Works without Faith?

A Sermon preached by the REV. NILS CHITTENDEN

Sunday, September 5TH, 2021

At British universities, it’s known as ‘stash’; at American universities, it’s known as ‘swag’. Regardless of which term one uses, it basically amounts to the same thing. We even had some here at St. Stephen’s for our last class of confirmation candidates: a hoodie with the initials of each person’s name on it. So, yes, stash or swag is personalized promotional apparel.

When I was a college chaplain at the University of Durham, in England, my college’s student leaders always made sure to include me when they placed the apparel order – so I have an enormous collection of university hoodies, polos and t-shirts, often embroidered with my name or role. I remember one such, a polo shirt, embroidered with the word ‘Chaplain’, as befitted my role, but unfortunately the person placing the order wasn’t the best speller in the world, and it came without the second ‘a’, rendering it less clergy and more Charlie, if you see what I mean. I unpicked the last three letters so that it simply read ‘Chap’, which was at least accurate in both terms of spelling and descriptiveness, and actually elicited more conversations in the new student year than it would have otherwise done.

We’re all familiar with the word, ‘chaplain’, but what does it actually mean? It is derived from Latin, via French, and at its root it is actually describing the person who was the custodian of the torn cloak of St. Martin.

The word for cloak in Latin is capellus, like ‘cape’, so the building housing the cloak became known as the capell, and the person in the building was known as the capell-ain. Or Chaplain.

And the word today still denotes a member of the clergy who works in a very specialized form of ministry. Whereas rectors are generalists, chaplains are specialists. Chaplaincy is where I have spent all but eight of the twenty-six years I have been ordained, much of that in college chaplaincy.

Steeped as I am, therefore, in college chaplaincy, I was very intrigued to read an article sent to me last week about the new ‘head’ chaplain at Harvard, who happens to be an atheist. Since a chaplain is exclusively a term for an ordained minister of a faith community, it made me wonder why on earth a place dedicated to the correct definitions of terms and concepts would apparently be fine with this, and why on earth someone who doesn’t believe in God would want to try and recreate an organizational structure and membership group that to all intents and purposes looked just like a spiritual and religious community.

The atheist chaplain at Harvard is actually a representative of a distinct philosophical organization called ‘Humanism’. It believes that the goodness that there is in the world is derived purely from within humans, and does not have any divine origin. As such, the Humanist chaplain at Harvard, as President of the Chaplains, leads a team that believe the diametric opposite from him. Faith communities all believe that goodness not only derives from the divine, but IS the divine. Faith communities believe that we humans are made in the image and likeness of God – the theological term for it is the Latin, Imago Dei – and that anything good is an actual manifestation of God. God and goodness are one and the same thing.

Does that mean that faith communities have a monopoly on goodness and doing good? No, absolutely not. And, at one level, it is heartening that the chaplains at Harvard are sufficiently pluralistic in their outlook that they are able to vote to elect someone with a totally different motivation from themselves to lead them. But, at another level, what it points to is a fundamental shift – a shift of non-believers into appropriating religious and spiritual language and practices, and a shift of believers into deliberately downplaying religious language and the role of God so that the two sides, as it were, meet in this warm and fuzzy middle ground that is occupied by the wellness movement and a laudable desire to do good to the needy.

And, as you might well be intuiting, I find all of this problematic. Does this mean I have a problem with people seeking to be well? No, not as such. Does that mean that I don’t think we should do good for the needy? No, not as such. At face value, neither of those things is in any way contestable by any right-thinking person. But, like so many things in today’s world, we don’t dig very much deeper than the surface.

But scratch away that surface, and what one finds is that these things are like so much of modern society – especially in this country – geared towards individualism.

Research out just this past week from the State University of New York at Buffalo has added to a growing body of research that the wildly popular practice of mindfulness meditation can actually – in countries which prize individual independence – this country being the world leader - make its practitioners more egotistical.

I kind of have to say that when I read this, I was not overly surprised, since it is my belief that when one takes spiritual practices, such as mindfulness meditation and removes the spiritual from them, there is no other purpose left in them other than self-actuation.

This goes hand-in-hand with what I have recently learned from my friends in Corporate America, that other religious and spiritual concepts and language are being appropriated, after being duly stripped of their spiritual DNA, the most egregious of which is corporate managers referring to their role as ‘servant leadership’, directly taking the language of Jesus before the Last Supper, and twisting it into some feel-good business jargon that is actually nothing to do with servant leadership at all, just as a yoga studio that has a picture of a serenely-poised model in the lotus position and the slogan ‘Nurture Your Best Spiritual Self. Namaste’ generally has nothing to do with real spirituality.

Perhaps it our focus on the centuries of oppression and harm that organized religion has done that makes our modern world so wary of it – though I have to say that there is a lot more willingness to focus on the oppression and the harm – undeniable though they are – than on the vast amount of goodness and justice they have brought. Nonetheless, we are at a point now where the word ‘spirituality’ can be used without it being truly spiritual.

Spirituality, by its very definition, is about acknowledging that there is a spiritual realm, complementary but different from the human realm. To believe in a spiritual realm allows for the belief in a divine creative force or, to put it a more concise way, God. So you can’t have the goodness of spirituality without God. Take God out of meditation, or servant leadership, or – I would argue – chaplaincy, and all you are left with, no matter how altruistic it might at first sight appear, is individualism.

You see, I don’t deny that people who don’t believe in God can do marvelously good and generous things with their time and money for people in need. But if you don’t believe in God, then you can’t believe in the Imago Dei – the image and likeness of God. And without that, the significant danger is that you will always end up with the benefactors on one side and the needy on the other. There will always be one group that decides who the needy are, and what they need, and they will use language like, ‘helping the less fortunate’. But if you believe in the Imago Dei, there aren’t the more-fortunate, or the less-fortunate but, rather, we are all equally in need, because we are all equally an image of God. No one person or group gets to be the arbiter of who or what is fortunate, or unfortunate. Instead, there is a reciprocity there about our mutual interdependence that is otherwise easily lost.

All of this, really, has been a very long introduction to a point I wanted to make about our first reading today, which warns against the dangers of what is referred to as ‘faith without works’ – that one might apparently be fully religiously observant, yet ignore the plight of those who have pressing needs. That is, to be sure, a very real, and very significant, danger. But I want to suggest an equally significant danger that is becoming more pervasive, as I spent most of my introduction, as it were, discussing: the danger of ‘works without faith’.