Rev. Molly F. James, PhD
Feast of St. Augustine, August 29, 2019
Chapel of Our Lord, Episcopal Church Center
May God’s Word be spoken. May God’s Word be heard. May that point us to the living Word who is Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Today is the feast of St. Augustine. I have a complicated relationship with Augustine. Hopefully I am not the only one. I have deep respect for him and find much of his writing to be insightful and thought provoking. I also have some challenges with some of his doctrines. First the good stuff.
Even if you don’t know much about the details of the life of St. Augustine, you probably know much his thought. He is a foundational figure in Western Christianity. We owe him a debt for articulating well so many of the important beliefs and doctrines of our faith tradition. It is from Augustine that we get our understanding that a sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. He so simply and beautifully articulates the truth of our experience, of our belief that when we gather around this table to share bread and wine there is more going on than baked wheat and fermented grape juice. There is something real, powerful, and meaningful happening here. God is present in a miraculous and tangible way. Along with that Augustine also articulates for us the belief that it is God in the Holy Spirit here that make the bread and the wine into the real presence of Christ. It is not about me as the priest. I am merely the conduit for God’s grace.
This was particularly important in Augustine’s time, because there was a controversy with the Donatists about whether it was the holiness of people that made the Church holy or whether the Church was holy because it belonged to God. Thankfully, Augustine’s view one out. Neither the holiness of the Church nor the validity of the sacraments depends on us. What a relief. It is not up to us alone. God shows up here in our worship no matter what kind of day we are having. If we are on top of our game and getting everything right, God is here. If we have failed five times before breakfast and really wishing we could just start over, God is here. It is not up to us or how well we are doing at living up to our goals as a follower of Jesus today.
Augustine’s willingness to own the frailty of being human is one of the things I so appreciate about him. He is aware of how small we humans are in the grand scheme of things and how big God is. There is comfort in that. As Augustine writes at the beginning of his autobiography, Confessions: our hearts are restless until them come to rest in God. We cannot do it all on our own. We will be restless until we put our trust and faith in God. We will be restless until we rest in God. As it says in one of the prayers in the Compline service in the BCP, which asks that “we who are wearied by the changes and chances of this world may rest in your eternal changelessness.” [p. 133]
In his book, Confessions, Augustine tells a story of his teenage years in which he and a group of friends snuck into an orchard and stole a bunch of pears. They stole more than they could possibly eat, not because they were good pears, but simply for the joy of thieving. While most of us probably do not relate to the joy of actually stealing something, we can certainly relate to the way in which we can give into the temptation to do something we know we should not, just because it feels good. Just one more way Augustine owns up to the frailty and challenges of being human.
My difficulties with Augustine come in the fact that at times he took the frailty of humanity too far. Augustine is known for a strong doctrine of original sin, the belief that we are born sinful. And it is a doctrine which the Church embraced for centuries until the Reformation. This doctrine taken to its extreme ends up promoting a negative view of our bodies, particularly female bodies, and of human intimacy.
Since Augustine had such a willingness to own up to the reality of human frailty, I am hoping we can chalk that problematic theology about sex and our bodies to his humanity without tossing out all the good stuff in his theology.
Ultimately, I hope Augustine’s emphasis on the enormity of God, of God’s goodness, God’s grace and the fact that God’s presence and God’s love are with us no matter how virtuous or successful a day we are having. I hope that is the message that you carry with you from our celebration of Augustine today. God’s grace is present in our lives, and we don’t have to do anything to earn it. Thanks be to God. AMEN.
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