Trinitytide Sermons, 2000 The Most Rev. John T. Cahoon, Jr. Metropolitan, Anglican Catholic Church Bishop Ordinary, Diocese of the Mid-Atlantic States Rector, St. Andrew and St. Margaret of Scotland Anglican Catholic Church Alexandria, Virginia

Trinity XI September 3, 2000	Trinity X August 27, 2000
Transfiguration of Christ (also Trinity VII) August 6, 2000	Trinity VI July 30, 2000
St. James' Day	Trinity V July 23, 2000
Trinity IV July 16, 2000	Trinity III July 9, 2000
Trinity II July 2, 2000	Trinity I June 25, 2000
Trinity Sunday June 18, 2000

August 27, 2000, Trinity X

As today's gospel opens, Jesus is riding his donkey down the hill into Jerusalem. This is an event that takes place on Palm Sunday, so it seems to be a bit out of season here in late summer. But what we are concentrating on here is not what the ride is leading up to, but what Jesus is saying as he looks out at the city.

What happened to Jesus in Holy Week was no surprise to him. His Father told him he was going to have to die, and the Transfiguration tried to show the disciples that the Old Testament said that he was going to have to die.

Even if he had not had those two powerful witnesses, Jesus could hardly have been optimistic about the treatment he was about to receive. He did not so much have a pessimistic view of human nature as he had a realistic view of human nature. As St. John puts it, "He knew what was in man."

Today he is concerned less about what is going to happen to him than about what is going to happen to Jerusalem because its citizens are going to reject him. He says, "Thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, and shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another."

Jesus is prophesying the complete destruction of Jerusalem, which was going to take place at the hands of the Romans in 70 A.D. - about forty years after today's scene. He says the city will be destroyed, because the people were too blind to understand what was going on when he came to them.

His prophecy is much more like saying, "If you play with fire, you are going to get your fingers burned," than it is like predicting who is going to win the Super Bowl fifty years from now. When the Jews reject him, it will set in motion a series of events that will lead to inevitable calamity. They are too blind to see the bigger picture.

God wants us to be able to see bigger pictures. He doesn't want us to go through life experiencing everything that happens to us as a series of random events which have no coherence and no pattern and no meaning. Part of what it means to believe in one God is to believe that everything that happens to us is contributing to the unfolding of a bigger picture.

God promises us that when we come face to face with him at the end we shall be able to look back on everything and see the bigger picture fully completed. That is really something to look forward to. But he wants us to cultivate the ability to see the bigger picture now, and not just wait to have it dumped on us at the last day.

The main tool God has given us to see the bigger picture is the Bible. The Bible is the narrative story of God's activity, first in the history of Israel then in the life of Jesus and the first-century church, culminating in the story of the end of all things in the Book of Revelation.

The Bible shows us that God works in characteristic and consistent ways most of the time. We can look at the ways he acts in the Bible and then begin to see that he is also acting that way in our lives. That is how we start to see the bigger picture.

The acute ability to see the patterns and the bigger pictures in the things that happen is called the gift of prophecy - one of the nine special gifts of the Holy Spirit St. Paul enumerates in today's epistle. Later on in First Corinthians he will say that among the nine the gift of prophecy is the most important one - simply because it can have an impact on the greatest number of people.

The Old Testament prophets were able to look at what was happening and see God's hand in it. We call them prophets not because they spent all their time predicting the future, but because they interpreted events in terms of God's will and in light of his unfolding plan.

There is a sense in which we all need to ask the Holy Ghost to help us to be prophets. We need to have some sense of the meaning of what is going on in our lives. We grow in our Christian understanding when we can ask such things as, "Why has God let this thing happen to me?" and "What is God trying to tell me by what is happening in my life?" and then be able, by grace and through an understanding of the Scriptures, to begin to have answers.

Jesus completes his prophetic activity this morning by going into the temple and throwing out the money-changers. Here again he was proclaiming the existence of a bigger picture. The money changers were there to turn regular money into special temple money - the only kind of money that worshippers could offer.

Instead of being content to play the roles God had set out for them, the money changers exacted exorbitant exchange rates. What was supposed to be a service to the people of God turned into a scam. The money changers ignored the bigger picture - what God wanted - and did instead what they wanted. That is why Jesus had to cast them out of the temple.

