To do the right thing

(c) 2014 C. B. Park/July 6/St. Patrick's, Dublin, OH

 

Many of you have asked me about the recent pilgrimage that many of us made last month.  The most frequent question “What did you like the most?”  This is a terribly difficult question to answer.  I don’t think there is much about England I don’t like!  Maybe London traffic?  However, I think if I had to pinpoint one memory and claim it as favorite, it would be seeing T.S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral. 

Why?  Well, first because we were all together that evening.  And, unbeknownst to us at that time, one of our merry band of pilgrims was to become a guest of Britain’s National Health Service and her spouse stayed behind to care for her.

Second, it was staged inside St. Bartholomew the Great Church – famed for being the set for one of the weddings in Four Weddings and a Funeral among other films.  Third, I’d read this play several times when I was in seminary but had never seen it produced.  It is the story of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral.  St. Bartholomew’s was built before Thomas Becket was born and he very likely worshipped there during his lifetime.  We really don’t appreciate the concept of “old” in this country.  There, you can scoop out history with a spoon.

At one point in the play, Becket is visited by four tempters.  He recognizes three of them. They suggest that he give in to the desires of the flesh, of wealth, and of power to pre-empt his struggle with Henry and bring peace to England. (Sound familiar?)

The fourth tempter is unexpected.  He is Becket’s ego and it is this tempter that gives him the most demanding choice.  Becket must decide whether to continue his course to keep the laws of the church and the power of the king separate  for the glory of God or in order to elevate himself to the status of holy martyr.  T.S. Eliot gives these words to the beleaguered archbishop:

The last temptation is the greatest treason:

To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

This theme is so profound that Eliot repeats it in “Little Gidding,” the last of his Four Quartets, when he writes:

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

By the purification of the motive

In the ground of our beseeching.

It was this theme that came to me as I read today’s selection from Paul’s letter to the Romans.  Paul, too, is wrestling with his ego and his inability to keep the law because of its unattainable standard.  And here’s the rub: we read this on the very weekend that we, as a country, celebrate our freedom and independence. 

If there is anything I take away from this it is that we are not independent and we certainly aren’t free.  We are enslaved by sin and dependent upon God’s grace.

Oh, we’re good people.  No argument there.  God loves us. No argument there either. But, beneath the façade of “everything is fine” lies the uncompromising truth that we are so steeped in our own desires and our own egos that, try as we might, we cannot always do the right thing.  Worse yet, we too often do the right thing for the wrong reason. 

In these few verses, Paul is inviting us to turn a mirror to ourselves and ask us to describe what we see.  Paul isn’t interested in whether or not we’ve made a misstep in our actions so much as he’s asking us to be honest about our relationship with God.  Is the good we do for God’s glorification or for the building up of our own ego-slash-resume?  How often have we turned from God-centeredness to self-centeredness? 

One of the confessions of sin that we use states that we have denied God’s goodness everywhere and has us repenting of the evil we have done and that others have done on our behalf.  In this confession we are acknowledging what Paul understood well, that we are up against a force so strong that we cannot begin to break it on our own. 

Sin is a force that bends our good intentions.  It is a force that lowers us to our base level where we simply hurl blame at each other instead of seeking Christ in each other. It is a force that threatens to keep us from yoking ourselves to Jesus like a child…trusting and full of hope.

It is not enough to confess our sins and ask for God’s forgiveness.  We so easily say those words without meaning them. We easily confess what we’ve already rationalized. Absolution doesn’t come solely via a priest’s words and the sign of the cross.  As Christians, it is in our embrace of the cross, in the surrender of our will to the Spirit’s, in our relationship with God our Father and Christ our Brother, where true absolution lies.  We cannot do this alone. We need each other. We need the example of the saints. We need the prayers of the martyrs.

In Eliot’s masterpiece, after the soldiers have murdered Becket, they turn the audience into the jury of their peers and state their case that we – the people in the pew – have murdered the archbishop. The soldiers simply did as they believed the people wanted…as they believed the king wanted.  Besides, Becket could have avoided everything if he’d just done the right thing. 

I think that the chorus of the Canterbury women said it best. 

Forgive us, O Lord, we acknowledge ourselves as type of the common man,

Of the men and women who shut the door and sit by the fire;

Who fear the blessing of God, the loneliness of the night of God, the surrender required, the deprivation inflicted;

Who fear the injustice of men less than the justice of God;

Who fear the hand at the window, the fire in the thatch, the fist in the tavern, the push into the canal,

Less than we fear the love of God.

We acknowledge our trespass, our weakness, our fault;

we acknowledge

That the sin of the world is upon our heads; that the blood of the martyrs and the agony of the saints

Is upon our heads.

Lord, have mercy upon us.

Christ, have mercy upon us.

Lord, have mercy upon us.

Blessed Thomas, pray for us.

Amen.