Feast of St. Augustine of Hippo - Frank Senn - Aug. 29, 2021

The Commemoration of St. Augustine of Hippo

St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church, Wilmette, IL

August 29, 2021

Texts: Isaiah 26:6—9; Psalm 87; Hebrews 12:22-29; John 14:5—15

How do church buildings and congregations acquire their name? Maybe it’s their geographic location (Corinth). Maybe it’s a numerical designation (First). Maybe it’s a theological affirmation (Trinity). But if it’s named after a saint, it implies that something in the life, thought, or work of the saint is an example for the congregation. With St. Augustine of Hippo, it could be all of these.

His life? We sang his biography in the sequence hymn today. He wrote his own life story in his Confessions, which is a pioneering work in depth psychology. Augustine probed the libido long before Freud. What was he desiring in his sexual and intellectual dalliances? What did his restless heart desire? He concludes: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

His thought? He was involved in some important theological controversies in history. Probably the most important was taking on the Irish monk Pelagius, who was a celebrated preacher in the early fifth century. Pelagius held that every person faces moral choices like Adam and Eve did and would be held accountable for their choices as Adam and Eve were. This implied that people could make the right choices of their own free will. Augustine countered that humanity is tainted by the original sin of Adam and Eve, and in every moral decision we are turned in on ourselves (incurvatus in se), seeking our own desire in everything. That’s what sin is.

Because we sin in all our thoughts, words, and deeds we are dependent on grace as the unearned gift of God for our election and salvation. We receive God’s grace through the sacraments, the means of grace. Affirming this required Augustine to counter the Donatists in North Africa who held that sacraments administered by unworthy ministers are invalid. Augustine argued that whether it is Peter or Judas who baptizes, it is Christ who gives the sacraments to us. The validity of the sacraments is not dependent on the ministers.

Augustine’s teachings on sin and grace were highly regarded by the Protestant reformers, including the Anglican ones.

Augustine’s work? That’s what I would like to focus on today. He was the bishop of the small port city of Hippo Regius on the coast of what is today Tunisia. If you think it’s hard to be a pastor in today’s world, try pastoring in the Roman province of Africa in the early fifth century. Do we have problems with racism? Augustine had to hold together a congregation of poor native Berbers and wealthy Roman colonists. Do we experience political instability? Try living at the time when Rome, the Eternal City, was sacked by the Goths in 410. Only fifteen years earlier, in 395, the Roman Emperor in Constantinople, Theodosius, made Christianity the state religion of the Empire. After the sack of Rome, the conservative Roman senators blamed Christianity for the unimaginable catastrophe and called for a return to the ancient gods of Rome. Augustine was on his deathbed in 430 as the Vandals, in their sweep across North Africa, were attacking Hippo Regius. In the last eight months of his life, he lived in a city besieged by land and sea, crowded with refugees and awaiting the final catastrophe. In a way, it seems not unlike the situation of the Taliban taking over Afghanistan. We name “vandalism” after the Vandals for good reason. The Catholic clergy especially had good reason to be afraid of a Vandal takeover.

Let us remember that those Goths and Vandals who overran the Western Roman Empire, they were not pagans; they were heretical Christians—Arians. They were radical monotheists who believed that the Son is subordinate to the Father. If you believed that the Father is revealed in the Son, as Jesus claimed in today’s Gospel, if Jesus is the way to God, as Augustine preached, you have a different view of God than the Arians, and probably a different and more tolerant political outcome as well.

How did Augustine the bishop and theologian respond to all this? By writing the most massive revisionist history ever written: The City of God. He began it the year of the sack of Rome and completed it three years before the Vandal siege of Hippo. Revisionist history is threatening to establishment identities. Today we’re arguing about critical race theory as a new lens through which to view American history. Augustine reviewed the thousand-year history of the so-called glories of Rome through the lens of biblical revelation and demonstrated how inglorious those glories were. He sought to demonstrate, much as Edward Gibbon did in his classic Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, how the endemic evils of the Empire brought about its demise. Except that while Gibbon blamed the church, Augustine blamed the pagans.

As for Christian life then and now, Augustine taught in The City of God that we live in a fallen world in which we have here no abiding city—not Rome with its world empire, not the U.S.A. with its corporate empires either. We are citizens of the eternal city of God who make our way as pilgrims through this world, besieged as it is by evidence of our fallen humanity. We are beset by racism, failures in foreign policy, lack of love for the neighbor by those who refuse even the minimal inconveniences of wearing a mask and getting vaccinated to help collectively to ward off this COVID plague. We sin in every choice because we are curved in on ourselves.

As we gather week after week in this church named after Augustine of Hippo, we take seriously the life of pilgrimage to which his spirituality invites us. Augustine spoke of the Christian life as a journey. We journey through this world following Christ who has gone ahead of us to prepare a place for us in the heavenly city. We enact this pilgrimage in our liturgy, which the late Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann called “a journey into the dimension of the kingdom.” Our eucharistic liturgy begins by blessing the kingdom of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Have you ever wondered why traditional Gothic-style churches have a long central aisle? It’s because we have a ways to go to get to that place prepared for us. We are “called out” of the earthly city—that’s what “church” means, ekklesia, “called out.” We come in from the world through the narthex, pass the place of our baptism by which we are made citizens of “that kingdom that cannot be shaken,” hear the word of God, and form the pilgrim procession “to the altar of God,” where Christ gives himself to us as the satisfaction of our heart’s desire.

In our earthly liturgy we are replicating the heavenly liturgy. As we heard in the Epistle to the Hebrews: we have “come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the first born who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all,…and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant…”

We come to the altar of God and receive bread and wine. As Augustine said to the newly baptized, “That bread which you can see on the altar, sanctified by the word of God, is the body of Christ. That cup, or rather what the cup contains, sanctified by the word of God, is the blood of Christ. It was by means of these things that the Lord Christ wished to present us with his body and blood, which he shed for our sake for the forgiveness of sins. If you receive them well, you are yourselves what you receive.”

We receive and become the body of Christ and are dismissed to return to the earthly city. How shall we live in the earthly city as citizens of the city of God? Our patron saint gives us one more pithy quote that I leave with you: “Love and do what you will.” He wasn’t advocating free love like a 1960s Hippie. Behind this statement is the affirmation that in spite of original sin, we retain the image of God the Trinity. Augustine defined the Trinity as love: the Father is Love, the Son is the Beloved, and the Holy Spirit is act of loving. The Trinity of love is the template for earthly society. Only by loving the neighbor can the earthly city flourish. So we Christians act in love to work for justice, to shelter refugees, to promote health of body and mind, and (may I add) to work for a habitable Earth, over which God made us stewards. This is, after all, God’s creation, not ours. We love and do what we will to erect signs in this earthly city of the eternal city of God. We may not always make the best choices, but we live by grace. That’s what this doctor of the church taught us. Amen.

Pastor Frank C. Senn, STS