They did not know the time of their visitation either. They did not know what was going on, because they blinded themselves to the bigger picture. Let us ask God not to let that ever happen to us.

August 6, 2000, Transfiguration of Christ (also Trinity VII)

The only way to understand the Transfiguration of Christ properly is to see it as the end of a sequence of events in Jesus' early ministry. As St. Luke unfolds the story in his Chapter 9, Jesus feeds 5000 people with a small amount of bread and fish; then St. Peter says that Jesus is the Messiah of Israel; then Jesus tells the disciples that he is going to have to suffer and die at the hands of the chief priests and elders, but after three days he will rise again; then comes the Transfiguration.

We know from the gospels that the disciples refused consistently to accept any notion that Jesus was going to have to suffer and die. The more he told them it was going to happen, the more they resisted it. They had left everything they had to follow him, after all, so it was difficult for them to accept the idea that what they had committed themselves to—which seemed to be going along so well--was going to end in what sounded like humiliation and failure.

One of the purposes of the Transfiguration was to show the disciples that the idea that the Messiah was going to die was not some crazy idea that Jesus had made up out of nowhere. It was, in fact, an idea to which the Hebrew Bible—our Old Testament—gave its witness, and one to which God the Father gave his endorsement.

On the Mount of Transfiguration, and in the sight of the sleepy trio of disciples Peter, James, and John, Jesus had a conversation with Moses and Elijah. They represented the two major divisions of the Hebrew Scriptures—Moses, the Law; and Elijah, the Prophets. St. Luke says that they "spake of his decease which he should accomplish at Jerusalem"—they were talking with Jesus about his impending death.

A bit later on God the Father spoke from the sky to say, "This is my beloved Son, hear him." The law and prophets agreed that Jesus was going to die, and the Father said they should pay attention to what Jesus told them. That constituted quite powerful endorsement for the idea that Jesus was going to have to die.

The specifically "Transfigurational" aspect of the story refers to the change in Jesus' appearance on the Mount. St. Luke reports, "As he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered, and his raiment was white and glistering." That means his face changed and his clothes shone.

That sounds most like the description St. John gives us of the resurrected Jesus who comes to him on the Isle of Patmos to begin transmitting what becomes the Book of Revelation. In both cases the veil of Jesus' humanity is parted a bit so his godhead can shine through.

The ridiculous and, therefore, most fully human aspect of the story is St. Peter's reaction when he wakes up. He sees Jesus shining and the two greatest heroes of the Old Testament talking with him. Peter says, "Isn't this wonderful! Let's hang onto this fabulous experience as long as we can—we'll build three tents—one for each of you—and then we can stay here and look at you as long as we want to." St. Luke says Peter spoke these things "not knowing what he said."

St. Peter did not realize that he was not at a light show or a freak show that could continue on to amuse him forever. Peter was being told and shown something he needed to know quite desperately. That was that Jesus was right when he said that he was going to die, even though he was the Messiah.

The three were also being initiated into what was, if possible, an even greater mystery—that Jesus the Messiah was also the uncreated Son of God. That was testified to by the change in his appearance, and testified to by the word God himself spoke from heaven.

So what do we make of all this? First of all, the Transfiguration is testimony to the two main things the church believes about Jesus—he is the Messiah of Israel, and he is the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the Son of God.

The Transfiguration shows that the story we tell about what happened to Jesus on earth is reasonable and probable and that it conforms to the Hebrew Scriptures—namely that the inevitable fate of the Messiah of Israel and Son of God was that he be put to death by human beings. The crucifixion was no accident. It was the ultimate clash between righteous God and sinful man.

As a event which shows us what God is up to, the Transfiguration is something in which we can take heart. The disciples thought the idea that Jesus was going to die was bad news—the worst news they could imagine. The Transfiguration told them, essentially—"Don't worry about it. Of course the execution of God is bad news, but God is stronger than anything human beings can do to him. The Messiah will be delivered up and crucified, but the third day he will rise again."

No matter how bad any earthly news may seem to us to be, in the long run it is all going to work out fine, because in the long run we are going to be in heaven with God where he will wipe away all tears from our eyes. Jesus does not deny the pain and tragedy of human existence. Instead, he transfigures it. Never forget what he said at the Last Supper, "In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world."

