Sermon impression: “Teaching of the Holy Spirit” (June 10, 2018)

What follows is not a manuscript of the June 10 morning sermon at Universalist National Memorial Church, or even a reconstruction, but an impression to share with those who were not present. The morning’s texts from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians and the Gospel of Mark may be found here.

I had planned to preach from a manuscript, but the suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain so close together raised a consciousness and care that I knew it would be on our minds at church. Better to speak from the heart and with with short notes…

I would like us to speak clearly about suicide, generally, and about the people we’ve known and lost personally. My call to the ministry began after the suicide of a dormmate in college, nearly thirty years ago. I’m sure it has touched people here.

Spade and Bourdain’s deaths are troubling, in part, because they were styish and adventuresome and well-known. Our culture values these things but they is no protection. And their deaths reminds us of the unrecognized courage and suffering borne by unfamous (but much loved) people who died from suicide, or who struggle with it. Silence is a deadly enemy, and their deaths is both a loss in themselves and a threat to our sense of self. There is help available, and I recommend you keep these numbers handy in your phone: National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (800-273-8255) and text 741-741 for the Crisis Text Line.

It is important as Universalists to make a public, matter-of-course profession of the hope we share, and claim God’s care for those who die in suicide. There are people who claim that “a spirit of suicide” is loose in the world, or that Spade, Bourdain and others who take their own lives will suffer hell for their act. But this is not so, and a terrible, cruel thing to say. Should someone say this to you, say back, “I’m a member of a church that believes no such thing.”

For we each rely on God’s nature and not our own actions, and God’s nature is love. Ill health (including mental health) and misfortune can afflict any of us. But God made us, and God cares for those who take thoir own lives. Hold on to that.

We could spend much time reflecting on these realities, but let’s also review the text from the Gospel of Mark. It is not easy to hear — say, “Satan casting out Satan.” What would that mean? But there is one part that stands out more and has long been a difficulty for Universalists.

With this in mind, let’s turn to the passage in Mark 3, about the eternal sin and the blasphemy against the holy spirit.

“Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”– for they had said, “He has an unclean spirit.”

Blasphemy is one of those words that might make us chuckle because it so lost in time, like haughty, wicked or naughty. Each of these meant something very serious, but that was a long time ago. So it’s easy to under-estimate the point of the passage. In some sense, it is about demeaning or not adequately showing honor to some deity, and by extension to a text or holy person. Most of the remaining blasphemy laws are in Muslim countries, but this hides the fact that they existed in many other countries, including in western Europe until very recently. Denmark had a blasphemy law until last year, its repeal triggered by an active prosecution. The past, as the saying goes, isn’t even in the past. It has long been the perogative of civil authority to police blasphemy.

Jesus was engaging in theological jujitsu with blasphemy hunters in religious leadership. He was suspect of blasphemy and were hoping he would entrap himself. So that blasphemy against the holy spirit is blasphemy against what was working within Jesus, and as he had just commissioned the apostles, presumably the work within them. This seems not so far removed from our ideas of the violation of conscience, except that the “conscientousness” comes as a divine gift, we would call that grace. Then it seems to me that the blasphemy against the holy spirit is tied to an intrusion, a violation against our inward soul. That picking and digging that others so easily do, perhaps because they think they have the right to do.

Blasphemy against the holy spirit is insulting the grace God gives us, and souls by which we meet God. Anyone who stood out for the three and a half hours of the Pride parade yesterday saw evidence of this. The mistake grows by reading “eternal sin” as “something that needs punishment (after death) without end.”

There’s a problem here with the word translated eternal. … not a succession of years stacked end to end without beginning or end. The short version is that the word translated eternal pertains to God’s nature, much as we might speak of God as the Eternal One. A sin against God’s nature, which is not ours to forgive.

The answer is to defend the work of God as it grows in each of us, through care and forbearance, and not act in hubris against one another.

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