Like a Child Quieted Is my Soul

.... like a child quieted at its mother’s breast;
like a child that is quieted is my soul.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Our lections this morning combine to quiet our souls in an unquiet world. We begin with a reading from the Prophet Malachi who describes a priesthood that is corrupt. We learn that the priest, through context, offers no decent sacrifice to God, keeping unblemished animals for himself while diseased and maimed animals are laid on the Altar. The implication is that priest does not believe in God, from whom he steals boldly and in the plain sight of Heaven. "'I have no pleasure in you,'" God tells them, '"and I will not accept an offering from your hand'" (Mal 1:10). Clearly, the deformed animals represent the deformed character of the priests. Certainly, this is a troubling prospect: priests unacceptable to God and whose sacraments God will not validate. In our own world, we shudder to think of absolutions that do not absolve or baptisms that do not baptize.

What is at stake in our readings this morning is the question of valid sacraments. What makes a sacrament valid? Certainly, Apostolicity and Catholicity are required. My own ordination, in fact, can be trace to three Apostles, Ss. John, Peter, and James the Less (the Lord's brother and Bishop of Jerusalem). Indeed, my ordaining bishop, Bp. Keith Ackerman, stands in both the line through Canterbury and the Roman Catholic Apostolic Descent. Then there is the Catholic question. In addition to valid descent, we must receive, accept, practice, and teach the historic Catholic faith. And this we do. Beyond this, we must have valid matter, form, and intention, which we rigorously ensure.

But there is also the disposition of those receiving the sacrament. This is required for validity as well. Consider the child who does not want to be confirmed or the bride who does not want to be married. Has this boy been confirmed? Or is this bride married? The answer, most assuredly, is , "No." The Church is crystal clear about this. The intention to receive a sacrament does matter. And this intention is required on both sides of the Altar rail. Are we to believe that a priest who desecrates the Blessed Sacrament could actually be the valid instrument through whom the Risen Christ appears. Respected and orthodox Roman Catholic theologians have debated this for centuries. Yes, the sacraments are channels of grace, but we must be properly disposed. Our hearts must be open to receiving these graces. Above all, the priest must bring his sincere and incorrupt heart to the Altar. As the eminent Roman Catholic theologian Mon. J.M. Herve wrote, "Intention is required for the valid administration of the sacraments; Faith and uprightness, however, are required, that the sacrament may be worthily performed."

The Catechism of the Roman Church insists that the sacraments "work because they work" independent of the morals of any sacred minister, but we must be aware that there are certain practicalities at stake here. Indeed, the locus classicus for this debate goes back to St. Augustine, who was asked by the pope to help resolve the Donatist crisis, which would deeply divide the Church for centuries. It all began with the persecution of Christians, many martyred. Clergy and faithful who cracked under pressure, repudiating the faith, wanted to return to their posts once the persecutions had died down. Unfortunately, in the most extreme cases, there were bishops and priests who turned over the names of their own people to Imperial authorities. These Christians were then rounded up and martyred. We can only imagine the scene when these same clergy and faithful showed up again in the very congregations they had betrayed. The Pope backed the compromised clergy, which caused the people, known as the Donatists, to emphasize honor, sacrifice, and the holiness of martyrdom all the more. No one among their group would agree to attend the Masses offered by these priests. No one would present their children for confirmation before these bishops. In the end, St. Augustine wrote a treatise arguing that the moral character of a bishop or priest does not matter concerning the validity of sacraments. Did this resolve the question? Suffice it to say that the world continues to debate the question. But no amount of debating can decide one's spiritual sensibilities, what one feels or sees with the eyes of the soul when he or she participates in a Mass. You see, there is one principle that no one debates: Its Latin name is ex opere operantis, and it means that the holiness of a priest directly influences the worthiness of his sacramental ministrations. And this principle rings true to the soul.

Our Gospel reading continues the theme begun in Malachi. Jesus admonishes corrupt religious figures, Scribes and Pharisees, who impose impossible burdens of ritual and observance on the people but who do not observe these strictures themselves. In effect, Jesus says, "You're fired! You are no longer to be called Rabbi or Teacher or Master, much less, 'Father.'" They are deposed. If Bishop Morales were to depose me (Heaven forefend the thought!) I would receive a letter in the mail, probably Certified Mail. And it would say, "You are no longer to be styled 'priest' or 'Reverend' or 'Father.' You are no longer to appear in public in the distinctive dress of a priest, neither clericals or a collar." Jesus strips them of their titles. Their ministries He sweeps away. He has deposed them. And their world, the Lord concludes, is be turned on its head: "He who is greatest among you shall now be your servant."

A corrupt priesthood? An entire religious lifeworld swept aside? What does this signify? The place of the priest, which is the day-to-day face of the Church to the world, is a mysterious place. His function is a sacramental function, which only deepens this mystery. Indeed, the Eastern Church shies away from the word sacrament as being too formulaic (this equals that), preferring the term Sacred Mystery, which humbles us and invites us to ponder the ineffable qualities of God and Heaven. In this is how it was from the beginning.

