Donatists: March 4, 2018

As Rome approached what it understood to be its thousandth year, many felt that theirs was a nation in decline. Roman values had been undermined by modern ways of thinking and wave after wave of immigrants from other cultures that had been absorbed into the empire, making Rome less Roman. They needed to make Rome great again, and to do that meant getting back to tradition. So it was that the nationalists, with the help of the armed forces, installed Messius Quintus Decius as emperor in 248, though it would take a year for him to consolidate his power.

Once his position was secure and difficult senators had been bullied into submission, Decius did what needed to be done. He knew what it would take to bring prosperity back to Rome. He issued an executive order that everyone must sacrifice to the old Roman gods, for clearly the nation was being punished for not sticking to that old time religion. Those who completed their sacrifice received a certificate called a libellus, proof that they were loyal. Dozens of these libelli have been recovered.

The problem, of course, was that sacrifice to other gods was anathema to Christians and Jews. And while Judaism remained a fringe religion scattered throughout the empire, especially after the devastation of the Third Jewish War, Christianity continued to spread like wildfire, so there were Christians in every community, well known, with visible leaders.

Christian documents from that period reveal complaints we might hear today. Many who claimed to be Christian followed a sort of Christianity Lite, all promise, no costs. They liked the basic ideas, after all, but really, it was more a social club than a way of life. So as Decius’ edict slowly spread across the empire, they dutifully lined up in their cities, town, and villages, and sacrificed to the Roman gods. Many turned over their sacred texts and objects as well.

But for others, faith actually made demands, required commitment, grace not cheap at all. They were unwilling to break with their belief. Within 17 days of the edict, Bishop Fabian of Rome had been arrested, tried by the emperor Decius himself, and executed. Ambitious regional officials took this as a model, sought to curry favor, and so persecution and execution flared up in spots across the empire. Though Decius himself would only last two years, a pattern developed of sporadic persecutions, sometimes local, sometimes widespread across the empire, continuing for decades, especially under Diocletian. We have many accounts from this time period, martyrologies like “The Acts of St. Felix” that describes the trial and execution of a North African bishop. As he prepares to be beheaded on the ides of July, he proclaims “Lord God of heaven and earth, Jesus Christ, I bend my neck to you as sacrificial victim, you who remain forever.”

Fortunately, the proponents of tolerance, decency, and sanity would eventually regain control of the empire, though only after years of chaos and a revolving door in the emperor’s palace. But the rise of Constantine, the legalization of Christianity and the end of persecution brought another problem: what to do with those who had been weak, who had sacrificed to the Roman gods, who had turned over sacred texts? It is the same sort of reckoning that takes place after any period of violence, the shaved heads of French women accused of consorting with Nazis as the Second World War drew to a close, translators left behind in Vietnam as US Forces fled, in Iraq and Afghanistan, where we abandoned allies.

As Diarmiad MacCulloch notes in his doorstopper of a book “Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, “The truth is that the overwhelming majority of Christians gave way.” But some fled, hiding long enough and far enough away to avoid the decision between apostasy and death. And then there were those others who courageously refused to make the required sacrifice, like Felix, becoming part of a tradition of religious obstinacy that stretches back to and is celebrated in the tales of the Book of Daniel, Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego cast into the furnace rather than violate their faith. A cult of the martyr, Christians practically hurling themselves on to the chopping block.

The survivors of this group, those willing to risk death for what they believed, came to be called “confessors,” after the Roman legal term for someone who pled guilty to a criminal charge. The surviving confessors believed that their sacrifices would be rendered meaningless if those who had denied Christ, called the lapsi and those who handed over sacred texts, traditores, were allowed to return to the church.

In truth, local church leaders handled the situation in a variety of ways, with varying degree of reintegration and reconciliation, but the dispute raged across the empire, to the point that it drew in Constantine. It would, in fact, continue, driven by a hardline faction in North Africa, for decades. North African Christians were accustomed to a life of discipline and hardship long before the Great Persecution, and had little sympathy with those who had succumbed. They rejected Caecilian, ordained as Bishop of Carthage in 311, because one of the other bishops who presided at his ordination was accused of being a traditor. A series of rival bishops were installed by the legalistic and self-righteous confessors. History remembers this rage-filled and destructive faction as Donatists, named after the second in the series of schismatic bishops.

Donatists argued that there could be no reconciliation with those who had been weak, and that even rites and sacraments that had been performed by them were rendered invalid. Imagine if the validity of your baptism depended on the sanctity of the clergy person who performed the rite.

