In my Wednesday and Friday homilies last week I mentioned the diaspora. Today I am going to talk about Donatism. I was too old and cool to watch programs like Sesame Street and Electric Company when they came out, but I will admit that sometimes I would be in the room with my little sister when she would watch. I feel a little bit like Morgan Freeman telling you the weeks sermons have been brought to you by the letter “d.”
Saints come and go on the church calendar. The House of Bishops at General Convention will decide who will or will not be commemorated. This process means that the calendar is always changing and keeping us on our toes. We had editions of Holy Woman, Holy Men that came out after the conventions of 2009 and 2012. The next volume will be called A Great Cloud of Witnesses. In some ways it is good to have this kind of flexibility. Someone like Mother Teresa can get on the calendar fairly quickly. There is a downside though. People do not make the cut any more and get dropped.
One of the people who has been dropped from the calendar in recent year
s is Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage. He died on September 14, 258. September 14, gets pre-empted by Holy Cross day. It is complicated. I like Cyprian, and one of the things I like about him is that he is a complex character. We think of the saints of the church as these giants of the faith. The fact is that the saints are forgiven sinners, we can learn from them not only because they were holy but also because sometimes they were not and recovered gracefully. Cyprian was one of these saints who recovered gracefully and ended well. He wrote and his writings are fairly well preserved. We have about 60 of his letters still. There is a famous sermon preached by St. Augustine of Hippo about Cyprian.
Carthage was in North Africa, and it was located in what is Tunisia today. Cyprian was the Bishop of Carthage. This area was under Roman control in the 200’s, and Decius was persecuting Christians. Cyprian abandoned ship. He fled the persecution, and in the words of today’s Gospel reading, he was setting his mind “not on divine things but on human things.”
Now, our Lord condemns the pastor who “sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them.” “He flees,” says Jesus, “because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep.” Bishop Cyprian is not winning any awards for saintliness here.
After the persecution, Cyprian returned. He had not been especially heroic or saintly, but he had not denied his faith to save his skin. He ran away and was not especially brave, but he did not sacrifice to the emperor or renounce Jesus. Some of those who stayed did sacrifice to the emperor or deny Jesus, and the church had a problem. What do you do with these folks? Some people held that once you denied the faith to save your life, you were a traitor to the Church. Essentially, you were no longer a Christian and could never be forgiven. Cyprian insisted that they had to be given a chance to repent and be forgiven.
During another wave of persecution, Cyprian fled again but this time decided to return to care for his flock. He was captured and refused to deny his faith. He was executed for it.
Donatism is named for a bishop after Cyprian who taught two things. First, he said there are some things which can’t be forgiven. Deny your faith after you have been baptized, and you have just bought a one-way ticket to eternal damnation. Second he taught that Sacraments were invalid if they were administered by priests who were in a state of sin. In other words the worthiness of the Sacrament depended on the worthiness of the priest.
Donatism horribly divided the Church in North Africa, and both sides thought themselves superior to the other. There were squabbles over bishops and who the valid clergy were. The Pope named a council to address the issue, and they decided that God’s grace was sufficient. Even denying the faith could be forgiven if the person repented. It was decided that the worthiness of the sacrament did not depend on the worthiness of the priest. You may be aware that this detail is also in the Articles of Faith found in the back of you Book of Common Prayer. Priests are of different worth, and I would not like to think the worth of the Sacrament was variable too.
There is one more piece of the Donatism story I have not told you. The church remained divided, and it stayed that way weak and fighting until defeated by the Vandals in the 5th century. The Vandals were Arians, and this was a heresy that said Jesus was a prophet but not God. The fighting and struggles for power among the Christian factions continued, and the Vandals were thrown out by Muslim invaders in the 7th century. It is said that the political unrest caused by the divided community made them vulnerable.
I will let you ponder some of the lessons from the short history lesson I have given you, and I want to turn to the readings this morning.
The reading from James today deals with teachers, and it mentions that “all of us make mistakes.” The epistle reads,“How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire.”
Bishop Donatus preached division and the church was divided. His tongue was a fire that started something that smoldered for a long time and did a lot of damage. The decision to judge and not forgive had a long term impact in the region. In some ways the historians believe that Tunisia was lost to the Christian faith because Christians were not able to keep first things first. They were worried about human things and not divine things.
Jesus asked Peter, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter answered “You are the Messiah.” In some ways it is that simple. We have to understand that Jesus is the one who dies for our sins. We are forgiven by grace and because God loves us. We can do stupid things and God will forgive us. God calls us to love our brothers and sisters and our Creed says we believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.
Now I am not saying it is all good. I am however saying that we are all sinners and are all forgiven. I am not called to judge, and so I don’t. I am called to preach the Gospel and work as a pastor. Part of what I am called to preach is unity and forgiveness. We may think some of our Christian brothers and sisters have some dumb ideas or have done some stupid things. This does not change the fact that they are brothers and sisters in Christ, and we are called to forgive and work with them for unity.
You may recall that at Ivy Kreamer’s funeral we sang the hymn “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God.” This is a favorite of mine because it was one of the hymns we would sing as the children marched out to Sunday School when I was in Maine. One of the lines from that hymn sticks wi
th me: “God help me to be one too.”
We don’t need to be perfect in order to be a saint. The saints are forgiven sinners.
Now I have thrown a lot out there for you today.
Here are the takeaways for you:
When Jesus asks you “Who do you say that I am?”, how do you answer?
In what ways have we – like Peter – been distracted by human things and not divine things?
Doing something stupid in a moment of weakness does not condemn us. God’s grace is abundant. Like Cyprian, we can recover.
I have said these words in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Sermon preached by Fr. Tom at St. Thomas, Plymouth
September 13, 2015; Sixteenth Sunday of Pentecost
Proverbs 1:20-33
Psalm 19
James 3:1-12
Mark 8:27-38