Trinitytide Sermons, Trinity XII - XXIV 1999 The Most Rev. John T. Cahoon, Jr. Metropolitan, Anglican Catholic Church Bishop Ordinary, Diocese of the Mid-Atlantic States Rector, St. Andrew and St. Margaret of Scotland Anglican Catholic Church Alexandria, Virginia

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November 24, 1999, Thanksgiving Eve

It is a bit odd that neither the epistle nor the gospel for this evening says anything explicit about the act of giving thanks. The collect thanks God for the fall harvest -- using the delicious phrase "the labours of the husbandman." But St. James' closest connection to that theme is when he refers to the members of the church as "a kind of firstfruits of (God's) creatures."

The gospel comes from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is counseling us not to be anxious about where our food and shelter and clothing are going to come from. Our heavenly father knows we need those things, and he will provide them for us.

We can presume that Jesus is suggesting that giving thanks is the best antidote for anxiety. If we spend our time being grateful to God for what he does give us, we shall be less likely to become nervous about his continuing to give and about the speed with which it all comes.

I think the most interesting insight about thanksgiving in the New Testament comes, not at all surprisingly, from St. Paul. He says similar things in other places, but I want to concentrate on what he writes at the end of First Thessalonians: "Be joyful always, pray at all times, be thankful in all circumstances." Be joyful always, pray at all times, be thankful in all circumstances.

My favorite book on the subject of prayer is called The Way of a Pilgrim. It explains what it means to pray at all times. Praying at all times and being joyful always are directly connected to being thankful in all circumstances. The possibly troublesome word there is "all."

St. Paul wants us to be thankful all the time -- even when things are going on around us that we do not like. It is not terribly difficult to generate the energy to thank God for beautiful weather or for a raise in pay or for falling in love. The test comes in illness and calamity and disappointment.

Those sorts of things test our ability to give thanks, because they test our ability to trust God -- to have the confidence that he is always doing what is best for us --- that he will be able to bring good out of what seems to be catastrophically bad.

Wanting what you don't have -- wishing that your circumstances were different from what they are -- -is the sin of coveting -- 10 in the big ten. Coveting is the opposite of giving thanks. The Prayer Book tells us what not coveting means. It says I am to "do my duty in that state of life into which it shall please God to call me." That is to say, I am to "be thankful in all circumstances." All.

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

November 21, 1999, Sunday Next Before Advent

St. John's story of how Jesus fed five thousand people with a bit of bread and two fish comes up as the gospel reading twice in the Church Year. We hear the story first in Lent, when it injects a note of feasting and of God's generous care for us into the middle of our main fasting season.

We hear it again today at the end of the Church year to help us remember what God is going to do at the end of time. The prophet Jeremiah, who wrote about 650 years before Christ, says that someday God will send a saviour who will be a descendant of King David. The saviour will gather all of God's people together from all over the world and bring them to live in their promised land.

That mighty act in the future will be so powerful and so staggering that it will even make people forget God's mightiest act in the past -- the Exodus -- when he led his people out of their bondage in Egypt. The feeding miracle connects to Jeremiah's prophecy through the clean-up. Jesus' disciples gather up twelve baskets of leftover fish and bread.

Twelve is the number for Israel -- twelve sons of Jacob, twelve tribes. The leftovers gathered up in twelve baskets reminded the crowd that Jeremiah said the saviour was going to gather up God's people. So the crowd praised Jesus and said, "This is of a truth that prophet that should come into the world."

What happens in the miracle mechanically is that as Jesus thanks God for the bread and the fish, and the disciples begin to pass it out. Jesus multiplies what is there, so it becomes enough to feed five thousand people. That is not unlike what happens in nature, where, over time, God makes a little become a lot in one sense, the closest we come to this miracle in normal life is in what happens at the altar on Sunday mornings. If you think about it, you will realize that the Communion service is a series of sacrifices.

The word "sacrifice" means "to make holy" "to set apart -- set aside -- differentiate." Anything we give to God is, in that sense, a sacrifice. On Sundays we give a number of things to God. We put them on the altar both literally and figuratively, and then he gives them back to us changed and perfected and purified. We join our sacrifices to Jesus' sacrifice on the cross.

We offer him bread and wine, and he gives it back to us as his Body and Blood. We offer him prayers, and he gives them back answered. We offer him our sins, and he forgives them. We offer God ourselves, our souls and bodies, and he gives them back purified and energized and filled with his own eternal life.

The most obvious thing we offer to God every Sunday is money. God doesn't keep the money, he gives it back to us to use for godly purposes. He multiplies the money to make it go farther than we might expect it to go. Money in the most tangible way possible represents everything God gives us. The money we give him represents in the most tangible way possible the level of our commitment and our confidence that he will take care of us.

In the prophecy of Malachi, God tells his people they have turned away from him and they need to turn back. The people ask, "What should we do to turn back to you?' God says, 'I ask you, is it right for a person to cheat God? Of course not, yet you are cheating me.' 'How?' you ask. In the matter of tithes and offerings. A curse is on all of you, because the whole nation is cheating me. Bring the full amount of your tithes to the temple, so that there will be plenty of food there. Put me to the test and you will see that I will open the windows of heaven and pour out on you in abundance all kinds of good things."

God tells us to tithe -- to give him back the first ten percent of everything he gives us. If we don't tithe, we are cheating him. If we put him to the test and go ahead and obey, he promises to shower down material blessings on us. In the logic of the gospel, he will multiply our tithe and multiply the faith and commitment it represents.

In the first New Testament church, people gave one hundred percent of what they had. The ten percent standard is there to tell us it is possible to give too little and so be cheating God. The one hundred per cent standard is there to tell us that it is never possible to give too much.

I am very blessed that I don't have to waste a lot of time nagging you about money. That is purely and simply because so many of you do tithe, and God blesses that and multiplies it. But preaching tithing is only secondarily about raising money for the church. It is primarily to tell you how you can get yourself right with God in this most important area of human life.

A tither knows he has done what he should, so he can enjoy the other ninety percent with a clear conscience. He can watch God take better care of him with the ninety than he could take care of himself if he hung onto the whole hundred. If you won't tithe, you miss out on the peace of mind and the daily display of God's care -- and you may live with the nagging suspicion that on the last day God is going to hold up your bank statement and ask, "Why did you cheat me? You really only cheated yourself."

So bring the full amount of tithes and you will see that God will open the windows of heaven and pour out on you in abundance all kinds of good things.

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

November 14, 1999, Trinity XXIV

The basic message of today's gospel is that if you ask God to do something for you, your chances of getting what you want improve if you believe God can actually do it. St. James tells us, "When you pray, you must believe, and not doubt at all."

