Holiness and Community

John Coburn Preaches the Faith

John B. Coburn

• Publisher: Morehouse Publishing
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780819227485
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This varied and vast collection captures more than 160 sermons developed and delivered by John Coburn — prominent church leader, educator, and rector at St. James Church in New York City. Powerful, yet readily accessible, the sermons reflect Coburn's refined understanding of personal spirituality, Christian responsibility, congregational life, and the Christian journey. The collection also includes significant meditations for Lent and Easter, plus Coburn's personal and professional observations on life, church, culture, politics, and the nation at large.

The Story of Jesus Christ: His Trial (Mark 15:1–20)

Good Friday, April 20, 1973

That night Jesus spent in a cell in the home of the high priest. In the morning, after further consultation, the priests, scribes, and elders decided to turn Jesus over to Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, with the charge that he claimed to be the King of the Jews and that since they had no king but Caesar, Jesus should therefore be charged with the death penalty.

It is interesting (and all too depressing a business because it is all too common) to note the easy abdication of religious responsibility to political authority. The Jewish leaders in fact had the authority to stone Jesus to death because of his blasphemy. Rather than make that decision and live with it, whatever the consequences, as mature people are meant to do (to make mature decisions and live with them), they backed away and said, “We’ll let Pilate do it. We’ll pressure him to have him put Jesus to death on political grounds. Then we will not be guilty, but he will be.”

The word “religion” comes from the Latin word religio, to bind together. The business of religion is the business of binding people together with one another and with God. Whatever that religion is, its concern is the relationship that binds God and men together. The Christian religion maintains that the fullest expression of that relationship is in Christ. He maintained in his teaching and in his ministry and in himself that God’s kingdom is meant to rule the hearts and the minds of men. That rule is expressed as men and women are bound together in love and as every society is built upon justice. It is as clear and as simple as that. Therefore, anything that expresses love and justice—anything, not just religious things but any aspect of life where there is love and where justice prevails—is an expression of a religious motivation and concern. Therefore, naturally, anything that stands against love and justice and prevents or violates them is a matter of religious concern.

For religious forces to abdicate their responsibility to try to determine and therefore express what God’s will is for his people is a renunciation of what it is to be God’s representatives and to claim to speak in the name of religion. I say “try to determine” because any religious interpretation is given by very fallible men and women and their political judgment may be wrong. To be a man of religion does not necessarily bring any political insights into what is true. Indeed, one of the perspectives of religion is to be able to see that nonreligious men sometimes are better representatives politically of God’s rule than religious men.

Their basic religious concern is always, however, very simple and very all-inclusive—that everything that affects man affects God. Therefore, God is concerned about every aspect of man’s life from the cradle to the grave, and before the cradle, the womb. That is as much God’s womb as it is the woman’s womb, or the man’s who put the seed in the womb. For religious men to say that is a matter of the state is an abdication of their responsibility. What they determine to be the right life or how they judge the termination of life in the womb may be subject to wide disagreement and diversity, but the fact that God is there is the affirmation that God is the God of life—and, of course, death. God is God. He is to be involved in the lives of men. He is to be obeyed in every area of life where his kingdom is meant to reign. Where his kingdom reigns is wherever man lives—the kinds of houses he lives in, the kinds of houses he can’t get into, the kinds of houses that decay, the kinds of houses that have rats, the kinds of schools his children go to, the kind of family life that his children belong to, and the kind of political life he lives, because all men are political animals. These are all God’s. Those fundamental human issues of how men and women live together in society are finally always moral issues, and as such they are God’s business and therefore the business of religion as well as of politics.

Perhaps when the Gibbons of the future writes “The Decline and Fall of America,” he will point out that one of the reasons for that fall was the decline in the sense of moral outrage against injustice, against corruption, against the big lie, against manipulation of opinion as of stocks; and that one of the reasons for that was the abdication of the religious forces of America of their responsibility to witness to “One nation under God” and to hand all decisions affecting man’s life in the nation over to the state and the political leaders and to say that religion is concerned only about man’s personal morality.

Religion is not simply a private matter of one’s personal relationship to God—although it is that. It is a corporate matter of how men living together reflect the characteristics of the kingdom of God in some measure creating a society which makes it possible for love to be expressed and compassion to go on and undergird human affairs, for justice to be in the law courts as well as safety in the streets, for equality of opportunity, and dedication to serve the state, not to manipulate it or to ask to be served by it. That is treason! A church which abdicates is a cowardly church. A cowardly church crucifies Christ day after day. A Church more concerned about itself than its mission, more concerned about its inner life than the life of God in the world is a crucifying church.

