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Trinitytide Sermons, 1999
The Rt. Rev. John T. Cahoon, Jr. |
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Trinitytide Sermons, 1999
The Rt. Rev. John T. Cahoon, Jr. |
Bishop Cahoon was on vacation June 20 - July 1
Trinity II, June 13, 1999
Trinity I, June 6, 1999
Trinity Sunday, May 30, 1999
August 15, 1999, Trinity XI
This morning the Prayer Book gives us two lessons which touch on issues that are at the heart of the Christian faith. The epistle is the beginning of St. Paul's most important discussion of the death and resurrection of Jesus. The gospel is a parable in which Jesus tells us how to get right with God.
Christian belief and Christian behavior are completely intertwined. The Bible begins with belief, not with behavior. It does not tell us, "This is how to behave, and if you behave this way you will come to believe certain things." The Bible tells us instead, "If you really believe these things, your behavior will change for the better."
The central beliefs of Christianity are tied up with Jesus' death and resurrection. St. Paul tells us this morning, quite simply, "Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures." He means that Jesus died on the cross to forgive every act of disobedience anyone ever has committed or ever will commit. His death and what his death accomplished are completely consistent with the Hebrew Bible -- the Old Testament.
St. Paul goes on to say that on the third day after he had died Jesus came out of his grave, and many people who had thought he was dead permanently saw him also. His resurrection is also consistent with the Old Testament scriptures.
In other parts of his writings, St. Paul says that Jesus' resurrection shows us what will happen to us in the long run. Jesus rose from the dead in a new body. We too will rise again from the dead in new bodies when Jesus comes back to earth.
The Epistle to the Hebrews tells us that the greatest power the devil has over us is to make us afraid to die. The resurrection breaks his hold. If we have been baptized, and if we believe what St. Paul tells us, then we have no reason to be afraid of death -- either our own death or the deaths of people we love. This life is not all there is. We will see one another again, and we shall go to heaven to live forever with each other and God.
While we wait for the resurrection, if we have any ability to look at ourselves honestly, we find that we are plagued by feelings of shame and guilt. We feel guilty because, in fact, we are guilty -- guilty of repeated acts of disobedience and rebellion against God.
God offers us a solution. He says, "I sent my son to die to forgive you all for all of that disobedience and rebellion. I don't hold any of it against you. All you need to do to receive my forgiveness is to admit you need it, and turn to me with sorrow and the hope to do better."
So the death and resurrection of Jesus are God's solution to the two major problems we face, which are sin and death. Living with those solutions every day of our lives is the point of the Christian life. In the short run God forgives us, and in the long run we are going to come back from death and go to heaven. In light of all that, life on earth just doesn't look so bad.
This morning's parable is the one about the law-abiding Pharisee and the no-better-than-he should-be tax collector. If you have a grip on this parable, you have a grip on the essence of the right Christian attitude toward life.
The Pharisee comes before God and looks him straight in the eye, brags about how much better he is than other people, and then rattles off all of his spiritual accomplishments. The tax collector won't even look at the altar as he beats his breast and says, "God be merciful to me a sinner."
Jesus says that the tax collector went home in a right relationship to God, and the Pharisee did not. Was that because the tax collector was a more moral person that the Pharisee? No -- there is no suggestion in the parable that the Pharisee was lying about his good behavior, nor is there any suggestion that the tax collector had, in fact, a heart of gold.
The tax collector had a proper relationship to God because he knew the truth. He was a sinner, and he needed to have God forgive him. He knew that he could not do anything to reconcile himself to God -- he had to receive reconciliation as a gift from God himself.
The Pharisee thought he could make God love him because he was so good. That was his great mistake. Nobody can earn God 's love. Nobody can stand before God and say, "You have got to love me, because I am so wonderful." God did not prefer the tax collector because he groveled. God preferred the tax collector because the tax collector knew the truth and acted accordingly.
A person who tries to base his life on what St. Paul teaches us this morning is going to end up in the same good position as the tax collector. God is going to love him and forgive him and accept him because he knows the truth, and he lives by the truth.
And the truth is, "I am a sinner. I deserve to die and be shut off from God forever. But God loved me enough to send his son to die to forgive my sins and promise me resurrection and eternal life."
"For everyone that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted."
The Collect: O God, who declarest thy almighty power chiefly in showing mercy and pity; Mercifully grant unto us such a measure of thy grace, that we, running the way of thy commandments, may obtain thy gracious promises, and be made partakers of thy heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
The Epistle: I Corinthians 15: 1-11
The Gospel: St. Luke 18:9-14
We are mired here in the middle of summer, but the gospel for today takes us back to the rather balmier climate of spring. St. Luke describes for us what Jesus is saying to himself as he rides into Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday.
The big picture meaning of this occasion should be quite familiar. Jesus rides a donkey to link himself up with an Old Testament prophecy. The prophecy said that when the true king of Israel arrived in his capital city he would be riding on an ass, not on a white horse. When the people see Jesus on the donkey, they know he is claiming to be their king.
The crowd cheers for him and waves palm branches at him, because they are sure they know what he is going to do. They knew their Messiah king would raise an army, overthrow the Romans, and restore Israel to her rightful political and military independence.