Transfiguration of Christ

Trinity VII

The Collect: Lord of all power and might, who art the author and giver of all good things; Graft in our hearts the love of thy Name, increase in us true religion, nourish us with all goodness, and of thy great mercy keep us in the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Romans 6: 19-23

The Gospel: St. Mark 8: 1-9

July 30, 2000, Trinity VI

This morning's gospel is taken from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. He delivers the sermon in his home territory of Galilee, north of Jerusalem, and not far from Nazareth where he grew up. His audience is a collection of ordinary local Jews.

Jesus begins by making an astounding statement. It is, "Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter the kingdom of heaven." In other words, you are not going to get into heaven unless you are more righteous than the scribes and the Pharisees are."

What made his statement astounding was that most of the people in the crowd would have been sure that the scribes and the Pharisees were the most righteous people around. They were the teachers of the Law and the transcribers of the Law. They knew the Law backwards and forwards, and they were the most learned interpreters of the law. It was their business to be righteous. If the only way I can get into heaven is to be more righteous than they are, then I had better resign myself to spending eternity in hell.

Jesus goes on to explain why the scribes and the Pharisees are really not righteous, even though they claim to be extremely righteous. Their fundamental problem is that they believe God's commandments have to do only with literal actions. They fail to take into account that in God's eyes thinking about breaking a commandment or talking about breaking a commandment is the same as acting to break it.

Some of you will remember the presidential campaign of 1976, when Governor Jimmy Carter gave an interview to "Playboy" magazine. In the interview he said he had never actually committed adultery. He did say that he believed he was still guilty of breaking the commandment against adultery, because he lusted in his heart after women to whom he was not married. Many people laughed at him for saying all that, but he was saying exactly the same thing Jesus says about the commandments in the Sermon on the Mount.

In today's lesson, Jesus concentrates on the sixth commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," or "Thou shalt do no murder." He takes up adultery later on. Jesus says everybody knows that commandment and what goes with it, that if you kill somebody you will be in danger of judgment.

Jesus says, "I am telling you that if you are angry with somebody for no reason, you are in danger of judgment, and if you call somebody a nasty name, you will be in danger of going to hell."

His point is that name-calling and unrighteous anger are types of killing. If you call someone a name in anger you are cutting yourself off from him as surely as you would if you actually killed him. Obviously the consequences for the other person are greater if you kill him than if you are just angry at him or call him a name, but the danger for you is identical. You are cutting off the other person, You are saying that a creature of God does not matter. You are breaking the sixth commandment.

If we apply the same logic to all of the commandments, we find out that we cannot claim to have kept any of them perfectly. Yes, I have never burned incense to a golden calf, but I have made decisions on the basis of what I want rather than what I think God wants, so I am, in fact, an idolater. I may never have actually taken anything that doesn't belong to me, but I have thought about how nice it would be to have something someone else has, so I am, in fact, a coveter and a thief.

Jesus wants us to see that we have no claim to righteousness on our own at all. If we recognize that the commandments have to do with thoughts and words as well as with deeds, we shall see that when it comes to keeping them, we are in a pretty sorry mess.

Our righteousness can exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees when we realize that we are not righteous. The only righteousness we have is the righteousness God gives us in Jesus.

God does not take us to heaven because we are good and righteous. God will take us to heaven because he loves us, and because he sent Jesus to die to forgive our sins. That is the issue St. Paul addresses in today's epistle.

St. Paul says that when we are baptized we die the death we deserve to die because of our sin. We share in Jesus' own death. After baptism we live by the power of God—we live the new life of Jesus' resurrection—we have eternal life from that point onward. As St. Paul puts it, "If we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection."

Baptism frees us from sin not because it makes us perfectly moral. Baptism guarantees that God will always forgive us no matter what we do. That frees us to try to obey his commandments--not because we are afraid of what will happen to us if we don't obey them, but because we are grateful to God for saving us.

Our righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees when we acknowledge we are sinners and we rely on what Jesus did for us on the cross. So "Reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord."

