by Dr. Mark McInroy
Sermon for May 25, 2025 on YouTube
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God.
Good morning! Today we celebrate the feast of St. Monica, mother of Augustine of Hippo, and I have been invited to preach because our clergy know how much I love Augustine, on whom I teach in my theology courses at the University of St. Thomas.
I can’t seem to go more than a few classes without repeating the well-known passage from Augustine’s classic text, Confessions, “You have created us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” What I love about Augustine in general and this passage in particular is that here he recognizes the fact that we go about our lives with a restlessness, with our deepest desires unfulfilled, because we can only find true rest, complete fulfillment, in God.
He powerfully captures the profound yearning that permeates human existence,
and the ability of God to provide what we most deeply need. Christian faith in his understanding meets and even surpasses our deepest longings.
For these reasons and many more, Augustine is one of the most significant theologians in the history of Christianity. His influence is massive, so much so that it is difficult to imagine Christianity as we know it without him. And yet, as Augustine acknowledges in his Confessions, his journey to becoming Christian was a long one.
And his conversion had everything to do with his mother, Monica. She, indeed, stands behind this epoch-making theologian, not only in bringing him into the world, but in her unceasing prayers for him to become part of the church. She is described in the Confessions as gentle and respectful, but firm when need be. She is portrayed as a pillar of her community, a reconciler and peacemaker. And it seems that she experienced visions with some regularity, carefully discerning through them God’s will for her and her son.
And she was, it seems, nothing if not insistent, making no secret of her desire for her son to become a Christian. Indeed, Monica worked on Augustine, praying for him for years, decades even, and she clearly made a powerful impression on his mind. In fact, in his classic biography of Augustine, Peter Brown reminds his reader of multiple moments in the Confessions when Monica is the voice of God in Augustine’s early life.
It is no doubt with these ideas in mind that the collect for Monica’s feast day asks that we, like Monica, bring others to acknowledge Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord.
Now, Episcopalians can be said to be good at any number of things, but bringing others to acknowledge Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord is not typically at the top of that list. Such a notion, after all, smacks of evangelism, for which Episcopalians have varying degrees of enthusiasm, I think it is fair to say. More importantly, one might wonder what, exactly, it means to bring others to acknowledge Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord.
What I would like to suggest this morning is that the sort of acknowledgment of Jesus Christ for which Monica prayed for her son speaks directly to the situation in which we find ourselves today, on this fifth anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, and that acknowledging Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord in this particular way is something that we need, rather desperately in fact, in our world today.
To connect all of these points, we need to begin with Monica.
As I have contemplated her in preparing my remarks for today, I have found myself wondering what it must have been like to be the mother of a son so brilliant that Christians today, some 1600 years after his death, continue to recite central features of his thought. What do daily conversations with one of the towering figures in our intellectual history look like? There is every indication that, on a number of occasions, Monica held her own in conversations with her gifted son, periodically telling him something he needed to hear, but could not acknowledge.
One has to think that she perceived his staggering intelligence. And yet, one wonders if she also detected in him early what he would come to recognize in himself, namely, the restlessness of his heart. As Augustine divulges in great detail to his readers, his restless heart made him something of a mess.
The first half of his Confessions consists of one tale after another in which he could not tame his unruly desires, which were so intense as to incapacitate and overwhelm him again and again, laying waste to his best laid plans over and over. Monica must have seen both the strength of her son’s intellect, and the weakness of his will. She must have had high hopes on account of the former, and deep worries because of the latter.
If she prayed that her son would recognize Jesus Christ as his Savior and Lord, then, one has to think that she prayed specifically for his for his restless heart to find repose, for his desires to be re-formed by Christ, for him to find peace.
One of the most striking features of Augustine’s conversion story is that it has less to with the intellect, and more to do with the will. He tells his reader that, at a certain point in his development, he had come to agree with Christian ideas; any intellectual impediments had been eliminated, and his mind was satisfied. The problem, however, was that he could not find the strength of will to commit himself to Christianity. He felt himself to be called to a celibate Christian life, but given Augustine’s proclivities, such a life seemed utterly impossible. At this stage, he admits that he would pray for God to grant him chastity and continence, “but not yet,” as he famously puts it. Augustine would ask God for just a little longer to continue in his present way of life. As I say to my students, it’s like hitting snooze on your alarm. You know that you need to get out of bed, but you can’t quite do it just yet. And as Augustine acknowledged, the “not yet” kept being prolonged, like an endless series of nine-minute naps, the decision being perpetually postponed.
This stage dragged on for quite some time, until finally in a garden in Milan, the crucial moment arrived. There, Augustine encountered an angelic figure who serenely asks the question that would determine the rest of his life, and around which our message today is organized: “Why are you relying on yourself, only to find yourself unreliable?” Instead of relying on himself, she advises Augustine to take another course. She insists, “Cast yourself upon him, do not be afraid. He will not withdraw himself so that you fall. Make the leap without anxiety; he will catch you and heal you.”
