Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Speaker A: Hallelujah.
[00:00:42] Speaker B: The holy gospel of our savior jesus christ according to matthew.
When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.
Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?
He said to him, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind.
This is the greatest and first commandment.
And the second is, like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
Now, while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them this question.
What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?
They said to him, the Son of David.
He said to them, how is it then that David, by the Spirit, calls him Lord, saying, the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet.
If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?
No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.
The Gospel of the Lord.
[00:02:47] Speaker C: Our speaker this morning is Diana Butler, Bass author and speaker. I met Diana in 2011 at a conference in Chicago. I'm sure you remember me among the 10,000 people that were there. It's an honor to have you here this morning. Please be seated. And if you're a child and you want to escape, now's your chance.
Katie, our story time teller, will take the children and they'll return. Return at the peace.
[00:03:23] Speaker A: Good morning, 2011.
Oh, my gosh.
I was trying to remember the last time I had actually been inside of St. Columba's. And I walked in, I went, I don't feel like I've ever been in this church before, so I must have been here before you redecorated.
But I know it was for a weekend with Marcus Borg, so that was a while ago. There might be a few of you who were there. And it was even before 2011, I believe.
Well, today I begin by just saying, happy Reformation Sunday.
Now you're all looking at me like, what?
That's not on my bulletin.
And I've never heard of such a thing.
And that's because in the Episcopal Church, we don't often celebrate the Sunday before October 31st as Reformation Day. We save all of the big liturgical guns for next Sunday All Saints celebration.
But our kin denominations like the Lutheran Church and the Methodist Church and the Presbyterians, they all celebrate today.
Now, why is this?
Well, as Episcopalians, we generally don't pay a whole lot of attention to the Reformation, not because we didn't like it or we don't think it's important, but really because we tend to emphasize the pre Reformation identities of our community. More things like Celtic spirituality or medieval monasticism or early Christian theology.
But just because we don't celebrate it, it doesn't mean that it isn't part of our heritage.
Indeed, Saint Columbus, the Episcopal Church, the Washington National Cathedral down the road apiece, none of it would exist if it weren't for the events of the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago.
Now, our Lutheran friends can tell these stories from heart. They learn them in Sunday school when they're little and they grow up telling the tales of Martin Luther, the extraordinary and eager monk who was also a learned theology professor whose life was dogged by a single question.
And that question was, what must I do to be saved?
You see, Luther had done absolutely everything that the church prescribed for salvation. He went and he confessed all of his sins, so many sins indeed. He was always in his confessor's office, and his confessor said, go away until you actually commit a sin.
He said Mass. He learned scripture backwards and forward. He served the poor. He did it all. But he never felt assured of his salvation.
The question for Luther, what must I do to be saved? Clearly rose from two sources.
Luther was, and our Lutheran friends will be loath to admit it, but he was quite a character.
And he had a lot of internal struggles physically, spiritually, and probably psychologically.
In other words, he was profoundly human, like all of us. And we all have questions that dog us.
But what also played into the Protestant Reformation? And Luther's question, what must I do to be saved? Was the larger context in which he lived.
You see, Luther lived at a time when a particular kind of greed and corruption had taken control of the institutions of both politics and ecclesial life.
And so, through both the state and the church, no one could really be trusted.
No one could be assured that either the state or church had the best interest of the people in mind, because all they really cared about was their own glory, their own power, and their own wealth.
Indeed, what had happened was that the church had made salvation a commodity.
The way you were saved. Yes, do all that stuff like Luther did.
But they also said, if you just give us a little cash, we'll make sure you go to heaven.
A little quid pro quo right there from the papal office.
Indeed, they sent indulgence salesmen all over the oliver of Europe to make sure that the people knew that they could purchase these pieces of paper that would let them out of hell.
And of course, if you're a really, really good Christian, you don't want your mom rotting in hell either.
So you'll buy a piece of paper to get her out of purgatory or out of hell.
There was a saying that ran around Europe at this time, a little song that explained the situation.
When the coin in the coffer rings, A soul from purgatory springs.
Thus, Luther's question, what must I do to be saved?
Wasn't just his.
It was the question of countless others. Those who had wanted to live good lives, who cared about being a Christian people, and who wanted to be assured of the hope of heaven.
