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Trinitytide Sermons, 2000
The Most Rev. John T. Cahoon, Jr. |
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Trinitytide Sermons, 2000
The Most Rev. John T. Cahoon, Jr. |
This is the last Sunday of the Christian year. We have one more highlight coming with St. Andrew's Day on Thursday, and then we start a new church year next week with the First Sunday in Advent. The season of Advent is all about the coming of the Messiah of Israel, and today's lessons give us some idea of what the Messiah is going to do when he finally comes.
The prophet Jeremiah preached mostly during the seventh century before Christ, the 600s B.C. Israel split in two after the death of King Solomon, about 350 years before Jeremiah. The northern kingdom, called Israel, was conquered by the Assyrians in 722 B.C. Jeremiah lived in the southern kingdom, which was called Judah.
Judah was more or less under the control of the Babylonians, the empire which succeeded Assyria as the major power in the Middle East. Jeremiah said that Judah was doomed to destruction because her kings refused to obey God, and they refused to conduct their foreign policy as God wanted them to do.
Interspersed among Jeremiah's unpleasant predictions were various rays of hope for the future. They suggested that even though Judah's bad behavior was going to bring God's wrath down upon them in the short run, the prospects for the long run remained positive. The people of Israel and Judah were still God's chosen people, and he still wanted what was best for them.
Today's lesson is one such ray of hope. God speaks through Jeremiah and says that someday be is going to send his people a good king. The king when Jeremiah preached what we heard today was a puppet of Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon. The king of Judah's name was "Zedekiah," which means "God is righteousness". Jeremiah promises a king whose name will be "The Lord our Righteousness," but this time the name will be accurate rather than ironic.
The coming king is going to be a descendant of King David -- a righteous branch of David's family tree. Jeremiah prophesies a successful reign for him, during which he will enforce judgment and justice, and both Israel and Judah will be safe -- safe, presumably, from the foreign aggressors who had caused both nations so much trouble.
Then Jeremiah makes the startling prediction that the righteous branch from David is going to do something so great that he will make the chosen people revise their whole idea of who God is. Up to this point if anyone in Israel were asked who their god was, he would have replied, "Our God is the one who brought us out of Egypt in the Exodus."
The Old Testament always describes God in terms of what he has done or what he is doing in Israel's history. Hebrew Biblical thought does not conceive of God as an abstraction or a theoretical philosophical principle. God is not love, or justice, or even goodness. God is the one who acts in history. The most significant thing God ever did in history was to get his people out of their slavery in Egypt, around 1400 B.C.
Jeremiah says that what the coming king -- the Messiah -- is going to do will be so great that he will make people forget about the Exodus from Egypt -- or, at the very best, regard it as one of God's lesser feats. The coming king is going to bring all of God's chosen people back together from all of the places war and other turmoil in the holy land have driven them, and he is going to have all the people live together again in their own land.
As Christians, we know that the king Jeremiah was talking about is Jesus -- a descendant of David who expands the membership of the chosen people to include Gentiles. The safe place where all God's people will live together some day is the ultimate promised land, heaven.
So on the basis of today's prophecy, Israel knew that the Messiah was going to be a collector -- a gatherer-up -- one who would put fragments together and bring scattered people back into one place.
At the end of the feeding of the five thousand, which is the miracle today's gospel lesson describes, St. John tells us that Jesus told the disciples, "Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost." The disciples picked up twelve baskets of leftover bread. Twelve is the mystical number of the chosen people, because Israel had twelve tribes.
So the people who saw the miracle did not only see the remarkable feat of feeding lots of people with only a little food. They also saw in the cleanup an indication that Jesus the miracle worker was the one Jeremiah had talked about -- the one of whom the chosen people will say, "The Lord liveth, which brought up and which led the seed of the house of Israel out of the north country, and from all countries whither (God) had driven them, and they shall dwell in their own land."
So Jeremiah turns out to be talking about Jesus and about what Jesus is going to do for us at the end of time when he takes us to heaven to be with him forever. And so we cry, "O come, o come, Emmanuel; come again, o Jesus, the righteous branch of David, the Lord our righteousness."
The Collect: Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may by thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Jeremiah 23: 5 - 8
The Gospel: St. John 6: 5 - 14
Giving thanks may be the most basic religious impulse there is. The old joke goes that an atheist has his greatest moment of doubt when something nice happens to him, and he finds that he has nobody to thank for it. The life of Israel was full of rituals of giving thanks -- usually, as befits an agricultural society, rituals like ours tonight in which people give thanks to God for providing them with food.
The New Testament suggests that thanksgiving is best understood as an attitude -- an attitude which should pervade our every waking moment and which should be the lens through which we look at everything that happens in our lives.
One element that informs this attitude comes from tonight's epistle. St. James tells us that every good and perfect gift we have comes down to us from our father in the heavens -- the one who made the stars, the one who never changes. It is not hard to extrapolate from that idea the further idea that we can understand everything that happens to us in terms of God and of his purposes for our life. Nothing happens that God does not either cause or permit. To begin to understand what he is up to, you have to thank him.
A second element of the thanksgiving attitude is what Jesus provides in the Sermon on the Mount -- tonight's gospel. That is the idea that what it means to call God "Our Father" is that we can rely on him to give us everything we need materially and to make things happen that are good for us in other ways. We can trust the process of what goes on in our lives. God is in charge of the process. God is good. He is our father and he loves us. Everything that happens reveals that that is so.
The only way we ever discover what God is doing in our day to day lives is to begin by assuming that he is behind it all in some way. To thank him for it does not mean to cultivate an attitude of denial or of acute Pollyanna-ism. Such an attitude can lead us to think that we have to pretend to be in raptures about cancer and lawsuits and deadlocked elections.
If we can look something in the eye -- especially something which appears at first to be bad or evil even just random -- and if we can thank God for it, then we can begin to discern why he might have caused or allowed it to happen. If he is truly a father, then he wants us to grow up. Growing up involves accepting that he is in charge. Accepting that he is in charge means that we give thanks before we lapse into self-pity and despair.
St. Paul assures us in Romans that if we are thankful, and if we move in the direction of trying to understand what is going on in terms of God, then we will become rooted in two absolutely central facts. The first one is that nothing can separate us from the love of God which is in Jesus Christ our Lord. Nothing -- no matter how bad or confusing it may seem.
And the second fact is that everything that happens works together for the good for people who love God and trust him. Everything -- even the things that at first look bad or puzzling at best.