This is the decisive moment in Augustine’s conversion. He finally sees that his mistake had been to rely on himself, on his own resources, for the change that he sought to make. His weak and unreliable will could never serve as such a foundation. He recognized instead that the only reliable foundation is God, and that casting himself on God was the only way forward.
This feature of Augustine’s conversion would become a central element of his theology. He emphatically held that, left to our own devices, we would never be capable of performing sufficiently well for God. Instead, to Augustine we receive salvation as a gift from God. It is grace, given to us freely, despite the fact that we do not deserve it.
In the wake of Augustine, the Christian life comes to be seen, not as pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps and doing what must be done through enormous exertion of one’s own will. Christian life instead involves a recognition of one’s need for God, of how much trouble we end up in when we try to go it alone; it is a casting of one’s hope for newness of life on God.
Now, by this point you might be wondering, what exactly does this have to do with us here and now, in this particular cultural moment in which we find ourselves today? For much of this week, as many of you have seen, I am sure, there has been a great deal of coverage of what has changed—and what remains frustratingly unchanged—since George Floyd was murdered.
If, in the months after May 25, 2020, it seemed that a sea change might finally be upon us—in reforming policing practices, in acknowledging and addressing racial discrimination, in moving our society toward justice and reconciliation—such confidence is difficult to find now.
As heartbreaking and maddening as these developments are, I think it is fair to say that Augustine would not exactly be shocked at them. Another way to put what we’ve been saying about Augustine is that he had what’s called a “low anthropology.” He had an unflinchingly dark view of human beings as utterly incapacitated by sin. For all its pessimism, however, such a view of humanity might have more explanatory power for the world we see before us today. It may track a bit more consistently than the optimistic view of human beings to which we have become accustomed in modernity. And, we just might find ourselves unexpectedly consoled by a response to the events in our world that is unsurprised by them, if still deeply dismayed. Such an attitude could be said to recognize what is in fact going on, namely, a world that is mired, that cannot find the will to effect the change that is so desperately needed.
More importantly, however, I want to suggest that Augustine’s stark recognition of human shortcomings actually points the way forward, precisely because he makes clear where we can and cannot place our hope.
We will not be ok on our own. If that thought has laid hold of your mind in the last few months or years, you have a friend in Augustine. Just as Augustine saw in the garden in Milan that his mistake had been to rely on himself for the change that he sought to make, we need to ask, “Why are we relying on ourselves, only to find ourselves unreliable?” We will not make the change we seek for our world unless we cast ourselves on a reliable foundation.
And although it can be difficult to come to terms with Augustine’s darkness,
the good news is that, to his low anthropology is attached a high view of God’s work, of Christ’s ability to re-form human beings, to heal and liberate us from the debilitating effects of sin, and it is here that the Christian proclamation makes a real difference. If ever one worries about Christianity supposedly being irrelevant to our modern world, one can put that concern to bed based on what we have been claiming here.
Our world desperately needs the particular kind of acknowledgement of Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord for which Monica prayed for her son. To acknowledge Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord is to turn to the only foundation that is reliable, not ourselves, but God.
Crucially, too, it’s not just that we can do more in Christ than we could ever do on our own. My message to you all this morning is not simply that we will fail on our own but succeed when we rely on Christ. Instead, to turn to Christ is to perceive the world in a fundamentally different way; it is to be transformed by God’s grace so as to see one another, not through our own eyes, but instead from God’s point of view.
Some of you will recall that a few months ago the Faith Formation Commission developed a series for the Sunday Forum on Loving our Enemies. We did so out of the awareness that many members of our congregation feel acutely dehumanized in our current societal moment, but that we cannot respond to that degradation of our humanity by dehumanizing in return.
As a resource for this challenging idea, we turned to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
In a sermon on Loving one’s Enemies delivered in 1957 at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, King explains, in the first place, that hate destroys not only the hated, but the hater as well. To succumb to hate is to put oneself on a path, not only to the destruction of one’s enemy, but to the destruction of oneself, as well. Elsewhere in the same sermon, King insists that one love one’s enemy,
not because that person is actually likeable at all, but instead because God loves that person, inexplicable though such a notion might be to us.
King calls us to see our enemies as God sees them, and implicit in his view is the idea (very close to our central claim today) that love finds its ultimate ground, not in anything human, but instead in God.
As urgently as our current predicament calls for resolution, we will not emerge from it without love. To love when it is most needed, to love those who oppose us, to love our enemies, is not something we will be able to do ourselves, on our own. Instead, it is only when we cast ourselves on God that we can be drawn up into the divine life, seeing one another as God sees us, that we can find the reliable foundation for the love that will transform the world.
To return to Monica one more time, it is easy to imagine that, in her unfailing love for her deeply flawed, brilliant son, she saw him as God saw him. She no doubt recognized his many faults, but the ground of her love was surely not how he conducted himself in his day-to-day, but instead the love that God had for him. And, although she could have never known it at the time, that love of God, shown through Monica to her son would change the world.
May we live in hope that God’s love, shown through each of us to a hurting world, might change that world such that it reflects with greater and greater brightness the divine glory.
Amen.
