"Darkest before the Dawn"

“Darkest before the Dawn”

A Hallowe’en Sermon on Sin, Confession, and Justification

Delivered at St. Nicholas’ of Myra Parish,

Encino, California 90275

The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost,

Sunday, the Eve of All Hallows’, MMX. A.D.

Ps. 32: 3-6 For while I held my tongue, my bones consumed away

through my daily complaining. For thy hand is heavy upon me day and night, and my moisture is like the drought in summer. I will acknowledge my sin unto thee; and mine unrighteousness have I not hid. I said, I will confess my sins unto the Lord; and so thou forgavest the wickedness of my sin.

St. Luke: 19: 5b, 7. “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay in your house today … All who saw it began to grumble and said, “He has gone to be the guest of one who was a sinner.”

“Simul justus et peccator.” --Martin Luther

O Lord, thou knowest our faults, and our sins are not hid from thee, nor by thy saving, forgiving, and cleansing grace are they altogether hidden from us, for they stand before us, before Thee, and between us night and day, and there is neither day nor hour, nor scarcely minute or second when our self-love and self-will do not darken or corrupt utterly our love for thee and for our neighbors. In thy mercy, we beseech thee, keep thy Cross before the faltering eyesight of our faith that by thy grace daily bestowed through thy Holy Church and Sacraments we may have the comfort and reassurance of thine abiding peace, mystical union, and indwelling presence with us, and thus come to dwell in thine house with thee forever, as in thy Holy and Saving Name we pray. Amen.

I’m pretty sure that most of you these days, like me, are almost amazed, and perhaps amused by the degree to which the popular and probably peculiar American custom of observing Hallowe’en by buying up, storing up, and possibly gobbling up with as much goblin-like delight as the younger folk about us the tricky treats (for they contain as much as they conceal calories) of this rather recently concocted holiday, has grown, developed, even exploded—in our lifetimes? No doubt many of us—even a goodly proportion of the folks in my retirement home, have been busied in decorating our doorways, windows, rooftops, driveways, and table-tops with jack-o-lanterns, plain old pumpkins, skeletons, witches’ gangrenous faces, ghosties, ghoulies, feline-footed beasties, and other decorations in the—to the privileged among us—sacred--colors of orange and black—not to mention welcoming in the now elongated “holiday season” with parties, even masquerades and dances for those in their second childhoods as well as the kiddies. I wonder if you all wonder as I do just how such a widely and even weirdly now almost month-long celebration has come to be. Does it have any meaning? If so, has it any deep, perhaps psycho-sociological, only half-conscious, cultural meaning? Perhaps even disguisedly theological—or else demonological—deeper meaning?

I confess that my graduate studies in religion have led me to think so. Holidays, their observance, are after all part of the ritual structuring of human life, and I doubt that it takes college classes in religion or anthropology—at least not for us Episcopalians, certainly Anglo-Catholics—to realize how centrally and perhaps inescapably important ritual is for our humanity. Ritual is, after all, the acting-out, the dramatizing of the symbols, the primal graspings of reality, probably preceding language, on which our common consciousness, our communication, our culture depends, from which the structures of social and political life spring.

Two scholars particularly come to my mind as having shaped my understanding of ritual. The first was Victor Turner, an Australian anthropologist, who taught about what he called “structure versus anti-structure” as fundamental to human society and elemental to ritual, which he saw as a social, a dramatic way of coming to know the basic rules, the norms, of human life through occasional acts of reversal—of precisely violating those laws, of reinforcing social order—morality—in occasional rites or rituals that recognize, realize, enact disorder, chaos—violation, immoral behavior, even orgy. An earlier scholar, another anthropologist, Sir Edmund Leach, suggested or illustrated the same idea in an article called, “Of Time and False Noses,” in which he argued that through custom and costume we enact, we realize norms and their reversal—at special, “sacred” times—on “holidays,” through ritual. Such holiday rituals usually, Leach argued, involve three stages: the middle one, orgy, is a sort of anti-drama--frenzied dancing, falling into trances, that can involve licentiousness, violation of moral norms and the shedding of social distinctions through the shedding of clothes: think of Mardi Gras, of Mayday, of fraternity initiations, freshman-Fall’s hazings—or of baptism in the ancient Church. On either side of this ritual reversal, people emphasize proper norms and roles sometimes by disguising them through masquerades of Mardi Gras and Hallowe’en disguises, New Year’s Eve’s party hats, noisemakers and confetti, and then also people overemphasize norms, standards, and ideals by overemphasizing them: eucharistic vestments, clerics, uniforms, Masonic ritual costume, public ceremonies, white tie dinners, formal dances.

