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Trinity Sermons, 1998
The Rt. Rev. John T. Cahoon, Jr. |
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Trinity Sermons, 1998
The Rt. Rev. John T. Cahoon, Jr. |
Trinity XIII Trinity XIV Trinity XV Trinity XVI Trinity XVII
Trinity XVIII Trinity XIX Trinity XX All Saints Day (Trinity XXI)
Twenty-Second Sunday After Trinity
Twenty-Third Sunday After Trinity Sunday Next Before Advent
Thanksgiving St. Andrew's Day
The facts the New Testament gives us about St. Andrew are well-known and few in number, and at no point do they mention Scotland. The names of the twelve apostles are divided between Greek ones and Hebrew ones to show the comprehensiveness of Christ's salvation. "Andrew" is the Greek name "Andreas" which means "manly."
St. Andrew was a fisherman and a disciple of St. John the Baptist. He was responsible for bringing his brother Simon Peter to Jesus. He has several spoken lines in the gospels, and then he disappears from the New Testament narrative completely.
The Prayer Book calls attention to the speed with which St. Andrew left his fishing nets to follow Jesus, and prays that like him we "may forthwith give up ourselves obediently to fulfill (God's) holy commandments." Various traditions which have come down to us from the early church have St. Andrew preaching in various places after Pentecost, but, again, none suggests that he got as far as Scotland. He is thought to have evangelized in Scythia and Kiev in the former Soviet Union; later, possibly, in what is now Istanbul; and finally in Patras in the western province of Achaia in Greece.
There, tradition tells us, Andrew was instrumental in the conversion of the wife of the local governor. The governor had Andrew tied to a chi or x-shaped cross--tied rather than nailed so as to prolong his sufferings. From the point of his death on, the saga of St. Andrew is tied up mainly with his bones--his relics.
Again, traditions about the relics themselves are varied. One story holds that when the Emperor Constantine founded the great capital city he named after himself and wanted to style it "The New Rome," he sought some of St. Andrew's bones. His son Constantius moved what he could get to Constantinople in 357. The family theory was, "if Rome thinks it's so important because it has the bones of St. Peter, won't it be even more impressive to have the bones of the man who brought St. Peter to Jesus in the first place?"
What connects St. Andrew to Scotland is a fifth or sixth century story which features a Greek monk named Regulus. Regulus was in charge of guarding the part of St. Andrew's bones that had not migrated already to Constantinople. God appeared to Regulus in a vision and told him to get on a ship and sail until he was told to get off. God told him to disembark at a Pictish settlement which was at present-day St. Andrews in Scotland. Tradition says that Regulus brought along one of St. Andrew's teeth, an armbone, a kneecap, and some fingers.
The Turkish conquests in the fifteenth century and the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth disturbed the separated parts of St. Andrew. His Scottish relics were lost or destroyed during the Presbyterian takeover there; other relics, including his head, migrated to various sites in Italy. The Archbishop of Amalfi later sent a piece of St. Andrew's shoulder blade to Scotland when Roman Catholicism was reestablished there.
Pope Paul VI seemed to take special interest in the relics of St. Andrew. He returned the saint's head to the Greek Orthodox Bishop at Patras in 1964. Then in 1969 he sent some remaining relics of St. Andrew to St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church in Edinburgh, with the message, "St. Peter gives you his brother."
Our task tonight relative to St. Andrew is to thank God for his life and for the many ways in which his example and his bones have influenced the church, the nation of Scotland, and the Commonwealth of Virginia. Let us pray the dying words of St. Andrew may be on our own lips as well.
"Accept me, 0 Christ Jesus, whom I saw, whom I love, and in whom I am.
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
When it comes to Thanksgiving Day, I am all in favor of the eating; I am all in favor of the drinking; and I am all in favor of the helpful reminder that the most important thing we can ever say to God is "Thank you" -- thank you for all that we are, and for all that we have, and, above all else, thank you for sending Jesus to die to forgive our sins."
I am not at all in favor of the Pilgrims or the Puritans -- the groups who seem to have grabbed the franchise on the American Thanksgiving Day. They came to North America to escape our church and our bishops and our Prayer Book. If we must turn our thoughts to brave colonizing forefathers, let us not think about the Congregationalists at Plymouth Rock and Salem, let us think instead about the Anglicans at Drake's Bay and Jamestown.
Thanksgiving Day in the church calendar is the logical partner of the Rogation Days. Coming in the spring at the very end of Eastertide, Rogation is a reminder of all the spring planting festivals mankind has ever celebrated.
Those are times when we thank God for the rebirth of nature in spring, and we pray that what we plant in the spring will come up again richly in the fall. Then on Thanksgiving Day we thank God for the fruits of the spring planting in what he provides as a fall harvest.
In Christian terms, the cycle of planting and harvest becomes a metaphor -- a poetic way of talking about death and resurrection. St. Paul calls Jesus "the firstfruits of them that slept." Jesus is the first dead person to rise up out of his grave in a perfected body. His resurrection tells us death did not win, just as crocuses and robins tell us that winter did not win.
If Jesus is the firstfruits of the dead, that implies that there will be more fruits of the dead later on. The more fruits of the dead are everyone else -- including us. Just as Jesus rose from the dead in the spring, we shall rise from the dead later on -- as it were, like a fall harvest, when he comes back.
Rebirth in spring, the Rogation Days, and the resurrection of Jesus lead logically to the fall harvest, Thanksgiving Day, and our own resurrections at the last day.
As our sublime hymn puts it:
All the world is God's own field;
fruit unto his praise to yield...
Even so, Lord, quickly come
To thy final harvest-home;
Gather thou thy people in,
Free from sorrow, free from sin;
There, forever purified,
In thy presence to abide;
Come, with all thine angels come,
Raise the glorious harvest-home.
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
Sunday Next Before Advent, sometimes called "Stir up Sunday"
On the Sunday next before Advent twenty years ago I preached a sermon at my parish in northern California about the mass suicide of the People's Temple at Jonestown, Guyana. That event had taken place the previous week. The congressman from our district had been murdered while he was trying to investigate what was going on in Jonestown, and the entire San Francisco Bay area was in an uproar.
I don't remember what I said, precisely. I do remember thinking to myself as I composed the sermon that I wanted to say that there is no such thing as a meaningless event -- despite the apparent absurdity of Jonestown.
We know God through the actual things he allows to happen in the world. We find out what our relationship to God is about by looking at everything that happens to us and trying to see patterns, threads, webs of meaning.
We are trying to figure out the plot line of a drama God is both writing and directing. The drama is the series of events through which God tries to let us know that he loves us and that he wants to save us and make us grow up and finally take us to heaven.
