Ism, ism, ism

It looks like the same St Mary’s this morning, but something is not quite the same today. Even more so than usual, the Rector, for some reason hanging around the lych gate, is clearly agitated but trying to exude calm. The choir is at full force and full throttle and singing the whole mass setting, in Latin,  to some impressive music from the 18th Century penned by a dead Austrian. There are glorious clouds of incense wafting around and of course, other than the choir stalls, the church is even emptier of people than usual. It can mean only one thing: the Bishop is here. There are other clues of course- someone is wearing a pointy party hat and the parish Reader is standing behind him holding a big stick. And when the sermon happens, it’s not, as it usually is, nine minutes of tired jokes and camp double-entendres sandwiching thirty seconds of God talk;  it’s a thick slab of weighty theology. The only joke there is in the sermon is one precisely two non-episcopal people present seem to understand revolving as it does round seminarians wearing t-shirts bearing the legend “if you’re not Marian you’re an Arian”.

You still haven’t got it and it’s still not funny. References to 4th century Christian heresies rarely are. However, if the bishop can do it, so can I. Possibly it will be a bit funnier, but that’s only because you and I are pretty much on the same level and the bishop is on a  somewhat higher one.

So. Heresies, wrong beliefs.The first few hundred years of the Christian faith are one cautionary tale after another of well meaning believers taking the wrong theological turn, at least when viewed looking backwards from more doctrinally settled days. Up to their necks in it, it took our forbears in the faith quite a while to work out they’d gone off route, off piste and off the map. Despite the terrible reputation posterity has given them and at various periods the tendency for other believers to gift them unpleasantly hot and sticky ends, mostly your future heretics were simply Christians trying to work out what’s what and getting it wrong. There was a lot of wandering about the theological byways before we found the highways; eventually it all settled down, pretty much everybody agreed on what to believe;  until Luther nailed his theses to the cathedral door and then off we go again. Before Lutheranism, Protestantism and Anglicanism there was gnosticism, Marcionism, Arianism, Pelagianism, semi-Pelaginaism, docetism, patripassionism, Nestorianism ism ism ism as John Lennon sang. I want to talk to you this morning, about a heresy not usually accorded an ‘ism’ the Donatist controversy. See, who said we’re not down with the kids.

So, the Donatists. The movement which eventually got that name arose in Africa in the 4th century in response to one of the periodic persecutions of Christians that occurred under the emperor Diocletian. When we say ‘persecution’ we don’t mean not being allowed to wear a cross at work or being forced to bake a gay wedding cake. We mean fed to the lions, roasted on a gridiron, covered in pitch and turned into a street lamp, sort of persecution. Sacrifice to the Emperor or you’re for the chop, persecution. At the time  of Diocletian’s persecutions, Rome’s African province had a relatively lenient governor: rather than jumping straight  to the interrogation followed by torture chamber option he would allow those known to be Christians to hand over their scriptures as a sign of renunciation of their faith and wouldn’t ask any more questions as long as they promised to go away and shut up. Only if the Christians didn’t hand over their Bibles did the Roman provincial move on to the lion food and hot roast options. Nevertheless, in Africa, as elsewhere in the Empire, some Christians persisted and paid the ultimate penalty for their refusal to toe the Roman line– many of the saints whose days we still celebrate, after whom we name our churches and schools, and whose faces grace our stained glass windows, many of those saints died in this persecution. 

But— the majority of Christians when faced with the choice of the books or the barbecue capitulated and did what the authorities wanted, and when the persecution ended, that’s why the problems began. The spark that lit the Donatist fire was the appointment of a chap called Caecilian as the Bishop of Carthage because he had handed over the holy books and saved his neck in the great persecution. Many North African Christians, led by a priest called Donatus, refused to accept the ministry of this bishop and any other who had capitulated rather than be martyred– ‘traditors’ they called them. The followers of Donatus refused to accept the validity of any sacrament— eucharist, baptism, penance—administered by a traditor. Christian clergy the Donatists argued, must be faultless for their ministry to be effective and their prayers and sacraments to be valid. Everybody else in the church was corrupt and only Donatists were the true Christians (sound familiar?). The Pope condemned the Donatists, the church elsewhere moved on and got on with other business, pleased that the persecution had stopped: but in North Africa the Donatist controversy refused to die down.