The Collect. O God, who hast prepared for those who love thee such good things as pass man's understanding; Pour into our hearts such love toward thee, that we, loving thee above all things, may obtain thy promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle. Romans 6: 3 - 11

The Gospel. St. Matthew 5: 20 - 26

St. James' Day

We heard something about St. James in this past Sunday's gospel. He was a partner with Peter and John in the fishing business. Jesus astounded all three of them with his advice about how they might go about catching nets full of fish. They are so taken by what happens when they heed his advice that they drop everything they are doing and follow him. "Fear not," says Jesus, "from henceforth thou shalt catch men."

Those three fishermen Jesus impressed with the great catch of fish became the inner circle of his disciples. James and Peter and John accompanied Jesus to the resurrection of Jairus's daughter, to the Mount of Transfiguration, and, finally, to the Garden of Gethsemane.

If you look at the list of the original twelve, you will see that some of them have Hebrew names and some have Gentile Greek names. That is both a reflection of the mixed cultural conditions in first-century Palestine and a prophecy of the union of Jew and Gentile in Christ. Andrew, which means "the manly one," and Philip, which means "the lover of horses," have Greek names, for example, where John "gift of God" and James have Hebrew names.

The Greek word we translate into English as "James" is "Jakobus." So "James" equals "Jacob." The presence of two Jacobs among the twelve kept the Hebrew roots of the Christian movement firmly before everyone's eyes, because Old Testament Jacob was the father of the twelve tribes of Israel.

It is striking that the story the Prayer Book chooses as the gospel for St. James' Day has such clear connections to the story of Jacob in the Book of Genesis. The name "Jacob" means "supplanter" or "heel grabber." You will remember that his mother Rebecca was pregnant with twins. She complained to God during her pregnancy that it felt as though there were two nations fighting with one another in her womb.

God replies, "You've got that absolutely right." Her son Jacob is the father of the nation of Israel and his twin Esau becomes the father of the nation of Edom.

As the twins are being born, Jacob sees that he is behind his brother Esau in the birth canal. He grabs Esau's heel to try to get past him and be born first so he can be the heir to the birthright of his father Isaac. Jacob is foiled in that attempt, but he succeeds later on.

One day when the twins are working in the field, Esau seems to have forgotten to bring his lunch along. When he sees the tasty looking lentil soup Jacob has, he asks him to share. Jacob says, "I'll give you some soup if you give me your birthright." Esau, who is not exactly oriented to the long term, agrees to trade his birthright for a mess of pottage.

But Jacob still has to get his father's blessing. The good news for Jacob is that his clever mother wants to help him out, and his father is old and almost blind. The bad news is that it will be difficult to trick Isaac, because, as Jacob laments, "Esau, my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man." But Rebecca provides goatskins for Jacob's arms, and that fools Isaac into giving him the blessing.

Tonight's gospel for St. James is also about brothers and their relationship to their ambitious mother. Mrs. Zebedee is quite proud of her boys, so she goes to Jesus and says she has something she wants to ask him. When Jesus asks what it is, she replies, "I want you to let my sons have the best seats in your kingdom."

She quite obviously thinks that Jesus is going to proclaim himself a political and military leader. She wants her boys to have the most prominent jobs in the new administration.

Jesus asks John and James, "You don't know what you are asking for. Are you willing to go through what I am going to go through—suffering and death?" They reply, "Sure we are." Jesus says, "It is a good thing that you are willing to go through it, because you are going to have to go through it. But I cannot promise you the best places in the kingdom—seating arrangements are up to my Father."

The other ten disciples resent what John and James are doing. It was bad enough to try to get the best positions ahead of time, but it was an even lower blow to get their mother to intercede with Jesus for them.

But Jesus tells them that rank and position and status and being able to lord it over other people are what go on in the secular world. The disciples and the church are not supposed to work that way. If you want to be great in the Christian movement, you get there by taking care of other people. If you want to be the most important, you accomplish it by serving.

That is because Jesus who is, after all, God himself, did not come to earth to lord it over people but to serve them and to take care of them and to die for them.

We learn in tonight's epistle that St. James was the first of the apostles to be martyred. He dies under King Herod in about 44 A.D. Many legends and stories have connected St. James to Spain—both suggesting that he preached there and that his relics were taken there. Both ideas seem to rest upon rather shaky historical foundations, but the shrine of St. James at Campostelo remains one of the chief places of Christian pilgrimage in Europe.

