The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost 2003

Fr. Dan Weir preached a lengthier version of this sermon on the 12th Sunday after Pentecost, August 31, 2003.

We live in a world that has been rocked by incredible changes over the past few years, a situation that is not unlike that faced by the Jewish people in the first century. Their country was occupied by a brutal foreign power, one that only barely granted them some measure of religious freedom. The Romans had so little respect or even understanding of the faith of the Jewish people, that they labeled them as atheists, for from their point of view one God was hardly enough. Given the situation they were in, perhaps we should be more understanding of the Pharisees, who decided that one way to preserve their integrity in the face of this threat was to wall themselves around with a clear and authoritative set of rules - "Follow these rules and you will be alright with God."

But Jesus didn't see it that way. He saw that there is great danger in having an absolute and authoritative set of rules. The danger lies in a failure to account for the human imperfections of those who formulate and interpret the rules.

I am fifty-six years old and have been a priest for nearly thirty years. In all those years I have come to know a few things as being absolutely true. One of them is that I don't know the truth absolutely. No matter what I do, no matter how hard I try, I know that I won't get it right, that some error will find its way into my interpretation of the truth. Knowing that, I have come to see that I can only speak descriptively and not prescriptively. I can only say that this is how I see the truth and not that this is how you ought to see the truth.

I am very distrustful of those - including myself, when I fall into that trap - who claim to know and understand the truth absolutely. The terrorists of September 11 claimed to know the absolute about what it means to be a Muslim. The man who murdered Dr. Slepian claimed to know the absolute truth about what to means to be a pro-life Christian. Timothy McVeigh claimed to know the absolute truth about what it means to be a patriotic American. And the murderers of gay Episcopalian Matthew Shephard claimed to know the absolute truth about what it means to be a man.

None of us knows the "truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," no matter what we may be asked to swear in court. But each of us knows something of the truth. Each of us is invited to share how we understand the truth and in that sharing to grow.

That is the invitation in the wake of the decisions of this summer's General Convention, the invitation to continue the conversation in community. I believe that nothing is gained, and much is lost by leaving the community. While I respect the right of people to leave, my prayer is that people on all sides of the issues that were raised by the Convention will stay in community, will stay in the conversation. I believe that it is here in community that God will lead us into deeper understanding of the truth.

Soon after the Episcopal Church's decision to ordain women, a decision which thirty years later still upsets some Episcopalians, I ran into my friend Fr. Joe Quigley and another Roman Catholic. One of them asked me how the Episcopal Church could have made such a bad decision. I replied that I didn't think that it was a bad decision, but that if it were, God would show us that in time.

I don't know absolutely if the decisions of the General Convention were good decisions. But I trust that if they are not, God will lead us back to the truth. As I said earlier there are few things that I know absolutely. There are two more that I can count on as being true. One is that Jan and our children love me. The other is that God loves, has loved, and will always love us. I believe that Jesus is asking us to trust that love, and not any interpretation of the truth, to trust that love absolutely.