Two of Jesus' miracles make the point. An important man asks Jesus to raise his daughter from the dead. As Jesus is on his way to the man's house, a woman comes up behind him and grabs the hem of his cloak, while she says to herself, "If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole."

Jesus heals the woman and tells her, "Your faith has made you whole." When he gets to the ruler's house the crowd of paid mourners makes fun of him, but he brings the young woman back to life anyway. As is the case in the other two New Testament resurrections, this one is performed for the benefit of a family member of the dead person. Here the young woman's father, who has the confidence that Jesus can do it, is the one rewarded.

Today is the two hundred and fifteenth anniversary of a central event in the history of our church. Looking at it through the lens of confidence in prayer, we have to say that this event did not reward the faith of everybody who prayed about it, because some people wanted it to happen, and others did not. Why God chooses to do what he does in any given situation remains, at least in part, always a mystery.

From 1607 on there were Church of England clergymen and Anglican churches in America. The resistance of colonists who belonged to dissenting Protestant churches was the main reason the American Anglicans never had a bishop of their own during the colonial period though many Anglicans were also just as glad to be an ocean away from their bishop. As a result, few Americans were ever confirmed, and it was a rare American who traveled to England to be ordained.

After the Revolutionary War ended, American Anglicans had some major decisions to make. If they were to remain true to the tradition of the Church of England -- to say nothing of the church of the previous eighteen centuries -- they would have to have bishops.

But actually getting bishops was another matter. The colonists had just ended a successful war against Great Britain -- the nation most likely to be the source of bishops to make new bishops for America.

Some leaders of American Anglicanism believed the church could get along without bishops at least for awhile until the smoke cleared. Others were appalled at the prospect of giving up for any time at all the historic succession of bishops which comes down from the first apostles.

Clergy in Connecticut took the bull by the horns and elected a priest named Samuel Seabury to be their bishop. Just being elected was not enough, of course. Bishops are elected to their administrative jobs, but they have to be ordained by other bishops to become bishops in the first place.

Seabury went off to England and asked the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London to ordain and consecrate him. They hid behind a Parliamentary statute which said that no Church of England bishop could consecrate someone who refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Crown. That, quite obviously, excluded Seabury, who was seeking to be a bishop in a country that had just finished beating the army of the King of England.

Seabury had studied medicine some decades earlier in Aberdeen, Scotland. Scotland was the home of an Anglican Church that had broken off from the Church of England about a century earlier. The issue was the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which Parliament fired the legitimate King, James II, and replaced him with William and Mary who came from Holland.

Much as they deplored James II's attempts to make the Church of England Roman Catholic again, loyal English bishops believed they could not swear allegiance to a new king while the one to whom they had sworn allegiance already was still alive. They became known as "Non-Jurors" or "Non-Swearers." After they were kicked out of the Church of England, the Non-Jurors established the Episcopal Church of Scotland.

Bishops in succession to the original Non-Jurors consecrated Samuel Seabury as the first Bishop of Connecticut and as the first Anglican bishop in the United States -- in Aberdeen on November 14, 1784, 215 years ago today. Seabury and his consecration were denounced by such American Anglican luminaries as George Washington and John Jay.

After awhile, however, the Americans who wanted to go slowly on the issue of bishops capitulated. Parliament relaxed its rules also, and bishops for New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia were consecrated in the next couple of years. An ancestor of mine named Samuel Prevoost was the first bishop of New York. I feel I can drop his name without much shame because he was not a very appealing fellow. Prevoost wanted to squeeze Seabury out of the House of Bishops, but just before the meeting at which he wanted to do his dastardly deed, God struck Prevoost down with the gout.

In any event, American Anglicanism has bishops -- bishops to whom my fellow ACC bishops and I stand in direct succession, because of Seabury and the Non-Jurors. God has been faithful to us in giving us apostolic ministry. Let us be faithful to him in using it properly.

The Collect: O Lord, we beseech thee, absolve thy people from their offences; that through thy bountiful goodness we may all be delivered from the hands of those sins, which by our frailty we have committed. Grant this, O heavenly Father, for the sake of Jesus Christ, our blessed Lord and Saviour. Amen.

The Epistle: Colossians 1: 3 - 12

The Gospel: St. Matthew 9: 18 - 22

November 7, 1999, Trinity XXIII

I want to call your attention to the last lines of this morning's epistle. St. Paul is writing to the church at Philippi, and he says, 'Our citizenship is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ; who shall change the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed unto the body of his glory, according to the working whereby he is able even to subject all things unto himself."

His overall point is that we should not allow ourselves to get dragged down by our associations with people who think this world is all there is. Knowing that there is a life beyond this one is one of the things that sets us Christian saints apart from the world.

St. Paul says while we live on this earth, we really belong in heaven. And we look to heaven for Jesus to come again. When he comes back he will raise us up from the dead and change our mortal bodies into immortal bodies like his own body. That will happen because he has power over everything in the universe, and he can subject any and all of it to his will -- what he wants it to be.

The reason I am dwelling upon this is that this line from Philippians is quoted in one of the most significant places in the Prayer Book. That is the sentence of burial that is read over a dead body at the grave. Please indulge me while I quote these dramatic words of committal in full.

"Unto Almighty God we commend the soul of our brother departed, and we commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the resurrection unto eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ; at whose coming in glorious majesty to judge the world, the earth and the sea shall give up their dead; and the corruptible bodies of those who sleep in him shall be changed, and made like unto his own glorious body; according to the mighty working whereby he is able to subdue all things unto himself."

Listening to that sentence of committal -- especially when it is being read over someone you mourn deeply -- is a major test of how much you really believe the central Christian teachings about life and death. If you think Jesus has power over everything and that he can subdue everything to himself, as St. Paul says, then you will indeed believe that death means only good-bye for awhile. You will also believe that we will all be raised from the dead together when he comes back and then go to heaven together to live forever.

That cosmic note seems rather far from the more mundane concerns of today's gospel, though the epistle is about death and the gospel is about taxes. Both the epistle and the gospel also condemn people who are content not to go beyond merely earthly things.

Each of Jesus' three major groups of enemies goes to him during the last week of his earthly life to ask him a question -- a question they hope will make him look bad in front of his crowds of supporters. As we know, Jesus finesses quite cleverly each of the three questions, and then he asks his opponents a Bible question of his own that leaves them speechless. At that point they decide that the only way to get rid of Jesus is to kill him, and they proceed to conspire to do so.

The first whack is taken by a group of Pharisees, together with some Herodians. The Herodians were the special political partisans of the Herod family who had ruled Israel for some time. The Herods' claim to the throne rested upon their alliance with the Romans, rather than upon any connection to the original, legitimate Hebrew monarchy.

After they butter Jesus up for a nauseating moment, the Herodians ask him, "Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or is it not?" If Jesus said, "It is lawful," he could be accused of treachery to his people and collaboration with the Romans. If he said, "It is not lawful," then he would attract the Romans' attention as a rebel and insurrectionist.