So we are grateful to St. James for his place among the disciples, for the Old Testament resonance of his name, for his conniving with his brother and mother which brings forth one of Jesus' primary teachings about his own mission, and finally, for his martyrdom--in which he did indeed drink of Christ's cup of woe and was baptized with the baptism of blood with which Jesus himself was baptized. For, "The son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many." Who follows in their train?

July 23, 2000 Trinity V

This morning's gospel lesson is set near the beginning of Jesus' public ministry. As St. Luke tells the story, after the devil tempted him, Jesus went back to his home territory of Galilee and to his home synagogue in Nazareth. He was invited to be the lay reader that day, and he was given the scroll of the prophet Isaiah.

The reading for the day was a well-known passage about what the Messiah would do when he finally came to earth. It begins, "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek." Jesus concludes his reading, rolls up the scroll, and announces to the congregation, "I am the man Isaiah was talking about. This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears."

The congregation is impressed with his reading ability and his eloquence, but they don't buy his conclusion., They start whispering among themselves, "Isn't that the son of Joseph the carpenter? We saw him growing up in Saturday school. Who does he think he is saying he's the Messiah?"

Jesus tells them that a prophet is never taken seriously in his own neighborhood or by people who knew him before. That antagonizes his former friends all the more, so they drag him out of town and try to throw him off a cliff, but he gets away.

Jesus has a little better luck in the towns in Galilee into which he goes next. He is able to cast out some evil spirits and to perform some healings. The implicit message is that people who are receptive to what Jesus has to offer are more likely to benefit from his presence.

His early ministry reaches its climax in today's story. Jesus is standing alongside the Sea of Galilee when he sees two fishing boats on the beach. The fishermen are cleaning off their nets. Jesus addresses Simon—whom he is later to nickname Peter.

He has met Simon Peter already. Peter invited him to his house for lunch after synagogue services on the previous Saturday. When they got to Peter's house, they found that his mother-in-law was sick—these were obviously days when the pope was allowed to be married. Jesus healed the woman, and she got up and made lunch.

So Peter had reason to know that Jesus was concerned with practical and material things, and that he was willing to apply God's power to them. Jesus says to Peter, "Why don't you launch your boat back out onto the water, let your nets down, and catch some fish?" Peter—always the hard-headed one—says, "We've been out all night, and we haven't caught a thing—but if you say so, we'll do it."

Peter and his partners James and John are astonished at the number of fish they catch—so much so that Peter says to Jesus, "Go away from me, I am a sinful man." Jesus replies, quite calmly, "Don't get so excited. From now on you are going to be catching men." And Peter and James and John followed him from that time on.

One obvious lesson from this story is that we are supposed to trust Jesus and be willing to take the risk of obeying him and launching out in faith to do what we suspect he wants us to do. I had a meeting with our congregation in Charlottesville earlier this week. They have been having some difficulty deciding what they ought to do in terms of buying land and hoping to build a church. I told them to pay attention to today's gospel. Jesus asks us to take a chance and trust him. He never lets us down.

Most of us don't like to take risks—even if they are risks Jesus says he will support—which means they are not really risks. Another story from the gospels which makes a similar point concerns the rich young man who comes to Jesus and asks him, "What do I have to do to go to heaven?"

Jesus tells him, "Keep the commandments." The man replies, "I've already done that." Jesus replies, "Then there is one more thing you have to do—sell everything you have and give the proceeds to the poor." The man walks away.

The shallow and ignorant interpretation of that story is, "Jesus tells us to give away everything we have to the poor. That is obviously absurd. Therefore we have to be suspicious of anything Jesus the unrealistic dreamer tells us."

What the story is really about is the fact that even if we say we want to get saved and go to heaven, and even if we get baptized and confirmed and come to church, we never really put forward a complete and wholehearted commitment. There are always at least a couple of sins which we don't want to get rid of. There is always some point of commitment—attending church without fail, tithing, regular prayer and Bible reading--on which we hold back.