Theirs wasn’t a brief flurry of indignation mostly happening in the letters page of the Church Times. The controversy went on for almost a century, long after anyone alive in the time of the Diocletian persecutions had gone to meet their maker. The Donatists certainly knew how to bear a grudge and more to the point the didn’t just express their disgruntlement by tutting, refusing to pay their parish share or keeping it all bottled up so they developed interesting neuroses. The Donatists set up their own parallel church. (sound familiar?). They shouted, they rioted, they used violence and destruction and on odd occasions even murdered. Eventually the Donatist movement died out as severe and austere religious sects tend to, finally disappearing with the Islamic conquest in the 7th century, a conquest facilitated, perhaps by the fact that Christians were too busy fighting each other to defend themselves against invaders.

Now that should really have been the end of it, but it isn’t is it? Heresies gain traction because they are plausible, because they contain a nugget of truth, however distorted. The thinking of the Donatists is never far below the surface somewhere in Christianity, ready to breathe the air again and break out in a rash of puritanical self-righteousness. Most recently of all Donatist revivals, our very own Church of England has been struggling with the ugly and wearying Donatist-like opposition to equal marriage and LGBT clergy.

Never far away, and yet Donatist belief, and its more recent relatives, is wrong about God, wrong about the church and wrong about humanity.

Donatist thinking is unforgiving and inhuman in the sense that it doesn’t really understand what being human is about. Those who were left to denounce the traditors by definition weren’t martyred and therefore, were never put in the position to have to  choose. They must have imagined that had they been up before the officials they would have stood their ground and gone to the wild beasts still clutching their Bibles and proclaiming their faith. This is highly unlikely to be the case, it is yet one more example of what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error. Because, pretty much everybody will eventually cave under pressure; very, very few people don’t, and they are the people we rightly venerate as martyrs. If the only people who could be Christians were those that would pass muster for the Donatists, there would be fewer people of the faith worldwide than there are in church when the bishop comes. We don’t like pain,  we hate suffering, we shy away from hurt and that’s how God made us. Denying that, you deny the incarnation, you deny what God has made and deny that he made it good.

Saint Augustine, also a North African, the towering theologian of Catholic Christianity, never one to shy away from controversy,  asked the question of the Donatists: how is the church holy? His answer was: not in its members– sorry–  but in Christ. On earth, the church, bishops, priests and people, is a mix of saints and sinners. We cannot attempt a separation of saints and sinners in this world: the separation will take place in God’s time; no human can make that judgement and separation in God’s place and we shouldn’t try. 

And more: the efficacy and validity of prayer, worship, the sacraments do not rely on humans, they rely on God. It is God who imparts holiness, not us. When a person is baptised, it is God who blesses, not the priest; when the eucharist is celebrated it is God who makes the bread and wine holy, not the priest; God answers prayers, we don’t. It is, clearly, preferable to have a minister who knows what they are doing, and isn’t distracting by regular appearances in the Sunday People, but if personal holiness is the qualifying criterion, then not even the saints are not worthy to celebrate the sacraments; none of us are, only one person ever was. The priest, whatever her individual purity, acts not in a personal capacity but on behalf of the whole community of believers: a community on earth of saints and sinners; a community where even the saints are sinners; a community where saints and sinners both are striving for the holiness that can only ever be the gift of God, never merited, freely given. 

In a way then, there are no saints: no human has the holiness, of themselves, to demand entry into heaven. And in another way, all are saints, because each of us relies utterly on the holiness of God and that, freely given and given to all,  has no end. As the Moon only shines with the reflected light of the Sun, so the holiness of the saints is only ever a reflection of God. None are holy of themselves, but God makes everything holy.

Thanks be to God.