Pre-Lent Sermons, 2001 The Most Rev. John T. Cahoon, Jr. Metropolitan, Anglican Catholic Church Archbishop Ordinary, Diocese of the Mid-Atlantic States Rector, St. Andrew and St. Margaret of Scotland Anglican Catholic Church Alexandria, Virginia

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Quinquagesima -- 50 days before Easter, the Sunday before Lent.
Sexagesima -- approximately 60 days before Easter, second Sunday before Lent.
Septuagesima -- approximately 70 days before Easter, third Sunday before Lent.

Quinquagesima, February 25, 2001

The Sunday before Lent starts always brings us face to face with one of the best-known, most-read, and least-understood passages in the New Testament. That is St. Paul's hymn to charity in the thirteenth chapter of his First Epistle to the Corinthians. It is a very worthwhile passage to think about as Lent begins. It tells us that the only reason for Christian discipline -- in Lent or any other time of the year -- is to try to make ourselves more charitable.

One of the barriers to understanding this passage is the connotation the word "charity" has in our current usage. Charity is what stronger and richer people bestow upon weaker or poorer ones, out of the presumed goodness of their hearts -- or the advantages in the tax codes. There is always a faint hint of condescension about it. "I won't accept your charity." "He gave his old tennis shoes and his canned hams to charity."

The Greek word the King James Version translates as "charity" -- and it doesn't clear anything up to translate it "love" -- means selfless action for the good of another person. When Jesus tells us to "love" our neighbors, he isn't ordering us to feel good about them or to think friendly and sentimental thoughts about them. He is telling us, instead, to do what is best for them to act always for their good.

The selflessness in Christian charity -- in this sort of love -- is of foremost importance. When I say I love my family or I love my friends or I love "Win Ben Stein's Money," it is obvious that I love those things at least in part because I derive some sort of personal satisfaction from loving them. In the charity kind of love, what I am going to get out of it is not a consideration at all.

The ministry offers all sorts of opportunities to do good for other people. I hope I take advantage of at least some of them. But in my heart of hearts I know it is impossible even to imagine a completely selfless act much less actually perform one.

There is always part of me that wants people to tell me what a wise and good person I am. I want to took at myself in the mirror after I have done something for somebody else and say, "You know, you really are a great guy." If I am in a particularly masochistic mood, I can also remind myself that, I am after all, getting paid to do this. It is not possible even to approach selflessness without God's help.

St. Paul fleshes out what it means to be charitable. He describes what the life and the attitudes of a truly selfless person would look like. A charitable person puts up with anything and everything, because he has not made his own convenience and comfort his top priority. A charitable person does not try to call attention to himself or put himself forward.

When a charitable person hears something negative about another person, he doesn't immediately conclude the worst or impute the basest possible motives to the person under discussion. He surely does not take pleasure in the real or imagined bad behavior. Instead he seeks the truth, and he actually prefers knowing the truth to wallowing in salacious rumors and suppositions. Can any of us say that that describes us?

First Corinthians 13 is part of a more extended teaching on spiritual gifts. Gifts come from God, they are not human achievements. Charity is not something we can have or exhibit without God's help. In chapter 12, St. Paul says that God gives every Christian one or more gifts which he is supposed to use for the benefit of the whole church -- to edify and build up the body of Christ.

In Chapter 13, he says that the gifts he has talked about in Chapter 12 are only temporary. "Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail ... whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away." The three greatest gifts are available to everybody. They are faith, hope, and charity, and even among them charity -- selfless action -- is the only one that will last.

"Charity never faileth," because charity describes the behavior of Jesus himself. Jesus was always charitable – "Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends." The crucifixion is the supreme act of charity. If you are hoping to find out what your spiritual gift is, start out by asking God to help you to be more charitable.

St. Paul concludes the chapter by describing the final fruits of charity. Our selfishness and the general fallen state of the world mean that we cannot see things as they really are. We don't see ourselves clearly, and we can't perceive fully how God is working things out through what happens to us. St. Paul says that it is like looking into a mirror in a funhouse -- the image is distorted – "Now we see through a glass, darkly."