It was surely ludicrous for the young man to claim that he had kept all the commandments, but Jesus was really saying to him, "You say you'll do anything to get into heaven? I'll bet I can tell you something you won't do—I'll bet you won't give all your riches away."

We are not particularly inclined to take risks for God. We don't much want to have our normal patterns challenged or changed. But Jesus calls us out of our complacency into obedience and commitment. The Lord has anointed him to preach good news unto us meek ones. So let us launch out into the deep, and let down our nets for a draught.

July 16, 2000 Trinity IV

Today's gospel comes from a section of St. Luke's gospel which sounds very much like the Sermon on the Mount in St. Matthew. Jesus is giving a series of recommendations about how to live—proverbs of a sort. In this morning's passage he is addressing the issue, "How should we treat other people?"

Now we know that Jesus' basic instruction on how to treat other people, is "Love your neighbor as yourself." To love in the Christian sense is to act for the good of the other person without calculating the impact that sort of activity will have on you. The supreme example of love is what Jesus did on the cross. He got nothing out of his suffering and death, but we got our sins forgiven and the promise of eternal life in heaven with God.,

What Jesus has to say to us today spells out what love is a bit more specifically. First of all, he says that God will treat you the same way you treat other people. God will hold you to the same moral standard to which you hold others.

If you are critical of the details of another person's behavior, God will be critical of the details of your behavior. If you let other people's behavior get you so angry that you want to write them off and condemn them to hell, you run the risk of God's doing the same thing to you.

Does that mean we should have no standards at all as to what constitutes acceptable behavior? Of course not. If God wanted us to apply no standards at all to our own behavior or to the behavior of others, he would surely not have bothered to give us the Ten Commandments—or the commandment to love, for that matter.

Jesus is concerned about the spirit in which one applies the standards and draws one's conclusions. God applies his standards to our behavior, but he doesn't do it either to make himself feel good at our expense or to have a good reason to send us to hell.

God applies his standards to our behavior to get us to see where we have gone wrong and to give us the opportunity to admit our sins, say we are sorry, and then with his help do better. That is what Jesus means by the words, "Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful."

Mercy does not mean calling wrong right or overlooking bad behavior. God wants to bring us to judgment about our bad behavior so we can turn away from it and be saved. We like to use another person's bad behavior not as an opportunity to bring him to repentance and salvation but as a way of making ourselves feel good by comparison. That is not how God acts, and it is not the way he wants us to act.

Jesus says we will give as we get. If we have truly experienced God's mercy, we shall want to extend the same mercy to other people. If we regard God primarily as the enforcer of impossible rules, we shall have the same attitude toward others.

Then Jesus throws in a brief parable which he directs toward the self-righteous teachers of the Jewish law. He suggests that they are blind, because they know nothing of God's mercy. They think they are perfect and have nothing of which they need to be forgiven.

If you don't know mercy, you cannot show mercy. So when they try to teach others, they are like blind people who are trying to lead other blind people around. Both the teachers and those whom they are trying to teach will wind up falling into the ditch.

Jesus concludes with another related and pointed lesson about our behavior toward other people. He is saying quite clearly that we are most inclined to condemn in other people the faults we cannot face in ourselves. That is why it is a good idea to look at people who are especially vehement against particular sins and ask if it is possible that this is a sin with which they cannot come to terms in their own lives.

Jesus says that that particular kind of judgmental behavior is like looking for a speck of dust in another person's eye while you ignore the log in your own eye. If we feel ourselves being drawn to condemn some aspect of another person's behavior, we should first look within ourselves for evidence of the same behavior.

If we can see what it is that we are doing wrong ourselves and then do something to correct it, then we can look at the other person's behavior to try to help him correct it. That is far better than our natural inclination to attack, him, condemn him, and go away satisfied that we look pretty good compared to him.

In between being saved and going to heaven we still have to go through this life on earth. Jesus is trying to get us to see that it is better to use that time taking a hard look at ourselves than it is to spend all of our time taking a hard look at others.

Our goal should be to repent of our own sins and help other people repent of theirs—not always to be on the lookout for reasons to fell morally superior. God is the most morally superior being there is, and he isn't interested in making himself look good at the expense of others. So, "Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful."