God wants us all to be saved. God wants us all to grow up. God wants us to rely on him. He can make everything that happens contribute to the working out of all those things he wants for us. We need to say, no matter what happens, "Thank you God. Please help me see what this is all about."
So "praise the Lord, for it is a good thing to sing praises unto our God; yea, a joyful and pleasant thing it is to be thankful."
The Collect: O Most merciful Father, who hast blessed the labours of the husbandman in the returns ofthe fruits of the earth; We give thee humble and hearty thanks for this thy bounty; beseeching thee to continue thy loving-kindness to us. that our land may still yeild her increase, to thy glory and our comfort; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: St. James 1: 16 - 25
The Gospel: St. Matthew 6: 25 - 34
It seems appropriate that the epistle we read this morning goes so well with yesterday's observance of Veterans' Day-or Armistice Day, as I think I first learned to call it. St. Paul wrote his letter to the church at Ephesus from prison in Rome. We aren't exactly sure what his imprisonment was like. It doesn't seem to have been in a dark solitary dungeon, because he was able to meet with people arid, quite obviously, write letters.
It may well have been a sort of house arrest where he was not allowed to move around outside freely, but where he had a certain amount of mobility within a defined area. He was probably guarded by at least one Roman soldier.
In today's reading, St. Paul is trying to warn the Ephesians that they are locked in a battle with the devil. It is quite possible that as he was meditating on that fact he looked at his guard. What resulted is a list of similarities between the offensive and defensive weapons of a solider and the offensive and defensive weapons of a Christian.
St. Paul's experience of spiritual warfare had to do in part with the resistance to his message he had encountered in his travels. He would go into a town, and he would preach in the Jewish synagogue to see if he could get any Jews to accept Jesus as the Messiah of Israel. After awhile the Jews would toss him out, and he would preach to the converted and to possible Gentile converts in another house or school.
St. Paul was continually being arrested, sometimes imprisoned, sometimes flogged, shipwrecked, and vulnerable to robbers along the road. On top of all of that, he was also responsible for a network of congregations that stretched all over the Mediterranean world. He was their bishop, and his letters show that he had plenty of trouble dealing with them. They added what we might call "friendly fire" to his other burdens.
St. Paul believed that the devil did not want him to get his message across, and that the devil exploited all of these various difficult situations to try to wear St. Paul down and keep him from spreading the gospel and setting up churches. It is very clear that St. Paul did not place the ultimate blame for his difficulties upon the people who resisted him.
He says, "We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." means, "Our real enemies are not other people. Our real enemies are demons and the devil himself. The problem with other people is that they let the devil use them - whether they know it or not."
Dealing with the devil requires weaponry. No human being is strong enough on his own to resist the devil or to fight successfully against the devil. As protection from the devil we need to be grounded in truth and righteousness and be convinced about the gospel. One of the reasons to pray every day and get together in church every week is to remind us what the simple truth of the gospel is: that Jesus Christ died to forgive our sins and to reconcile us to God.
The devil doesn't want us to dwell on that. He wants us to believe that we are dead in our sins, and that God is really mad at us, and that there is no possible way that he will ever forgive us or reconcile us or give us any peace. When the devil plays on our guilty consciences, we need to fend him off with the shield of faith-the confidence we have that what God has promised us in Christ is real and true.
Our thoughts are especially susceptible to the devil's clever mind games. They need the protection of a helmet -- in this case, the helmet of salvation. Salvation is a healthy relationship to God. The devil wants us to think we are too bad ever to earn such a relationship. St. Paul wants to remind us that we have that relationship already -- and that we have had it ever since Jesus gave it to us at 3:00 on Good Friday afternoon.
Whenever we see apostles depicted in art, we can tell which one St. Paul is by looking for a sword. The sword is the sword of the Spirit which he talks about here. The sword of the Spirit is the word of God. The word of God in its fullest sense is Jesus himself. The word of God in a more narrow sense is the Bible.
Like a sword, the Bible is both for protection and for attack. The Bible tells us the truth about ourselves and God, and being rooted in those truths gives us protection against the devil. But the Bible also shows us who the devil is and how he acts against us and how we can drive him away.
The main means of driving the devil away is prayer. Prayer is attaching oneself to God cultivating the relationship of child to father which is one of Jesus' greatest gifts to us. Prayer can take the form of words we exchange with our heavenly father on any conceivable subject that concerns us. Prayer can take the form of merely remembering constantly that we are in his presence. I think we probably need to talk more directly about prayer here than we do now.
"We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities... against powers... Wherefore take unto you the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand."
The Collect: Grant, we beseech thee, merciful Lord, to thy faithful people pardon and peace, that they may be cleansed from all their sins, and serve thee with a quiet mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Ephesians 6: 10 - 20
The Gospel: St. John 4: 46 - 54
All Saints' Day is one of the most important feasts in the Prayer Book calendar. We can tell that is so, because All Saints' Day has an octave. That means we don't celebrate only on one day, but for eight days - a week counting both ends, November 1 through November 8. During the octave we use the collect for All Saints' Day which we heard a moment ago, and the proper preface for All Saints, which will come up in the service a bit later on.
One of the fundamental points of All Saints' is to remind us that Christianity is a social religion. There is no such thing as a solitary Christian. The relationship to God that Christianity offers is never just "Me and Jesus" or even "Me and the television and Jesus." To be a Christian means to be part of a social organism, a member of a group.
The New Testament makes it clear that a Christian is a member of a church, someone who participates actively in the life of the church. Jesus says we cannot go to heaven unless we eat his flesh and drink his blood. How can you do that without involving other people?
Both Jesus and St. Paul say that one has to acknowledge one's faith in Christ in front of other people to be a credible Christian. Almost all of the moral teachings in the New Testament involve one's relationships to other people.
The Old Testament is not about the relationships between individual human beings and God. It is about God and his chosen people - a nation - Israel. The New Testament is no different. It is about the relationship between God and the New Israel, which is the Holy Catholic Church.
All Saints' wants to teach us that every Christian always and everywhere is tied together by the Holy Ghost. From God's viewpoint, which is the viewpoint we need to try to adopt as our own, we are just as close to St. Peter and to St. Augustine and to St. Francis and to Archbishop Cramner and to George Washington and to Pope John XXIII as we are to the person sitting next to us in the pew.