The idea that we know God through what happens is the basic theological insight of the Hebrew Bible. Other religions might look for God in mystical experiences or in beautiful explanations of the universe, but the down-to-earth Hebrew people looked for God in history -- in what happened -- both in their history as a nation and in their own individual lives. The pattern of God's activity at both the private and the public levels of history is exactly the same.
God did not reveal himself to the Jews as an abstract philosophical principle like goodness, or justice or love. God revealed himself as the person who dominates the flow of what happens. After the time of Moses, when the Hebrews talked about God they identified him as "the one who led us out of Israel." They believed they saw God and his purposes most clearly in the Exodus -- their miraculous escape from slavery in Egypt.
The prophet Jeremiah wrote in the seventh century B.C. -- six or seven hundred years after the Exodus -- about as far away in time from Moses as we are from the High Middle Ages. In the intervening centuries Israel had made it to the Promised Land; engaged in wars; demanded that God give them a king; split the kingdom in two; and then seen the northern kingdom overrun by pagans and the southern kingdom in immediate danger of being conquered by Babylon.
God had remained faithful, but the people and their kings had disobeyed him, and the ugly realities of the previous seven centuries of their national history were the result.
Like most of the Old Testament prophets, Jeremiah alternately scolds and offers hope. He is, in the proper Biblical way, pessimistic about human beings but hopeful about God. What he writes in today's lesson holds out the promise that God will provide a cure for the ills of Israel's past history within their future history.
First he promises Israel a good king. Israel had had to put up with century after century of bad kings. That was God's way of reminding them that they should never have asked for a king in the first place. The good king would have a proper pedigree -- he was going to be a descendant of King David -- a righteous branch of David's own family tree.
The king would be righteous toward God in his own life, and his personal qualities would let him rule with justice and proper judgment in the public sphere. And Jeremiah goes on to make the astounding promise that what God will accomplish through this king will be so great and so powerful that it will make the Hebrew people forget about the Exodus.
What he will do is to reconcile and reconstitute all of Israel -- bring back together all of the chosen people who had been scattered to the four winds. So they won't any longer say, "The living God brought us out of Egypt." They will say, instead, "The living God brought us all back together so we could live with him in our own country."
As Christians -- inheritors of the promises God made in the Hebrew Bible -- we know that God made Jeremiah's prophecy come true in Jesus. He is the descendant of David; he is the good king; he has led us out of bondage to sin and death; and he has brought all of his chosen people -- Jews and Gentiles alike -- from all times and all places together into one body which is the church. We will live together forever in our own true country which is heaven.
The righteous branch is the one who gathers people together for God. After he fed five thousand people with a bit of bread and fish, his disciples picked up twelve baskets of leftovers -- the number of the twelve tribes of Israel. It was at least as much because of the baskets as because of his miracle that the crowd looked at Jesus and said, "This is of a truth that prophet that should come into the world."
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
Twenty-Third Sunday After Trinity, November 15, 1998
Some Pharisees and Herodians -- certified bad guys -- think they can trip Jesus up by asking him a question about paying taxes. They hope they can get him to say either that Jews should not pay the taxes the Roman occupying government demands, or that they must pay them. Jesus' antagonists don't really care which way he answers the question, because they have him set up to look bad either way.
If he says, "Don't pay the taxes," he will sound like a revolutionary, and the Romans will have a good reason to arrest him. If he says, "Do pay the taxes," his enemies can label him a collaborator with the Romans and a traitor to his own people. Smart fellow that he is, Jesus manipulates the argument, and his opponents end up marveling at his cleverness.
He asks them to show him a coin, and then he asks them whose name and picture are on it. When they reply, "Caesar's," Jesus says, "Well, if it has his name and picture on it, it must be his -- and there can't be any reason not to give a man what belongs to him. But you also must give God what belongs to God -- that is to say, following the same logic, you have to give God what has his name and picture on it."
What has God's name and picture on it is you, yourself. God made you in his image; he seals you with his cross and calls you by his name when you are baptized into his body. Christians owe a total commitment to God. Paying taxes to Caesar does not compromise the commitment.
The demand for total commitment suggests one of the fundamental questions the Bible poses for everyone -- the question, "Do you really trust God?" God led the children of Israel on a forty-year trek from Egypt to Jericho to find out how they would answer that question. Jesus tells us to look at God and talk to God as "Our Father."
To call God "Father" implies some degree of confidence in the way he is running the universe -- and, specifically, in the way he is running your life. He is your father who loves you, and who wants to take care of you, and who wants to forgive you for what you have done to disobey him, and who wants to take you to heaven at the end so you can be with him forever.
One of the main ways we answer the question, "Do you trust God?" is in the way in which we deal with our money. The Bible lays down two simple guidelines. First, we give to God before we meet any other financial obligation (that means before we pay any other bill, no matter how pressing we may think it is). Second, the minimum percentage of our income we are to give to God is ten percent of it -- a tithe. The Biblical requirement about money is that we give God ten percent and give the ten percent first.
To obey God in this matter is to say, "I trust that God can take care of me better with the other ninety percent than I can take care of myself with the whole hundred percent." It is an issue of trust. You cannot know how trustworthy God really is until you trust him. If you excuse yourself from tithing -- for whatever reason -- you are disobeying God -- disobeying him as blatantly as you would be disobeying if, say, you happened to be married and you just happened to have an affair with an underling half your age.
The issue of paying taxes to Caesar was complicated by the fact that Roman coins were really portable idols. The coins had images of Roman gods on them. One of the ways Augustus Caesar announced that he had promoted himself in all humility to the status of god was to put his own picture on the coins. All of that was greatly offensive to the scrupulous, monotheistic, graven image-abhorring Jews.
Tithing is an issue about idolatry too. You have a choice either to obey God or not. If you won't tithe it may be because you are making an idol of your own accomplishments or your own self-serving interpretation of what God asks of you. God says quite explicitly that if you won't tithe you are robbing him. I've got enough other sins to answer for without adding stealing from God to the list.
You'll be getting a copy of this sermon and a pledge card in the mail soon. It is my conscious, thought-through pastoral decision to preach about tithing once a year, rather than harangue you about money constantly or drive you crazy with endless bake sales, car washes and aluminum can drives. I trust that the Holy Ghost will move people to tithe just as he moves you to obey what we learn from the Bible the other fifty-one Sundays in the year.
Do you really trust God? Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.
The Collect: O God, our refuge and strength, who art the author of all godliness; Be ready, we beseech thee, to hear the devout prayers of the Church; and grant that those things which we ask faithfully we may obtain effectually; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Philippians 3: 17 - 21
The Gospel: St. Matthew 22: 15 - 22
Twenty-Second Sunday After Trinity, November 8, 1998
Jesus' parable today addresses the issue of forgiveness. Forgiveness suggests that there has been misbehavior, and that puts me in mind of some cliches which have crept into our way of talking about misbehavior -- or what some judgmental people call misbehavior.