The difference between sacrament and mystery has everything to do with the disposition of our hearts and the atmosphere around our participation in this mystery. For the pure springs of its headwaters begin in mystery. The original culture of the Church was, and is, an Eastern culture. The Greek language, thanks to Alexander the Great, was the language of the East three centuries before the birth of Christ. Everybody spoke Greek. It was the language spoken by Jesus and the Disciples (else, why are all their references to Scripture from a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible and not from the Hebrew and Aramaic originals?). It is the language in which the New Testament is written. It is the language in which all the early prayers and liturgies of the Church were inscribed. It is the language which the Early Fathers of the Church, that deep and vast storehouse of sacred theology, chose to write their treatises and letters. And that Greek language by its nature and structure is mysterious. While our own English language has two voices — our verbs can be active or passive — the Greek language has a whole middle voice reserved for mystery.

By contrast, the Latin language, like English, has only two voices. Latin is the language of engineers. For while the Greek language gave us the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the mathematics of Euclid, the histories of Herodotus, the epic literature of Homer, the tragedies of Aeschylus, and much, much more, the greatest achievements of Rome were military science, engineering and construction techniques, laws and contracts, and the governance and administration of vast bureaucracies .... indeed, the greatest and most vast bureaucracies in the history of humankind which stood for the longest period. It is a fact that the Roman Catholic Church today is a living continuation of those bureaucracies begun in antiquity. The basilica, which is the trademark architecture of Rome's great churches, would have communicated, not religion, but rather governance and especially laws to an ancient Roman. The basilica is where the Emperor Constantine, himself an administrator, placed them. Indeed, he enjoined the Roman Church during the fourth century to found herself on laws. And she built her foundation upon legal contracts, which today are called canon law. Without making too fine a point, we might generalize and say that the sensibilities of the West are intellectual and technical while the sensibilities of the East are rooted in mystery. And this trajectory would continue for centuries into the Protestant Reformation, which was founded upon and happened within the motivations for, the context and animus of the Scientific Revolution. Empiricism and the Revolution of Science girded up the mind that set about building a new kind of Christianity. The Western trajectory of the Church throughout its career had been away from mystery and toward rationality; a journey from the "right brain" to the "left brain"; away from mystery and toward categories and formulae and equations.

In fact, the Eastern Church does not place a set and prescribed limit on the number of sacraments, as we Western Catholics do. For everything the Church does, in the opinion of the East, is sacramental. I recall a talk I attended in New Haven many years ago. A distinguished priest .... I am sure he was a hierarch of the East asked the question, "How many sacraments are there?" The answer to his question was, aptly, another question. "How many things," he asked, "did God create?"

At her roots, the Christian church speaks a language of mystery. And mystery, unerringly, teaches humility. From the first moment, once we have entered the vast spaces of mystery, with its vaulting ceilings disappearing from sight and its flickering candlelit Altars, we instinctively know that we must step carefully and slowly. We are no longer in a scale and logic we are able to understand. We could misstep as we slowly venture into deeper and deeper mystery, for its character is sacred. And we do not know but that we might touch God's holy mountain without having prepared ourselves. We could stumble, without making ready, into an encounter with the sublime. For "it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God" (Heb 10:31).

This was the reason Saint Augustine, as a young man, refused baptism. He looked into his heart, and he knew that he would continue in a life that was an affront to Heaven, for he was a promiscuous man who could not stop, would not master the thoughts and daydreams that preyed upon him. His friends, learning of this canceled baptism, might have asked him, "Do you not not profess the Christian faith? Do you not believe in the Lord Jesus Christ?" "Oh, no," he would have replied. "My belief is what stops me." St. Augustine, you see, did not play with fire.

The right disposition of the heart standing before God is humility. For this reason, the Anglo-Catholic Mass begins with the Confiteor, an act of self-humbling at the foot of the Altar; advances to the Collect for Purity, petitioning the Holy Spirit to cleanse our thoughts and hearts; thence to the Commandments. Later there is a General Confession, followed by the Prayer of Humble Access: ("We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under they table"), and then to the non sum dignus ("I am not worthy..."). For it is only through careful preparation of the heart that we dare approach God, that we dare to receive a particle of God placed within our very persons. What man or woman durst approach the living God at the rail without making these careful and carefully orchestrated preparations? And what priest dares to approach the Altar without knowing that he is blameless before God to the furthest extent he is able? For in His hands and through his character will become Present the Lord Jesus Christ.

What is left when proud corruption is swept away? What is desired in the priest and in the faithful? The Lord could not be more clear in our Gospel lesson this morning: humility. We must be humbled in order to be exalted. And becoming humbled and clearing ourselves of the world's debris and unworthiness, we will know a peace unto our very souls. As Saint Paul assures us in his Letter to the congregation at Thessalonika,

.... we were gentle among you, like a nurse taking care of her children....
.... for you know how, like a father with his children,
we exhorted each one of you and encouraged you and charged you to lead
a life worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory.

A way of gentle love, of decent affection, of self-sacrifice in community, and charged only to be worthy of God, Who is holy. A ministry by the humble to the humble in the face of the sublime. Here is the only way to peace. And knowing this peace we are apt to fall .... into the safe reveries of a sleepy child: "like a child quieted at its mother's breast; like a child that is quieted is my soul."

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.