Those people, those good people who were following the rules and doing what they thought was right were being abused by the powerful and by the ultra wealthy who had turned their hopes into nothing more than a money making scheme and their church into a giant vendor of salvation.
And thus the Protestant Reformation was born from a struggle of one person that echoed the struggle of millions.
Luther's question would eventually be answered. He discovered that salvation was the free gift of God that came through grace alone and faith alone.
And when he articulated what was the truth of the matter, throngs joined with him and and these people remade the world in which they lived.
They remade theology, they remade the church.
Eventually, they remade the political, social and economic life of every country that struggled with these ideas that had first been suggested by Martin Luther.
My doctorate is in church history.
And one of the things that I have learned through the many years that I taught history, and just through my deep love of the subject, is that history generally turns on a question.
And history also has a funny way of backtracking on itself.
And as I think about the Protestant Reformation and I think about now, I ask myself, what is the question?
What is the question that dogs our souls?
What is the question that we can't get away from, not just as individuals, those particular questions that emerge from the circumstances of our own individual lives and psychologies, but the question that we somehow share as a people.
What is the question?
Now.
We are surrounded by greed and corruption.
It is the error that we breathe, especially here in Washington, dc.
Now, we can be cynical and say that greed and corruption always exist. And that is true because we're human beings. There are always people who are greedy. There are always people who are corrupt. There are always people taking advantage of other people.
But sometimes the spirit of these things, greed, corruption and the abuse that attends both become embodied in systems and structures and Institutions that are supposed to work for our good.
And instead the whole institution becomes turned toward evil.
That's when our souls are violated by those we put our trust in and those systems and structures and the people who run them and the people who abuse them for their own wealth and power. They are mocking God.
They are mocking God's goodness, God's infinite kindness, God's generous mercy and, and God's bottomless compassion.
This week I had trouble sleeping and I couldn't stop crying a couple times during the week because I think that we've witnessed, if you paid attention to the news this week, one of the most stunning episodes of mocking God that might have ever occurred in our political life.
I'm a historian and I know that's quite a claim to make.
It was the ad.
The ad run by the Republican candidate for governor in Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy, against his Democratic challenger, Amy Acton.
Very simply, I don't want to repeat it, it's quite an ugly story.
Very simply, Vivek Ramaswamy used Amy Acton's mother as a prop and an ad in order to win the election.
Having the mother refer to her daughter as a liar, only to discover through the hard work of media and people who insisted upon digging up the truth of the mother's accusations against her daughter was that the daughter, Amy Acton, had actually been removed from her mother's care along with her brother when she was a young teenager, I believe 13 or 14 years old, because the stepfather in this situation had been credibly accused and indicted of a form of abuse. Abuse that is unspeakable.
When all of this unfolded, Ramaswamy defended the ad.
The Vice President of the United States defended the ad.
Indeed, anyone who dared say that it was immoral.
The Vice President of the United States said, stop whining because we need to do anything to win.
At first, the President of the United States was quiet and then he defended the ad.
Powerful people, billionaires, the richest people among us, the ones who hold the fate of democracy in their hands.
Mocking morality and purveying abuse as if it was a moral good.
During this same week, Public Religion Research released a report about what they called this was the most unexpected finding of a year long study that they had been doing.
The empathy gap.
They discovered that some 70% of Americans believe that empathy feeling with another person's
[00:17:42] Speaker C: pain
[00:17:44] Speaker A: is a good foundation for a healthy society.
70% of us agree with that empathy is good for us as a people.
But 30% do not.
Indeed, 30% believe that empathy is dangerous.
Especially when it leads away from what they say is the clear teaching of God's truth.
And what we saw in Ohio was an example of the politicization of empathy.
Lots of Republicans told Vivek Ramaswamy to take down the ad.
It's just that the most powerful didn't.
And that's because the Republican Party found this study is actually split on whether empathy is good or bad.
Almost 50 50.
Sadly, there is one religious group, America, that agrees overwhelmingly that empathy is dangerous.
It's not us.
Indeed, congratulations. You're pretty much right on the mark if you're an episcopalian. It's about 70% of us that believe that empathy is necessary for a good society.
But our white evangelical Protestant neighbors believe in large numbers that empathy is evil indeed, some call it toxic.
One popular evangelical book written by a pastor who is ahead sort of theological voice in Pete Hegseth's denomination refers to empathy as brazen malice and cruelty.
