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

This text we just heard from the Gospel of John, beloved in the Lord, is infinitely rich. This is my 21st sermon on the text since coming here. There’s not the slightest chance of saying something new, but there’s plenty new there. When I was in high school, I heard a sermon on this text by Fulton J. Sheen, and I knew I would never match that; it was that kind of sermon.

This morning I’m going to come at it through a side window. We probably won’t even get to the living room; we certainly won’t get to the kitchen. We’ll probably get somewhere in a hallway, but as you know I’m quite satisfied with hallways these days. For about the umpteenth time, I remind you that we’re preaching the Gospel in a completely different setting than we’ve ever preached it before. The normal way the Christian Church was to preach was first to the Jews, but at least there we had the same Scriptures, the same history; then we preached to the pagans, and that worked out pretty well. The Jews are still here, but the pagans are gone; the pagans are gone. See, pagans were religious people; pagans knew they had a soul; pagans had some feel for ritual, for example, and worship. In the contemporary world, that’s gone. The contemporary world is completely disordered.

I’ve been thinking about order a lot. I’m not going to preach about order this morning; I’m going to preach about disorder, but I’ve been preaching a lot. A recent parish council meeting, the chairman said, “You’re out of order.” And the very next day I was walking through the drug store; there was a sign that was saying, “Bathroom out of order.” Since then I’ve been pondering what we mean by “order” that can be used at a parish council meeting and on a sign in a bathroom. But I’m not going to share any of that with you; it’s just too deep. [Laughter]

When Jesus meets this Samaritan woman in today’s gospel, we can, in all charity, say that she is really messed up; she’s messed up. She has a disordered life. A first sign of disorder—and the woman certainly exemplifies it—is an adherence to materialism. Indeed, to the extent that this lady is a materialist, she may be regarded as a bit modern. When she begins her conversations with Jesus, her presuppositions are all materialistic. He talks about life; she wants to live forever. That is just so modern. All these experiments they’re doing now to lengthen human life, but all they’re doing is lengthening human existence; what they would give us is not much of a life. But she, when she hears about eternal life, she just thinks: a continuation of what we’ve got now. When she hears about living water, she thinks in terms of something to drink. Jesus must speak to her with great patience because she’s not able to understand him.

Now, one of the major features of a materialistic approach to life is the dominance of quantity. Something is said to be significant or important if you can measure it. During the ten years I taught college philosophy, right before I came here, I met this supposition all the time. I taught philosophy in college every semester for ten years before I came here. One semester I also taught high school French. That was a disaster! [Laughter] I thought things were bad in college philosophy. High school French, it was— Never mind; that’s not even in my notes. I should just skip that. [Laughter]

The vast majority of my philosophy students had been taught during their previous education that nothing was real unless you could measure it. Now, perhaps I should illustrate this with an extreme example, one that’s so extreme you’ll never meet it, really—or at least, I don’t think we will. This example goes beyond anything I’ve ever encountered in person, but because it’s so extreme one can see how ridiculous it is.

Some of you may be familiar with a writer and wildlife artist named Ernest [Thompson] Seton, who was still alive when I was a boy; he died in 1946. He was one of the founding pioneers of the Boy Scouts of America in 1910, an outdoor artist and writer. Not everyone knows that Seton was not his name at birth. His original name was Ernest Evan Thompson. He changed his name upon attaining his majority, and the reason he changed is quite memorable and instructive. On his 21st birthday, Ernest received from his father an invoice for all the expenses connected with his childhood and youth, including the fee charged by the doctor for delivering him. [Laughter]

Rather extreme example, I think. Because it is so extreme, it illustrates what I mean. It’s important, it’s significant, if you can put a price on it. Now, this was a Scottish family: I’m assuming he even charged interest! [Laughter] Now, Ernest, being a Scotsman, paid the bill, but he never spoke to his father again. See, the day his father did that, he stopped being a father; he wasn’t a father. He made an investment in this kid, but he expected a return. And promptly Ernest changed his name to Seton.