As he rides along on the donkey, in one of his displays of genuine human emotion, Jesus begins to weep over Jerusalem. He is looking beyond what is going to happen to him in the next week and ahead about forty years.
Jesus predicts that Jerusalem's enemies are going to destroy her. He says they will surround the city and then tear it down to the point that there will not be one stone left on top of another. His prediction comes true in 70 A.D. when the Romans finally get tired of all the agitation from the Jewish people and retaliate with force.
Jesus is talking the way so many of the Old Testament prophets talk. The prophets are continually telling the people of Israel -- especially the kings -- that if they don't pull themselves together and figure out what is really going on in the world and turn to God for help, their enemies are going to destroy them.
Being among God's chosen people does not guarantee a carefree ride through life -- either in Israel or in the church. God is continually working his people over to try to get our attention, and he does not spare us from catastrophe -- especially if he thinks that is what we have earned, and that it may be the only way he can reach us.
Jerusalem's problem in the first century was that the Son of God -- the saviour for whom they had been waiting for a thousand years -- had come to them, and after they failed to recognize him they killed him.
Jesus laments, "If thou hadst known ... the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes," and he ends by saying that Jerusalem will be destroyed, "because thou knewest not the time of thy visitations" -- they didn't know who he was when he came to them.
Now this may all sound bit removed from us, or merely like an interesting sidelight to a familiar story. But the point we have to remember that God treats us -- as a church and as individuals -- just as he treated Israel in the Bible. He loves us without a question, but part of loving us is wanting us to grow up and see what is really going on around us and act accordingly.
That is one of the areas in which the image of God as "Our Father" is so powerful. God wants us to mature, and not spend our entire lives wandering around in a cloud with no idea of what is happening. He doesn't want us to be fools, as so many Old Testament leaders were, and as the people in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus were.
Israel's foolishness came from the simple fact that they did not take God seriously enough. They tried to pretend that he was not in charge of everything that was going on in their lives, and they ignored what he had to say to them in the Scriptures and through the prophets.
We are in exactly the same position in which the people of Israel found themselves. God is continually trying to get our attention through what we hear in church and in our own private prayers and Bible reading and in the pattern of the things that happen in our lives. Are we really listening? Are we even trying?
As a matter of fact we should be more tuned into God than Israel was, because we have a significant advantage over them. Our advantage is the Holy Ghost. When we are baptized and confirmed, God comes inside us, and he lives in us by his spirit.
In this morning's epistle, St. Paul enumerates several of the ways in which the Holy Ghost helps us to see what is going on. How many times have there been when you did something right or said something right without thinking about it beforehand, or when what you needed to know just mysteriously popped into your mind? Those are experiences of what St. Paul calls the gifts of wisdom and knowledge and prophecy and discerning of spirits -- gifts of the Holy Ghost.
God is not trying to catch us out so he can send us to hell. He wants to save us and he wants to help us. But he wants us to cooperate. He wants us to want to grow up and not to be fools and to rely on the gifts he puts inside us which help us to figure out what is going on.
It would be truly horrible if Jesus had to pronounce this verdict on our lives. You never really figured it out . . . Thou knewest not the time of thy visitation.
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
For the past several weeks our two Wednesday Bible classes have been getting an introduction to the Old Testament. Both classes have read plenty of the Old Testament before, to be sure — but the cast of characters which attends the classes changes over time, and most of us probably forget about as much of what we study as we remember.
So we need a reminder, first of all, of what our Anglican Tradition teaches us about the authority of the Old Testament in the church. We also need to learn over and over again that it is the next thing to impossible to make any sense out of Christianity if you don't have at least a basic grasp of what the Old Testament teaches.
This morning's epistle comes from St. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. He too is preoccupied with the issue of how Christians should approach the Old Testament what he and the rest of the apostles would have called "the Bible" or "the Scriptures." They obviously had no New Testament, because they were in the process of writing it.
St. Paul tells us first of all to look for foreshadowings — for previews, if you will in which we can see things that happen in the New Testament suggested in advance in the Old Testament. Today he is reminding the Corinthians that the two main sacraments of Christianity: Baptism and Holy Communion — appear in the Old Testament in shadowy form.
When Moses and the Israelites escape from Egypt through the Red Sea, that is a foreshadowing of Baptism. In both cases God saves his people through water.
When God gives the Israelites manna and water from the rock while they are wandering in the wilderness, that is a foreshadowing of Holy Communion. In both cases God gives his people miraculous food and drink.
From these foreshadowings of the sacraments, we can conclude that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are the same God. We see that he does the same thing in both Testaments, he rescues his people, and he takes care of them -- all because he loves us.
St. Paul goes on to show us that we should also look at the Old Testament as a cautionary tale. Even though God got the Israelites out of Egypt and fed them in the wilderness, they still disobeyed him rather extravagantly, and he punished them for it.
The Israelites worshipped idols; they held an orgy; they tested God; and they complained about their living conditions. God — old stick-in-the mud that he is — did not find any of their activities at all cute or amusing, and he let them know it — by killing twenty-three thousand of them in one instance and by sending along a plague of snakebite in another.