I'm thinking about: "Mistakes were made." "We want to put this behind us." "He wants to get on with his life." "Everybody does it."
Just after the beginning of creation, God put Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. He told them they could do pretty much anything they wanted to do. His only warning was not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for if they ate from that tree they would die.
The way Adam and Eve responded to God established the pattern of all human sin. First they convinced themselves (or, as it happens, she let the serpent convince her) that God didn't really mean it about dying, and if that law did apply, it only applied to other people.
Then came the actual act of disobedience -- of open rebellion. But of course it didn't really feel like open rebellion, because they had already convinced themselves that what might be sinful if other people did it was perfectly o.k. in their special case.
Next came the coverup -- throwing up a smokescreen in hopes that God and anyone else who might be have been wronged wouldn't notice. That got played out in the garden with the fig leaves and Adam and Eve's skulking around in the bushes when they heard God's footsteps approaching.
Finally -- after the rationalization, the disobedience, and the coverup -- came the last inevitable act in the process of sin, which is shifting the blame. Adam and Eve did not want to admit they had done anything wrong, let alone accept responsibility for it. So Adam told God, "The woman ... gave me of the tree, and I did eat." And Eve said, "The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat."
The story of Adam and Eve poses an extremely important question for each one of us. The question is, "Can I face the fact that the story of Adam and Eve is a story about me?" Because, as it turns out, everybody does do it -- that is to say, everybody follows the same dreary pattern of rationalizing, disobeying, covering up, and shifting the blame.
We call that pattern original sin precisely because it is basic to our nature. It explains why things are not the way they ought to be. Original sin is what separates us from God and from one another. The individual sins we commit every day are symptoms of the overall condition.
That is not an excessively grim or pessimistic view of human nature; it is a realistic and honest view of human nature. Belief in original sin is fundamental to the Christian perspective on the world. If you don't believe in original sin -- and that it is not just everybody else who is infected with it -- you cannot possibly appreciate what Jesus has done for us.
One of the most moving passages in the New Testament appears in the Epistle to the Romans. St. Paul is as committed and informed a believer as anyone could possibly be; he has given his whole life for the cause of Jesus Christ -- and yet when he looks honestly at himself he sees this same ugly pattern of original sin still working -- despite his constant efforts to combat it with the Holy Ghost's help.
St. Paul cries out, "O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" And then he answers his own question, saying, "I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord." The cure for original sin is Jesus. The medicine of his cure is forgiveness.
It should be obvious that there can be no forgiveness without judgment. Judgment is the way we know we have sinned -- that we have done something for which we need to be forgiven. God gives us the standards. He also gives us the inclination and the ability to measure our lives by those standards.
Jesus' death on the cross guarantees that God forgives us for whatever we have done that defies his standards. The crucifix teaches us that God doesn't hold anything against us. We can get ourselves back into a proper relationship with him any time we are willing to face up to our disobedience and then turn away from it and face him.
What goes along with that rather remarkable guarantee is an obligation to forgive other people -- to be channels of God's forgiveness. That is the quite obvious point of the parable in today's gospel. God has forgiven each of us an enormous amount -- far more than the accumulation of evil any single person on earth can possibly have done to us. Truly accepting God's forgiveness means forgiving other people. "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us."
If you won't forgive, you remain in prison, just like the servant in the parable -- imprisoned by your own resentment and imprisoned by your obvious inability to accept the fact that God has forgiven you.
So if you want to put all this behind you and get on with your life, you'll have to admit that mistakes were made -- and that you made them -- on purpose -- but you're sorry for them now. Everybody does it, and that is precisely why Jesus had to die.
The Collect: Lord, we beseech thee to keep thy household the Church in continual godliness; that through thy protection it may be free from all adversities, and devoutly given to serve thee in good works, to the glory of thy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Philippians 1: 3-11
The Gospel: St. Matthew 18: 21-35
All Saints' Day, November 1, 1998
I am always grateful to God when he lets All Saints' Day come on a Sunday. That means we have the maximum number of people together to celebrate it -- attendance at weekday services being a bit chancier, reasonably enough. Having as many people around as possible matters especially on All Saints' Day, because All Saints' Day is a celebration of the church. The New Testament defines a saint as a baptized person -- so all saints together add up to the church. Today we celebrate the fact that the church exists, and we thank God we are members of it.
Today's Collect calls the church "the mystical body of God's son, Christ our Lord." St. Paul teaches that the church is like a human body. Human bodies are run from their heads; the head of the church is Jesus Christ. We know human bodies are alive because they are breathing; the church lives by the breath of God which is the Holy Ghost.
A human body has many organs and other body parts. Each of them has a function to perform to help the body work smoothly. In the church, the individual Christians are the members of the body -- each of us has an organic purpose, if you will -- a function we perform for the good of the whole body. Just being here and worshipping and praying is the beginning.
Christianity was never intended to be a solitary experience -- something you can do on your own -- just you and your Bible; you and your favorite TV preacher; you and your own private God, in splendid isolation from that problematic category of existence we call "other people."
The Epistle to the Hebrews warns us that we must not "forsake the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is." Jesus ordained that the obligatory and necessary week-by-week, year-after-year experience of his continuing presence among us is eating his flesh and drinking his blood in Holy Communion -- holy community -- together with all the rest of the saints.
I make no apology to anyone for the size of our congregation -- I believe we are doing miraculously well. I do think that one of the advantages of being our size is that it is possible for me to know all of you and for each one of you to get to know a fair number of your fellow parishioners. Solitary Christianity is impossible, and I suspect that anonymous, face-in-the-crowd, Christianity winds up being about the same thing. We learn to be Christians by living the Christian life with people we can come to know and observe and with whom we can have genuine relationships. That is part of the glory of All Saints.
One of the remarkable things about the mystical body is that people don't lose their membership in it just because they happen to be dead. The mystical body of the church includes not just the Christians we see around us here, but everybody who has ever been baptized any time, any place.
Again in the All Saints' Collect, we ask God to give us the help to "follow thy blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living." That is very much like what we say in the Prayer for the Whole State of Christ's Church when we say of the dead, "give us grace so to follow their good examples." Our first obligation to the dead is to thank God for their lives and for what we learned from them. A proper All Saints' meditation is to think about the dead Christians who have had the greatest influence in bringing you to where you are on your Christian pilgrimage right now.