The All Saints' collect reminds us that God has knit us all together into one community and one fellowship, which is the mystical Body of Jesus Christ himself. We are not alone. We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses who are cheering us on as we try to make it to the finish life of the race of life which God has set before us.
Today's gospel gives us a picture of heaven. Again, heaven is not a place where we shall enjoy an individualized relationship to God. Heaven is a group experience. Jesus paints the picture of a wedding feast to which anyone who wants to come can have an invitation. The guests are a motley crew, including both bad people and good people - just as in real life, just as in the church.
There is one man at the banquet who is not dressed properly, and when he cannot explain himself, the host commands that he be tied hand and foot and tossed out into a darkened alley. We are not supposed to conclude either that God just zaps people at random or that there is one way of dressing that makes God so angry that he'll send you to hell for it.
The man who is not dressed properly is not fully committed. He has not really accepted God's invitation. He wants to come to the party on his own terms. He is like someone who wears a sweatshirt to a wedding to show that he is his own man, and that he will not be bound by boring social conventions.
God knows what our real motives are. He is the one unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid, after all. God wants us to be part of the church and to take our place as saints because we love him and we respond to his love for us. There just is no other good reason. Hell is having your own way forever.
I think that one very good way to observe All Saints' is to think about the particular people who have helped you along your Christian path. We say that the saints -- which means, again, all Christians -- are examples to us. Examples can be good or bad. We often learn more from bad examples than we do from good ones.
But take some time between today and Wednesday to think about who has helped you along. Those are the particular saints for whom you should give thanks. They are the special manifestations of the reality of the communion of saints in your own life.
My mother took me to church and made me into the kind of rock-ribbed Episcopalian she was. I'm grateful for my father, who never tried to stop her. My godfather was an example of great wit and passionate self-destructiveness and then a kind of redemption. My Presbyterian godmother was as honest and kind and long-suffering as a human being can be.
C. S. Lewis helped me understand what the Christian religion really teaches. St. Anthony the Great and the Russian pilgrim made me pray. My basically atheist New Testament professor in seminary kindled my enduring love of St. Paul. And on and on it goes.
The communion of saints is not just another moldy church doctrine. It speaks about the reality of God -- that he brings people together in the church so we can rub up against each other and in the process approach his kingdom. The saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one too.
The Collect: O Almighty and most merciful God, of thy bountiful goodness keep us, we beseech thee, from all things that may hurt us; that we, being ready both in body and soul, may cheerfully accomplish those things which thou commandest; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Ephesians 5:15-21
The Gospel: St. Matthew 22:1 - 14
This morning's gospel describes, in a first century setting, things that go on here every Sunday morning. People get their sins forgiven. People receive physical healings. One of the purposes of today's story is to show that Jesus is God. He has the power to forgive sins. He proves his power to forgive sins by making a paralyzed man get up and walk.
Jesus passed the same powers to the church through her ministry of bishops, priests, and deacons. He told the original apostles, "When the Holy Ghost has come to you, you will do even greater works than I have done." On Easter night he gave the apostles the explicit power to forgive sins, saying, "Whose sins you forgive are forgiven; whose sins you retain are retained."
That is one of the reasons we guard the propriety of the apostolic succession of our bishops and other clergy so jealously. We want to be sure the powers and the gifts that Jesus gave the original apostles and that they passed to their successors continue to be available to us in the same way two thousand years later.
By purporting to ordain women as bishops and priests and by tolerating bishops who deny the bodily resurrection of Christ, the Episcopal Church and the rest of official Anglicanism broke the apostolic succession. That is why we are here and not there. We know we still have the gifts and the valid sacraments. No one can be sure that they still do.
I am second to none in my desire for valid sacraments and unbroken apostolic succession in the church. But we must not allow those things to be the only evidence of our Christianity. St. Paul attacks those who "have a form of godliness, but deny the power thereof."
He writes in today's epistle about the fruits of the Christian life. St. Paul is also in favor of valid sacraments and apostolic succession, but he wants to tell us what a life based on those things should look like.
Here in his letter to the Ephesians, just as in many other places in his writings, St. Paul suggests that there are two basic ways in which one can live one's life. One choice is to focus yourself on trying to do what you think God wants you to do. The other choice is to ignore any consideration of God at all, and just do what you please.
He contrasts the two choices in rather extravagant terms in today's reading. He says people who ignore God are ignorant, blind, and vain. They are the prisoners of their own fleshly desires, and that makes them "work all uncleanness with greediness." All that may sound like great fun, but St. Paul suggests it is a losing strategy for the long haul.
Christians, in contrast, have been changed by their encounter with Jesus in the sacraments and in God's word. They have stopped being the completely self-centered people they were, and they have turned themselves toward trying to act as God wants them to act.
Christians should not lie, because we are all connected, and hurting someone to whom you are connected is hurting yourself. St. Paul counsels against unrighteous anger and says you should not go to sleep angry, because that allows the devil to work overtime. Christians should not be thieves or live off other people. Instead they should work honestly so they can help people who cannot work.
He cautions against what he calls "corrupt communication." Corrupt communication has only the purpose of tearing other people down. St. Paul says the only things one should say to and about other people are things that will build them up.
Then, rather touchingly, he says we should not make the Holy Ghost sad. I like the idea of attributing emotions to the Holy Ghost. We are inclined mostly to think of him as an impersonal force who is either beyond, or not quite up to, having human emotions.
We make the Holy Ghost sad when we lapse into bitterness, and wrath and anger and clamor and evil speaking and malice. The way to keep the Holy Ghost happy is to be kind and tender-hearted toward one another—that is, be loving—always putting the good of the other person ahead of your own selfish advantage.
The most important matter is to be forgiving. If you know how much God has forgiven you because of what Jesus Christ did for you, you will be less likely to hold against other people the relatively fewer grave things they have done to you. And today's gospel reminds us that forgiveness leads to healing.
So we want indeed to preserve our valid sacraments and our apostolic succession of ministry. But those things, important as they are, are means to an end, not ends in themselves. The end is to make us into Christ—to get us more and more every day to think and act and talk as Jesus would.
We can never get all the way there in this world. But if we allow the Holy Ghost to act upon us through the Bible and the sacraments and our life together in the church we shall become more and more what Jesus is.
As St. Paul writes a bit earlier in Ephesians, we shall see that the end of the world will be when "We all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ."