Now I give this as an example not because this sort of thing is common practice—and I don’t think it’s going to be. Although the contemporary world seems to be losing its mind, I don’t think we’re going to go in that direction. I hope not. It does illustrate, however, in a striking way, the logic of materialism. Seton’s father thought he could quantify his relationship to his son. He was completely under what René Guénon called the reign of quantity. If that example seems implausible, I refrain from mentioning some things I’ve seen in families—I’m just not going to give you those examples.

The second feature of a disordered life is a lack of perspective. The woman certainly here has a lack of perspective. If she has a moral compass at all, she has no north pole. She has lost track of any fixed point in human existence. Really, things are quite falling apart out there right now, and I wish we could say just the world was falling apart. When I look at what the Christian churches are doing right now, there are no fixed points! Or maybe the fixed points are still there, but we don’t see them. Oh, I know the fixed points are still there because God fixed them. With respect to this woman, many distractions stand in the way and block her vision. We pile things up in front of fixed points so that we no longer see them; we just see the details of our life. We don’t know where the lighthouse is any more.

Willa Cather, in her wonderful novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop, tells a story of a priest named Antonio José Martinez. Although he appears in a work of fiction, Martinez was not a fictional character. He really was a priest in the old Southwest. He lived from 1793 to 1867. Martinez was a priest, but he was also a very wealthy man, and he became somewhat materialist. He was highly successful from the world’s perspective. He owned extensive properties. He fathered a number of children by several women. And after years of abusing his ministry, Martinez was finally excommunicated by his bishop and died excommunicate.

Willa Cather, in her description of the home of Fr. Martinez, remarked that there was a cross hanging on the wall, but he was no longer able to see the cross for all the books stacked up on his desk. It was a fixed point, but he no longer saw it. The author uses this invisibility of the cross to explain the tragedy of this man’s life. The important fixed point was no longer visible to him. He really didn’t know what it meant to be a priest.

Now, beloved, if our lives are to be ordered, it’s essential that we don’t lose sight of the fixed points, and most of those points God himself fixed. There are other fixed points that human beings had fixed. The human race has been around in this world for a rather long time, and the human race had made recent conclusions, centuries ago: This far, and no further. The word for “law” comes from the word for “log.” A tree falls over; it’s a big heavy tree: it’s a log. That’s what gives us the word for “law.” It’s there. It’s there. It’s been there for so long, you don’t mess with it. Particularly you don’t mess with it for purposes that are transient, ephemeral, and untried. It’s important that we have absolutely fixed points in our lives, from which there’s no deviation.

The third quality of a disordered mind is willful confusion. Willful confusion. “Confusion” comes from the Latin to pour. Confusion means to pour together, so you can no longer distinguish between the two. Now, confusion is inevitable in life; I understand that. The confusion I have in mind here, however, is a special kind: the deliberate confounding of things that the Creator made distinct and separate. The Bible’s operative verb here is habdeel, heebdeel in the causative form, habdeel, which is often translated as “to divide, to separate.” When God first creates the world, all is confusion, but when God speaks, confusion disappears. When God speaks in creation, when God speaks, in every single instance, a division is made, a separation is made. God will not allow things to be confused.

We’re all familiar, I think, with the text.

When God saw the light, God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided it, the light from the darkness. Then God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.” And God made the firmament and divided the waters that were under the firmament from the waters that were above the firmament.

Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, the fruit that yields fruit, according to its kind.” Then God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven to divide the day from the night. And God set them in the firmament of heaven to give light upon the earth and to rule over—rule over, lemem shelet—the day and over the night, layala, and to divide the light from the darkness.

And finally, when God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female.

That division, no other: male and female he created them.