Our second obligation to the dead saints is to look forward to the day when we shall see them again. That mind-expanding promise is what makes today's Epistle and the All Saints' hymns especially exciting. While we are locked in time, only God can see the whole church -- we can see only part of the part of it that is actually living right now. God always sees us all together, and he promises us that we will go to heaven all together.
The picture our Bible readings give us today is of suffering in this world -- Jesus is honest about that in the gospel -- but unspeakable joy and pleasure in the next world. The thrill of finally being in heaven will make whatever suffering we have endured seem worth it, and it will be so wonderful that, as Jesus promises, we won't remember the suffering anyway.
We need to make a specific effort to focus our attention on heaven -- if you are sorry for your sins, you are going to heaven -- there is no way God will keep you out -- he wants you to be there. You should make a conscious effort every day of your life to say, "I am going to go to heaven." You'll begin to get a handle on what St. Paul means when he says, "I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared to the glory which shall be revealed in us."
And, speaking of glory, I don't think there is much in the whole rest of the Bible that can measure up to what St. John promises us about heaven in the Book of Revelation -- so let's listen to it once more: "They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes."
The Collect: O Almighty God, who hast knit together thine elect in one communion and fellowship, in the mystical body of thy Son Christ our Lord; Grant us grace so to follow thy blessed Saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those unspeakable joys which thou hast prepared for those who unfeignedly love thee; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Revelation 7: 2-17
The Gospel: St. Matthew 5: 1- 12
Two weeks ago we talked about some debates in which Jesus took part during the first Holy Week--the time between his triumphant ride into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and his execution on Good Friday. Three groups within Judaism each took one last stab at trying to make him look bad. Each of them failed to humiliate him; he turned the tables and humiliated them; so they did what they needed to do to have him killed.
The parable Jesus tells in today's gospel lesson comes just before those three final encounters, so it is reasonable to imagine that it is what led directly to them. It is another parable about wedding invitations to which the guests RSVP, "No, I've got something better to do," and then live to regret it--or, more to the point, die regretting it.
The wedding idea--that the relationship between God and his people is like the relationship between a husband and wife--begins slowly in the Old Testament, and then gains some steam in the gospels and epistles. By the end of the New Testament it stands alone as the final revelation of what our relationship to Jesus is all about.
The Old Testament books which get at the idea most directly are the Song of Songs and the book of Hosea the prophet. The Song of Songs works on the literal level as sensuous erotic poetry. It can also be taken from there to be a parable of the romance between God and Israel--a romance which ends when the handsome prince comes down from heaven to rescue his fallen bride the church.
God calls Hosea to be a prophet and tells him to marry a woman named Gomer. After Hosea marries Gomer, he discovers that she is promiscuous. When he complains to God about this arranged match, God replies, "Now you know what it is like for me to have Israel as my bride." God is talking about the way Israel consistently adulterated the loyalty she had pledged to her one God by chasing after many false gods.
Early in St. John's gospel, John the Baptist describes his relationship to Jesus as that of a best man to a bridegroom. The best man comes out first to get things ready for the groom, but when the groom appears, the best man fades into the background.
Jesus gives us parables like today's which liken heaven to a wedding banquet and the whole world to the invited guests. He performs his first miracle at a wedding reception. St. Paul tells us in Ephesians that the intimacy of the relationship between a husband and wife is like the intimacy of the relationship between Christ and the church.
Finally, in the Book of Revelation, the church appears as a spotless bride all dressed up for her husband Jesus. The same transforming power of God which brings forgiveness out of sin and restoration out of decay and life out of death changes a whore in the beginning into a virgin at the end. With all of this load upon it, we can hardly be surprised that marriage turns out to be so difficult--or so important.
The twist in today's parable comes with what St. Matthew calls, "a man which had not on a wedding-garment." After the guests the king invited refuse their invitations, a rather dramatic escalation of violence follows. Then the king tells his servants to go out and round up anybody they can find. The only criterion for admission to the wedding reception now is not moral achievement, but the mere willingness to show up.
When the king comes into the ballroom to welcome his guests he sees a man who is not dressed properly for the occasion, and he asks him why he is not dressed properly for the occasion. When the man cannot give him an answer, the king calls his bouncers and has the man thrown out.
Oh, unfair, unfair--the man probably didn't have time to change after he got his invitation or maybe he couldn't afford a nice outfit--so how can God be so mean? The answer is that the man who is not dressed properly represents the person who has not made a full and complete commitment.
Proper dress is the perfect way to talk about that sort of wrong attitude. A person who goes to any sort of function and goes out of his way not to dress appropriately is saying, "I am going to be here, but I will be here on my own terms. I am not going to conform to anyone else's expectations. I am going to do it my way."
That may be all well and good and independent and being your own person and unhypocritical, but it is not the attitude to have if you want to get into the kingdom of God--if you want to go to heaven. God doesn't want you to do it your way, he wants you to do it his way. God is not interested in your iconoclastic independence, God wants to know if you intend to shape up and get with his program.
The wedding garment is the garment of humility--I am arrogant enough to tell you that that is so and that I know it is so because God told me so. Humility does not consist of grovelling around and pretending to be less than you are. The first step in humility is realizing that despite outward appearances to the contrary, you are not God.
The next step is realizing that if you are going to get to heaven it will not be because God needs someone with whom he can talk on his own level. It is going to be because God loves you and he wants you to know he forgives you. As St. Peter--no shrinking violet himself--puts it, "Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time: casting all your care upon him, for he careth for you."
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
St. Luke's Day, October 18, 1998 Also, Trinity XIX
Today we celebrate the feast day of St. Luke the Evangelist. He is called an evangelist because he wrote the third of the four New Testament Gospels. It seems clear that St. Luke also wrote the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, which comes just after the Gospels in the New Testament's table of contents. Taken together, St. Luke's Gospel and Acts form a continuous story of the birth of Christianity from the announcement of the birth of John the Baptist, in about 5 B.C. to St. Paul's imprisonment in Rome, in about 60 A.D.
There are two things which most differentiate St Luke's Gospel from the other three., St. Luke has detailed information about the conceptions and births and childhoods of Jesus and his cousin St. John the Baptist. The familiar and wonderful stories of Gabriel's annunciation to the Virgin Mary, Christ's birth in the stable at Bethlehem, the adoration of the shepherds, and the circumcision of John the Baptist are found only in St. Luke. There has been legitimate speculation from the church's earliest days that St. Luke got his information on these matters from the person who would have known about them best -- the Virgin Mary herself.
St. Luke also stands out from St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. John in regard to the parables. If I asked you to tell me what the two most famous parables are, I suspect most of you would respond "The Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan." Both of those parables appear only in St. Luke -- as do two of my other favorites, the Pharisee and the Publican and the Conniving Steward. I know of no theory which explains why he has all the best of these stories, but it may be because he was able to have long conversations with St. Peter in the last years of Peter's life.