July 9, 2000 Trinity III

Our lessons this morning give us two very different pictures of God. In the epistle, St. Peter tells us that God is mighty and even stronger than a lion. In the gospel, Jesus tells us that God is the sort of person who, rather tenderly, goes about looking for lost things.

St. Peter is trying to encourage Christians to be humble, though he knows that humility is not everybody's favorite virtue. He tries to sell humility on a pragmatic and practical basis. God can't do too much for proud people, but he helps out humble people. That suggests that it is a better idea to be humble.

That is not just because humility is intrinsically more becoming than pride. The very character of pride makes it impossible for a proud person to look for help from any source—let alone God. St. Peter tells us to humble ourselves under the mighty hand of God, and then, when the time is right, God will raise us up—far beyond the extremes of our own pride.

St. Peter describes the devil as a lion who is wandering around looking for people to eat up. I have often made the point that dogs are very negative figures in the Bible, wheras Jesus himself is a cat—the lion of the tribe of Judah. So, on the basis of what St. Peter says, I cannot claim that cats are uniformly positive in the New Testament. "Your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about seeking whom he may devour."

If we are faithful to God, and if we discipline ourselves to rely upon God's help, then we will be able to resist the devil when he tries to draw us away from God and what God wants us to do. Even if we have to suffer for awhile, God will work it all out for us in the end, and we will be stable and settled—something to be looked forward to.

The gospel gives us the two parables which come just before the parable of the prodigal son, which we shall hear later on in the summer. All three parables share the common theme of loss and recovery.

Jesus tells the three parables to the self-righteous Pharisees. They see that Jesus is having dinner with tax collectors and other low-life types, and they murmur against him. They whisper, "This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them."

Jesus offers the parable as a way of explaining why he chooses the dinner companions he does. His overall point is that he has come to earth not to congratulate people who think they are righteous, but to look for people who know they are not righteous and who may be willing to make a change. He won't find such people among the Pharisees, who are sure they are just fine. He is far more likely to find them among public disgraces.

The first parable is about a shepherd. Jesus does not just tell the parable as a story. Instread, he puts it in the form of a question to the Pharisees. Instead of saying, "There once was a shepherd," Jesus says, "If any of you were a shepherd, wouldn't you act this way?" That technique sticks the knife in a bit more deeply, of course.

The idea is if one were a shepherd tending a hundred sheep and one of them got lost, wouldn't one let the ninety-nine sit while one went off to look for the lost one? And then wouldn't he bring the lost one back across his shoulders with great joy and then wouldn't he call all of his friends together and say, "Let's be happy and celebrate. I found my lost sheep"?

Then Jesus says that any woman who owned ten silver coins and mislaid one of them would light a candle and sweep the house and look around as diligently as she could until she found it. And then, just like the shepherd with the lost sheep, she would call all of her friends together to celebrate the discovery of what had been lost.

To tie both of these parables together, Jesus concludes, "Likewise, I say unto you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth." If people get that happy over finding a lost sheep or a lost coin, how much happier will God and the angels be when they find a lost human being?

Taken together, the two lessons raise an issue which is near to the heart of what the New Testament is all about. We can imagine that Christianity is about showing off how virtouous we are and being very proud of our own spiritual accomplishments. On the other hand, we can fremind ourselves that God has come to earth to look for each one of us. And he looks for us not because we are good, but despite the fact that we are not good. If we will admit we are not good, he will take us to himself and love us and be delighted that he has found us at last.

The Pharisees thought that God was mainly a rule-maker and a rule- enforcer. If you deviated from the rules, you were in big trouble. Jesus was trying to get them to have a bigger and deeper vision of God. He wanted them to know that God is not somebody who just makes up arbitrary rules and then crushes you when you cannot follow them. God is the sort of person who wants to save everyone and who will go looking for them until he can find them and bring them home.

We are about to be invited to dine with Jesus at the altar. The question he asks before you come to his table is not, "Are you good enough?" but, instead, "Do you truly and earnestly repent of your sins?" There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth."

The Collect: O LORD, who never failest to help and govern those whom thou dost bring up in thy stedfast fear and love; Keep us, we beseech thee, under the protection of thy good providence, and make us to have a perpetual fear and love of thy holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle. 1 St. John 3: 13-24

The Gospel. St. Luke 14: 16-24

July 2, 2000, Trinity II

Several weeks ago I had lunch with the friend of one of our parishioners. The man is a member of a traditionalist Anglican church, so we had the predictable number of mutual acquaintances and friends to talk about to keep the conversation chugging along.

