In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Well, both the epistle and the gospel today talk about eating. The epistle in particular talks about eating meat. Paul says if eating meat causes problems for anybody, I’ll never eat meat again. Interesting epistle to have on the last day we have meat. [Laughter] I presume you’re all going to have meat today, and it may seem, over the next seven or eight weeks, that you’re not ever eating meat again, but it’s not true. [Laughter] Pascha is just around the corner.

Because of today’s gospel, beloved in the Lord, I have in mind to talk to you today about judgment and a fallen people. I do this in three points. Point one: the legacy of Adam, or the reality of the Fall. I’ve talked about reality quite a bit the last couple of months, from the Latin res meaning “thing.” The reality of the Fall, something very deep in the memory of the race, but almost forgotten today. Let me illustrate this forgetfulness.

I invite you to do what I did recently. Just Google whatever the computer has for you on the island of Majorca. I did that, and it has a bunch of things there, and you can click on them, but one of the questions I clicked on was: “What is Majorca best known for?” What is it best known for? And I clicked on it, and it had about two lines. It’s best known for its beaches and the sunshine and the fresh fruit, and you can get a tan there. There wasn’t one word about what happened in the last part of August or the first part of September on the island of Majorca, that thousands and thousands of people were slaughtered; there was death everywhere, an invasion of the rebel forces. Someone who was following those events very closely, and he was more or less in favor of the revolution until that point, was a French thinker, writer, novelist, essayist… In fact, I read somewhere recently—John Lucas—John Lucas says somewhere that Georges Bernanos was the most important writer of the 20th century, which is really quite a statement. I think he’s the best French novelist of the 20th century.

Georges Bernanos wrote a book about the Spanish Civil War called Les Grands Cimetières Sous la Lune, The Great Graveyards Under the Moon. Georges Bernanos took very seriously the legacy of Adam, that we are a fallen race. Let me give you a statement of Georges Bernanos which is so striking—it’s so obviously true—I don’t know why I never thought about it before. It’s particularly good French, so let me read it in the original.

Il est assurément plus grave (it is assuredly more serious (plus grave, more serious)) ou du moins beautcoup plus dangereux (or at least much more dangerous) pour l’homme (for men), de nier le péché originel que de nier Dieu. It is assuredly more serious, or at least more dangerous for man, to deny original sin than to deny God.

Think about that. It’s safer to deny the existence of God than to deny original sin, because the one is far clearer than the other. There’s vastly more evidence for original sin than there is for the existence of God. It’s morally safer. The big heresy nowadays is not the denial of God. In fact, as far as I can see out on the spectrum of the world, there are absolutely too many gods! Just look at the membership of the United Nations. There’s just too many gods. Now, I won’t quibble about the words. I’m not sure “original sin” is the best way of saying it. The Orthodox tend to use the expression “inherited sin,” which for me is a richer expression. I’m not going to quibble with the people who use the word “original sin,” though. We all know what we mean here.

The human race and every human person inherits the legacy of Adam, the enormous accumulation of evil from the beginning of our race until now. That’s what we inherit. From the moment of our conception, we begin to inherit it. I think modern psychology of infancy and gestation strengthens my view on that. The things that the child in the womb, developing in the womb, hears and feels from the emotions of his parents and the conversations going on around, the first of his senses to be developed is hearing, just as, when he finally takes leave of this life, the last of his senses to depart will be hearing.

There’s always been a disposition within the Christian Church itself to deny or make light of this fact. You notice that the Nicene Creed does not say anything about original sin. It doesn’t require an act of faith! It’s just a fact; the evidence is overwhelming. Everybody here knows, I’m presuming, or you will before we finish the adult Sunday school, who was condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431. We all remember Nestorius. He wasn’t the only heretic condemned at that council. The council also condemned a man by the name of Pelagius. Pelagianism was condemned by exactly the same council that condemned Nestorius.

Pelagius sort of made light of this sin. Pelagius thought we could at least do something on our own. I admit that sometimes the approach to this has been misguided. I’m thinking particularly of Calvin and the first article of five-point Calvinism, of the TULIP (total depravity, and that’s overstating it—it can’t be total) Calvin taught at Geneva. Far worse, however, was the answer to Calvin given by another Genevan named Rousseau. Rousseau believed that human beings were not fallen, and if there is a Fall, it’s civilization itself. He’s the one who believes in the noble sauvage, the noble savage. Even though he’s reacting against Calvin, he denies what is most obvious: that we’re fallen creatures. Rousseau wrote a treatise on education that’s influenced the history of philosophy and the history of education ever since. I’m talking about his book, Émile. Just think of the influence of a book like that, Émile, on the American school system, through somebody by the name of Dewey, who was a great reformer of American schools back in the—well, before my time, the ‘30s. [Laughter]

The worst notion against this—and it’s been around for a while; been around for 200 years, anyway—the theory of progress, that we’re making progress.

Back when I was doing my theological studies, one of the big names influencing theology was a Jesuit by the name of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who completely accepted the theory of evolution, and even falsified, deliberately falsified evidence in favor of it. He actually did that; didn’t bring any merit to the Jesuits there, I think. So there were rising and converging. I never knew what exactly to think about that, because I tried to read Chardin, and having neither a strong stomach nor a lofty mind, I was not able to make any progress. At the time… a few years later I was a chaplain at Fort Knox. I don’t remember how the conversation came up, but there was a young Lutheran chaplain there, and he nailed me, and I’m grateful to him every since. He nailed me! He says, “It’s not like this. It’s like this.” [Laughter] We’re not rising in conversion; we’re swirling down the plumbing. For that, there’s plenty of evidence.