The Collect: O God, forasmuch as without thee we are not able to please thee; Mercifully grant that thy Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Ephesians 4:17-32
The Gospel: St. Matthew 9:1- 8
Jesus' enemies decide to kill him largely because they cannot beat him in debate. The debates Jesus has with his enemies are not about health care or abortion or the size of government, but they do result in capital punishment—his crucifixion.
Today's gospel lesson comes from St. Matthew's account of the last week of Jesus' life—what we might call the first Holy Week. Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey on Sunday, that proclaimed that he was the rightful king of Israel, and the crowd cheered him.
But as the week went on, Jesus did not act as the crowd thought a king should act. He did not raise an army to challenge the Roman occupying government. Instead, he did what he usually did when he came to Jerusalem. He went to the area around the temple and preached and taught and debated about the Bible.
As St. Matthew tells the story, during the week each of the three major groups within Judaism asked Jesus a question with which they hoped to trip him up. They were all questions to which any answer he might give could make him look bad.
The supporters of the puppet dynasty of the Herods asked him if it was proper to pay taxes to Caesar. If he said, "Yes," they could denounce him as a collaborator. If he said, "No," they could attack him for being a rebel. Then the highly rational Sadducees asked him a question which was intended to make Jesus' proclamation about the resurrection of the dead seem completely absurd.
Finally, as we see today, the Pharisees—law-abiders, rule-followers, and the group with which Jesus was most connected--came to him with a final question. Their question was, "Which is the greatest commandment in the Law?"
That sounds fairly innocent. The trick was that the rabbis taught that all of the commandments were important. The Law formed, as it were, a seamless garment. To take one commandment and set it above all the others would start a process of unraveling.
The issue was not which commandment Jesus would say was most important. It was that if he said any was greater than the others, he would be revealed as someone whose goal was to destroy religious tradition—not necessarily a helpful reputation for a holy man to have.
Jesus, for all intents and purposes, says, "There is not one greatest commandment, there are two." The two are—love God and love your neighbor as yourself. The entire Hebrew Bible—the law and the prophets—is summed up in that double commandment. The Pharisees, who realize that they have been outwitted yet again, make no response to what he says.
Having won all three skirmishes, Jesus now asks the Pharisees a question. "When the Messiah comes, from whom will he be descended?" They reply, correctly, "The Messiah will be descended from King David."
Then Jesus says, "Well, if that is true, that makes it difficult to explain the first verse of the 110th Psalm." Everyone agreed that Psalm 110 was about the coming Messiah—the Christ who would enter the world some day to save and rescue the Jews.
Verse one of Psalm 110 reads, "The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool." The person speaking is King David, who wrote the psalm. He is saying "The Lord"—that is to say, God the Father--"said to my Lord"—that is to say, the Messiah—"sit here next to me on my right, until I destroy your enemies."
The problem is that nobody ever calls someone in the family who is younger than he is his lord. By calling the Messiah his Lord, David implies that the Messiah is older than he is. But because David lived a thousand years before today's scene, and since it appeared that the Messiah had not yet come, the Messiah must, in fact, be younger than David.
Jesus wanted to know how the Pharisees dealt with the paradox that the psalm verse raised. How can the Messiah be both older than David and younger than David at the same time? Again the Pharisees are silent. St. Matthew reports, "And no man was able to answer him a word, neither durst any man from that day forth ask him any more questions."
In terms of the overall dramatic action of the story, this is the point at which the Pharisees decide that the only way to deal with Jesus is to kill him. They were the great debaters and Bible interpreters. He proved that he could beat them at their own game and humiliate them in front of the people whose respect they needed to have. The only way to shut him up was to have him done away with once and for all.
As far as the Bible interpretation goes, Jesus is not particularly trying to get them to believe that he is the Messiah himself. He knows that is a lost cause. He does want them to admit that their own Scriptures say that the Messiah is going to be more than just a descendant of David.
The only way the Messiah can be both older and younger than David is if he is God. He is older because he has been from before the beginning, and he is younger because he entered human history a millennium after King David lived. Jesus the Messiah is both God and man. That is why only he can reconcile us to God.
So "Hail to the Lord's anointed, great David's greater Son."
The Collect: Lord, we beseech thee, grant thy people grace to withstand the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil; and with pure hearts and minds to follow thee, the only God; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
The Epistle: I Corinthians 1:4 - 8
The Gospel: St. Matthew 22 : 34 - 46
Our Wednesday Bible classes have been working on two separate gospels this fall. The morning class is reading St. John, and the evening class is reading St. Luke. Even though those two gospels differ in many ways, they share, not surprisingly, some common themes. One of the themes they share is the question of what Saturday is all about.
The creation story in the book of Genesis tells us that God created the heavens and the earth in six days, and then on the seventh day he sat down and put his feet up. The Ten Commandments take that fact and turn it into a law.
The law reads "Remember that thou keep holy the Sabbath day." "Holy" means "separate." The law commands that nobody do any work on the seventh day of the week because, "In six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day; wherefore the Lord blessed the seventh day and hallowed it."
Notice that the commandment doesn't say anything at all about going to church or refraining from playing baseball or from buying scotch on the Sabbath. The fundamental purpose of the fourth commandment is to tell us to get some rest. The human machine will not work properly unless it takes at least one day in seven off.
Even God rested on the seventh day. People who pride themselves on being workaholics or who boast that they never take a vacation or a day off are mired in the same sort of mortal sin that thieves and killers and adulterers are.
By the time of Jesus' earthly ministry the people in Judaism who were obsessed with rule-following had turned the day of rest into a nightmare. The rabbis had concocted a list of 153 rules which spelled out what constituted breaking the Sabbath commandment. Instead of being a day to relax and enjoy the fruits of six days of work, Saturday became a day people spent being paranoid about breaking one of the rules.
That was not the sort of take on religion—and certainly not on the commandments—that Jesus approved of. One can read through the gospels and conclude that Jesus hid out for six days and only came out on Saturday to do his miracles so he could antagonize the scribes and the Pharisees and engage them in arguments about what the Sabbath day was all about.
In today's gospel a Pharisee has invited Jesus to his house for a Saturday meal. Probably not by coincidence there is a man there who is suffering from dropsy—edema—water retention.
Jesus senses that he has been set up, so he asks the lawyers and Pharisees, "Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath day?" They don't say anything back to him, both because they didn't want to give him any help and because the rabbinical tradition would have allowed one to answer the question either way.