There was much at stake, not only specific questions about sacrament and reconciliation, but bigger questions about the nature of church and what it meant to be a disciple. One of those opposing the Donatists would leave a permanent mark of Christian thinking in the West, and though we might be troubled by his disgust with human flesh, we can easily embrace Augustine of Hippo’s call for a grace filled church of reconciliation, a church filled with imperfect sinners, a church where the works of the church depended on the working of the Spirit, and not the perfection of the humans administering them, for if the Donatists had won, few of us would be in church.

It didn’t do the church a whole lot of good that this new religion that was supposed to be egalitarian and filled with love, this movement that had just been legalized and embraced by the emperor himself, was suddenly under internal siege by the self-righteous in its own ranks. How could they make disciples when they were busy destroying one another? What future could there be if weakness and sin could never be forgiven? It was as if they had all forgotten the injunction to stop looking for the speck in the eye of your brother or sister when you have a plank embedded in your own.

C.S. Lewis famously suggested that the question is not whether Christians are objectively better than non-Christians, but whether this individual person was better for being a Christian than he or she would be if they were not. Perfection is not attainable in this life, not for saints like Teresa of Calcutta, not for pastors, not for God’s gathered people in Blue Hill.

There have always been self-righteous Pharisees, and there always will be self-righteous Pharisees, and the church will always be filled with humans, and humans are imperfect and messy. If only we would offer one another the same grace we ask of God, love of all we are despite our flaws and imperfections. Scripture tells us to forgive if we want to be forgiven, meaning the Donatists must have thought themselves spotless but were in fact damned, and as my Daddy used to say, the only perfect human only lived to be 33…

So what are we to do with Peter?

It is not like he didn’t know what was coming. Jesus made no secret about what was coming. He said “I am changing things. I am shaking up old ways of believing. I am challenging the powerful and their love for buildings and show. I am offering religion that actually does something in the world for the world. Look at the people that were sick and tired of the stagnant old Hebrew system. Look at them flocking for this re-energized faith. Those who are uncomfortable are drawn to us. Those who are comfortable aren’t going to like it. Things are going to get a whole lot worse before they get better. But trust me. Love is going to win.”

Did Peter not believe him?

But Peter is confused and afraid and people are imperfect.

So he denies Jesus. He doesn’t just deny Jesus. He does it three times.

Because despite seeing Jesus perform one sign or miracle after another in his gospel, Peter still doesn’t really believe the good news. Maybe he likes the sermons but could do without the rest.

Peter isn’t the first one at the tomb on Easter morning, because he is not expecting resurrection. It is Mary Magdalene who discovers the empty tomb and goes to get him.

Nope. Don’t know him. Jesus who? No, that was some other fisherman from Capernaum, some other Galilean.

And the remaining ten disciples decided that since Peter had denied Jesus, he would not be allowed to stay in the community. They drove him out, and no one ever heard of Simon Peter again. The end.

Except that isn’t how the story goes. That would be a terrible story.

Days later, after the joy and shock of loves’ great victory, just after daybreak, a fire on the beach, and a man with fish and bread. The man. The one they had seen destroyed. The one they had seen live again.

Peter who denied Jesus three times.

Three times Jesus asks, “Peter, do you love me?”

“Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.”

Because what calls itself Christian but contains no grace, no forgiveness, has no Christ in it. Some of us might push back against the idea that Jesus saves us by being the scapegoat, God destroyed by God to satisfy the ego of God, and rightly so, for the very idea of redemptive violence flies in the face of all we claim about a God of love and the free gift of costly grace. But maybe what Jesus is saving us from isn’t God. Maybe what Jesus is saving us from is us. From hubris and pride and self-righteousness. From our tendency to forget that we are imperfectly perfect, humans, not gods. For the ways we judge and belittle others for their sins while ignoring our own.

I did not call myself into being.

Instead of judging Peter, the door is opened for reconciliation. Instead of seeing him as a mindless pawn in a terrible script, might we ask what he was feeling? What was it like to see this man hauled off? This man you believed would change the world? This man that was adored by thousands? This man that could even raise Lazarus from the grave?

How terrifying was that?

Because love walk with, not over, and it goes to the broken places.

What was the end game for the Donatists? A church made up only of pure people? That would be a small club indeed. I wouldn’t be in. Peter wouldn’t be in.

Do you love me, Peter?

Yes, Lord, you know I love you.

Love requires vulnerability.

Now these three things, faith, hope, and love, abide, and the greatest of these is love.

Grace upon grace, humility and vulnerability, and the gathered, sinners in the hands of a loving God.

May that always be my home, a man of dust and ashes and the stuff of stars and the viscous ooze of creation itself. Amen.