St. Paul says, "All these things happened unto them for examples, and they are writing for our admonition" -- to warn us about what can happen when you disobey God.
He closes with a point that embraces both Testaments. God tested Israel in the wilderness; God tests us all through our lives. The good news is that God promises us that he will never give us a test that we cannot bear if we rely on his help — the kind of help the sacraments, for example, give us.
The feast of the Transfiguration of Christ comes later on this week. Jesus has told the disciples that he is going to have to die, and they cannot accept what he says. He takes Peter, James, and John up a mountain where they see Jesus radiating with light and talking to Moses and Elijah — Old Testament characters who represent, respectively, the Law and the Prophets.
Jesus and Moses and Elijah talk about Jesus' approaching death. And if that is not enough to convince the doubting disciples, the cloud of God 's presence comes down onto the mountain, and God himself tells the disciples, "This is my son, Pay attention to what he tells you." The Transfiguration is another New Testament event that is just about incomprehensible if you are ignorant of the Old Testament.
So all in all, everything in the Old Testament, in one way or another, points ahead to and helps us understand the most important events in the New Testament, which are the birth and death and resurrection and ascension of Jesus. Those are the events through which God saved us from sin and death and hell.
The sacraments of the church are foreshadowed and previewed in the Old Testament, as St. Paul shows us. Even though the saving events of Jesus' life and death happened over nineteen hundred years ago, we get to participate in them and enjoy their benefits today through the sacraments. It is through the sacraments that God makes the past eternally present.
If we need any further encouragement to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the Old Testament, we can meditate upon what St. Paul says about it in another place, "Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning: that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope." Hope is the opposite of despair.
The Collect: Grant to us, Lord, we beseech thee, the spirit to think and do always such things as are right; that we, who cannot do any thing that is good without thee, may by thee be enabled to live according to thy will; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Gospel: St. Luke 15: 11-32
Today is the feast day of St. James the Apostle. There are at least three men named James in the New Testament. One is called the Lord’s brother, and he is a leader of the church in Jerusalem after Pentecost. The other two are members of the band of Jesus’ twelve original disciples. One is James the son of Alphaeus, who is designated James the Less, the other is today’s saint, James the son of Zebedee --James the Greater.
St. James is a fisherman on the Sea of Galilee. He drops his nets to follow Jesus after Jesus promises to make him a fisher of men. He is with Jesus during his entire earthly ministry, and then he is martyred some years after Christ’s Ascension. Today’s epistle says, About that time Herod the king stretched forth his hands to vex certain of the church, and he killed James the brother of John with the sword.
James is part of one of the two pairs of brothers among the disciples, St. Peter and St. Andrew are brothers, just as St. James and St. John are. The brother theme is extremely important in our thinking about St. James. It is a theme that is quite important to me personally, since I am the eldest in a family of four brothers.
In today’s gospel, James and John and their mother who is not named approach Jesus to ask him a question. When Jesus asks her, What do you want?, she replies, I want my two boys to have the seats on either side of you when you become king. That is a fairly outrageous request.
Jesus takes her quite seriously perhaps more seriously than any of the three intend. He says, You don’t have any idea what you are asking. He goes on to ask, Are you able to drink of the cup I’m going to drink of, and be baptized with the baptism I am going to be baptized with? What he means is, Are you willing to put up with suffering and dying as I am going to do?
Probably having no clue as to what he means, James and John say Sure we can, Jesus replies, You are going to suffer and die just as I am but even so, it is not up to me to prepare the seating chart for the kingdom that is up to my father.
St. Matthew doesn’t report their mother’s reaction to this disturbing news, but he does tell us what he and the other nine disciples thought about the whole conversation. When the ten heard it, they were moved with indignation against the two brethren. It was bad enough for them to have asked for the best seats in advance, but it was tacky in the extreme to put their mother up to asking Jesus about it for them.
James is the rendering in English of the familiar Hebrew name Jacob. Jacob is a pivotal figure in Old Testament history, first of all
because of his relationship to his twin brother Esau. Jacob and Esau were the sons of Isaac and Rebecca and the grandsons of Abraham and Sarah. Jacob began his life trying to grab Esau’s heel and get in front of him as the twin boys came down the birth canal. The older son inherited the birthright, and Jacob wanted it for himself. Later on, not to be denied, Jacob conned Esau into trading his birthright to him for some lentil soup. Then, to seal the deal and get his father’s blessing, Jacob and his mother fooled Isaac into thinking Jacob was really Esau.
Jacob went on to be the father of twelve brothers who provide the names and the ancestry of the twelve tribes of Israel. So the presence of two men named Jacob among Jesus’ twelve disciples kept the connection to Old Testament Jacob in the front of their minds.
Cain and Abel. Ishmael and Isaac. Jacob and Esau. Ephraim and Manasseh. The Prodigal Son and his jealous older brother. The Bible is full of stories of situations in which a younger brother takes over the rightful place of his older brother. It seems to me that what all of those stories point to is how Christianity replaced Judaism how the Gospel, the upstart younger brother, if you will -- took the place of the Law which is, as it were, the older brother.