At the end of time we shall be able to see everything clearly and without any distortion. We shall see ourselves as God sees us, and we shall see the point of the unfolding pattern of our lives clearly. We shall finally be able to understand what God was up to all along. "Then (we shall see) face to face. Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity."

Sexagesima, February 18, 2001

During the second week I was at St. Vladimir's Seminary, the Archbishop of the Orthodox Church in America came to the campus to ordain one man as a priest and another as a deacon. The ordinations came on the feast day of the saints to whom the seminary chapel is dedicated -- the ones comparable to our own St. Andrew and St. Margaret of Scotland.

The chapel is named for three heroes of the fourth century Church -- St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian, and St. John Chrysostom. We recognize them too. There is a prayer attributed to Chrysostom in our Morning and Evening Prayer. The three of them lived during the period after the Council of Nicaea, which formulated more or less what we recite every Sunday as the Nicene Creed.

The Nicene Creed did not win immediate widespread acceptance in the Church. The doctrine that people had the hardest time buying was the one which says that God the Father and Jesus are both God in exactly the same way. The phrase "being of one substance with the Father" is what expresses that idea.

When the ordination was over, the archbishop called the newly ordained and their wives and children to the front of the church. He said that this was a great day for them and a great day for the Church which was recalling the faithfulness of the three teachers. But he warned them, "Don't think that they lived in a golden age, where everybody was happy to believe and practice all the right things. The truth about their lives is that hardly anybody paid any attention to anything they said."

This morning's gospel is Jesus' parable of the sower. When Jesus gets done preaching the parable, his disciples come to him and say, "Would you please explain it to us?" It doesn't seem to me that the parable of the sower is one of the more difficult ones, but, of course, we have the Holy Spirit to help us understand it, and the disciples did not have the Holy Spirit yet.

In any event, Jesus tells them, "The knowledge of the secrets of the Kingdom of God has been given to you, but to the rest it comes by means of parables, so that they may look but not see, and listen but not understand."

In other words, teaching in parables creates a separation between the people who get them and the people who don't. The disciples don't understand the parable right away, but they are at least willing to admit that they don't and come to Jesus for help. Other people listen to the parables and get nothing from them -- not even the impulse to look for an explanation.

The words Jesus uses in explaining that fact to the disciples come directly from the mouth of God, as he is quoted in the Book of Isaiah. When God calls Isaiah to be a prophet, and Isaiah agrees to do it, the first thing God says is, "Good, now you are going to devote your whole life to telling people things to which they will not listen and that they won't even try to understand," exactly what the archbishop told the ordinands. Welcome to the ministry.

Now the idea that someone who preaches the Word of God is not necessarily going to be successful is, in fact, also the point of the parable itself. The sower in the parable scatters seed. He doesn't place seeds tidily in holes. He tries to make the seed go into places where it is likely to take root, but much of the seed is, inevitably, wasted.

Jesus says that that is what preaching the Word of God is like. Some people hear, and then the devil snatches the word away from them. Others get excited about God for awhile, but when any sort of test comes along, they doubt God and fall away. Others have a more sustained relationship to God, but they let other considerations get in the way and never become fully serious. There is also a group which hears the Word and pays attention.

Most churchgoers hover between the last two categories. You can tell which category you are in by asking if you are doing even your minimal Christian duties as the Prayer Book sets them out.

Do you come to church and bring your family to church every Sunday no matter what? -- illness is the only valid excuse. Do you pray every day? Do you study the Bible every day? Do you try to get other people to come to church? Do you give the ten percent of your income God requires? Do you try to measure everything you think and say and do by the standard of what Christ wants?

Now when you hear those requirements, if you are not living up to them, you will have excuses and you may even imagine that God understands, and he accepts your excuses because you are a special case. Don't be so sure. Your excuses for not performing your Christian duties are your thorns. They are what Jesus calls "the cares and riches and pleasures of this life," which keep you from getting serious about God.

We are heading toward Lent. Lent is the time to figure out what your thorns are, and try to take on some discipline which will help you get rid of them. God will help you do anything he asks you to do. If you don't do what God wants it is not because he is unreasonable, it is because you don't want to do it. In Lent, we face that fact and try to get serious. "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear."