The writing of the Book of Acts makes St. Luke the first historian of the church. He tells us what happened to the new church in Jerusalem in the weeks after Jesus' ascension into heaven -- taking us through the first Christian Pentecost, the establishment of apostolic orders, and the martyrdom of St. Stephen -- and then he focuses most of the rest of his attention on the most important New Testament character after Jesus himself, who is St. Paul the apostle. We don't need to speculate about where St. Luke got his information about St. Paul, because Luke appears in the story of Acts as one of St. Paul's closest associates and missionary partners.
This morning's epistle is the end of a letter St. Paul wrote from prison in Rome to one of his most trusted lieutenants -- St. Timothy, who is the bishop in Ephesus in what is now southwest Turkey. It is impossible to use this excerpt to defend the idea that Christians should never say anything negative about anyone else. St. Paul says some quite unpleasant things about at least two of the people he mentions.
A man named Demas has run out on Paul, who describes him as "having loved this present world" -- not, quite obviously, taking the same long-term view of things that Paul thinks is proper. He also mentions "Alexander the coppersmith (who) did me much evil." He prays that God will pay Alexander back for what he has done, saying "the Lord reward him according to his works." And he cautions Timothy against having any dealings with the disobedient Alexander, saying, "of who be thou ware also; for he hath greatly withstood our words." St. Paul was not at all mealy-mouthed.
That makes it all the more remarkable that his friendship with St. Luke was able to withstand arrest and shipwreck and imprisonment. I admire no human being in history more than I admire St. Paul, but I cannot imagine that he was an easy person to be around or to get along with. Yet in this same epistle, he contrasts St. Luke with Demas, Alexander, and all the other difficult characters he knew by the simple and touching sentence "Only Luke is with me."
Remembering that St. Luke was a doctor, today's collect asks God to show Jesus' healing power forth in the church -- the healing of our bodies by the power of his spirit; the healing of our minds and hearts by the power of his love. We are grateful to St. Luke for making this healing known to us through the power of his Word -- but you cannot know what I mean unless you read what he wrote.
The Collect: Almighty God, who didst inspire thy servant Saint Luke the Physician, to set forth in the Gospel the love and hearling power of the Son: manifest in thy Church the like power and love; to the healing of our bodies and our souls. Through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: 2 Timothy 4: 5 - 15
The Gospel: St. Luke 10: 1 - 7
Trinity XVIII, October 11, 1998
When King David appears in the First Book of Samuel he is taking care of sheep. Being a shepherd has made him handy with a slingshot, and he uses that skill to become a war hero overnight. His next occupational leap is to become a music therapist -- playing his own sweet songs on the lyre to try to calm down the increasingly crazy King Saul.
A number of the songs David wrote are preserved for us in the Book of Psalms. The Psalms have been the backbone of synagogue worship for three thousand years; they are the core of the monastic worship which began in the early Christian centuries; they are central to our Prayer Book daily offices of Morning and Evening Prayer; and they are the source of many of the texts in our Hymnal 1940.
The Psalms are also our greatest resource for private prayer. Some people experience frustration in praying because it seems they are doing all the talking while God never responds. But if you get used to praying the Psalms, you will discover that God is talking back to you through them.
The Psalms also teach the extremely important lesson that there is no such thing as a taboo emotion or an inappropriate attitude toward God or what he is doing in your life. Many of the Psalms praise and thank God, to be sure, but there are also many passages which question God and lapse into doubt and despair.
We all have those sorts of feelings from time to time. The Psalms help us acknowledge them and work them through with God's help. Remember Jesus himself expressed his moment of deepest doubt with a psalm verse, "My God, my God, look upon me, why hast thou forsaken me?"
When the New Testament writers teach Christian doctrine, one of their favorite places to look for support is the Psalms. That is partly because the Psalms were the part of the Hebrew Bible that was most familiar to their Jewish listeners.
The second half of today's Gospel shows us how Jesus used a well known Psalm to confound the Pharisees -- the same group of religious opponents who tried to make him look bad last week at his Sabbath day dinner with the man who had the dropsy.
Psalm 110 is a poem King David wrote about the Messiah. Remember that "Messiah" is the Hebrew word which is equivalent to the Greek word "Christos." "Messiah" and "Christos," or "Christ," both mean "the anointed one," "the one on whom God's favor rests" -- which came to be a title of the man God was some day going to send to save Israel.
During the first Holy Week, each of three leading Jewish groups takes one last shot at Jesus to see if they can make him look foolish or inconsistent in his teaching. The Herodians ask him about paying taxes to Rome; the Sadducees ask him what the accommodations in heaven will be like for a woman who has been married seven times; and then, in the opening of today's Gospel, the Pharisees try to get him to say that one Hebrew Law is more important than all the others.
Jesus cleverly evades all three traps, and then he starts to question the Pharisees himself. He begins quite innocently, asking them an extremely easy one: "Tell me something about the Messiah. When he comes, whose descendant is he going to be?" They all give the right answer, "He is going to be the son of David."
Then Jesus quotes them the first verse of Psalm 110, which reads, "The Lord said unto my Lord, 'Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool."' "The Lord" is God; "my Lord" is the Messiah. So the verse comes out "The Lord (God) said to my Lord (Christ), come on and sit down here next to me."
Everybody knows no one ever calls one of his descendants his lord. So Jesus asks the know-it-all Pharisees to explain to him how the Messiah can be both greater than David and younger than David at the same time. Rather than making themselves look even more foolish, they take the same route of silence they adopted last week when Jesus asked them if it was lawful to heal on the sabbath day.
St. Matthew records, in a rather dead-pan fashion, "And no man was able to answer him a word, neither durst any man from that day forth ask him any more questions." Jesus' opponents knew the time for debating with him was over, and the time to have him killed had begun.
Jesus is not our Lord just because he is clever, but I think his cleverness is extremely attractive. His brilliant debating is not intended just to show off how smart he is. Jesus knows the Scriptures backwards and forwards, and he knows exactly what they are supposed to mean because he wrote them.
He is outraged by people who twist the words of the Bible for their own purposes; or who cannot accept the implications of what it says; or who refuse to read it and apply its plain words to themselves.
The Messiah is simultaneously the Lord of David and the descendant of David, because he is both the eternal God and a man with the right pedigree who was born a thousand years after David lived. The Messiah comes to earth to reconcile God and man. He is the one who can do it, because he is both God and man.
