Saturday, March 23, 2019

Polycarp, Bishop and Martyr

Very little is known of the life of Polycarp, the bishop of the early church whose ministry and martyrdom we celebrate today. He lived in Smyrna, on the Aegean coast of Greece, and was martyred in or about 156. Like Paul, he wrote a letter to the Philippians, which is perhaps most notable for referring to or quoting multiple Christian texts that ultimately became part of the New Testament. So while Polycarp was not himself a biblical author, he can be regarded as a biblical architect.

We also know that one of Polycarp’s early admirers was St. Irenaeus, best known as the author of “Against Heresies.” Specifically, Irenaeus praises Polycarp for holding the line against the gnostic heresy. Gnosticism has been romanticized in recent years, perhaps most prominently in Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code. Gnosticism asserts a complex system of heavenly realms and emanations, and further claims that the spiritual and material worlds are so fundamentally opposed to one another that the incarnation, the idea that Jesus is simultaneously fully divine and fully human, could not be right – that God could not stoop so low as to assume human flesh, let alone die on a cross. At most God might appear to do these things, as if in an elaborate game of pretend.

Now, we do not place our faith in elaborate games of pretend. Paul writes, “I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you but Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” In other words, at the very heart of our faith is our God who took our form, truly suffered, truly bled, and truly died. We have a God who is not fundamentally opposed to our material beings, but a God who so loved the world that he shared our suffering and our fate – and in his resurrection points to our ultimate end.

This is hopeful and amazing news for a despairing and cynical world. And a core vocation of the church is, in the words of Walter Brueggemann, to give “expression [to] the very hopes and yearnings that have been denied so long and suppressed to deeply that we no longer know that they are there.” But, he goes on, “hope is an absurdity too embarrassing to speak about, for it flies in the face of all those claims we have been told are facts.” Those facts being such claims as that your net worth and your self worth have something to do with one another, that hard work alone is what it takes not to be poor, that ill health is the just reward for bad choices. Christian hope challenges these facts as falsehoods. When we talk about evangelism in this church, what we mean is being a hopeful people amazed at the gift of God’s love, and being people who share that hope and amazement.

But part of the reason the church often fails its calling to give expression to hope and amazement is that it is distracted by its decline as an institution, and all the challenges, material and spiritual, that come along with that. Which brings us to why you are here today, financial leaders of the Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis. The church must be able to deal with the financial realities of budgets, payroll, and accounting, without being imprisoned by them. Your role, financial leaders of the diocese, is to help the business operations of your local context run so smoothly that your congregation as a whole can be focused on the Gospel. Good administration of a congregation is not the one thing that will drive a church to proclaim good news, but without it, a congregation will necessarily focus inward as it struggles with chaos and crisis. Better that a congregation spend its time struggling with how the Gospel calls them to be a transformed people.

Today you will be hearing about practices that can help your congregational leaders make good decisions by understanding the resources they have at hand. You will learn about practices of transparency so that people who make sacrifices to give to the church know that their gifts are being used faithfully and to the glory of God. You will learn about how you can use online giving technology to allow newcomers to your church to be generous, even if these days they don’t carry cash.

For the rest of the day you will be immersed in business operations, accounting controls, and accounting software features. It may seem at times that we have wandered far from the Gospel. In those moments remember that even among Jesus’s disciples, one was charged with manning the common purse. (Now, that disciple was Judas, so today we are going to ask you to do better.) But the important thing to remember about money is that it can be transformed into anything. Money enables choices. These can be foolish or wise, sinful or holy. My hope for today at that what you learn will help you and your church to use the gifts you have been so generously given to bring the kingdom of God that much nearer to your congregation and your neighbors.

- Sermon delivered to Financial Leadership Workshop in the Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis on the Feast of Polycarp, Bishop and Martyr, March 23, 2019. Readings: Ps. 121, 1 Cor. 2:1-5. Walter Brueggemann quotes from The Prophetic Imagination, 2nd ed.