St. Matthew tells us that Jesus was not fooled, and said, "Why are you trying to trip me up, you hairsplitting legalists? We can clear this up easily if you show me one of the coins that are used to pay the taxes. OK, whose picture is on this coin -- whose name is on this coin?"

The Herodians reply, correctly, "Caesar's name and picture are on it." Jesus says, "If his name and picture are on the coin, then the coin must be his -- so it must be proper to give it to him. But you also have to give to God what belongs to him."

Following the same logic used with the coin, what belongs to God has to be what has his name and picture on it. What has God's name and picture on it is you – me -- church members -- baptized people -- saints. We are made in God's image, as Genesis tells us. We get God's name on us when we are baptized and he adopts us as his children and gives us his name.

There is never a conflict between meeting our legitimate earthly obligations and meeting our obligations to God. But if there ever appears to be a conflict between our duty to Caesar and our duty to God, it is our obligation to let God win out, no matter what the consequences for us may be.

"For our citizenship is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ."

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

October 31, 1999, Trinity XXII and Christ the King

The Gospel for the Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity begins with a question St. Peter asks Jesus, "If somebody does something to me over and over again, how many times do I have to forgive him? Do I have to do it as many as seven times?" Peter obviously thinks that if he were to forgive somebody seven times, it would represent a superhuman effort for which he should be congratulated extravagantly.

Jesus tells him, "You don't have to forgive seven times, you have to forgive seventy times seven times." Biblical literalists need to be wary at this point. Jesus does not mean that when someone has done something to you for the four hundred and ninety-first time, you are free to start withholding your forgiveness.

The responsibility to forgive other people has no limitations. God forgives us without limitations, because Jesus died for us. We are to forgive others without limitations, because Jesus died for us. Those ideas are at the core of the Christian religion.

What comes into your mind when you hear the word "saint?" To many people a saint is a person who puts up with someone or something that is more than they would be willing to handle. "She is an absolute saint to put up with that impossible man." "He is an absolute saint to put up with that impossible boss."

To others, the word "saint" conjures up a person who is not quite of this world, and extremely churchy, and who probably lived back in the old days. If we happened to run into such a person, we would try to be respectful, but religious fanatics are always slightly embarrassing, and we'd rather no one thought to put us in any such category.

But a saint in the New Testament sense — and, indeed, in the All Saints' Day sense —- is simply a baptized person. So, with no exceptions I know about, everybody here is a saint. The word "saint" is connected to the Latin word "sanctus," which means "holy." "Holy" means "set apart," or "differentiated."

The respect in which Christians are "holy," "set apart," and "differentiated" is not that we are necessarily better behaved than other people, and it is not that we are necessarily smarter than other people, and it is certainly not that we are more pious and holier-than-thou than other people. We are set apart because we are forgiven seventy times seventy times seven times and a few times more when necessary.

On All Saints' Day we celebrate the fact that God ties all us baptized and forgiven people into a community which goes beyond the limits of space and time. The collect's words on this matter are particularly memorable, "(God) hast knit together (his) elect in one communion and fellowship, in the mystical body of (his) son Christ our Lord."

We are all in this together from the first century until now, and all over the planet — at all times and in all places. And what we are in together is the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church — what the Prayer Book calls, "the blessed company of all faithful people," and, "that body of which Jesus Christ is the head and all baptized people are the members."

This church body of which each of us is an organic part is here on earth to do the will of Jesus our head. What Jesus wants is for us to love one another the way he loved us. To love is always to do what is best, and to do what is best is to forgive. St. Paul tells us that God has committed to our hands the ministry of reconciliation. We are saints because God forgives us. We act the way saints are supposed to act when we forgive others.

The wonderful hymns and lessons for All Saints' Day raise our thoughts to heaven. Heaven is where we saints whom God has chosen will go at the end of all time and all things. And we shall go there, not because we have been good, but despite the fact that we have not been good, and because Jesus died on the cross to forgive us.

St. John tells us that when Jesus first appears in the throne room of God in heaven he is "a lamb as it had been slain" — a lamb who was killed and then came back to life. One of the delicious paradoxes of heaven is that we saints will appear before God's throne in white robes, washed not in bleach but in blood, lamb's blood.

And then the Lamb will take us forgiven, set apart, washed-in-the-blood saints on a cool and pleasant walk — a walk which never needs to end. St. John says, "The Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed (us), and shall lead (us) unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from (our) eyes." I can hardly wait.

The Collect: Almighty and everlasting God, who hast exalted thy beloved Son to be King over all worlds, and hast willed in him to make all things new; mercifully grant that the kindreds of the earth which are wounded and dispersed by sin, may speedily be knit together under his gracious sovereignty who liveth and reigned ith thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: Colossians 1:12-20

The Gospel: St. John 18:33-37

October 24, 1999, Trinity XXI

We have not heard any of Jesus' parables in several weeks, but we have one as the Gospel this morning. He tells this one during the first Holy Week, when the tension between him and his enemies is heating up. Jesus never lets up on the pressure he places upon his opponents, and this parable helps to pour gasoline on the fire of their hateful resentment against him.

Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wants to hold a wedding feast for his son. When the dinner is ready, the invited guests refuse to come, and they are so adamant about it that they kill the king's messengers.

The king pays the ungrateful guests back by slaughtering then, and then he tells his servants to go out into the streets and invite anyone they see to come to the feast. When the banquet hall is full, the king comes in and sees a man who is not dressed properly for the occasion. When the king asks him why, the man says nothing to defend himself, so the King has him thrown out of the party.

Jesus was clearly directing that parable against his opponents. If God is the king and the Messiah is his son, then the guests who are invited to the banquet first are God's chosen people, the Jews. Their refusal to come to the banquet represents the hundreds of years during which the Jews turned away from God and mistreated the prophets God sent to call them back.

The rag-tag army of people who wind up accepting the invitation represent all the people whom respectable law-abiding Jews thought not to deserve a good relationship to God. That would include both the Jewish publicans, sinners, prostitutes and other unclean types whom, Jesus seemed to love to spend time with and the hated Gentiles--the people who weren't even Jews--that is to say, most of us.

So we can see why Jesus' parable only made the situation between him and his enemies even worse. They thought they had earned God's favor through their piety and their law-abiding and their all-around righteousness. Jesus was suggesting that their efforts had in fact earned them God's wrath, and that all the people whom they looked down upon would get into heaven long before they would.

St. Paul tells us in this morning's epistle not to be stupid. Since we live in evil times, we have to be very careful about how we act. It is of the highest importance that we try to figure out what God's will is in every particular situation and then act on what we figure out.

He suggests that getting drunk is not the best way to go about discerning God's will--if only because the hangover you may have on Sunday morning will make it less likely that you will show up in church. It is better not to fill oneself up with wine, but, instead, to fill up on God's Spirit.

St. Paul gives us three ways we can fill ourselves up with the Spirit and so help ourselves discern God's will. First, we should sing psalms and hymns--those of you who like to complain about our hymns should pay particular attention here. Second, we should learn to thank God for everything that happens--especially for the things we don't much like. That is how we can begin to see how God's will is different from our own will, and why in the long run his will turns out to be better.

Finally he says we should submit ourselves one to another. That is another way of saying, "Love one another." To submit is to put the needs of the other person ahead of your own needs. In any community--a family, a workplace, a parish church--if everyone put the other person's concerns ahead of his own, things would go much more smoothly.

One way not to be stupid in St. Paul's terms is not to assume that today's parable only applies to those nasty old first-century scribes and Pharisees who hated Jesus so much. We Gentiles get our invitations to the heavenly banquet because the Jews rejected theirs, to be sure.

But God wants a sincere and whole-hearted commitment from us Gentiles also. He wants to see that we have learned from the mistakes his chosen people made. God's demand for total commitment is represented in the parable by the man who is not dressed properly. His not having on a wedding-garment shows that he is only going to accept the king's invitation if he can do it his own way.

God invites everybody to his party. He wants everybody to be saved and to go to heaven. But if you dare to tell God, "I'm interested in you, but only on my own terms--only if I don't have to be inconvenienced too much," then you will be in for exactly what the bad wedding guest experienced.

That is to say, "There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many are called, but few are chosen."

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

October 17, 1999, Trinity XX

In this morning's Epistle (New Testament lesson) St. Paul tells us a Christian is like a soldier. At times in the church's history when pacifism and other sorts of anti-war feeling get stirred up, the idea that a Christian is a soldier comes under attack--non-violent attack to be sure.

But in saying that a Christian has to conduct himself as a soldier does, St. Paul is not taking sides about the wisdom of war in general or the wisdom of any individual war in particular. He is stating a fact. Everything that goes on in this world is the continuation of a war that began in heaven.

The war in heaven was fought between angels led by the archangel St. Michael and angels led by the dragon, "that old serpent called the devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world." The war between St. Michael--God's general--and the devil is going on now, and the battle is fought out within the heart of each one of us.

St. Paul says, "We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." He means our real enemies are not other human beings, our real enemies are demons--but demons can and do use people for their own purposes.

If you are going to be in a fight you have to protect yourself. In a spiritual fight you need both defensive protection--the breastplate of righteousness, the shoes of the gospel, the shield of faith, and the helmet of salvation--and an offensive weapon--the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

When St. Paul is depicted in art, he is usually carrying a sword--the sword of the Spirit. That is not meant to suggest that St. Paul was a professional soldier in military service, but that he was a soldier of Christ who tells us that we have to be soldiers of Christ too.

Last Monday, October 18, we celebrated the feast of a soldier of Christ, St. Luke the Evangelist. This coming Thursday, October 28, is the feast of two more Christian soldiers, St. Simon and St. Jude, Apostles.

St. Luke's most lasting accomplishment was writing two New Testament books--his gospel and the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. The Prayer Book's collect for his day talks about his description of Christ's love and healing power, and prays that the same power may be manifested in the church today.

St. Luke talks about healing in his Gospel, to be sure, but so do the other three gospel writers. What makes healing of particular interest in St. Luke's writings is that he was a doctor--St. Paul calls him a physician. Some of the most dramatic moments in the Book of Acts come when St. Luke describes how the apostles are able to heal people by the Holy Ghost just as Jesus did in the gospels--proving that Jesus left the same power he had to his church.

St. Luke accompanies St. Paul on his journey to Rome toward the end of Acts, and St. Paul's letters say that St. Luke was his constant companion during his imprisonment there. He is unique among the four gospel-writers in some of what he knows about the annunciations and births of both Jesus and St. John the Baptist. So the evidence suggests that St. Luke was an intimate friend of the two most important human beings in the New Testament--St. Paul and the Blessed Virgin Mary herself.

We don't have as much information about St. Simon and St. Jude as we do about St. Luke. Simon and Jude are in all the lists of the twelve disciples in the gospels. Simon is known as "the zealous one," and Jude is also called "Thaddeus" and, to be safe, "not Iscariot." There is a New Testament "Epistle of St. Jude" which he probably wrote, and tradition has Simon preaching in Egypt before they were martyred together in Persia.

The Prayer Book appoints a selection from Ephesians as the epistle for their day. St. Paul addresses the church to say you "are builded on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner-stone."

If the people in the church are like a building, our foundation is the apostles and the prophets--not just the apostles and prophets as our founding and continuing leaders, but also what the original apostles and prophets taught. We find their teaching in the Old and the New Testaments. Jesus is the corner-stone that holds us all together.

St. Paul goes on to say that the church is organic--a growing building, if you will. If we are willing to rest upon the foundation and the corner-stone, then the building can get larger so it can become a proper place for God to live. He writes, "all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit."

We are all soldiers and we are all bricks in the wall of God's temple, while some of us are also healers arid writers and preachers and martyrs. So, as St. Paul tells us, "My brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil."

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

October 10, 1999, Trinity XIX

In this morning's gospel, some people bring Jesus a paralyzed man on a stretcher, trusting he will heal him. Instead of pronouncing him healed, Jesus says, "Cheer up, your sins are forgiven." The scribes, yet another group of self-appointed critics, mutter, "He is committing blasphemy" since only God could forgive sins, a human being who said he could forgive was blaspheming. Jesus doesn't tell them, "I am God, so don't worry about it."

Instead he asks them, 'Do you think it is easier to say, 'Your sins are forgiven' or to say, 'Get up and walk'?" They don't answer the question, so he says, "Now I will show you that I have the power to forgive sins."

He tells the paralyzed man, "Get up and go home," and he gets up and goes home. Jesus' point is that he shows his power to forgive in his power to heal. That must mean there is a connection between sins and illness.

Some people think that what connects sins to illness is that illness is the way God punishes our sins. When we do something wrong, God pays us back with ailments which range all the way from a runny nose to cancer. That view is wrong. When Jesus meets a blind boy in Jerusalem, the disciples ask, "Why was he born blind? Was it his sin or his parents' sins?" Jesus says, "Neither one."

The connection is much more subtle. God put Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to take care of creation. As long as Adam and Eve maintained their good relationship to God, they maintained their good relationship to creation. When they disobeyed God, they mined not only their relationship to him, but also their relationship to creation.

Before the fall there was no illness and no death, and the creation provided a completely friendly environment. After the fall everything changed. Human beings became alienated from God, and they became alienated from the material world, too.

One symptom of the general alienation is the willful disobedience we call sin. Another symptom of the general alienation is disease — sickness. Another is death itself. Jesus came to earth to return us to the relationship Adam and Eve had with God in the Garden of Eden — and also to return us to the relationship they had with creation.

That should help explain what he means when he says that his healing power shows his power to forgive sins. They are two parts of the same overall process — the process of reconciling us to God, and so also reconciling us to the created, material order in which we live.

Our prayers for healing in church respect this connection. We always have a confession of sin and an absolution before we get to the laying-on of hands. Healing proves Jesus' power over sin and its consequences.

The importance of the created order is also what lies behind the animal blessing we shall hold this afternoon. One way in which St. Francis of Assisi had an impact on the church was to call Christians back to a sense of our connectedness to the material world.

Christianity always has to be on its guard against the tendency to excessive otherworldliness and spirituality and general wispiness and insubstantiality. That is remarkable, because there is very little hint of any such tendency in the Bible.

At the beginning of Biblical religion we meet a God who makes things and says the things are good. At the center of Biblical religion we have a God who takes on human flesh. At the end of Biblical religion we get married to God and have an endless party to celebrate. While we wait for the end God gives himself to us in ordinary material things — wine and bread and water and olive oil and hands.

St. Francis wrote the marvelous poem we sang as our processional hymn this morning. He celebrates the God who shows himself to us in the incredible world he has created for us to live in. It reminds us of what King David celebrates in the psalms:

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork.
The lions roaring after their prey do seek their meat from God.

David's lions remind us that St. Francis liked animals and animals liked him. That is why we pay special attention to animals around his day.

One reason I love God is that God makes cats. I will also admit that I love God too because God makes dogs to make dog people love him.

So today helps us know that the Lord is a great God. He is a God who came to earth to forgive our sins and heal our infirmities, and he is a God who makes us glad through our animal friends. So, to steal a verse from our last hymn:

Let us, with a gladsome mind,
Praise the Lord for he is kind.
For his mercies aye endure,
Ever faithful, ever sure.

Hymn 308, John Milton, 1623, alt.; Psalm 136

The Collect: O God, forasmuch as without thee we are not able to please thee; Mercifully grant that thy Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Ephesians 4:17-32

The Gospel: St. Matthew 9:1- 8

October 3, 1999, Trinity XVIII

Today's gospel is one of my very favorites. The fact that it is one of my favorites helps me understand why the sin of idolatry is so dangerous. We all have a tendency to remake God in our own image — that is, we like to think of God as being pretty much the same kind of person we are.

That makes us confident that he will always overlook our shortcomings — if God is as sensitive as I am, then of course he'll understand a few slip-ups here and there. That attitude is as foolish as our tendency to like God most when he does what we want done — and why we question him most when he acts without paying attention to our best advice.

I like today's gospel because it shows Jesus as a clever and witty Bible teacher. Draw your own conclusions, the story is set during the last week of Jesus' earthly life — the run-up to the crucifixion. Each of the three major groups within the Judaism of Jesus' time takes one last crack at him to try to humiliate him in front of the crowds.

Last week we saw the Pharisees put Jesus in a damned-if-he-did, damned-if-he-didn't situation in regard to healing on the Sabbath. St. Matthew tells us that the supporters of King Herod tried a similar tack regarding paying taxes, and the Sadducees — the religious liberals — tried the same thing regarding the afterlife.

In today's gospel a Pharisee lawyer (a double whammy there) asks Jesus the seemingly innocent question, "Of all the wonderful commandments in our wonderful Law, which one do you think is the most wonderful?" The trick there was that Jews were supposed to think that the Old Testament Law was all of a piece. To take one aspect of the Law and set it above all the others was like pulling a thread at the bottom of a sweater, the whole structure might unravel.

The Pharisees had probably spent a good bit of time thinking up this question which they were sure would make Jesus look bad, but he does not even hesitate as he smashes it right back into their faces. He tells them, "There is not one greatest commandment, there are two — love God and love your neighbor as you love yourself. The demands of the entire Hebrew Bible can be summed up in those two commandments."

Now Jesus gets a measure of revenge as he probably puts on his best innocent choir boy face and says, "Now let me ask you a question. When the Saviour of Israel comes — the Messiah — the Christ from whom is he going to be descended?" The Pharisees answer correctly, "The Messiah will be a descendant of King David," but their correct answer entangles them further in the spider's web Jesus is spinning.

Jesus goes on, "Well, if King David is the Messiah's ancestor, why does David call him 'Lord?' —since we know nobody calls anyone younger than he his lord." Jesus cites the first verse of Psalm 110 as evidence. Everybody agreed that King David wrote Psalm 110 about the coming Messiah.

Psalm 110 begins with David's saying, "The Lord (that is, God) said unto my Lord (that is, the Messiah), 'Sit thou on my right hand till I make thine enemies thy footstool." Jesus asks, "How can the Messiah be a descendant of David and David's lord at the same time? If you lawyers and Pharisees know the Bible so well, tell me how the Messiah can possibly be both older than David and younger than David."

The Holy Ghost has helped us all be bright little Bible students too, so we know the answer to Jesus' question. The Messiah is both older than David and younger than David because he is God — the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. He is David's Lord because he existed from before the beginning of time. He is David's son, his descendant, because he became a full human being a millennium after David lived and died.

It is possible that the Pharisees saw what Jesus' question implied, and didn't want to put tongue to it since they believed that the idea that God could be a man was blasphemy. It is also possible that he had them absolutely stumped.

In any event, St. Matthew tells us, in this delicious understatement, "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 realized finally that they were never going to make him go away by beating him in a debate. The only way to make him go away was to kill him.

Now lest I indulge myself in further idolatry by congratulating Jesus on his brilliant teaching style, let us not forget that the content of the debate is as important as the debate itself. The demands of God are two: love him (that is to say, obey him and trust him to work things out); and love your neighbor (that is to say, help other people — do what is best for them). Every bit of the Old Testament can be summed up in those two commands.

Finally, Jesus was trying to get the Pharisees to see that the Old Testament was not just about ethics and morality important as ethics and morality are. Jesus was trying to get them to see that the logical conclusion of the Old Testament was that God would come to earth as a man to save everyone and forgive everyone for all the ways they did not and do not keep the law. The enemies of mankind are sin — disobedience -- which leads to death, and Jesus put his feet down on them for us.

So King David writes, "The Lord said unto my Lord, 'Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool'."

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

September 26, 1999, Trinity XVII

This morning's gospel lesson continues the story New Testament saga called "Jesus against the Pharisees." The Pharisees love rules. They like to impress other people with their own rule-following, and they like to remind other people that they are not following the rules properly. The keynote of the Pharisee's life is that he likes to make himself look good at the expense of others. The Pharisees did not die out in the first century.

As today's story opens, Jesus has been invited to Saturday brunch at the home of a Pharisee. It becomes apparent quite quickly that the invitation is a set-up. When Jesus gets to the house, he sees that the Pharisee have placed in his path a man who is a victim of the dropsy — edema — water retention. By this time, Jesus has acquired a reputation as a healer.

The key to the set-up is the fact that the invitation is for the sabbath Saturday. One of the Ten Commandments is "Remember that thou keep holy the sabbath day." The sabbath observance was intended originally to see to it that everybody took a day off every week. God created for six days and rested on the seventh. Human beings need time off too.

By Jesus' time the Pharisees and people of a similar mind had come up with all sorts of picky rules which defined what constituted observing the sabbath and what constituted breaking it. That had turned the sabbath into the exact opposite of what God intended it to be. Instead of relaxing, people spent all day Saturday afraid they might be breaking one of the rules.

Nobody was quite sure whether or not performing a healing was breaking the sabbath. So Jesus seemed to be in a no-win situation. If he played it safe and, out of deference to the sabbath laws, suggested that the man with the dropsy come back on Sunday, people could accuse him of not being compassionate. If he went ahead and healed the ma, the Pharisees could say, "Aha — gotcha you broke the sabbath."

As he approaches the water-retention man, Jesus asks the Pharisees, "It is lawful to heal on the sabbath-day?" They refuse to make his life any easier by answering his question. Jesus goes ahead and heals the man.

Then he turns back to the Pharisees and says, "If any of you goes home this afternoon and discovers that one of your prize animals has fallen into a hole, you won't let the fact that it is Saturday keep you from pulling it out, will you?" The Pharisees remain mute.

Jesus is showing what hypocrites they are. He is not saying they should not rescue their distressed animals. He is saying that if they will do the right thing for an ox or a donkey on a Saturday, they shouldn't be too concerned if a human being gets healed on a Saturday.

In another place Jesus says, "The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath." God's concern is that the right thing get done, Saturday or not. Doing what is right is more important than any rule.

When the food was ready, Jesus remarked on the fact that the other Pharisees rushed into the dining room and tried to grab the best seats — the ones nearest the host. That was another aspect of their desire to impress.

Jesus could see that trying to get the prime seats at the dinner table was similar to their trying to impress God with their rule-following. He goes on to say that in social gamesmanship and in one's relationship to God, it is better strategy to lie low and play humble than to put yourself forward.

We have to begin with the idea that it isn't possible to impress God. He knows what we are all really like; he looks beyond the façades we all put on; and he loves us despite our badness and our pretending that badness is really goodness.

If you think you can con God into believing you are something you are not and expect that he is going to give you special treatment because you are such a wonderful person -- you are going to end up disappointed and looking like a fool.

In a similar way, people who grab for the best seats run the risk of being told, "Oh, you can't sit there, there is a more important person's name on that place card." Then as you slink off to a less prominent seat, you are revealed publicly not only as a shameless self-promoter, but also as someone who is not very good at it.

Jesus says, "It's always smarter to go for a lower seat, the worst that can happen to you then is that you will have to stay there. But it just might happen that the host will say, 'Why are you way down there? You're supposed to be way up here.' Not only will you wind up with a better seat, but people will also think you are humble."

The spiritual point is that we never gain by trying to promote ourselves to God the way the Pharisees did. The Pharisees didn't realize that God and Jesus see right through theft hypocrisy. It is always better strategy to say, "God, I am sorry for what I have done wrong," and not to say, "God, I am grateful to you for making me so much better than everybody else."

For, as Jesus reminds us, "Whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted."

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

September 19, 1999, Trinity XVI

Is it possible to be a Christian and not believe in life after death? Can one be a Christian and not believe in an afterlife? The clear and simple answer to those questions is. "No."

But it is possible now — as it was also possible at the time of Jesus -— to be a Jew and not believe in an afterlife. A sect within Judaism called the Sadducees accepted the authority of only the first five books of the Old Testament. Those books did not seem to talk about an afterlife, so the Sadducees did not believe in it.

Other Jews pointed to various passages in the books of the prophets to indicate that there is life after death for the people of God. But even some of those passages seem to talk more about the survival of the whole nation of Israel after military defeat than about the survival of individual people after death. So the Jewish view on the subject in Jesus' time was muddled.

For Christians, the resurrection of Jesus is the most convincing evidence about the afterlife. Jesus survived death in a body, and then he went back up to heaven to live forever with God. The promise we Christians have is that since we have been baptized into Jesus' body, we too shall come back from the dead in bodies, and we too shall ascend into heaven to live with God forever.

The question of the afterlife came up, of course, during the three years of Jesus' earthly ministry that preceded his death and resurrection. Jesus made it clear not only that he believed in life after death, but also that he was the person who was able to provide it.

When the Sadducees ask him a trick question to try to get him to admit that believing in an afterlife is crazy, Jesus reminds them of what God said to Moses at the burning bush. When Moses lived, the Hebrew patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had been dead for hundreds of years. Yet God told Moses, "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." If Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were not living on in some way if their relationship to God was not continuing somehow even though they were dead — God would have told Moses, "I was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."

Jesus also performed three resurrections which the gospels describe for us. They are not exactly like the resurrection that he experienced, or the ones that we will experience. His resurrection was permanent, as ours will be. We will get new bodies like his -- bodies which will never die.

The people in the gospel miracles died again later on — or else they would still be walking the earth writing their memoirs and appearing on talk shows. But the power that raised them is the power that will raise us.

There are several things about these miracles that are worth looking at — along with the obvious value they have as previews of the great resurrections to come. In today's gospel Jesus is going into a city called Nain which was not far from where he had grown up. He and his entourage run into a funeral procession which is coming out of the city gate.

The dead man is the only child of a widow. It was sad enough that she lost her last close relative, but he was also her only source of financial support. Jesus feels sorry for her and tells her to stop weeping.

Then he goes over to the stretcher on which the dead man was being carried -- the first century equivalent of a Cadillac hearse — and he touches it. That was shocking, because touching a dead body or anything associated with a dead body made one unclean, and Jesus was known as a holy man.

Jesus then addresses the corpse, saying, "Young man, I say unto thee, 'Arise." At that point the man sits up and starts talking, though, regrettably enough, St. Luke doesn't tell us what he said. Jesus hands the man over to his mother, the crowd praises God, and the news about what Jesus can do spreads through the whole country.

It seems clear to me that the person for whom Jesus performed the resurrection was the widow of Nain — not her dead son. There is no implication in anything Jesus teaches or in anything Jesus does that being dead is in and of itself a particularly bad thing. In each of the resurrection miracles there is a family member who is in anguish: the mother here; the father of a dead little girl in a second story; and Mary and Martha, the sisters of the dead man Lazarus, in a third.

In each case, the resurrection is Jesus' response to the grief of the family members. That suggests that grief is a sorrier state than death is. It also reminds us that the resurrection at the last day promises not only individual survival, but also the reunion of families and the reconstitution of friendships.

And in case that casts a faint pall over an otherwise glorious future, remember this: the family members you don't like to invite for Thanksgiving and the ones you are mortified to run into at weddings will either be in hell where you won't have to worry about them or just possibly your and their newly perfected natures will make you glad to see each other after all.

When it comes to the afterlife, Christianity does not teach that the soul lives on in some filmy way. The New Testament teaches the resurrection of the flesh. We shall survive death just as Jesus did — in bodies, ready for heaven, where we shall enjoy God forever.

The Collect: O Lord, we beseech thee, let thy continual pity cleanse and defend thy Church; and, because it cannot continue in safety without thy succour, preserve it evermore by thy help and goodness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Ephesians 3: 13 - 21

The Gospel: St. Luke 7:11-19

September 12, 1999, Trinity XV

Jesus' subject in this morning's gospel is anxiety worry. He says that one of the big problems with human beings is that we spend a lot of our time worrying about our material well-being. We worry about where our food is going to come from. We worry about where our drink is going to come from. We worry about where our clothing is going to come from.

Even if we are well-off enough not to have to worry about those specific things from day to day, we are all beset with concerns about the future, which is his more general point. What is going to happen to me when I get old? What is going to happen to me now that I am old? Are my children going to turn out properly? Am I ever going to get things straightened out at work? Is something or somebody going to come along and foil all my plans and ruin all my dreams?

Jesus tells us that worrying is foolish. First of all on the very most practical level, much of what we worry about are things over which we have absolutely no control. He asks, "Which of you by being anxious can add one cubit unto the measure of his life?" Do you really think you can worry yourself into living longer?

Jesus also says that worrying about the future — especially about your material welfare in the future --makes you no better than a pagan. He says, "After all these things do the Gentiles seek." Jesus is not just indulging himself in religious name-calling.

Jews and Christians have someone on whom we can rely to provide all the material things we need. That is, quite obviously, God, our Father in heaven. Jesus says, "Your heavenly father knoweth that ye have need of all these things." Pagans don't know about a heavenly father whom they can trust. Jews and Christians are supposed to know better.

Our Wednesday Bible classes have just begun to study the Old Testament book of Judges. At one point in one of the classes this past week I asked, "What are you getting out of this story?" The correct response came back, "Human nature hasn't changed very much in the last thirty-three hundred years."

The biggest problem with the people of Israel in the Old Testament was that they did not trust God. They did not trust God even after all of the great things he had done for them. He led them out of slavery in Egypt, and they repaid him by spending the next forty years complaining about their food and their living accommodations in the desert.

God led them across the Jordan River and into the Promised Land, and they repaid him by taking up the pagan religion of the people they were supposed to conquer. God told Israel, "I have done great things for you in the past, so you can trust me to continue to take care of you in the future." Israel's response was, "We don't trust you."

The Christian story is identical. God tells us through St. Paul and others, "I have done great things for you too, I sent my son to die to forgive your sins and lead you out of the bondage of death and into eternal life. Don't you think on the basis of all I have done in the past that you can trust me to take care of the future? Will you repay me with worry?"

Each of us has to find his own way to offset our tendency to worry with an increased confidence in God's good providence. One reason we come to church every Sunday is to be reminded of the good things God has done for us in the past. That helps us to see that if he loved us enough to send his son to die, he surely loves us enough to get us through whatever this life may bring us.

We have to learn over and over again that the story of what God did with Israel and the story of what God did in Jesus form the pattern of what God does with us. God did mighty things in Israel's history, God did mighty things in Jesus, God does mighty things in our lives too. We have to remind ourselves of what those specific things are. We need to keep an ongoing list of what God has done in our lives.

And we need that list not only so we can thank God for all he has done, but also so we can build our confidence in him as we face the future. "He has got me this far, I guess I can believe he'll get me the rest of the way." "He got me out of that predicament, why do I think he won't get me out of this one?"

We base our confidence in God for the future on what he has done for us in the past. That is the message of the Old Testament, and that is the message of Jesus. That means we have to learn to look at what has happened in our past and ask, "What was God doing there? What was he trying to teach me? What was he showing me by allowing this or that event to take place?"

Jesus tells us to consider the lilies of the field and the birds of the heaven. God takes care of them, and they don't seem to need to worry much about it. Pretty as the lilies are and pleasant as the birds may be, human beings are worth more to God than either of them. If you see that God takes care of the birds and the lilies, can you really believe he won't take care of you?

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

September 5, 1999, Trinity XIV

I need to apologize, at least to the person with whom I shall be riding home this afternoon, for the utterly embarrassing cutesiness of scheduling both "Awake, awake to love and work" and "Come, labor on" as hymns for the Labor Day weekend.

But that is not the most outrageous exploitation of Labor Day in the church that I've ever heard of. The first parish in the Episcopal Church where I worked full-time was so anti-sacramental that they did not even have Holy Communion at the mass services on the first Sunday of the month as even the lowest church parishes usually did.

They scheduled Holy Communion instead for what they called "special occasions." The special occasions tended to be the Sundays within three-day weekends where many of the parishioners could be expected to be safely out of town. On the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, the ill-attended Communion service was dedicated to "Vocation in daily life."

Paying attention to the issue of vocation in our daily lives is not a bad idea — as long as it is not used to shield people from Holy Communion. It is proper to think on Labor Day and on any other day for that matter that God has callings — vocations -- for everyone in the church.

For most people the word "vocation" suggests something explicitly religious a call to the ordained ministry, perhaps, or a vocation to enter a convent. But every honest occupation and every reasonable position in life is a calling from God too. He calls us to be mothers, fathers, wage-earners of various sorts, students, retired people and so on.

We shall help ourselves to live at least a bit more calmly if we can look at who we are and at what we do as things God intends for us consciously — as vocations we can pursue for his sake. If we cannot imagine that it is God who has put us where we are, we should think about a change. The Prayer Book sums it up in its explanation of the commandment not to covet. I am to "do my duty in that state of life into which it shall please God to call me." That is every Christian's vocation.

Today's gospel suggests to us two things that all Christians ought to be doing whatever their different vocations may be. The two things are, quite simply, obeying Jesus and thanking him. Obedience and thanksgiving are two of the most important Christian virtues.

Jesus goes into a city where there are ten lepers. The lepers don't come near him, because they don't want to contaminate him. Instead, they yell over, "Hey, Jesus how about helping us." Jesus yells back, "Go show yourselves to the priests."

One of the jobs of priests in Israel was to certify healings from skin diseases. Skin diseases — from leprosy on down — kept people away from worship. Only a priest could let a former sufferer back in. But if someone went to the priest before he was really healed, then he contaminated the priest and further complicated his own problem.

So when the ten lepers went off to the priest on Jesus' say-so it showed that they had confidence in his power to heal them before they got there. And they were healed — not because Jesus said, "You're healed," but because Jesus told them what to do and they did it.

We would have an easier path through this world if we concentrated on obeying what Jesus says just because he says it. That helps us to acquire the confidence that if we do what he says things will go better for us than if we try to mastermind everything ourselves.

After the ten lepers realize they are healed, nine go on about their business and only the tenth approaches Jesus to thank him. Jesus asks, rather mockingly, "Were there not ten cleansed? but where are the nine?" Jesus ends the story telling the man, "Go along, your faith has made you whole."

Jesus did not give the ingrates leprosy again, though it might have been tempting. The point is that thanking God for whatever happens completes the circuit of faith. Being thankful reminds us that whatever happens to us and whatever we have all come from God. Most of us are far quicker to condemn God when he doesn't give us exactly what we want than we are to thank him for what he does give us.

It isn't that God needs our gratitude, or that he will pout if he doesn't get enough of it. He wants us to learn the pattern of how he deals with us.

That will help us to appreciate and understand how he is truly our father who loves us. We come to see it not only in the obviously good things for which it should be easy to thank him, but also in the not-so-pleasant things where we have to learn to push ourselves to thank him anyway.

So "Awake, awake to love and work," and "Come labor on." The main work God has for all of us is to do what he tells us to do and then thank him for everything remembering that what we have to thank him for most is Jesus' death.

As the Prayer Book puts it, "We, thine unworthy servants, do give thee most humble and hearty thanks for all thy goodness and loving-kindness to us and to all men…, but above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory."

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

August 29, 1999, Trinity XIII

The most important character in this morning's gospel is a man who has no name other than "a lawyer." The lawyer has been listening to Jesus preach, and he decides that it is now time to find out how clever Jesus really is. So he asks Jesus, "What do I have to do to get eternal life?" - not a bad question at all.

August 22, 1999, Trinity XII

Today's Gospel lesson tells us how Jesus heals a deaf man. The first thing that is unusual about this healing is that it takes place outside of Israel in a Gentile territory in present-day Jordan. Jesus also adds some extra theatrics, as he takes the deaf man aside, puts his fingers in his ears -- as if to unstop them; spits and touches the man's tongue -- as if to loosen it; sighs; looks up into the sky; and says "Ephphatha (EFF-fa-tha)."

Jesus spoke a language called Aramaic, which was a degenerative form of Hebrew -- rather in the way in which Spanish and French are degenerative forms of Latin. To add further color to the scene, St. Mark keeps Jesus' prayer in Aramaic, rather than translating it into the Greek in which he wrote his gospel. "Ephphatha" is Aramaic for "Be opened." Once Jesus has accomplished all the preliminaries, the deaf man's ears open immediately, and he is also able to speak.

Jesus makes a point of telling the crowd that they shouldn't talk about what has happened. But they have been so struck with what he has done that they can't keep their mouths shut, saying, "He hath done all things well: he maketh both the deaf to hear and the dumb to speak."

It is from stories like this one that we derive our practice of laying on hands for healing. Jesus promised the disciples that they would do not only the works he did, but even greater works as well. At the end of St. Marks' gospel he says, "Believers will lay hands on the sick, and the sick will recover." We do it because he told us to. When we act obediently, he shows us why he told us to do it in the first place.

A further aspect of this story has to do with Jesus' identity. The church believes two primary things about Jesus: first, that he is the Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity become a man; and, second, that he is the Messiah of Israel. It is unnecessary -- and more or less impossible, anyway -- to separate out Jesus' identity as God from his identity as the Messiah, today's story puts the emphasis upon Jesus' identity as the Messiah of Israel.

One of the greatest themes of the Hebrew Bible -- what Christians call the Old Testament -- is that some day God is going to send someone to earth to straighten things out once and for all. Israel discovered that being God's chosen people did not guarantee them a peaceful and successful ride through history. The people of Israel were disobedient, and their leaders were unfaithful, so God made them live with the consequences of their actions -- which included military defeat, exile from their homeland, and persecution.

But God promised that some day a man would come along to set everything right and restore Israel to her proper place among the nations. Israel has a hot, dry climate, so soothing and cooling ointments are always much coveted items -- something we learn on the beach. Having plenty of such oil -- and thus being cool -- was regarded as a sign of God's special favor. As a consequence, when a man became king of Israel oil was poured on his head to show that God supported him lavishly.

The Hebrew word for "anointed," "oiled," "slick," and "cool," if you will, comes into English as "Messiah." The equivalent Greek word enters English as "Christ." "Christ" is not Jesus' last name. "Christ" is a title.

When we call Jesus "Christ" we are saying that he is the one the Old Testament said would come. He is the Saviour of God's people -- first the Jews and then us Gentiles. The deaf man in the story is probably a Gentile, which underscores the point.

Most present-day Jews do not believe Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah of Israel, but most of them think some Christ is still going to come. St. Paul suggests that when Jesus appears at the end of the world, Jews will say, "Here he is," while we Christians say, "Here he is again."

The Old Testament prophet Isaiah said one of the things that would happen when the Messiah came was that the deaf would hear. Many of the miracles Jesus performed were intended to get people gradually to realize that he was the Messiah. Today's miracle is a good example.

The reason Jesus tells the crowd not to talk about what they saw has to do with another set of expectations about what the Messiah would do. Since he was going to be a descendant of King David, many Jews expected him to be a military leader who would lead a rebellion against the Romans.

Jesus was not yet ready to reveal who he really was. To attract too much attention from the Jewish authorities and the Roman occupying government this early would have thrown off his internal time schedule -- and his intention to have the final showdown take place in Jerusalem.

Amid all of these Bible facts, today's gospel lesson poses at least two questions for us. First, do you have any direct experience of the healing power of Christ the deaf man received? And, second, do you have the direct sense that the Messiah of Israel came to earth not just to save Jews and Gentiles generally but you specifically?

The most direct way to begin to experience the healing and saving power of Christ is to open yourself to him in worship and prayer -- as you acknowledge how dependent you are upon his love and forgiveness. Pray always that God will show you that, "He hath done all things well: he maketh both the deaf to hear and the dumb to speak."

The Collect: Almighty and everlasting God, who art always more than ready to hear than we to pray, and art wont to give more than either we desire or deserve; Pour down upon us the abundance of thy mercy; forgiving us those things whereof our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things which we are not worthy to ask, but through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: II Corinthians 3:4 -9

The Gospel: St. Mark 7:31 - 37

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