When Jesus hears that the other ten disciples are provoked with James and John, he calls them all together. He tells them there is a difference between prestigious positions in the world on the one hand and being great in the kingdom of heaven on the other.
In the world, people like to get themselves into positions of power so they can lord it over other people make them jump at their command. He doesn’t exactly accuse James and John of wanting that, but he clearly implies that their hope for good seats in the kingdom is not exactly noble.
In the kingdom in the church if you want to be great, the way to do it is not to lord it over other people but to try to help them not to assert oneself as some sort of big deal, but to serve, to assist, to comfort, to love.
Jesus says, I am the Son of God. There can be no bigger deal than that. But I have not come among you to tell you how great I am, or to make you feel insignificant, or to boss you around for no reason other than my self-gratification. I have come to serve you and to give my life for you.
As we know, St. James did drink the cup, and he was baptized with the baptism. He gave his life for Christ. And in the Book Of Revelation, when his brother tells us what the throne room in heaven is like, James is sitting on a throne with Jesus not necessarily in the best seat, but certainly among the top twenty-four.
The Collect: O God, whose never-failing providence ordereth all things both in heaven and earth; We humbly beseech thee to put away from us all hurtful things, and to give us those things which are profitable for us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Romans 8: 12-17
The Gospel: St. Matthew 7:15-21
The most recent major golf tournament was the U.S. Open, which ended on Fathers' Day, four weeks ago. The golfer who won was an American named Payne Stewart, as I watched him play on TV, I noticed that he was wearing some sort of bracelet on his wrist. There was never enough of a close-up shot for me to figure out exactly what it was, but a picture on the front page of the Sunday newspaper revealed that the bracelet had the initials WWJD on it.
WWJD are the initial letters of the question, "What would Jesus do?" Jewelry and clothing and other memorabilia with WWJD on them are very popular in evangelical Christian circles nowadays. Payne Stewart has undergone a transformation in his life in the last couple of years, which he credits to his conversion to Christianity. When he accepted the winner's trophy at the U.S. Open, the first thing he did was give thanks to God.
I have to confess to a bit of ambivalence about such public displays of piety —although as a person who goes out in public wearing a backwards collar and a purple shirt, I probably have no right to such feelings. Of course, I am pleased to see Christianity get any sort of public attention at all that is not sneering and completely distorted. It is good to see public evidence of a truly changed life.
On the other hand, there is always a whiff of the Pharisee in almost anyone who is extremely public about his faith. And, even though I am now part of a thoroughly cleansed and perfected church, I still carry an embarrassing amount of snobby Episcopalianism around with me.
At any rate, I want to suggest to you that even though it bypasses the issue of bracelets at golf tournaments, the fundamental message of this morning's epistle has to do with the question, "What would Jesus do?" The epistle comes from St. Paul's letter to the church at Rome. Romans is one of the two or three very most important books in the Bible.
St. Paul begins Romans by laying out the points we discussed last week. We are all sinners, because we all break God's laws all the time. Because we are sinners we deserve to be separated from God and sent to hell. But God sent Jesus to die on the cross to forgive our sins and give us the promise of eternal life and heaven. As he says this morning, "The wages of sin (what we deserve) is death. But the gift of God (better than we deserve) is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord."
What we need to do is admit that we are sinners, admit we cannot get ourselves out of our predicament and we need help, and then accept the forgiveness Jesus bought for us on the cross. We can't put ourselves right with God. Jesus puts us right with God. Making that realization the center of your life is called living by faith.
St. Paul goes on in Romans to meditate upon the fact that even though he has accepted God's forgiveness and has become a baptized and faithful member of the church, he still finds himself sinning. His conversion to Christ has not kept him from continuing to disobey God. He tries to figure out why that is so and what he can do about it. I hardly need to tell you that we are all in exactly the same position.
St. Paul concludes that as long as we are in this world, we will be fighting a constant battle against sin -- against disobeying God. We just can't help it. Before we are consciously Christian, we don't even realize that we have a choice.
But after we have made a commitment to Christ, we begin to realize that every time a serious question comes up about what we are going to think or what we are going to say or what we are going to do, we choose. We choose between, if you will, WWJD on the one hand, and anything else on the other.
Now what we have to remember is that God does not determine whether he will love us or save us on the basis of how many times we make right choices as opposed to how many times we make wrong ones. Jesus died to forgive us, period. St. Paul assures us that even though we will never be perfect in this world, God loves us anyway. The crucifix guarantees it.
What St. Paul promises is that the more you ask God to help you make the right decisions — WWJID sorts of decisions — two things will happen to you. First, you will see that you really don't get as much pleasure and fulfillment out of wrong decisions and disobedience as you thought you did. That will incline you toward the will of God all the more. And, second, you will find yourself wanting to obey him because you are grateful to him -- not because you are afraid of him. God loves us, "not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offenses."
So whether you wear it on your arm or not, keeping the WWJD question in the forefront of your heart is clearly a good thing. And we can keep the question there and apply it to what comes up everyday without being afraid. For, as St. Paul writes in another place, "We have not received the spirit of bondage again unto fear, but the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry "Abba, father."