An empathy gap has opened up in our politics and our religion.
And I would like to suggest this morning that we need a new reformation and that the question is hanging before us.
The question is no longer what must we do to be saved? I never hear anybody ask that question. I think that people kind of know the answer to that one.
Rather, the question I hear all the time is what must we do to survive?
And today's words from Jesus ring in my ears. Love God and love your neighbour as yourself.
Love God and love your neighbour as yourself.
This is Jesus call to empathy, compassion, walking in another's shoes, the golden rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
The words of Jesus stand in stark contrast to the words of many of the tech billionaires who see empathy as a stumbling block to their own visions of the future and their own wealth.
Indeed, Elon Musk has proclaimed on several different occasions that empathy is the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.
I disagree strongly, and I suspect you do too.
Empathy is our fundamental strength.
Empathy is what has brought us to the point of being able to see the necessity for a successful nation here in America, not just for ourselves, but for the world, so that the hungry are fed, so that people are educated, so that the rights of women and children are upheld around the world.
We are an empathetic people at heart, and it is that empathy expressed in our politics that has often been our greatest asset and that which brought to us wonderful and amazing friends and allies and kept the world saf safer.
Jesus said that loving one's neighbor as oneself was the greatest command.
That this law Summed up all the others.
And sometimes we think of empathy just as sort of something that's individual. Oh, I'm empathetic. I'll be kind. I'll be nice. I do this myself. But in the context of the command, the original command that Jesus is quoting in the gospel, we heard it this morning from Leviticus. It comes from Leviticus 19.
It was an individual directive. It was a communal directive.
Indeed. Leviticus 19 begins with God saying to Moses, speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say these things.
Then there's a whole list of them about social justice, about mercy, about reverence to God, about equity, fairness.
And in verse 18, it all comes to a conclusion with a summary. You shall love your neighbor yourself.
You as in y'. All.
I live in Virginia.
I understand you when I read it.
You all, the whole of Israel, not just little individuals doing their thing here and there.
It's a corporate question.
The Israelites were asking it corporate, quite simply, in the middle of the wilderness, what are we going to do to survive now that we're free and we don't know what the new land looks like? What are we going to do to survive? And this was God's answer. You will love your neighbor as yourself.
I think that in our day, we are asking the same question, how are we going to survive?
I think God hears our question.
I don't think there's any coincidence that these terrible events happened this past week and that this is the lectionary reading for today in hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Christian communities around the world, love God and love your neighbor as yourself.
It stands as a challenge.
It stands as a condemnation.
It stands as a comfort.
And I'd like to suggest one final thing is that our question may be, how will we survive this wilderness?
I ask myself that question every day. People email me that question every day. How are we going to survive this?
I don't know why we're here.
I don't know how we got here.
I don't know where we're going.
Can you help reassure me?
I have had one consistent answer over the last decade, and I'm so happy to share it with you today.
I have always replied, the only thing I know to do is to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves.
And I think when Jesus replied that, or when God said to Moses, tell the people of Israel this is what they are to do, is that God, in a sense, changed the question.
It became not a question of, how are we just going to survive this?
But it became an answer that pointed to, what does it mean to thrive as a people, as a community?
Who can we be when the entire world around us seems to mock love?
You don't play the game.
You don't join the laughter.
Instead, you live justly.
You, y' all act rightly and love with a powerful and genuine love until you feel like you can love no more.
It is an honor to stand in the midst of this community on Reformation Sunday and say these words.
We need a new reformation of the oldest commandment.
We don't need something new to survive or thrive or to be the kind of people that we have always been called to be.
The answer is right before us.
Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.
We can do this.
We can do this.
This is our legacy.
This is what God has always intended for all of God's people, this universal call to love.
We can be that people.
When Herr Doktor Martin Luther was challenged by Catholic authorities that he was too rebellious, that if people really lived by grace alone and faith alone, that they would never really follow God.
But on one day long ago, when Herr Dr. Martin Luther stood in front of a trial after being arrested for just trying to answer the question, how are we saved?
The authorities of the corrupt church pressed upon him. And Martin Luther finally, finally replied in words that again our Lutheran friends know by heart, here I stand.
I can do no other.
Today those words echo down to us.
We can do this.
Here we stand in the love of God and the love of a neighbor, and we can do no other.
Amen.