At one point, the dangerous word "heaven" came up. Our friend said, "Well, I'm not sure if I am going to heaven or not." I replied, somewhat incredulously, "How can you possibly say such a thing -- you are baptized, and confirmed, and a regular communicant, and you may even be sorry for your sins -- why don't you think you are going to go to heaven?"

He shot back, "Well, maybe it's more a matter of the fact that I am not sure I want to go to heaven." Fool that I am, I asked, "Why don't you want to go to heaven?" He said, "I just don't like clouds very much, and I've never been interested much in learning how to play the harp."

I was beginning to realize that this defender of the faith was getting his theological ideas more from the "New Yorker" than from the New Testament. So I said, "If you don't like clouds and harps, what would you think of an endless wedding reception that would be the biggest feast you had ever seen?" He said, "That sounds a little better, but where would you have got such a weird idea?"

From today's gospel, among other places. One of the most consistent ideas in Jesus' parables is that heaven is going to be a great supper or a wedding banquet. That idea reaches its fruition in the Book of Revelation, where the Lamb of God invites people to his own wedding feast.

At any rate, I would agree with my friend that if the choice is between an endless banquet and an endless harp concert, I'll take the banquet. But the main issue in today's parable is not what heaven is going to be like, but, rather, how one gets to heaven in the first place.

The clearest message of the parable is that going to heaven is like being invited to a party. Once you are invited, you can say "Yes," or you can say, "No," or you can say, "I can't make my mind up yet, please give me some more time to think about it."

In the parable, when the invited guests learn that it is time to come to the supper, they all cook up excuses to explain why they cannot come just then. One has brought a new piece of property he wants to go and look at; a second says that he has to test drive some new oxen he has just bought; and a third says, "How can you expect me to come to some crazy party -- I just got married.'

The host of the banquet is angry when he hears about the excuses so he tells his servant to bring in all the sorts of people a respectable person might never invite to a party -- poor people, crippled people, and blind people.

There is still room after all of them have arrived, so the host tells the servant to go out and ask everybody he can find to come, up to the point where the house is filled up. He ends with the chilling words, "I say unto you that none of those men which were bidden shall taste of my supper."

The fact is that most of us live most of our lives more or less in the excuse-making mode. Baptism is a time of definite commitment -- but we can push that off onto our well-meaning parents and other relatives. At Confirmation, the bishop asks us, quite definitively, "Do you promise to follow Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour?" We know our scripted response is, "I do," but we may not really understand what that means, and we were just teenagers then after all.

We travel through life, even if we are fairly serious churchgoers, excusing ourselves from one or another aspect of full commitment -- I don't need to pray every day, there are some times when there are things that are more important on Sunday mornings than church, Bible reading can be taken too far, God understands why I can't keep his moral laws.

But the truth is that God is calling us to a complete commitment, and he is calling us to it right here and right now. He is inviting us to a big party. The party begins here on earth as we grow more deeply committed to him and to enjoying the fruits of his love for us. The party continues on through death and the grave, because nothing can separate us from the love of Christ. The party reaches its fulfillment and consummation in heaven where Jesus marries us, his Church.

All we need to do is RSVP, "Yes,"--I'm coming, I want to be there now, I want to continue to be there throughout the rest of my life, and I want to be there on into eternity. God does not want to slam the door in anyone's face -- not in the face of the Jews who rejected Jesus when he came to earth, not in our faces even after we have grieved him with our selfishness and our disobedience.

Soon you will hear the words, "Ye who do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins... draw near with faith." Today, think to yourself, "I am making a real commitment here --not just going though familiar motions." And remember what Jesus says to wishy-washy excuse-makers. "I wish you were either hot or cold. Because you are lukewarm, I am going to spew you out of my mouth."

The Collect:O LORD, who never failest to help and govern those whom thou dost bring up in thy stedfast fear and love; Keep us, we beseech thee, under the protection of thy good providence, and make us to have a perpetual fear and love of thy holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.