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
Trinity XVII, October 4, 1998
In today's gospel St. Luke describes what sounds, almost literally, like the dinner party from hell. One of the chief Pharisees has invited Jesus to his house to eat. It seems pretty clear that the invitation was less an act of sociable kindness than an attempt to set Jesus up. The invitation was for Saturday--the Jewish sabbath--an indication of trouble to come.
The fourth of the Ten Commandments reads, "Remember that thou keep holy the Sabbath-day." The original purpose of the commandment was to see to it that nobody worked all the time. The logic of it is, "God created for six days and then rested on the seventh. If even God took a day off, shouldn't you?"
The human mechanism needs time off if it is to function properly. God does not smile upon workaholics. The emphasis in the commandment is on rest--rest for people, rest for animals, even rest for the land.
The problem was that between the time of Moses and the time of Jesus Hebrew teachers had clouded over the original commandment. There were one hundred and fifty-three regulations which spelled out what constituted working on the sabbath. You could walk a certain distance but no further. You could do some things but not others.
The regulations were so nit-picking that the sabbath had gone from being a day of rest and relaxation to a day spent worrying about violating it by breaking one rule or another. Jesus was known to be opposed to all of that, reminding the rabbis about God's original intention, "The sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath."
So Jesus knew being invited over for a Saturday meal probably meant there would be more on the menu than bread. As he walked into the Pharisee's house he nearly fell over a man who was plagued with swelling--water retention--edema--what the King James calls "the dropsy."
Jesus' religious enemies, who have also been invited to the party, are watching to see what he will do. Never one to pass up a moment of high drama, Jesus looks over at them and asks, "is it lawful to heal on the sabbath day?" They don't say anything. If they said, "Yes," they might be accused of encouraging Jesus to break their own regulations. If they said, "No," they would look even more heartless than they probably were.
Jesus does not wait around for any further debate. He heals the man and lets him go. Then he points out the hypocrisy of his self-appointed judges by saying, "You won't tell me if it is lawful to restore a human being to health on a Saturday, but you know perfectly well that if you go home this afternoon, and you find one of your prize animals has fallen into a ditch, you are going to haul him out, and you are not going to stop to ask yourself what day of the week it is."
As they stood there in silent astonishment, the host announced that it was time to eat. Jesus observed that quite a few of the invited guests climbed all over one another to get a seat near the host so they could look like the most important guest.
Jesus suggests that that is bad strategy. Not only is it loutish and mortifying from the etiquette-Miss Manners point of view, but it shows deep spiritual dislocation as well. In the Book of Proverbs King Solomon says that it is not smart to put yourself forward in the presence of the king--if important people have half a brain, they can recognize toadying when they see it, and they are not impressed.
Jesus says it is a far better strategy to take a lower seat at the table. If that is indeed where you are supposed to be, nobody will need to say anything, and nobody will be embarrassed. But if you are in fact supposed to have the better seat you think you deserve, then the host will invite you up higher. Not only will everyone know you are important, but they will be convinced that you are humble too. You win both ways.
The deeper meaning of all this should be obvious. God is not impressed with people who drop his name or try to make other people think they are extremely spiritual and have a special in with him.
The lawyers and Pharisees had revealed that they were guilty of doing that. They had made it almost impossible to follow the sabbath commandment by adding rules which only they fully understood--rules from which they would exempt themselves if it suited their convenience.
Grabbing for the best seats at the party was a social manifestation of their spiritual problem. They were only interested in outward show and in impressing other people with their piety and their importance.
God has an extremely limited interest in outward displays of piety. God looks at your heart, because he can He can tell--without any particular help from you--whether you are really with him or against him.
If all we are looking for in this life is the good opinion of other people, we will find that it is not terribly hard to get it. But the good opinion of God is the only thing that has any enduring value, so we are better advised to spend our time cultivating it.
We get God's good opinion not by showing off, but by being sorry for our sins, as St. Paul puts it, "in lowliness and meekness ... forbearing one another in love; endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace."
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
Trinity XVI, September 27, 1998
Our gospel lesson for this morning is the story of the resurrection of the son of the widow of Nain. Jesus and his disciples are on their way into Nain when they run into a funeral procession. The dead man is the only son of his widowed mother--so there is probably an economic as well as an emotional dimension to her grief.
Jesus tells her not to weep, as he touches the stretcher on which her son's corpse lies. He addresses the dead body and says, "Young man, I say unto thee, 'Arise."' Then, St. Luke tells us, "He that was dead sat up, and began to speak. And (Jesus) delivered him to his mother."
It's easy to be offhanded and blase about this miracle, thinking "Oh, yes, yet another garden variety resurrection from the dead--that Jesus surely was something." And we must not just dismiss it or pass over it, thinking, "That was back in the old days when people really believed that sort of thing could happen -- the man was probably just in coma--what can this story possibly have to say to us now?"
Resurrection is most properly the theme of the Easter season, but in another way resurrection is the theme of every season, every act of worship, every prayer, every encounter with God. We know God through Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ was alive, then he was dead, then he was alive again. To be in touch with Jesus is to be in touch with a resurrected man. Christianity without the resurrection is not Christianity at all, no matter what the mainstream churches think.
The miracle at Nain shows us first that Jesus is stronger than death. The power of life and creation is in his word, so he commands the corpse to get up, and he does. Jesus will use the same power on us at the last day, when, as St. Paul assures us, "The dead shall be raised." Christian hope about the afterlife is not that our spirits will live on, but that our bodies will be raised up.
Of course the son of the widow of Nain died again. His resurrection was only temporary. As in the other resurrection miracles in the gospels, Jesus performs this one for the benefit of a grieving family member. There is no suggestion that being dead is a horrible state -- from which Jesus wants to rescue dead people. The main purpose of the gospel resurrections is to restore families--another thing Jesus will do once and for all at the end.
The Prayer Book tells us, "In the midst of life we are in death." I cannot think of another year in my ministry when I have performed more funerals than I have this year. I am very pleased that so many of our parishioners attend the funerals. It gives tremendous support to the family members. And it is the best way there is to make yourself think about the fact that some day you are going to be lying there, and someone is going to be saying those words over you.
I don't mean that to be a descent into the maudlin and macabre. Death is the great puzzle, the great problem, the great bugaboo, the great unknown in human life. Christianity does not evade the question of death, Christianity faces death and offers an answer to it.
In St. Matthew's gospel Jesus says, "He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it." He is not just talking about martyrdom -- which is literally giving up your life because of your faith--a fairly unlikely prospect in the United States even now.
Losing your life for Jesus' sake also means letting go of being afraid to die. If we believe Jesus has power over death, and if we are certain of our own resurrections, we can face the facts that we are going to die and everyone we love is going to die without falling into suicidal despair. We are going to come back; we are going to see all the members of the body again. There is sorrow between now and then, but sorrow will turn to joy.