Septuagesima, February 15, 2001

In this morning's epistle, St. Paul expresses his worry that even if he does a good job of preaching the gospel to other people, he still might wind up not being saved himself. He says that he has to concentrate upon training himself while he tries to train his listeners, as he says, "lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway."

During last Lent I visited Will Cohen, who is one of the men who is studying to be ordained in our diocese. He attends St. Vladimir's Orthodox Seminary, which is just north of New York City.

Mr. Cohen was a student of my wife's when she taught at Stanford University in the 1980's. When she first knew him he was from a Jewish family, but he had no religious commitment or training of any kind. She kept in touch with him over the years, as he read himself into Christianity. I baptized and confirmed him here at St. Andrew and St. Margaret.

He felt a calling to the ministry, which was affirmed by his spending time here over a couple of summers following me around and seeing what I do all day. I have known about St. Vladimir's since the 1970s, when I became acquainted with some of the professors there. One evening when Mr. Cohen expressed a desire to go to Yale so he could convert the divinity school to Christianity, Leslie and I got on two telephone extensions and said, in unison, "No."

At any rate, my one day at St. Vladimir's last spring showed me that I need input. I am honored that this is so, but I am always the preacher, always the teacher, always the retreat-giver. I need to listen to somebody else talk, and I also need to go to church, rather than only conduct it.

When some kind parishioners suggested that it might be good for me to spend some more time at St. Vladimir's, I was happy to agree. I am grateful to them and to our most generous vestry for making it happen. "Lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway."

I have been interested in Orthodoxy especially Russian Orthodoxy -- since I was in seminary. I have profited greatly by reading Orthodox theology, and, as many of you know, my favorite book on prayer -- and the biggest asset to my own private prayer life -- is a nineteenth century Russian tale called The Way of a Pilgrim.

Orthodoxy is the brand of Christianity that is closest to classical Anglicanism -- despite its rather different packaging. Given the disarray in which most of Western Christianity finds itself, Orthodoxy provides some reassurance.

A recent book on the subject says "Byzantines believed . . . that perfection lay in unswerving fidelity to tradition. Its rigid conservatism is one of Orthodoxy's most pronounced and admired characteristics today." I believe that Anglican Catholicism is our ethnic orthodox church.

At any rate, I spent about eleven days at St. Vladimir's trying to pretend I was a student. I went to lectures, for as long as six hours per day. I went to church twice a day, for services of up to three hours and forty minutes in length. I saw ordinations and met bishops. I heard other people preach -- in all cases very Biblically, very pointedly, and very briefly.

On the Sunday I was there I attended our church in East Islip, Long Island, where Mr. Cohen goes every Sunday. I was blissfully happy to sit in the congregation. The officiant and preacher was Deacon Anthony Ojeh, who is the Nigerian man I ordained in December. He preached well, and he read the service well. I could not have been more satisfied or more spiritually refreshed.

I have never been near an institution of any kind which could rival the academic excellence of St. Vladimir's. I attended classes on, among other things: the prophet Ezekiel; the Church Fathers; Canon Law; Sexuality and Monasticism; Pastoral Counseling; and Christianity in Russian literature.

The high academic quality is augmented by the clear understanding that what they are doing mainly is training parish priests. The more practical aspects of priesthood are handled brilliantly as well. Mr. Cohen is getting the best training imaginable for his future ministry in our diocese.

My experience inevitably made me reflect upon my own seminary training 30 years ago. The professors at my Episcopal seminary were also intelligent and competent. The problem was that the entire intellectual and academic enterprise was in the service of trying to brainwash the students into what the professors hoped would become the new realities of the Episcopal Church. They succeeded -- mostly.

It hasn't stopped. My seminary announced recently a conference of bishops and theologians titled, rather ominously, "Beyond Orthodoxy." In seminary we were cut off from our Anglican tradition. That was, of course, on purpose, to make us more ready to accept a rewritten Prayer Book, the destruction of the apostolic sacraments, and bishops who denied major articles of the Nicene Creed.

I pray that in our new attempt to continue our Holyrood Seminary at Richmond we can keep the example of St. Vladimir's in the front of our minds. I am grateful to have been allowed to experience their community of teaching and belief and commitment. "Lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway."