Sermon by the Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori
Presiding Bishop and Primate, The Episcopal Church
Irenaeus, c 202
Bruton Parish, Williamsburg, VA, 10 am
So what might Irenaeus have to offer third millennium Christians? If you look a bit beyond the surface, I think you’ll find that the kinds of heresies he wrote about so accurately and humorously are still very much with us. He was enormously clear about what constituted heresy and why it was a problem, but the way he dealt with heretics was remarkably peaceful — like his name, eirenic. He had a pastoral heart, and even urged the powers that be to be gentle with those with whom he disagreed. He worked twice with bishops in Rome urging leniency in dealing with the Montanists and the Quartodecimans. A surprising coincidence of heart and head in that man.
He’s probably best remembered for his magnum opus, Adversus haereses, written primarily in opposition to the Gnostics. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, if you will. We of course don’t know of any Christians who would like to divorce the head from the heart, or the body from the spirit. The current troubles over sexuality and celibacy are only one example. I’ve run into more than one faithful Christian, often a teacher of the faith, who writes scathing diatribes on the internet about opponents yet operates face to face as an earnest and caring pastor.
Irenaeus was convinced — and convicted — by an understanding of creation as fundamentally good. He urged his readers to begin with the incarnation as evidence of the goodness of creation, seeing the incarnation as that which renewed human creation, rather than the atonement. In that sense he looks an awful lot like Richard Hooker.
He also opined that the glory of God is a human being fully alive — in all her or his parts, not just “spirit” or mental capacity. For him, a good deal of the truth of Christianity would seem to subsist in its bodiedness — incarnate and resurrected in flesh and blood, human beings using all their bodily parts to glorify God. Even human beings fed as much at the sacred table of the mass as the equally sacred table of everyday meals.
If you haven’t seen it yet, Sara Miles’ book, Take This Bread, is a remarkable contemporary example of what Irenaeus’ theology looks like in practice — welcoming Christ in the hungry poor, the mentally ill, drug addicts, excons, and struggling city dwellers. If you are hungry, in any way, come and eat. It’s provocative stuff as it’s lived out at St. Gregory Nyssen — growing out of a sense the gospel starts by feeding people, rather than insisting that they get a baptismal bath first. It’s a theology that’s likely to be far more challenging to this body of Christians we call the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion than any spat we might have over sexuality and its right use. In spite of Timothy’s letter, that might be a controversy worth arguing over.
Irenaeus’ take on the way we deal with controversy seems most pertinent right now. He was an incarnate example of “have nothing to do with stupid and senseless controversies, for you know they breed quarrels….The Lord’s servant must be kindly to all… correcting opponents with gentleness.” The man of peace, as his name reminds us, taught what he understood to be the gospel, but thought God should work out the ultimate consequences.
The gospel’s mandate to let godly light shine through the eye of the body has a message that’s hidden in English. It says that the unhealthy eye fills the body with darkness. It’s talking about the evil eye, against which you will see little blue-eyed amulets all over the Middle East to this day, warding off the evil eye of envy and jealousy. That evil eye drives the inglorious need to be right at all costs, the unwillingness to let God sort out the details of things over which we want to argue and judge our neighbors. The evil eye spreads darkness, not the light of the gospel, for it is based in human judgment — “don’t threaten me with your understanding, my own must be the center of existence.” However, if your eye is sound, healthy, and generous, then your whole body is full of light.
We’re remembering Irenaeus in an environment among the oldest sites of Christianity in the New World. It has seen light and darkness, yet the darkness has not prevailed. Light still shines forth in this place, ministering to the wealthy and the retired, to those who work covertly for our own government, and even occasionally to wandering tourists. Many come starved for light and good news. Many wrestle with the details of their faith — how can I live right in a far too ambiguous world? Irenaeus would urge us to see that “creation reveals the one who created it, and the work itself is suggestive of the one who made it, and the world manifests the one who arranged it.” Even this ambiguous, chaotic existence, is shot through with the glory of God. So, too, are we, even — maybe especially — as we wrestle with that ambiguity.
Wrestling seems like a good image of what Irenaeus meant when he said, “the glory of God is a human being fully alive.” Fully present in body and mind, using all of it to God’s glory. Eyes, hands, feet, minds, hearts. In that wrestling we begin to shine. May we illumine the world with that glistening, sweaty, light.