Last Sunday I implored you to read St. Matthew's gospel all the way through. You should be ready and eager for another assignment today. I suggest you read over "The Order for the Burial of the Dead" in the Prayer Book. It covers all of fourteen pages.
The Prayer Book's Burial Office is not just lovely and reassuring-though it is indeed lovely and reassuring. The selections from the Bible are also challenging. They ask us, "If we really believed all this, wouldn't we be likely to think and act another way?"
For example, the thirty-ninth psalm asks, "Lord, let me know mine end, and the number of my days; that I may be certified how long I have to live." God's clear, if unspoken, answer is, "No," -- perhaps even, "Not on your life. I am not going to tell you how much time you have left. I want you to trust me and my care for you at every moment. If you knew how much time you had left, you might wait until the last minute -- and then you would have missed out on knowing I loved you all along."
The ninetieth psalm reminds us that the life-span God intends for human beings is seventy years. That means some of us are on borrowed time and others are getting there faster than we might like. The prescription for dealing with all this comes in the verse: "Teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom." The piece of wisdom we need no matter how many days we have left is simply this, "in Adam all die; even so in Christ shall all be made alive."
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 andgoodness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Ephesians 3: 13 - 21
The Gospel: St. Luke 7:11- 19
Trinity XV, September 20, 1998
Twenty-five years ago this fall I went to work in an Episcopal church named for St. Matthew, which was located in a city in California also named for St. Matthew which was in turn situated in a county named for St. Matthew. To make things even better, the parish rector for whom I worked had been born on St. Matthew's Day.
I worked in San Mateo for four years in the Episcopal Church and then for another eleven in the Continuing Church. So I look at St. Matthew as another saint who has had a profound and lasting effect on my life. Our gospel reading today is from St. Matthew, and St. Matthew's feast day is tomorrow, September 21.
In the Book of Revelation, St. John describes four beasts who are in front of God's throne: a lion, a calf, a man, and an eagle. The church has always associated those four beasts with the writers of the four New Testament gospels.
St. Matthew's beast among the four is a man. Though it is not clear to me why the beasts and the evangelists were matched up that way originally, we can speculate reasonably enough that St. Matthew's man must be a Jewish man. Of the four gospels, St. Matthew's is the one written most clearly to appeal to Jews.
What I mean by that is that St. Matthew's main strategy in telling the story of Jesus is to show how he is the fulfillment of the Old Testament. Jesus is the logical extension and completion of the way God began to show himself to the world in the history of Israel.
Of course that doesn't mean that St. Matthew has nothing to say to us Gentiles. His position as the first book in the English New Testament is not because his gospel is the oldest or the longest, but because it is a logical bridge between the Old and the New. St. Matthew gives us the authoritative Christian spin, if you will, on Old Testament history.
In presenting Jesus largely in terms of the Hebrew Bible, St. Matthew uses the familiar technique of showing how events in Jesus' life connect to Old Testament prophecies. "All this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying..." is one of his characteristic devices.
But St. Matthew presents Jesus not only as the fulfillment of specific prophecies, but also as a man who embodies large themes of the entire history of the Hebrew people in his own experience. His baptism in the Jordan River is a good example. His passing through water points back to Israel's escape from bondage in Egypt through the Red Sea, and the baptism takes place at the spot where Joshua led the Israelites into the Promised Land.
After his baptism by St. John the Baptist -- himself an Old Testament character who has somehow wandered into the New -- St. Matthew tells us that Jesus went into the wilderness for forty days to be tempted by the devil. That is a quite obvious reenactment of Israel's forty-year pilgrimage from Egypt to the Promised Land -- also a time of testing and temptation.
After his temptation, Jesus goes up onto a hill to talk about the Old Testament Law in what we call the Sermon on the Mount. That is St. Matthew's way of telling us that Jesus is, among other things, the second Moses. Moses went up a hill to get the Law from God in the first place some thirteen or fourteen centuries before Christ.
It is from St. Matthew's report of that sermon about the Law that today's Gospel comes. Jesus is telling his listeners not to worry about material things -- their food or their drink or their clothing. That is not because material things are of no importance or that being concerned about them is somehow beneath spiritual people like ourselves.
The reason we shouldn't worry about material things is that God is our father, he loves us, he knows we need the material things, and he will see to it that we get them if we just relax and trust him.
What Jesus is talking about is quite reminiscent of what Moses went through with the Israelites in the wilderness. They were continually complaining about the lousy food and the primitive accommodations. Moses' exhortations that they should trust God and not worry worked on the Israelites about as well as they usually work on us.
But there is more to St. Matthew than his literary and evangelistic skill. He is a character in his own story. Jesus called him to be a disciple while he was collecting taxes for the Roman government which was occupying Israel.
Everybody hated the tax man, so, presumably, everybody hated Matthew. His presence among the disciples during Jesus' whole ministry became a living testimony to one of Jesus' most profound statements about his own mission, "They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick ... I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance."
May I beg you to go home and read St. Matthew's gospel? What can it mean to call yourself a Christian if you have never read the four gospels all the way though even once? St. Luke's Day is coming up in four weeks, and I am going to nag you about it again then. Why not be prepared?
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
Trinity XIV, September 13, 1998
A Samaritan is the hero of this morning's Gospel, just as a Samaritan was the hero of last Sunday's Gospel. The points Jesus makes in both Gospels would still be there if the heroes were not Samaritans. But the fact that they are Samaritans gives each story some extra bite, because the people who were around Jesus hated Samaritans.
Last week Jesus held up a Samaritan as the perfect example of how to obey God's commandment to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. This week, out of ten people who have received a miraculous physical healing, a Samaritan is the only one who bothers to thank God.
Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem from his home territory of Galilee in the northern part of Israel. As he goes into a village along the road he sees ten lepers. The Old Testament had quite a few rules and regulations to cover people who had skin diseases. One was that they were supposed to try not to contaminate other people. So St. Luke reports that the lepers "stood afar off."
From their position afar off, they yell over to Jesus and say, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us." They are asking him to heal them. What Jesus does not say is almost as remarkable as what he does say. He says, "Go show yourselves to the priests." He does not say, "Be healed," or "Ephphatha," or even "Your sins are forgiven."
Telling them to show themselves to the priests is a test of their confidence in him. People with strange skin diseases were not allowed to worship with the rest of the community. When they thought they were over their illness, they had to get the priest to check them out and then readmit them officially.
If they went to the priest before they were actually well, they would contaminate him, which would get them into further difficulty. So for them to head off to the priests just because Jesus said so showed their tremendous trust in his power to heal them. Their trust was rewarded, for, as St. Luke tells us, "It came to pass, that, as they went, they were cleansed."