Jesus heals the man, and then he exposes the hypocrisy of his enemies by saying, "If any of you had one of your prize animals fall into a ditch on a Saturday, you'd pull him out wouldn't you?" The implication is clear. If it is proper to help an animal on a Saturday (and Jesus surely thought it was), then why isn't it proper to heal a human being on a Saturday?
In another place Jesus says, "The Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath." Or, in other words, "I wrote the rules, and I will tell you how to apply them. Jesus places being helpful to other people ahead of any niggling regulations that might keep one from being helpful.
He attacks his law-abiding critics further as he watches them grabbing for the best seats at the dinner table. The best seats are the one closest to the host, rather than nearest the wine bottle or the TV remote control.
Jesus says, "It is bad strategy to try to get the best seat. When you go into a dining room (one, obviously, without place cards), take the least attractive seat. If you are supposed to have a better seat you will be asked to come up higher. That will be a public compliment to you, and you will also look humble in front of your fellow dinner guests.
If you are supposed to have a lower seat, you won't look silly for having taken one. But if you take a higher seat and then are asked to move down below the salt, you will be revealed to all who are watching as a pushy, but clumsy, self-seeker.
Jesus is not just being Mr. Manners. He is attacking the pretension of anyone—lawyer, Pharisee, self-righteous Christian, pious Anglican Catholic—anyone who thinks he has it made with God and can presume on God's good nature. Jesus reminds us that God loves us. But that does not mean we have some sort of special in with him that will protect us from tragedy or embarrassment.
We must remain humble before God—grateful to him for saving us and loving us but always mindful of the fact that we do not deserve any of the good things he showers upon us. If we can remain in an attitude of patient and humble receptivity before God, we will be more ready to receive all the good things he wants to give us.
For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted—and not only on Saturday.
The Collect: Lord, we pray thee that thy grace may always prevent and follow us, and make us continually to be given to all good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord.Amen
The Epistle: Ephesians 4: 1 - 21
The Gospel: St. Luke 14: 1- 11
In the closing minutes of last Sunday's 11:15 Bible Class someone asked me this: "Why do we bless animals?" That is a very sane and sensible question. After church this afternoon I hope to see many of you here with your pets in tow for this annual event. I think it is generally a bad idea for anything to go on in the church for which there is not at least some remotely coherent explanation. Let me try to give you one.
The Bible starts off with the story of how God made the heavens and the earth and everything that lives there. Unlike what any number of other religions in the world say, the Biblical tradition says that the chief God made the material world and that he said the material world is good.
Judaism and Christianity are not especially spiritual religions in that sense. We don't say that the ideal world where God is is a place that lies beyond the things we can grasp with our senses. We don't say that the material world is a mistake or some sort of illusion, and we don't say that it is a lower level of the universe put together by some sort of lesser god.
The kind of Christianity we offer here revolves around the Sacraments. The Sacraments are specific ways God gives us his help through ordinary material things—bread, wine, oil, water, other people's hands. The sacraments express a central Christian teaching, the doctrine of the Incarnation.
The Incarnation teaches us that in Jesus Christ, God became a human being—the word was made flesh—the spiritual became material—heaven became permanently connected to earth. The Sacraments extend the Incarnation of Jesus into time and space. So they help us to rejoice in the material creation. God put it here. God said it is good. God sent Jesus to be part of it for our sakes.
The Book of Genesis tells us that God put man in the Garden of Eden to take care of the material creation. God showed that Adam was in charge by giving him the power to name all of the animals. The power to name is the power to control.
People of good will can differ about regulations and rules and the overall sweep of policy on these matters, but it is wrong to claim that Genesis teaches that the material world is here for man to exploit and abuse as he pleases. The idea that we should protect and take care of creation is absolutely Biblical, and to do it is in our own best and most selfish interest.
Human beings are more important than animals. Jesus told us last week that we are of more value to God, for example, than the birds in the sky are. It is also a lie to assert that the Bible commands vegetarianism. Adam and Eve ate only plants, but after the Flood God gave Noah and his descendants the right to eat animals.
Animals are a significant part of creation. They are one of the most obvious ways through which God keeps his promises to give us food and drink and clothing. To bless animals is to remind ourselves that God made them, and that they are useful, and that they are pleasant and comforting, and that we should take care of them the way God takes care of us. God loves us not because we are lovable, but because we belong to him.
In this morning's gospel Jesus performs a resurrection miracle. He tells a dead man who is being carried out to his grave to sit up and come to life. We live and die in the material world. Our hope for the afterlife is not that our spirits will live on, but that our bodies will be raised up.
Jesus came back from the dead in flesh. He was not a disembodied spirit. He walked and talked and ate and drank. He promises us the same future. We are going to heaven in bodies. Jesus says heaven is a wedding banquet. How can you enjoy a wedding banquet if you don't have a body?
It may appear to be a major leap to go from resurrecting bodies to blessing hamsters, but the principle is the same. God shows himself to us in his material creation. Our life and our afterlife are in the material creation.
St. Paul writes, "Ever since God created the world, his invisible qualities, both his eternal power and his divine nature, have been clearly seen; they are perceived in the things that God has made." That echoes what King David writes, "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork."
To love one's pet is to begin to love God. And that is a completely proper way to start to come face to face with Jesus, who entered the material world to save us as the Lion of Judah and the Lamb of God.
The Collect: O Lord, we beseech thee, let thy continual pity cleanse and defend thy Church; and, because it cannot continue in safety without thy succour, preserve it evermore by thy help and goodness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Ephesians 3: 13 - 21
The Gospel: St. Luke 7:11- 19
This morning's gospel is a long section from the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus is making a series of points about what human existence is like and about how a person who claims to believe in God should conduct his life. The passage in the tradition of much of the wisdom writing in the Old Testament. Here Jesus sounds very much like the King Solomon who wrote the Book of Proverbs.
A moment ago we heard the commandments; "Thou shalt have none other gods but me," and "Thou shalt not worship any graven image." In practical terms, what your god is is the factor in your life upon which you base your decisions. The thing that most often determines what I think and what I say and what I do is my god.
What those first two commandments mean is that if you are claiming to be a believer, you should determine what you think and what you say and what you do by what you think the God of the Bible wants you to do. To use anything other than what you believe God's will is as the determining factor is to commit idolatry.
If we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that factors other than God's will often determine our behavior—things like the drive for power and control and the need for security and recognition and the welfare of our families. Those things are not necessarily bad in and of themselves, but putting any of them ahead of God's will leads to trouble.