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
Jesus escapes King Herod's murder of the Holy Innocents just as the children of Israel escaped the angel of death in the Passover and the Exodus. John the Baptist baptizes Jesus in the Jordan River; Israel passed through the Red Sea to escape Egypt and through the Jordan River to enter the Promised Land. Jesus is tested by the devil in the wilderness for forty days, just as Israel was tested in the wilderness for forty years.
In the Sermon on the Mount St. Matthew shows us that Jesus is the second Moses. Jesus stands on a hill above the Sea of Galilee to talk about God's law. Moses received God's law on a rather taller hill called Mt. Sinai.
This morning's reading begins a section in which Jesus takes specific parts of God's law and comments on them. His essential point is this: do not ever try to claim that you have kept any part of God's law perfectly. The only way you can fool yourself into thinking that you have kept a law perfectly is if you assume it applies only to what you actually do. When you realize that God's laws have to do with what you think and what you say as well as with what you do, you will realize that you are breaking them all all the time.
The specific law on which he comments this morning is the Sixth Commandment: "Thou shalt not kill; thou shalt do no murder." Most people who measure themselves by that law assume they can breathe easily. Thank God, most of us can say, "I have never murdered anybody."
But Jesus goes on to say that we break the law against murder every time we are angry with anybody without a good reason, and we break the law against murder every time we insult someone or call him a nasty name. If that is what the law really means, then none of us can say with a clear conscience that we have always kept it.
He goes on for a moment to explain that we cannot worship God properly if we know of anyone who has something against us and to whom we are not reconciled. Jesus says to get reconciled first, and then come to the altar. We hear that every Sunday in the Invitation to Confession. One condition for receiving Holy Communion is that we are "in love and charity with our neighbors."
St. Paul took what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, and he built his letters to the Romans and the Galatians upon it. St. Paul says, "There are people around -- especially self-consciously religious people -- who will tell you that the way to get God to accept you and love you is to keep his law perfectly. But that shows only that they don't understand the purpose of the law.
"The purpose of the law is not to give us a standard that we can keep so God will love us. The purpose of the law is to show us that we cannot possibly keep it perfectly. The purpose of the law is to show us that we are sinners, and we need help. Something or someone has to come in from the outside to rescue us."
That someone is Jesus. Everyone is a sinner, because everyone breaks God's law. Jesus died to forgive our sins. If we accept the fact that we are sinners, and if we accept what Jesus has done to rescue us, God accepts us. It is that simple.
Jesus told the crowd in the Sermon on the Mount, "You will not enter the kingdom of heaven unless you are more righteous than the scribes and the Pharisees are." That sounded impossible -- the scribes and the Pharisees made their living from being the most righteous people in Israel. Anyone else listening to the Sermon on the Mount would have thought that being more righteous than the scribes and the Pharisees was impossible for them.
But the problem with the scribes and the Pharisees at the time of Jesus -- and with the scribes and Pharisees who are always around us in the church -- is that they think that being right with God has to do with impressing him with their religiosity and their virtue so they can earn and deserve his love. Such people can't keep themselves from showing off to their fellow Christians about their many spiritual accomplishments.
But Jesus deplores that attitude, and he deplores people who have it. Nothing in the New Testament is clearer. The way to make your righteousness exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees is to humble yourself and accept the gift of forgiveness and new life God wants you to have even though you don't deserve it. And, amazingly enough, you will find yourself wanting to keep his law all the more, because you are so grateful to him for what he has done for you.
The way to begin, as St. Paul points out this morning, is to get baptized. Being baptized does not mean that we will not sin any more. Baptism means we don't have to go to hell, and it means we know God will forgive us every time we ask -- and we need to ask quite often.
So, "Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord."
The Collect. O God, who hast prepared for those who love thee such good things as pass man's understanding; Pour into our hearts such love toward thee, that we, loving thee above all things, may obtain thy promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle. Romans 6: 3 - 11
The Gospel. St. Matthew 5: 20 - 26
We must never flatter ourselves into thinking that we are the only Anglicans or Episcopalians who have ever suffered through a revision of the Book of Common Prayer. When the Revolutionary War ended in 1784, Anglicans in the American colonies found themselves in a strange bind. They wanted to remain faithful to the teaching and the worship of the Church of England. They also lived in a new nation that had just fought a war to get itself free from English control.
The Americans needed a Prayer Book of their own - if only for the obvious purpose of getting rid of prayers for King George III. A convention met in 1785 and approved a trial American Prayer Book. Incorporated within it was a form of Morning Prayer which was to be read every July 4 to thank God for political and religious freeedom from England.
Including that service was a problem. The majority of the clergy and a large number of the laity in the colonial Church of England had sympathized with the mother country. Among American Anglicans who had supported the Revolution, many thought it was unwise to introduce what could be construed as an unnecessary political test into the Prayer Book.
In any event, when the new Prayer Book was proposed for a final reading in 1789, the July 4 service was eliminated. No strong push to include any such thing surfaced again for almost 140 years. The Independence Day collect, epistle, and gospel we are using this morning came into the Prayer Book only in the revision of 1928.
