Who do you Say … and Watch what you say, Teacher!”
A Sermon Preached at St. Nicholas’ Church, Encino,
Sunday XV post Pentecosten

St. Mark 8: “Who do you say that I am?”
St. James 3: “You know that we who teach will be judged with greater
strictness. For all of us make many mistakes.”

It is a great honor and pleasure to have been asked to preach to you of this beloved Parish of St. Nicholas’—St. Nick’s—today. Your gracious calling me here today to be present and participating in the blessing of Professor Mazzuchelli’s generous and beautifully hand-crafted gift--his hand-embroidered replica of an illustrated manuscript of The Beatitudes—is an honor of which I feel as unworthy as I am grateful for it. Vince and his close friend, John Thornbury, were of course, faithful members of this parish during some of my happy years here. As I write this sermon, I am all too aware of the difficulty I will probably have in giving it, for I am deeply moved by this occasion and this honor.

Ιt is also somewhat daunting to attempt to preach on this Gospel text, which is at the center of the very purposefully constructed narrative traditionally attributed to St. Mark. For although only St. Peter answers the question Our Lord poses, Jesus asks it in the plural—to all the disciples, as I believe he still asks each and all of us, “Who do you say that I am?” It is some relief to me to note his verb: who do you SAY [λεγετε] that I am? He doesn’t ask, “Who do you BELIEVE [πιστευετε] that I am? He is asking about orthodoxy in teaching—what we publicly confess and proclaim to be truth as fully considered and assented to—more than in honesty, sincerity, and integrity—either in momentary inward attitude or in habitual human complacency while attempting to teach. But it is his choice of verb when aimed at his disciples—those commissioned to evangelize—to spread his Gospel—that makes a preacher or professor nervous. St. James hardly helps the situation when he adds in his epistle, “we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.” Thus I prepared this sermon and step into this pulpit –hallowed by the teaching of predecessors in it--fully aware that I am asked, “Father Professor Canon Happ, who do YOU say that Jesus is?”

It was only Wednesday that I was asked to preach. When Father Maronde first told me of the parish’s intent to honor me, I supposed I would just be attending. My usual self-assertiveness came to the fore. I normally attend of necessity an early service that has no music. I thought I could at least satisfy my needs and tastes and leave something of a personal mark on the service by suggesting the hymns, and I was courteously granted that privilege. Some change of mind on my part and further discussion with your talented and equally courteous choirmaster led to some change in those hymns, but since I have long borne them in mind, I found that they represented stages in the Church’s history and in the development of my thought in terms of which I can set out my ideas.

Our processional hymn is not from The Hymnal of The Episcopal Church. I helped make it the official Hymn of the Class of ’68 at Presbyterian Princeton Seminary because it was ascribed to John Calvin, my great hero in those days. Just this year, Calvin’s Quinquecentennial, when asked by PTS what influence the Reformer has had on my life, I bluntly replied, that he had led me to The Episcopal Church. That’s partly because, like the Benedictine scholar, Fr. Kilian McDonnell, I think he believed in The Real Presence in The Eucharist. He did believe in at least weekly celebration of it. He represents the first and chief of what Blessed Richard Hooker asserted were the three authorities in Anglican theology and worship: Scripture, which takes precedence over Reason and Tradition. With St. Peter in today’s chapter from Scripture I say that Jesus is The Messiah, the Anointed One—the prophet, priest, and king prophesied in the Old Testament and expected and hoped for by the People of Israel and later and still today by the Church Catholic. (The professor in me is now compelled to interject that today we know that the hymn was not written by Calvin, but by some burgher of the French Reformed community in Strasbourg in 1551, whose name I’ve managed to lose record of; it is still my favorite, and was sung at my ordination to the priesthood and not by me at least since then.)

The second hymn I chose originally but in agreement with your good director later exscinded, WAS in the old hymnal but was similarly cut out of the new one: “Lead, Kindly Light,” by Blessed John Henry Newman. Newman was, as I remember, part of the subject of Fr. Williams’ Oxford dissertation and perhaps the chief founder of our Anglo-Catholic tradition. I hazard the guess that St. Nick’s is the only Episcopal church in this country that has put him—a later convert to the Roman Communion—in stained glass—mostly my idea some years ago. He represents the role Tradition plays in what we have to say about who Jesus is, for the Oxford Movement recalled us to the realization that there were disciples who proclaimed the Resurrection—and thus there was a Church—before St. Paul first testified to the Risen Christ in I Corinthians “in the early ‘50’s” [New Oxford Annotated RSV], and indeed, however Scripture may be granted priority to Tradition authority-wise, it was only through the gradual formation of consensus in the Church that The Bible, the Canon of Scripture, came to be recognized and constituted. Well before that The Apostles’ Creed, and scarcely later than that, the Nicene, were more deliberately and officially and ecumenically recognized by the Church as authoritative, and thus I can and do say in Her tradition that Jesus is “the only-begotten Son of God…of one substance with the Father…incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary” and all the rest.
I chose two further hymns by authors one can call “Liberal,” who died in 1959 and 1969 respectively, one, a devotee of “The Social Gospel” and an editor of the RSV, a student of 20th Century Biblical criticism, the other zealous in movements for women’s rights and pacifism, the brother of an Anglo-Catholic poet and theologian. They represent the authority of Reason in our Communion, a criterion Hooker placed as prior to Tradition. I’ve known and loved both hymns since seminary days.
It is, of course, with respect to the realm and scope of reason that I am obliged to try to speak to you this morning. Reason—our common human ability to achieve a shared understanding of reality through intelligible language—is perhaps uniquely acknowledged as authoritative by us in the Anglican Communion among Christians who also claim reverence for Scripture and tradition. (Wow. That was a difficult sentence for me to speak and perhaps for you all to understand; for some reason known only to itself, my computer’s “spell-check” underlined the whole sentence until I inserted, “of reality.” Now it has modestly and mysteriously underlined, “itself.”) Our tradition has quite consistently attempted to realize St. Anselm’s goal of “faith seeking understanding.”