Who, then, to return to the trial, was responsible for the death of Jesus? Certainly not the Jewish people. So far as we can determine, the Jewish people—that is, the rank and file of them, the common people—in the words of one reporter, “heard Jesus gladly.” They flocked around him. He was followed everywhere by crowds of ordinary citizens who, while certainly not understanding who he was, knew he was someone who healed sick people, who fed hungry people, who loved little children, who called peace-makers the “blessed ones,” and said that he would lay down his life for everybody. Furthermore, Jesus said if you lay down your life for people and live in that spirit, then you have got to be able to live in a way that you never could live before. That struck a chord in the hearts of these very ordinary people. Why wouldn’t the Jewish people respond by being glad to be in his company? No, it wasn’t the Jews who were responsible for his death.

Nor was it Pilate. We like to think that if we could put our finger on the head of the state and say, “He is the guilty one,” no matter what the wrong doing, then we could be certain that justice would be done. Never true. Pilate was not responsible. Pilate happened to be the one in office who ordered the crucifixion, but he never would have done it if the prisoner had not been delivered to him by the abdication of the religious authorities. Pilate was an administrator. His job was to keep the peace. Though humanly speaking it seems in those gospel accounts that he may have wanted to save Jesus because he saw that it was for envy that the priests had delivered him, he was more concerned, as administrators usually are, to save himself and the power of his office. So he gave way finally to the pressures of the crowd that had been stirred up by the religious authorities. In order to keep the peace, he ordered Jesus’ death. How ironical that it was this death and resurrection which, in a few short years, turned, as the gospel says, “the world upside down”—Pilate’s world, the world of the Romans. Pilate was weak, but neither in himself nor in his office was he responsible for the death of Jesus. It is never political office or the holders of political office who are responsible for evil, though they may give way to certain pressures. Who then is?

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that there is something in the human race—in all of us—which is really set against love and does not like it, and will kill it if it can. We see in ourselves the same envy the priests had for position and power and prestige. They wanted to control life. We want to control life. They wanted to speak in the name of God and nobody else, and that is what we want to do. If we have something, we do not want to give it away. We certainly do not want to have it taken away. We have the same tendency to dodge responsibility that Pilate had. We do not want to be involved. We like to wash our hands of any responsibility if someone is going to get hurt and we might be blamed for it. We all know what it is like to give way to pressures the way Pilate did, to fail to speak the truth when we know it. We tend to identify with the pack that we travel with. We tend, in fact, to become like other members of the pack, and therefore moral chameleons—to be one person with one pack, and another person with another pack, just moving from pack to pack or place to place.

So when we look at that scene at the trial and try to put ourselves in the places of those who were carrying out the drama, we can sympathize with all of them. We resent love in the measure that we are unlovable. We resist justice in the measure to which we are unjust. When the loving God comes into our life with his justice, he is unbearable; when he comes as love—pure, unadulterated, self-sacrificing love—we abhor him, and we want to kill him.

But God will not stay killed. He keeps coming back. The resurrection happens day after day. No matter what we do, or how much we hate, or how we kill, or destroy, or back away from responsibilities, or how we point our fingers at everybody else, God’s love—God’s unbearable love—is finally unbeatable. No matter how we respond, or what we do, or who we are, he keeps coming back gladly, persistently, gracefully, saying, “You are loved. I love you. The reality of eternity is that you are loved and will always be loved no matter what you do. I am going to keep on coming until you learn to love me.”

So we can’t cast stones and say, “You over there are responsible for killing Jesus.” That is something that we all are responsible for because there is something in us that wants that. We confess it.

To whom then shall we turn? Look at that scene: the riled-up crowds, the frantic priests, the wavering Pilate. The only person not riled-up, not frantic, not weak is Jesus, in complete possession of himself in the middle of the tumult. He doesn’t even have to defend himself, or apologize for himself, or explain himself. His defense is who he is. His defense is simply his interior life, doing the will of God as he knows it. He is secure—secure in that inner integrity where he is obedient to love—the only one who not only would never kill love, but obey it right down to his death. He had once commanded it as the rule of life and of all men in every society and now he was to obey it. He had committed himself to accomplish the work that he had been sent to do. He is in God.

In our frantic, riled-up, weak, wavering, fuzzy lives, to whom can we turn? He is the only one. He is the only one who has that inner resource that we know we need and in fact, when we obey it, know we possess it. In him forgiven, given peace; in him born to new life, borne always to the Cross, never avoiding it.

In a sense if we can really turn from our inner lives and move into his inner life and with him see what it means to open ourselves to God, pressing upon him, to be obedient to love and to strive for justice and to want above all else to do just that, then we are led into the heart of the greatest mystery of all—the heart of the mystery of God himself.

