of Micah 6:8. But I also believe in the “walk humbly with your God,” though maybe not maudlin footsteps in the sand. Walk humbly with your God, through Tanglewood, or have coffee with your God on the porch in the early morning as the birds sing, or in the evening by the fire with a cup of cocoa as the snowflakes fall, for I believe it will snow again, though the world is on fire right now.
I am an advocate for a lived faith, but we cannot be effective in living love into the world if we do not also love ourselves and our God, if we don’t stop, rest, sabbath, if we don’t scratch away at the hard shell of consumer capitalism until we find a thin place where the holy shines through.
Sanctification in a world that is frantic, more so by the day, doom-scrolling and DeSantis… it isn’t easy. Stop. Remember the stories, of a boy facing down a giant, of an unwed teen and a baby who changed the world. Let them fight over the silly stuff, over doctrine and dogma. We have love, to receive and to give. Keeping it to ourselves would be inconceivable.