Jesus observes that it is not possible to have two things be the most important—one of them is bound to win out. He says, "No man can serve two masters…ye cannot serve God and mammon." "Mammon" means "riches," and Jesus connects the desire for riches to the desire for material security.
Jesus is not saying that it is wrong to want material security. He is saying that the best way to guarantee material security is to trust God and obey him. He asks us what we think we mean when we call God "Our Father." If God is a dutiful and worthwhile father, the least he will do is be sure his children have food and drink and clothing. Jesus says, "Your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things."
So Jesus says, "Don't let your life be ruled by your anxieties about food and drink and clothing. If you try to do God's will, he will see to it that you do not want for any material thing that you need." He says, "Seek ye first his kingdom, and his righteousness; and all these things will be added unto you."
There are several ways to go about doing all this. One is to do God's will with respect to your money—that means to tithe—to give God back the first ten percent of all you get. He says he'll take care of you better with the ninety percent left over than you can take care of yourself with the whole hundred. Do you trust him? God takes care of the birds and the flowers, and human beings are far more valuable than birds or flowers are.
Another way to do it is to think about what you are saying when you recite the Lord's Prayer—which I hope you do at least several times every day of your life. When you say, "Give us this day our daily bread," do you think he is really going to do it, or do you think all the responsibility lies on you? The way God gives most of us our daily bread is to provide us with the opportunity and the ability to work. Do you know that that comes from our heavenly Father, or do you think it is your own achievement?
At the end of the passage Jesus warns us not to borrow trouble—not to worry our lives away being concerned about what is going to happen next. He says there is plenty to do today without wasting time worrying about what is going to come along tomorrow. "Be not therefore anxious for the morrow: for the morrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."
Today—this moment—is the only bit of time over which we have any control at all. If we spend all of our time lamenting what happened in the past and worrying about what is going to happen in the future, we shall miss the opportunity to trust God now and to let him take care of us today.
St. Paul makes a similar point in Romans, when he writes, "All things work together for good to them that love God." If you strive truly to make God's will the focus of your life, you can be confident that he will take care of you—and that he will make all of the seeming madness and confusion in your life come out right.
In another place Jesus directs a question to his disciples who are fathers. "If any of your children came to you to ask for bread, would you give him a rock? If he asked you for a fish, would you hand him a snake? If he asked you for an egg would you give him a scorpion?"
Unless we are dealing with impossible sadists, the obvious answer is, "Of course not." He goes on, "So if you who are far from perfect know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to people who ask for it?"
If you want to learn to trust, you have to take a chance and trust.
The Collect: Keep, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy Church with thy perpetual mercy; and, because the frailty of man without thee cannot but fall, keep us ever by thy help from all things hurtful, and lead us to all things profitable to our salvation; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Galatians 6: 11 - 18
The Gospel: St. Matthew 6: 24 - 34
St. Michael appears first by name in the Old Testament book of the prophet Daniel. He is described as a prince who appears to be a messenger from God and as someone who stands up for the people of God at the end of time. Later on in the New Testament epistle of St. Jude, Michael rebukes the devil as he fights with him over the body of Moses.
The most sustained amount of information we have about St. Michael is in the morning's epistle, from the Book of Revelation. What this passage describes, in the very last book of the Bible, is something which we might more reasonably expect to appear in the first book of the Bible.
That is the explanation of how evil entered the world -- or, more properly, in terms of the way the story plays out -- how it was that the serpent who beguiled Adam and Eve came to be in the Garden of Eden in the first place.
St. John tells us that there was war in heaven, and that Michael led the heavenly hosts into battle against the dragon. The dragon is the serpent. He is called "the devil" --which means "the one who slanders", and "Satan" -- which means "the adversary" and he deceives the whole world as he first deceived Eve.
So what we have amounts to a civil war among the angels in heaven. Some of them stick with God and have Michael as their general, and some join the dragon's rebellion. We have met the dragon in the preceding verses of chapter 12, in which he chases after a woman who appears in the sky clothed with the sun and who gives birth to a manchild who is snatched up into heaven.
All of that reveals the devil as the persecutor of God's people -- first Israel and then the church. The dragon loses the battle against St. Michael, but instead of being exterminated completely, the serpent and his angels are cast down onto the earth. That is how they got here, and, at least the last time I checked, they are still here and still very active here.
God lets the devil and his junior imps operate here on earth so that the idea that we have the same free will God does can have some actual meaning. If we had no choice, there would be no free will. The devil's presence and his always trying to get us away from God guarantees that we always have a choice.
But the ultimate earthly outcome is guaranteed. The devil is not going to win. He lost out in heaven, and his earthly doom was sealed by Jesus' death on the cross. St. John tells us that the angels say the devil is angry because he knows he has but a short time.
The time will come when God will prevail over him once and for all, so Satan is always in a hurry. The war in heaven continues on in our hearts. We are best advised to try to stick with St. Michael.
In the gospel Jesus tells us about guardian angels. The disciples have come to him to ask who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven -- hoping, no doubt, that he will point to one of them and say, "Why you are, of course." Instead, he shows them a child and says that they have to change their ways and become like little children or they won't even get into the kingdom of heaven, let alone be the greatest one in it.
He tells them they must humble themselves as little children. It doesn't seem to me that humility as we normally think of it is particularly a characteristic of little children. Little children are usually as pushy and self-centered and whiny as most adults are.
Jesus means that little children have the built-in trust that their parents know what they are doing and that their parents will take care of them. We should cultivate the same level of trust in our father in heaven.
He goes on to talk about the consequences of giving offense to little children who believe in him -- which means trying to get anyone to give up his confidence in Jesus. He says that such a person would be better off having a big rock tied around his neck and then getting thrown into deep water.
After talking about how one has to get rid of anything that draws him away from God, Jesus concludes, "Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you, that in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven."
Whenever angels appear in the Bible, they are so frightening that the first thing they have to say is "Fear not," or, "Be not afraid." The implication is clear -- if you try to get anyone away from Jesus -- especially a trusting little child -- you are going to have to answer to his angel, and angels are scary.
Even if we never experience angels directly in any other way, we meet up with them every time we celebrate Holy Communion. The song the angels sing in heaven is "Holy, Holy, Holy," and we always sing it "with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven." The angels are not at war with us unless we provoke them. Let's try not to.