In our culture today we are caught between two enemy camps: those who exhibit what the great scholar Richard Hofstadter characterized as “Anti-intellectualism in American life,” who in their professed caricature of faith prefer ignorance to understanding, and those who in seeking understanding reject faith. Among the latter group stands prominently my favorite comedian, Bill Maher, writer of the current film, “Religulous.” Maher has a laudable moral sense of the dangerous closed-mindedness of what popularly passes for religion, and a lamentable insensibility to real religion and a regrettable failure to understand the academic and philosophical concept of its universality as a human phenomenon: even atheists, agnostics, and Satanists have a religion or a religious dimension. Everyone necessarily acts; action presupposes choice; choice, values, and values are gratuitous: they cannot be derived from or justified by facts, by empirical knowledge: they are at base taken for granted, as given, in a manner analogous to faith.

Αt the beginning of the last century, the thought of the Church was preoccupied in its faithful quest for understanding who Jesus was, by what Albert Schweitzer called “The Quest for the Historical Jesus.” Schweitzer concluded that through historical method we can learn only minimal facts about Jesus. More recently, in what is called, “The New Quest,” scholars have come to realize that through historical method, what in German is called, “Historie,” we can understand that the faith of the Church is itself an historical phenomenon. Thus Bishop Spong of Newark, who ably seeks to mediate between the world of scholarship and the mind of the Church at large, points out helpfully that the Gospel narratives were written, not as literal history, but as “midrash,” in the Jewish tradition of understanding the world by the means of holy Scripture and of extending and expanding Scripture in terms of the Scriptural tradition. Reason achieves understanding through knowledge of Scripture within the developing tradition of the faith of the Church.

When I was in graduate school I encountered the challenge reason seemed to present to faith—or my understanding of faith—in reading and hearing in lecture the philosophy of Jonathan Flew—“the world’s most notorious atheist,” an Englishman who at the time was Professor in The University of Oxford. Flew was in part a representative of the British “language analysis” school of philosophy that held that the traditional academic study of metaphysics—the attempt to understand reality through rational theory—was a vain enterprise: human knowledge consisted only of empirical science and the method of logic, a method in terms of which metaphysics, particularly any language about God, was inconsistent, self-refuting. Hence, I came to think that perhaps Bob Kolb, a Missouri Synod clergyman and scholar of Luther, a close friend since my early adolescence, was right in holding to Luther’s persuasion that faith and reason are finally antithetical, a position held by my equally close friend from that time on, Lanny Bell, an Egyptologist and committed agnostic. That was the position stated when last I knew him by my beloved Professor of the Philosophy of Religion, Victor Preller, of Princeton University, in his maxim, “Illusion, be thou my reality.” Vic was, when I knew him, a former monk and priest of The Episcopal Church who later returned to the Church and the priesthood.

Most recently, Professor Flew published in 2007 a book in which he revealed that he had “changed his mind” and argued brilliantly and to me convincingly in favor of “the argument from design” that he had long opposed, convinced within the continuing philosophical debate on the classic lines of argument on that subject. The title of his book appears at first glance to be, “There is No God,” but a closer look reveals that the “No” is crossed out, that the real title is, “There IS a God.”
Flew claims that his new belief is based on his up-to-date understanding of science: among other things, of astronomy, sub-nuclear physics, microbiology, and paleontology. He argues not only that there is in the known universe, not only an incredible complexity but also an intelligibility, a conformity, a parallelism that necessitates belief in a Supreme, transcendent Intelligence—God.

Beyond that, Flew emphasizes that the existence of the particular conditions on our planet earth are statistically highly unlikely, improbable, coincidental, and that this is true no less of the emergence of life and of human beings and intelligence through evolution, which implies design not only as a matter of form, rational and intelligible, but of will, of choice, of a Creator. He acknowledges that he is not himself a believer in any religious tradition, but he writes of the possibility of his being converted by a voice not his own, and states that of all religions, Christianity seems to him the most reasonable.
Since reading his book, I have come to think that reason and faith are not opposed, but congruent, as St. Thomas Aquinas and Bd. Richard Hooker had earlier persuaded me. It is not necessary but reasonable to believe that a benevolent God who brought into being our world and our human nature that seems to conceive a universal natural moral law and to set its highest value on human personhood, should reveal Himself to that personhood and draw it towards personal fulfillment in the knowledge of Himself through His Incarnation in history, that is, human self-knowledge through the story of its past, in German, Geschichte, rather than the academic study of the past, Historie, within the people and culture most aware and appreciative of God in its history (Geschichte), that is, in its midrash, its Scriptural tradition expecting the coming of a Messiah as such a person, such a Messiah—or Christ, as that word translates into New Testament Greek. “Who do you say that I am?” You are the Christ. That’s as much as I can say—in faith that I am not mistaken.