It is interesting that almost everybody nowadays, in spite of all the evidence, still believes in progress. Some of you are old enough to remember when General Electric had the boast that progress was their most important product. I mean, who doubts GE? Almost everybody believes in progress—for which there is no evidence! That is pure theory! And almost nobody takes seriously the evidence of the legacy of Adam. Most people profess that human beings and human society stand in need of some improvement, and most people seem to think that religion can be helpful in that regard. There appears to be a widespread agreement, however, that the government has responsibility to improve people and the government has the responsibility to improve society, that the moral structure of human society depends on the government—it’s their responsibility—and the Church is there to help. That’s a very widespread view. That’s why clergymen are called in to give innocuous prayers to legislative assemblies and things of this sort.

If we take seriously our own experience, beloved, if we examine our own hearts, we find there’s evil there beyond way back before any choice we ever made. The evil influences were brought to bear upon us. It might not be our parents. It might have been a great-great-grandparent who was a bit of a scoundrel, and you got the whole thing; you inherited it.

The United States, if this country lasts a thousand years, we will still be dealing with the effects of slavery. I have no doubt on that matter at all. And slavery, our history of slavery, pales beside the things that are going on now. The international slave trade right now is the worst in the history of the human race. When Mom and I were at Touchstone Banquet in Washington, D.C., some years ago, I remember Justice Scalia was there. We sat at a table with a gentleman who heads a department within the State Department that simply tracks international slavery. Millions of people are bought and sold as slaves, right now. This is the legacy of Adam. We must, at the beginning of Lent, take seriously that we are a fallen race.

Point two, let’s talk about the judgment of history. The judgment of history, this expression usually means that history will eventually pass judgment on the past. This is a complete misunderstanding of the use of the possessive or genitive case. The judgment of history does not mean that history will judge the past. It means that history will be judged. History is not going to pronounce judgment on anybody. The burden of today’s gospel reading is that history will be judged. This was prophesied almost 3,000 years ago. It’s a thesis we can trace back to the Prophet Zephaniah in the seventh century before Christ.

It was Zephaniah, reflecting on certain invasions of the Holy Land, somewhere around mid-seventh century, who spoke about the day of the Lord, by which he meant the day that the Lord will have his say about history. This day of the Lord, Zephaniah believed, will be a dies irae, day of wrath, something that has not been sung in any church since Vatican II. Almost the first thing they got rid of was this downer of a hymn called Dies Irae, Day of Wrath. Alas for Mozart.

According to Zephaniah, this would be a day of universal judgment. God’s judgment, he says, will visit all nations, not just the local folks like the Philistines and the Moabites,  but also the Ethiopians, the southwestern edge of the fertile crescent, and the Assyrians, at its other edge. The Lord, declared Zephaniah, will cut off all nations, all nations, panta ta ethnoi, all nations, all the ethnics, panta ethnoi. “When the Son of Man comes in his glory,” says today’s gospel, “and all the angels of God with him, he will sit on the throne of his glory, and all the nations will be gathered before him.” Today’s gospel, beloved, about the judgment of history, means the judgment to which history itself will be subjected. The judgment of the future will not be a judgment rendered by the future; it will be a judgment on the future and on the past, and, heaven help us, on the present.

And point three, the irony of the final judgment. Here’s the irony. Because the claim itself has to be scandalous, the claim that a Jewish carpenter is going to pass judgment on everybody. I mean, if that isn’t a scandal, I don’t know what. On the one hand Jesus portrays the judgment as universal. It’s a judgment, he says, involving all the nations. In other words, this will be a universal judgment on all of history, and we observe a singular feature of it. Everybody is going to be judged according to the same standard. Everybody’s going to be judged according to the same standard—try to reconcile that with every sociology textbook I’ve ever seen, which says that the standards of each people, each culture, each nation, are particular to that culture, and no one may pass judgment on them. When I was teaching just the opposite in a philosophy class, I got all kinds of complaints from the sociology department.

It should occur to us: How can this be? Is there not something singular about this claim: one standard of judgment for everybody? Or to believe that God plans to judge Jews and Muslims by the same standards as Christians? All nations, all men, all times? Does God really expect both cavemen and spacemen to live by the same standards? These questions express what is often called the scandal of particularity. One can hardly blame non-Christians for taking offense at the suggestion that their own moral laws will count for nothing. What would prompt a Buddhist to believe that he will be judged by how good a Christian he was? And yet, that is the teaching of the Gospel. Only the Gospel is the way to go.

Indeed, this Last Judgment necessarily is an affront to the suppositions of every single book I know of on cultural anthropology, without exception. I’ve got lots of them, because I used to teach these stupid subjects, and the publishers would send me the books free, and I had shelves full of these useless books. All of these textbooks—and I can recall no exceptions—either imply or deliberately state that there are no universal moral standards that God expects of everybody. They declare on the contrary that the standards of behavior are entirely the product of cultural and social conditioning, so what is acceptable behavior in one culture and social setting may be entirely reprehensible in another. We should not expect, therefore, to find the Aztecs keeping the same rules as the Buddhists.

Consequently, this argument says there are no universal ethical rules binding on all human beings. If universal moral norms really do exist, how is it that only a select group of people seem to know anything about it? That’s the blessing of the Gospel. How can Christians insist that everybody’s life must conform to the Sermon on the Mount? If you don’t believe that, then stop preaching the Gospel altogether. If the moral standards of Tibet are sufficient, leave the Tibetans alone. But they’re not sufficient.

Man is not somebody who needs to be improved; man is somebody who must be saved.

These are the sentiments and the thoughts, beloved, that the Gospel presents to us on the eve of Lent, when we’re called to the gates of repentance and ask that they be opened, to consider our situation and our legacy, and with all our hearts to do what the Prophet Joel says: to rend our garments and break our hearts before the presence of God and ask for the rule of his Holy Spirit as we commence this grace-filled season. Amen.