Finally, the one ultimately responsible for the Crucifixion is God. That is the mystery. In the Cross he expressed what was in his mind from before the beginning of the world—his unifying love for his creation, for all men, for you and for me to be at one with him. He will in fact in his son die to express it so that love can rise in our hearts eternally.

On Returning from Vacation

The Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity, September 23, 1973

Our good friend and neighbor, Dr. [David H.C.] Read of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, has pointed out that when a clergyman goes on vacation, he becomes just like a layman so far as his religion is concerned. That is, he no longer is forced professionally to think about religious matters. He no longer has to prepare sermons or call on the sick and dying. He no longer has to pray in public. He does not have to be concerned about the structure of the services of worship. He does not even have to write letters to parishioners asking for financial support. He is freed from vocational ties when he is on vacation.

This change—for me, and I imagine for most clergy—comes as a welcome period of refreshment. What is subject to professionalism becomes personal once again. The necessity—a proper necessity—to be professional, or to be as professional as possible, and therefore as responsible as possible, to be at least responsible professionally as a clergyman—as a doctor or teacher or businessman is meant to be professional—that proper necessity is lifted on vacation so that the appropriation of the Christian faith personally may be enriched by tapping deeper sources or new sources for the renewal of one’s own personal religious life. As a doctor or a teacher or a businessman or lawyer returns from vacation refreshed to carry on his professional life, so a clergyman. He returns having been renewed in what he professes to believe.

So, in fact, this first sermon is “On Returning from Vacation.” It was meant to be preached last Sunday, but as you will remember we had the unexpected pleasure of having Archbishop [Ted] Scott* with us so it has been renewed and reworked for this Sunday. The title seems a little distant now, as though vacation had come to an end a long time ago rather than two weeks ago. It is a little more personal a sermon than most sermons preached from this pulpit but that may be the purpose of a vacation—to get personal renewal and to share those personal reflections.

That renewal came in three ways: first, just simply physical renewal. I could not imagine how poorly I looked last June until I discovered people saying how well I looked in September: a recognition that our body is largely a temporary shelter which ought to be renewed from time to time, to be repaired so the spirit can be repaired. When the body breaks down it is easier for the spirit to break down; when it is in good repair the spirit that it houses is more apt to be in good spirit. So a vacation means physical exercise and physical exhaustion at the end of the day rather than nervous and emotional exhaustion: long hours walking on the beach, swimming, playing tennis—playing tennis as hard as one can, and finally being beaten by one’s oldest son. It is a humbling experience, and yet one is also a little proud of him when after you congratulate him he says, “Well, I’ve been waiting 29 years for this day!” Physical renewal.

Intellectual renewal. Most of my reading this summer was on Eastern religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism—in part to try to be intelligent in conversations with that older son whose field this is in graduate school, but more importantly, an attempt to try to go beyond the surface in searching for the renewal of the religious spirit in so many young people in American life today. Out of this came a renewed sense of our participation in nature, of our belonging to a process which goes on all through time and all through existence—the pounding of the surf in the evening and the surf still pounding in the morning; eons ago it was pounding and long after we leave this shore for another shore the pounding will continue. Belonging to that process, through the reality of everything and the void of nothingness—as we participate in that process in our own lives we both transform the reality and are transformed by it. We all are in some measure a part of that passage, that way, from mystery through reality to mystery and the reality that hides behind the void of nothingness. Thus the sense of renewal, of our belonging together—part of the cycle of nature—and of our being carried everlastingly along this way. There is so much more to the movement of our life than the passion of our little decisions as to how they will carry us. We are carried by that spirit who is in, and lives through, that process from everlasting to everlasting.

When Jesus said, “I am the Way,” he was saying, in effect, “I am the way of birth, and life, and death, and life again, and I touch all who are in the process because I am that process.” So the Incarnation.

I know that many Christian people would not agree with this statement but it seems to me that all people who strive in their own religious tradition and religious ways to be in touch with the Eternal Spirit are already, in fact, in touch with Jesus. Therefore our task as Christians is not to convert them but to affirm them in their own understanding of religious truth and the Way. As they are in the Way, we should be free to believe they will come to know him who also said, “I am the Truth.” So the Christian religion does not set itself over against other religions but at its best completes them. Our task is to enter as sympathetically as we can into other traditions as well as into the lives of those who belong in part to the Christian faith but are unable to accept what they call its “dogmas” and “absolutism.”

The only absolute is the Way. And if you are in the Way, then you will come to the Truth and the Life—that is the Eternal Spirit moving through all of life. So physical r...