The epistle comes from the Old Testament Book of Deuteronomy. Moses reminds Israel to be kind to strangers, because strangers were kind to them when they went down into Egypt. Egyptian hospitality toward the Hebrews turned a bit sour later on, but who's counting? Picking this reading was probably meant to suggest that immigrants should be treated decently.
The gospel comes from the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus says that we should love our enemies, bless them, do good to them, and pray for them. In acting that way we act as God does. His sun shines and his rain falls on both good people and bad people, after all.
The reason to forgive and pray for people who do bad things to you is not for their sake but for your own. A person whom you hate still has a hold over you which can obsess you and wreck your life. If you can forgive, you detach yourself from them and get free - and, into the bargain, St. Paul says that if we are nice to our enemies we heap coals of fire upon their heads - our kindness makes them burn with shame.
It is difficult to take moral prescriptions which pertain to individual circumstances and apply them to nations - not impossible, but certainly difficult. One reason for the difficulty comes from the political perspective which informs the Bible. In the Old Testament everybody who was part of the main story practiced the same religion and everybody was a citizen of the same nation. The reason for the existence of the nation of Israel and for its history and for its laws was God. God alone.
The New Testament assumes that Christians will not live in a system like Israel's where the laws of religion and the laws of govenunent are identical. We are told we are really citizens of heaven, so we are only passing through here on earth. Because we are only passing through - and because any form of political order reflects God more accurately than anarchy does - we should obey the laws of the government where we happen to find ourselves living.
St. Paul says, "The powers that be are ordained of God." St. Peter says, "Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake." And remember that those two men lived when the Roman imperial government was actively hostile to Christianity and they both died martyrs' deaths because of it. Jesus tells Pontius Pilate, who is very impressed with his own power, "You would have no power at all over me if it had not been given to you from above."
All political power comes from God. Obey the laws where you happen to live - including the ones that have to do with paying your taxes. Those are the hallmarks of Christian citizenship.
The reason for our gratitude on this July 4 is not that we are free of Great Britain - our best friend internationally, our father culturally and linguistically, and our mother religiously. The reason for our gratitude is that we are free to come to church without having a policeman take down our names. The reason for our gratitude is that no government official checked this sermon out before I got into the pulpit. The reason for our gratitude is that people have been willing to give up their lives to make certain that all this remains true.
If we are looking for encouragement and for a challenge on this Independence Day, we should think about Jesus' words: "Unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required."
The Collect: O Eternal God, through whose mighty power our fathers won their liberties of old; Grant, we beseech thee, that we and all the people of this land may have grace to maintain these liberties in righteousness and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Deuteronomy 10 : 17 - 21
The Gospel: St. Matthew 5: 43 - 48
July 11, 1999, Trinity VI
July 4, 1999, Independence Day
Today's gospel is one of Jesus' parables, just as last Sunday's gospel was. We talked last week about how obvious it seems that the main purpose of the parables is to give us information about God and our relationship to him - and to impart it in a story form which is relatively easy to remember. But what seems obvious turns out not to be so. Jesus says the main point of the parables is to separate those who get it from those who don't get it.
It is very helpful thing to read over the Bible lessons - the epistle and gospel -- that are going to be read at the service before you come to church. If you don't immediately understand them, you can pray to make yourself open to how the sermon and the hymns and the Bible class may help you understand them - and so assist you in the essential process of getting it.
Today's parable is about a great feast - a big banquet - a major dinner party. Jesus in fact tells the parable while he is eating at a big dinner party - the party you may remember where all the guests rush into the dining room to try to grab a seat near the host.
Jesus delivers a very difficult teaching just before today's parable. He says that if you are going to host a feast, you should not invite your family or your friends. Instead you should invite the poor, the lame, the halt, and the blind. If you invite your friends and family you will have the idea in the back of your mind that they will invite you back and even things up. If you invite the others, you will be doing it purely out of the goodness of your heart,, because they cannot possibly reciprocate.
But Jesus also says, "If you do invite such people, God will repay you on judgment day." God will reward you, because you will have obeyed the commanchnent to love your neighbor. Remember that love in the New Testament sense means acting for another person's good without calculating what you will get out of it. Love is what St. John is talking about again in today's epistle.
A foolish fellow sitting near Jesus says, "How happy are the people who will sit down at the feast in the kingdom of God." That was probably just filler to cover what was really on his heart: "If the only way to get into heaven is to be generous to people who cannot be generous back, my wife and I are in big trouble."
Jesus is surrounded at the party by Pharisees - the pinched, rule - following, holier-than-thou, smarter-than-thou killjoy types for whom he reserves his greatest disapproval. He tells today's parable for their benefit - even though the likelihood that they are going to get it is quite slim.
A man set out to host a great feast and invited many people to come to it. But when the dinner was ready, the invited guests began to make excuses to explain why they could not attend. When the host heard about all this he was angry, so he told his servants to go out and invite anyone who was willing to come - including, significantly, the poor, the lame, the halt, and the blind. When there was still some more room available, he told the servants to go out and drag people in - because he was not going to allow the guests who were invited originally to come.
So at one level getting this parable should not be much of a problem. The host is God, the invited guests are his chosen people the Jews. When the supper is ready -that is to say when Jesus their Saviour appears -- they reject him and offer all sorts of excuses to explain why they will not accept him.
The guests who are invited next and then compelled to come to the banquet are the Gentiles - the great unwashed - most of us - people who were not originally invited to be part of God's chosen people, but who are welcomed now. The guests invited originally rejected the invitation, because they just didn't get it.
Now that is a very satisfying interpretation. It blames the Jews, it makes us Gentiles look good, so we can feel smug at the Jews's expense. But helping us to feel smug is never Jesus' intention. The parable reminds us that now we are chosen, invited people too. We have moved from the lame and blind category to the status of first on the guest list.
So if we do not remain faithful to Christ - if we don't make any effort to love our neighbors or repent of our other sins or try to understand things and do things the way God would want - then we run the risk of not getting to go to the heavenly party. We shall lose out just as surely as if we had said no to the invitation in the first place.
So what should we do? First, take the commandment to love God and love our neighbors seriously. Try to structure our actions around that standard - which is promoting the welfare of others, not yourself. Pray for guidance, read your Bible, receive communion, ask for help.
St. John reminds us that talk is cheap, saying, "My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue, but in deed and in truth." And he reminds us as well that Jesus has set the bar of loving obedience quite high, saying, "Hereby perceive we the will of God, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren."
The Collect: O LORD, who never failest to help and govern those whom thou dost bring up in thy stedfast fear and love; Keep us, we beseech thee, under the protection of thy good providence, and make us to have a perpetual fear and love of thy holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle. 1 St. John 3: 13-24
The Gospel. St. Luke 14: 16-24
When the parables first appear, Jesus tells his disciples -- and us -- that their main purpose is to separate those who understand them from those who do not -- those who get it from those who don't get it.
If you don't get it, you aren't supposed to be satisfied with that, nor are you supposed to throw your hands up in despair. If you don't understand the parables, you are supposed to look for help -- either from someone who does understand them or from a book written by someone who understands.
What seems to be a more obvious reason for the parables -- that Jesus tells these stories to make points about God that we can remember easily -- is there too, of course, but it is secondary.
Today's parable is a sort of first-century version of a "St. Peter-at-the-pearly-gates" joke -- that is to say, it is not to be taken mainly as teaching about what things are like in the afterlife. The story is making other sorts of points. You've got to trust me that I get it.
A pathetic beggar named Lazarus lies starving at the gate of a rich man's house. The rich man refuses to give him any food. In the next world the beggar is in the good place -- called Abraham's bosom -- and the rich man is in the bad place -- called hell. It's hot in hell, so the rich man asks Abraham to send Lazarus over with some water to cool him off.
Abraham replies, "The tables are turned now. Now he has it good, and you have it bad. And there is too big a gap between where you are and where we are for anybody to get across it anyway." Lazarus says, "if he can't help me, then please send him back to earth to my father's house so he can tell my five brothers how to escape my fate."
Abraham responds, "They can learn the same message from the Bible." Lazarus says, "They are too busy for Bible study, but if somebody came back from the dead to talk with them they'd get the message." Abraham gets the last word and says, "if they won't pay attention to the Scriptures, they aren't going to pay attention if someone comes back from the dead, either."
One of the things that helps us get the parables is to look at the context in which they come up. It is often the case that a parable's message is clearer when we see what is happening and what Jesus is saying just before it and after it.
In the case of the rich man and Lazarus, Jesus has just got done telling a rather difficult parable about a man who is about to be fired from his job. Before he is actually through, he goes to his boss's customers and reduces the amount of money they owe. The boss actually compliments him on his shrewdness -- probably because the amount the bills are reduced is the amount he would have taken for himself.
Jesus' point in that parable is that God gives us money on earth as a test -- to find out whether we will use it wisely or not. True riches come in heaven. If we can't handle the lesser riches of earth properly, how can we expect God to entrust us with heavenly riches?
When we apply that insight to the rich man, Jesus' point becomes obvious. Part of using one's riches in a wise and godly way is to give some of the riches away. If the rich man's brothers had read the Hebrew Bible they'd have known of the obligation to tithe -- to give ten percent of one's money away to support religion and to feed the poor.
The standard of tithing persists in the New Testament as well. A person who does not at least tithe is not using his money wisely according to God's standards. And when we come to the next world, God's standards are the only ones that are going to matter.
The parable of the rich man and Lazarus also underscores the point St. John makes in today's epistle. He is talking about love. He says that the love God showed us by sending Jesus into the world to die to forgive our sins obliges us to love one another. Love in the New Testament sense is acting for another's person's good without calculating what you are going to get out of it yourself.
Nobody told the rich man to make Lazarus his social friend. Loving Lazarus meant feeding him. The rich man just wouldn't do it, and the consequences were grave.
There is also a Christian twist to this very Jewish story, when Abraham says, "If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead." In the immediate context he is talking about the absurdity of sending Lazarus to the rich man's brothers, but, more broadly, he is judging Israel.