If the story ended there, it still would have made several very telling points. First of all, the story confirms the idea that Jesus can heal. He has given the same power to the church. We should be as confident when we ask for his healing power now as the lepers were then.
Next, we see that Jesus works his miracle through their obedience. They ask him for healing; he tells them what they have to do; they do it; then they get what they want. Too often we want God to perform miracles for us when we are not willing to obey him or do our part.
We ask him to change the behavior of our family members and other difficult people without involving us in any messy confrontations. We ask for good health while we continue to abuse our bodies. We demand that he fish us out of financial predicaments when we refuse to tithe. The obedience of the lepers sets the proper example.
But the story does not end with the lepers' obedience. One of the ten lepers who is on his way to the priests sees that he has been healed. He turns back to Jesus; throws himself down at Jesus' feet; praises God; and thanks Jesus for what he has done for him.
Jesus--not passing up an opportunity for a bit of sarcasm--asks, "Were there not ten cleansed? but where are the nine?--the only one who has bothered to praise and thank God for what he did was this 'Samaritan-of all people." Then he tells the Samaritan, "Get up and go about your business. Your faith has made you whole."
Only a real cynic would imagine that when the nine got to the priests they had leprosy all over again because they weren't properly grateful. St. Luke tells us no such thing, of course. But Jesus is making a significant point about faith in what he says to the Samaritan.
Christianity is all about establishing a relationship to God. That relationship is called faith. God is our father. We have confidence and trust that he loves us and he always forgives us; and that he is watching over us and that he is encouraging us and helping us to do the right thing; and that he intends to take us to heaven in the end where we can see why the events in our lives unfolded as they did.
But a relationship is a two-way street. God wants us to thank him for what happens in our lives. He wants us to thank him for the things we like. That way we won't forget where they came from so we can ask again. And he wants us particularly to thank him for things we don't like.
If we believe that everything that happens to us is something God either causes or allows, then we have to believe that everything--like it or not--fits into his overall plan and makes sense.
So to thank God for whatever happens--especially something we don't like or don't understand--is not to deny what we really think, but instead to begin to say, "I don't know what you are up to here, God, but I have faith that you are doing something that is ultimately good--so please show me and help me."
The Samaritan liked what had happened, but he still closed the loop by thanking God and Jesus. So he didn't go home thinking he deserved what had happened to him. Instead, his faith had made him whole.
The Collect: Almighty and everlasting God, give unto us the increase of faith, hope, and charity; and, that we may obtain that which thou dost promise, make us to love that which thou dost command; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Galatians 5: 16 - 24
The Gospel: St. Luke 17: 11 - 19
Trinity XIII, September 6, 1998
The beginning of every service of Holy Communion is supposed to convince you that you are a sinner -- a sinner who needs God's forgiveness, a sinner who needs God's help. Some Sundays we hear the Ten Commandments, most Sundays we hear Jesus' Summary of the Law. In either case the point is the same: "These are God's moral standards. I have not lived up to them. I am in church to deal with those facts"
Today's Gospel is the story of a man who hears the Summary of the Law and looks for a way to weasel himself out of it. Jesus tells him to love God and love his neighbor, so he tries to get Jesus to define "neighbor" as narrowly as possible. He wants to know the minimum he needs to do to keep on God's good side -- he wants Jesus to tell him how he can slide by with as little effort as possible.
St. Luke says the man wanted "to justify himself" -- he wanted Jesus to tell him that he was doing fine, and that he had certainly earned his way into heaven already, and that he didn't need to change his ways one bit. We may possibly have known people who look at things that way.
Jesus does not spare him at all. He tells him a story which indicates that anybody who needs you to help him is a person you should help. To love your neighbor is to help him--to do what is best for him. Jesus places no comforting limitations on the obligation to love -- such as, "You only need to help people you approve of," or "You only need to be good to people who are good to you."
The hero of Jesus' story is a Samaritan. The people who were listening to Jesus hated Samaritans. The negative examples in the story are a priest and a Levite. The people listening to Jesus would have thought a priest and a Levite were the most righteous and godly people of all. When we come up against Jesus, our normal ways of thinking about things are usually not very helpful.
In any event, the parable of the Good Samaritan fleshes out what the Summary of the Law means. As far as my own situation is concerned, the parable only makes things worse. I might be able to convince myself in the abstract that I love my neighbor, but I have to admit I am not always up to the kind of absolute and universal commitment the Samaritan displayed toward the mugging victim. So if that is what God demands, where does it leave me?
As is the case so often, St. Paul comes to the rescue. In today's Epistle he tells us that God made promises to Abraham. Then God gave the Old Testament Law to Moses about 430 years after Abraham. "Love God and love your neighbor" is the summary of that Law.
People got the idea that the coming of the Law put conditions on God's promises to Abraham. Now his people would receive the promises only if they kept the Law. St. Paul says that is not so--a promise with any conditions on it is not a promise.
If I promise you today that I'll take you out to dinner for your birthday next week, and then tomorrow I say I'll take you out to dinner only if you are nice to me, then my invitation is not a promise any more. It becomes a deal -- a quid pro quo arrangement.
St. Paul says that when God makes a promise, he keeps the promise. The purpose of the Law is not to make God's promise conditional. The purpose of the Law and the Summary of the Law is to put us exactly where we found ourselves after we examined the parable of the Good Samaritan.
The purpose of the Law is to show us that we cannot keep it, and that we need God's forgiveness and his help. Listen to St. Paul's last words to us today. First of all, "The scripture hath concluded all under sin." That means that everybody is a sinner, nobody lives up to the example of the Good Samaritan all the time, and God knows all that perfectly well. So we can relax -- we don't need to waste a lot of energy pretending we are perfect.
Then he says that after you admit that you are a sinner, "the promise by faith of Jesus Christ might be given to them that believe." That verse is full of good things. God's specific promise to Abraham was that he would have land and descendants -- a never-ending relationship to God in both space and time. Jesus is the seed of Abraham -- his lineal, biological descendant. So we get in on the promises by being bapitzed into Jesus' body. We receive God's promise to be with us forever.
Faith in Jesus Christ means accepting the forgiveness he bought for us on the cross. His blood is what makes us right with God -- not our feeble attempts to pretend that we really do love our neighbors.
If we can accept what Jesus has done for us already, then we have a new and better motivation for trying to do what is best for other people. We can try to love out of gratitude to God, not out of fear.
Jesus told the man who wanted to justify himself to do what the Samaritan did. He tells us the same thing, with the guarantee that he will forgive us when we don't do it. Or, put another way, "We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under his table, but he is the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy."
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