Collect: Almighty and everlasting God, who art always more than ready to hear than we to pray, and art wont to give more than either we desire or deserve; Pour down upon us the abundance of thy mercy; forgiving us those things whereof our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things which we are not worthy to ask, but through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord. Amen.
Epistle: II Corinthians 3:4 -9
Gospel: St. Mark 7:31 - 37
September 17, 2000,
The parable of the Good Samaritan is one of the most familiar ones Jesus tells. St. Luke shows us that the parable comes out of some clever byplay between Jesus and a lawyer -- a lawyer who wants Jesus to tell him that he is already doing everything he needs to do to get eternal life.
The point of the parable is unmistakable. We are supposed to show mercy to everyone who comes across our path. That is mercy in the sense that Christian love is mercy. Christian love is doing what is best for the other person without any regard for how we will gain or lose from acting that way.
A man is beaten up and robbed and left for dead by the side of a road. Another man comes along and helps him out. Simple. If we want to act in a loving and neighborly way -- the way Jesus wants us to act -- we will act that way. Simple.
The way Jesus tells the story puts two extra things to think about alongside the simple and basic lesson. The first is the character of the priest and the Levite. A priest came down the hill, saw the man, and passed him by on the other side of the road. A Levite -- a priest's helper -- did the same thing.
They are the bad guys in the story, in the sense that they did not do what the third man did. But their badness is complicated by the fact that they did not think to themselves simply, "I don't want to get involved in a messy situation -- and nobody is watching anyway."
The complication is that under the Hebrew Law they had a perfectly good reason not to get involved. The beaten man looked as if he might be dead. If either the priest or the Levite touched a corpse, he would become unclean and forbidden to perform his religious duties.
So the priest and the Levite thought they had it made. They didn't want to get involved, and they had a godly reason not to get involved. But among the other things Jesus teaches here is the clear message that there is never any godly reason not to get involved with someone who needs your help.
The other twist in the parable is that the hero is a Samaritan. That doesn't seem surprising to us, necessarily. We assume that if most people were asked what word comes to mind when they hear the word "Samaritan," they would probably say, "good." But Jesus' audience hated Samaritans.
The Jews around Jerusalem believed that the Samaritans used to be Jews, but they sold themselves out to the Assyrians when they were conquered seven centuries earlier. The Assyrians intermarried with the northern Jews and, in the view of the southern Jews, polluted the bloodline.
So to make a Samaritan the moral hero of a story was to attack a very deep-seated ethnic prejudice. Jesus is clearly suggesting that he doesn't think any more of ethnic prejudice than he does of religious rationales for not loving one's neighbor.
Jesus tells the lawyer -- and us -- to act as the Samaritan did. But we are no different from the priest and Levite. We don't particularly want to do that, so we hope either that we will never run into such a situation or that we will be able to think up a reason why we don't have to do our obvious duty.
But the nagging thought remains -- I want eternal life just as the lawyer did. Jesus tells the lawyer to act as the Good Samaritan did. Maybe I should.
St. Paul addresses this issue in today's epistle, taken from Galatians. He says that God made some promises to Abraham and his seed, his main descendant who is Jesus Christ. The promises were that Abraham would have many descendants and a land in which they could live. We get in on the promises, because we are literally part of the main descendant. We are members of the body of Christ through our baptism.
The commandment to love one's neighbor -- the issue in the parable -- comes from the Old Testament Law. St. Paul says that the Old Testament Law came along after the promises. But the law did not cancel the promises, and one does not have to obey the law perfectly to inherit the promises. If there is something you have to do to get someone to make good on a promise, then it isn't a promise at all.
The point is that God knows that we are inclined to be more like the priest and the Levite than we are like the Samaritan. He gives us his law and he tells us such parables to remind us of that fact. He also wants to remind us that Jesus died precisely because we don't live up to the Old Testament Law, and we don't always act as the Samaritan did.
We should admit the truth about ourselves and ask for God's forgiveness and his help to do better the next time. We can go through that process without being afraid. We know Jesus has died to forgive us already, so God has said already that he won't send us to hell just because we are not perfect.
We are free to obey and to try to do better, because we are thankful, not because we are afraid. What shall I do to inherit eternal life? Try to show mercy on everyone, and ask for forgiveness when you don't. Simple.
The Collect: Almighty and merciful God, of whose only gift it cometh that thy faithful people do unto thee true and laudable service; Grant, we beseech thee, that we may so faithfully serve thee in this life, that we fail not finally to attain thy heavenly promises; through the merits of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Galatians 3: 16 - 22
The Gospel: St. Luke 10: 23 - 37
September 10, 2000,
Writing in Jerusalem about 650 years before Christ, the prophet Jeremiah speaks for God about what God is going to do in the future. He says, "The days are coming when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah . . . I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts . . . I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more."
Several New Testament writers refer to Jeremiah's prophecy when they are explaining what they believe God has done in Jesus. They ask Jews in particular, "Why do you resist the idea that through Jesus God has acted to change the relationship between himself and his people? A major change in the relationship is exactly what Jeremiah promised in the pages of the Hebrew Bible."
St. Paul is playing with Jeremiah's idea in today's epistle, which comes from his second letter to the Corinthians. Part of what he takes from Jeremiah is the picture of where God's new agreement with his people is going to be written down.
The old covenant was, as St. Paul says, "engraven in stones." He is talking about the tablets Moses carried down Mt. Sinai. The new covenant -- as Jeremiah says and St. Paul echoes -- is written not on stone but in human hearts.
That is quite a vivid image. God's law is written on your heart. It is inside you where it can do some real good. God does not want us to obey him because we are afraid of him. God wants us to obey him because we are grateful to him for what he has done for us in Jesus.
The great fear we all have is that if we disobey God we will go to hell. The truth is we all disobey God all the time. Jesus died to forgive us for all of the ways in which we break his law. That frees us to try to obey out of love and gratitude rather than out of fear of hell.
Another contrast St. Paul makes between the old and the new covenants is this, "the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life." What Jesus and St. Paul both teach is that the purpose of the Old Testament Law -- the Ten Commandments and all the rest of it -- was to show us that we cannot keep the Law perfectly. The Law reveals to us that we are sinners. The letter of the Law kills us, because it shows us we cannot earn God's favor by anything we can do.
That means that if we are going to be right with God someone or something is going to have to do it for us. That someone is obviously Jesus.