The fact that they did not accept Jesus as the Messiah even after he came back from the grave shows that they had not really understood their own scriptures. They just didn't get it.
Allow me to refer you to our scriptures to conclude. The Epistle to the Galatians tells us, "While we have time, let us do good unto all men; and especially unto them that are of the household of faith." While we have time.
The Collect: O GOD, the strength of all those who put their trust in thee; Mercifully accept our prayers; and because, through the weakness of our mortal nature, we can do no good thing without thee, grant us the help of thy grace, that in keeping thy commandments we may please thee, both in will and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: I St. John 4: 7-21
The Gospel: St. Luke 16: 19-31
Trinity Sunday brings us to the mid-point of the church year. We spent the time from Advent until today - about six months - thinking about how God has shown himself to us in the most important events of the past and the future. Now we spend another six months - from today until Advent comes around again - trying to grow in our understanding of what those events mean in our everyday lives.
On Trinity Sunday we think about the distinctive Christian understanding of the essential nature of God. We believe he has shown us that he is threeness, trinity. The main proclamation of the Hebrew religion is this, "Hear 0 Israel, the Lord our God is one." The main proclamation of the Christian religion is, "The Lord our God is one, and he is also three."
Some scholars believe that when the Israelites said, "The Lord our God is one," what they were really trying to convey was the idea that God was alone. The God of Israel was different from most of the other gods of the ancient world in that he did not have a wife - he was alone in that sense.
That idea had nothing to do with thinking that marriage was a bad thing. On the contrary, God told everyone in Israel to get married, be fruitful, and multiply. The aloneness - the bachelorhood of God, if you will, meant that he was completely responsible for creation. He did not create things sexually - with a female partner goddess, as so many other gods were believed to do - instead, the God of Israel spoke everything into existence himself.
Christianity does not deny what the Hebrew Bible says - after all, we know that the same God operates in both the Old and the New Testaments. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity goes beyond the idea that God is alone to say that the nature of the one God is to reach outside himself He does not exist in solitary splendor - he eternally begets a Son whom he loves.
The Son whom God begets and whom he loves is the person through whom he creates the heavens and the earth. St. John calls God's Son the "Word of God," and it is through God's spoken word that things come to be. It is also through his Word, his Son, that he shows himself to his creation.
God the Son, who is with his Father as pure Spirit ftom before the beginning of time, enters human history by coming to earth in the first century as Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus of Nazareth is put to death because he tells the world exactly who he really is, "Before Abraham was, I am. He who has seen me has seen the Father. The Father and I are one."
The power through which God continues to create and to lead his people into the right understanding of what he is up to and what he wants of us is called the Spirit of God - the Holy Ghost. The presence of the Holy Spirit of God in the world shows us that God does not intend to be alone - his life is bound up with us, because we are his people.
The way we get united to God, the way we become caught up in his social being - his not being alone - is through the sacrament of Holy Baptism. That is the subject Jesus discusses with Nicodemus in the rather strange conversation which is today's gospel. Jesus tells Nicodemus, "If you want to see the kingdom of God, you have to be born again - born again of water and the spirit." We are born the first time when we come out of our mothers. We are born the second time when we are baptized. At the moment of baptism God puts his Holy Spirit inside us, and that ties us to him forever. He adopts us as his children; we become by God's grace what Jesus is by his nature.
At the end of St. Matthew's Gospel, Jesus tells the disciples to teach everybody what he has taught them and then to baptize them with this formula: "In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." The reason the formula for baptism is the name of the Trinity is not for its hocus-pocus, incantationary value. We use the name of the Trinity in baptism, because it is baptism that takes us into the life of the Trinity.
One of the the things the New Testament teaches us about baptism is that it grafts us onto the body of God the Son. We are made members of the actual living breathing body of Jesus on earth, which is the church.
Baptism makes us part of the Son. The Father loves us, because we are in his Son whom he loves already. We love the Father back, because we are in his Son. The love that flows between us and through us is the Holy Ghost.
So the God who is Trinity is not alone. He goes out from himself to beget his Son, and to create the universe and to fill it with his Spirit. God is not outside of us and away from us and separated from us. He has made us "partakers of the divine nature," as St. Peter says. God is in us, and we are in him, we are members of his body, and he lives his life of creation and power and love in us and through us.
In heaven we shall see the Trinity as St. John does in today's epistle, taken from the book of his Revelation - the Father on the throne, the lampstands of the Spirit in front of the throne, and the lamb as it had been slain about to appear - the lamb who is the second person of the Holy Trinity, God the Son, Jesus Christ.
The nature of the Trinity is active and creative love. We are made part of the Trinity's life when we are baptized. We share God's eternal life from that moment on. Hear, O Israel our God is not alone - and neither are we.
The Collect: Almighty and everlasting God, who hast given unto us thy servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of the Divine Majesty to worship the Unity; We beseech thee that thou wouldest keep us stedfast in this faith, and evermore defend us from all adversities, who livest and reignest, one God, world without end. Amen.
The Epistle: Revelation 4: 1-11
The Gospel: St. John 3: 1-15
June 6, 1999, Trinity I