Now this, beloved, is the biblical cosmogeny is central to creation itself as this framework of distinctions. It is generally agreed among historians, and I think, frankly, they’re right, that the first chapter of Genesis comes from the priestly hand responsible for putting the final touches on the Torah. Some of the Fathers of the Church, like St. Jerome, believe that that was in fact Ezra the scribe, but there was a priestly hand responsible for the final touches in the Torah. The themes in Genesis 1 run all the way through the book of Leviticus, which is of course a priestly book. Dividing, setting apart, the erection of barriers to access are notions that suffuse the regulations about the worship, about the tabernacle. What goes along with the rigorous setting apart of sacred space is an anxious concern about contamination from the sphere of the profane. Sacred time and sacred space are developments of the hierarchical division of the cosmos.

This is why, ideally, we consecrate our churches. They’re here for worship; they’re not here for anything else, ideally. This is sacred space; we don’t treat this like any other room in the universe; this is sacred place. Sacred times are set apart.

In the Bible, confusion is never a good thing. Confusion means something is out of order. I’m afraid that over the last—well, since I came here, I guess, or perhaps Chicago has a way of making this more clear than anywhere else— I’ve just been overwhelmed by the enormous amount of raw confusion—I don’t mean this parish—enormous amount of raw confusion. Since coming here 21 years ago, I’ve taken to praying Psalm 74 every day. It’s one of the psalms I just have to pray it every day. And I can pray because I have the feeling I’m living in the midst of it, the total confusion, the incursion of the profane into the sacred, the removal of sacred time. In fact, there isn’t any more sacred time. People don’t stop and say, “Blot out all else; I’m going to devote this time to prayer every day.” Sacred space: “This is where I pray.” They’re just not doing that.

The notion of sacred space— In Protestant churches it does not exist at all, and that’s because Luther made certain decisions that they would not consecrate churches, and that’s why very often— I mean, I went to Southern Baptist Seminary; there were wonderful people there, but their chapel was not sacred space and was not treated as sacred space. I’m afraid we will lose that, too.

I’ll read you just some lines of Psalm 74. It’s in— This is the King James Version, which I don’t pray. It’s 73 in the Greek and Latin.

Lift up thy feet unto the perpetual desolations (he says), even all that the enemy hath done wickedly in the sanctuary. Thine enemies roar in the midst of the congregations; they set up their ensigns for signs. A man takes up an axe like a thick tree, to break down the carved work at once with axes and hammers. They have cast fire into thy sanctuary; they have defiled by casting down the dwelling-place of thy name to the ground. They said in their hearts, “Let us destroy them together.” They have burned all the synagogues of God in the land.

He goes on. That’s what’s happening in today’s world. It’s important that we don’t let the enemies of God within the realm of sacred space. I said sacred spaces particularly: our insides. It’s important that we do not allow filth to come through our eyes and through our ears, the filth that this world feeds upon.

I find it positively painful—I mean, talk about really painful; I pray when I’m there—whenever I go to Walgreens Drug Store, simply because of the music that’s piped in. I’d rather get the stuff at drive-in so I won’t have to listen to it—and I know that that’s fairly mild music as far as what passes for music these days. When I hear some of the things that people watch on television, I am appalled that you would actually look and see that. I tried once in a while to check out what people are watching. I can’t take it! What was it, House of Cards? Is that a show? I tried watching it a couple of times—no! No, I will not allow that inside of my mind. I will not allow the heathen to invade the sacred space. What should I say about Game of Thrones? I mean, I won’t say anything about that! If that isn’t clear to you, you’re almost beyond hope.

Brethren, it’s important to keep the sacred space and the sacred time sacred. It’s important all the distinctions that God made and placed into this world: we maintain them. It’s important that we always keep our eyes on the fixed points, that we don’t lose our direction. It’s very important that we don’t reduce life to that which can be measured, because unless all this takes place, we will not meet Christ at the well of the living water, we will not become partakers of eternal life—and that’s the promise that God’s hand holds out to us. We must give up all of that if we’re to meet him at the well and know him to be the Savior of the world. Amen.