And thus it seems evident that in our increasingly secular, pluralistic, non-church-attending, country, a purely secular, non-denominational ritual should attain an almost universal observance, since it places emphasis on all sorts of reversal: death, decay, decadence, self-indulgence, reversal if only in children ‘s demanding that adults render a tribute of goodies, etc. And thus it is understandable that in mediaeval and Renaissance Europe, high and solemn feast days were often preceded by their “Eves,” such as Mardi Gras, Midsummer-night’s Eve (that of St. John the Baptist), and All Hallows’ or All Saints’ Day’s Even. Thus it was appropriate that on the Eve of All Saints’ in 1517 a university professor and priest (dangerous combination) named Martin Luther should tack upon his church’s door (I’m uncertain whether it was the cathedral’s or the university church’s, or if they weren’t the same) 95 theses challenging practices that were normative for the Church at that time. To speak of Luther in what at least has been an Anglo-Catholic parish may seem my own sort of reversal ritual. I do think that our Episcopal Church is right in not observing today as “Reformation Sunday” as our Lutheran brethren do. But I do think it appropriate to remember one way in which Luther was a model for Anglo-Catholics: at least in his earlier years, he very much believed in and practiced frequently the unquestionably Catholic custom that he regarded as a sort of “half-sacrament:” having a confessor and going to or going through private confession.

This is not to say by any means, certainly Luther did not himself believe, that a Christian’s offering up a private prayer of confession of sin—or, more regularly, saying the prayer of general confession along with the parish congregation in its Sunday liturgy, isn’t really, fully, theologically sufficient to gain us God’s merciful forgiveness—indeed, the theological certainty of our pardon and restoration to the guiltless holiness of Christ’s Body through the sacramental ministry of that body, the Church. But it may well be the case for some faithful Christians of tender conscience and troubled memories, that a more particular, concrete, and assured sense of forgiveness and peace within themselves and with God is needed. At least at one time Luther is said to have needed such a sense of absolution and assured justification before God. Sometimes even contemporary Episcopalians feel that need and present themselves for the Sacrament of Penance. I know that regularly if occasionally this priest does. I trust it’s no great breach of Church etiquette to tell you that I made an appointment for such with your gifted Rector this morning—a superb confessor, I’ve discovered, as I first intuited upon meeting him years ago. Hence the topic of this sermon, a Sacrament about which Father Williams taught me decades ago, then directed me to Bishop Campbell up at Mt. Calvary, my first confessor—and a saint!

For just as ritual generally reinforces socio-cultural norms by ritually, perhaps just playfully, violating them—making moral lines known by drawing them as if with colored chalk on the sidewalk, so Hallowe’en seems to provide an at least semi-conscious sense of order and orientation to our otherwise seemingly mindless and conscience-free secular nation by leading us at least playfully to deal with death and the demonic; with self-indulgence if not serious sin. And far more effectively the Sacrament of Penance, of confession and absolution, the opportunity to focus our attention on our sins, and thus upon moral theology—Fr. Williams’ great subject of interest and expertise—coming to understand the structure of moral behavior by studying the different moods, motives, and degrees that constitute sin—is a practical and useful and indeed refreshing as well as morally strengthening exercise, whether or not it’s recognized as a soul-saving Sacrament.

Today is the Eve of All Hallows’. At least our nation is playing, if not praying, with its inadequate notions of evil, of sin and the Devil, and all the bewitching attractions of the world—its treats—and too sadly, its tricks. Again we face the darkness of this jack o’lantern-lighted night. Tomorrow we rejoice in the company of all the saints into which Our Saviour’s Grace has brought us. It’s always darkest before the dawn.

Zacchaeus, like the persona of St. Paul behind the text of Second Timothy, could well have thought himself “the worst or chief of sinners.” To be a tax collector was first of all to be a traitor: a collaborator with the Roman oppressors of your own people, God’s chosen ones. And it was to be a greed-obsessed, superlatively self-centered, successful genius at money-grabbing and cheating: Zacchaeus, the Gospel Lesson tells us, “was rich.” He put himself ahead of and in place of God, and he betrayed his neighbors. He didn’t know that when he climbed the sycamore tree. He knew it when Our Lord called him by name and told him to come down: that He loved and accepted and forgave him and would dine as a guest at his table that evening. Our Lord accepted; Zacchaeus converted. Grace preceded faith, and faith preceded repentance. He came down: it was a ritual of reversal—the Sacrament of Penance. It was acceptance and then assurance of absolution. Zacchaeus dined with Christ. We have heard Our Lord call us to come down. We have received His saving absolution, the assurance of our justification: our reception of His Holiness through the mystical Union we receive in dining at his table, in beholding his Presence on the Altar, of dining in the fellowship of His Love. Together let us, like Zacchaeus, come down.