Jesus brings us the Spirit that gives life. He led a life of perfect obedience to God's Law, and he gave himself as the sacrifice which forgives the sins of everyone, everywhere, and always. The letter of the law kills by convicting us of sin; the Spirit Jesus gives restores us to life.
The covenant with Moses brought the conviction of sin and condemnation, while the covenant in Jesus brings forgiveness and the promise of everlasting life. It should be obvious that the second covenant is better than the first one.
But St. Paul still allows himself some nostalgia about the first covenant. What he likes to think about is how shiny it was. What the Bible means by the word "glory" is "shininess" -- "light." He says that even though what Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai was the ministration of death, and even though it was not going to last forever, Moses' face was, nonetheless, so shiny that the people could not look at him directly.
So if even the deathly old covenant made Moses shine, then how much shininess will the new one bring? As St. Paul puts it, "If the ministration of condemnation be glory, much more doth the ministration of righteousness exceed in glory."
We see the new shininess in today's gospel. Jesus heals a deaf man who also cannot speak properly. He prays and sticks his fingers in the man's ears and applies a judicious amount of ordinary spit.
This event shows us that the new relationship to God Jesus brings us is not just theoretical, or something that can be discovered only in questions about covenants and where they are written down. The relationship Jesus gives us is also a matter of power and of healing.
The prophet Isaiah said that when the Messiah -- the Saviour of Israel -- finally came to earth, "the ears of the deaf will be unstopped." That is why the people who saw today's miracle could not help telling everyone they knew all about it, and, as St. Mark tells us, they "were beyond measure astonished, saying, 'He hath done all things well. He maketh both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak." He is the shiny one.
Collect: Almighty and everlasting God, who art always more than ready to hear than we to pray, and art wont to give more than either we desire or deserve; Pour down upon us the abundance of thy mercy; forgiving us those things whereof our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things which we are not worthy to ask, but through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord. Amen.
Epistle: II Corinthians 3:4 -9
Gospel: St. Mark 7:31 - 37
September 3, 2000,
I would not want you to think it is either excessively cutesy or completely obnoxious of me to have selected "Awake, awake to love and work' and "Come, labor on" as hymns for the Labor Day weekend. I, therefore, call your attention to these words from this morning's epistle, "I laboured more abundantly than they all."
St. Paul has begun his most detailed proclamation and explanation of the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. He sets it up by saying that our belief in the resurrection of Jesus rests upon two foundations. First of all, Jesus' death and resurrection were, as he says here and as we say in the Nicene Creed, "according to the scriptures." That means that those events were consistent with what we know about God and how God acts from the Hebrew Bible --our Old Testament.
The second pillar on which belief in the resurrection of Jesus rests is eyewitness testimony. St. Paul says St. Peter saw Jesus alive after he had been dead; then the twelve saw him too; then five hundred other people saw him; then James did; then all the apostles did; and then St. Paul himself did.
As we know from the Book of Acts, St. Paul did not see him during the forty days Jesus stayed on earth between Easter and his Ascension. St. Paul saw him later on, looking down at him and talking to him from the sky at the moment of St. Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus.
Then we move into a very revealing argument St. Paul carries on with himself. He a(hints freely here as he does so many other places, that he was not one of the original apostles, and that he did not see Jesus during his time on earth. He says he is not worthy even to be called an apostle, because he persecuted the church.
Then he says, "But by the grace of God I am what I" -- that is to say, "It is God's help that has made me what I am. God didn't waste that help, because, 'I laboured more abundantly than they all'--I worked harder than anyone else on the list of those who saw Jesus after his resurrection - but I should not take credit for my work because my accomplishments were really to the credit of God's help which was with me."
So St. Paul wrestles between taking the credit for himself and giving the credit to God. One side of him wants to be congratulated for all of his good work, while another knows all the glory is God's alone. His internal struggle is much like the contrast between the Pharisee and the publican in today's gospel.
St. Luke begins by saying that Jesus' parable is directed "unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others."
This parable is for people who think they are religious and moral and who use their religiosity and morality to justify their looking down on other people. You may have heard that such people exist.
The Pharisee begins by thanking God that he is not part of the common run of sinners like the publican in the next pew. Then he goes on to boast about his many religious accomplishments. The publican says, simply, "God be merciful to me a sinner."
Jesus says that the publican went home in a proper relationship to God,, and the Pharisee did not. God brings down people who raise themselves up by boasting about how great they are. God raises up people who are humble about themselves. There is possibly no more basic Christian insight.
You can see that the parts of St. Paul's personality that are at war with one another in the epistle correspond in some degree to the Pharisee and the publican in the gospel. St. Paul knows that it was really God working in him, but he still yearns to take the credit himself.
It is all very much like the internal struggles he describes so well in Romans. He starts off talking about the struggle we all have to accept that salvation is not something we can earn - a reward for which we can labor - but, instead, a gift God gives us because of the crucifixion of Jesus.
Then he describes a second spiritual conflict - the one that takes place after we have accepted God's gifts of salvation and forgiveness and get started on what we think is the road to heaven. After that, we soon find out that we are behaving just about as badly as we were before we got onto the Christian path. What's wrong? Why does that happen? Why can't we do the good we know we ought to do, even though we don't have to?
St. Paul resolves that conflict by recognizing that he cannot finally figure it out. He cries, "O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" And then he answers his own question by saying, "I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord." He recognizes that in the end it is not about him and his struggle, it is about Jesus and his victory.
St. Paul labored more abundantly than they all. But his labor is not what got him right with God.
The Collect: Grant, we beseech thee, merciful Lord, to thy faithful people pardon and peace, that they may be cleansed from all their sins, and serve thee with a quiet mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
The Epistle: Ephesians 6: 10
The Gospel: St. John 4: 46
August 27, 2000,
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.
The Collect: Let thy merciful ears, O Lord, be open to the prayers of thy humble servants; and, that they may obtain their petitions, make them to ask such things as shall please thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: I Corinthians 12: 1-12
The Gospel: St. Luke 19: 41-46
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."
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
Sunday Next Before Advent
November 26, 2000
Thanksgiving Eve
November 22, 2000
Trinity XXI
November 12, 2000
Trinity XX
November 5, 2000
Trinity XIX
October 29, 2000
Trinity XVIII
October 22, 2000
Trinity XVII
October 15, 2000
Trinity XVI
October 8, 2000
Trinity XV
October 1, 2000
Trinity XIV
September 24, 2000
Trinity XIII
September 17, 2000
Trinity XII
September 10, 2000
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
