This last Sunday in October has different significance attached to it in different parts of the Christian world. Throughout much of Protestantism it is known as 'Reformation Sunday." That is because it is the Sunday nearest October 31 -- the date in 1517 when Martin Luther posted his '95 Theses" on the door of the cathedral in Wittenberg. That was the opening shot in what became the Protestant Reformation -- an upheaval which changed religion in England, and so affected and formed us.

In the liturgical or more Catholic world, the last Sunday in October is often called the feast of Christ the King. I have no objection to glorifying the Reformation or to glorifying Christ the King, and our hymns this morning reflect that. The Prayer Book calls this the 22nd Sunday after Trinity, so that is where we are -- but there are echoes of both the kingship of Christ and the Reformation in what we are about to hear.

The Gospel lesson this morning is one of Jesus' parables - He has just got done telling the disciples how to resolve disputes in the church, and that raises the question of forgiveness. St. Peter always seems ready to ask the stupid question -- so we should thank him, because the stupid question is often the one we would all like to ask -- it we weren't so embarrassed.

Peter's question is, "How far does this forgiveness business go? How often do I have to forgive somebody who has wronged me? Do I have to do it as many as seven times7' Or, put another way, "What is the least I need to do to slide by but still stay on God's good side?"

Jesus says, "You don't just need to forgive people seven times -- you have to do it seventy times seven times" -- though, of course, that doesn't mean you can stop forgiving the 491st time. There is no upper limit on your responsibility to forgive other people- And to show Peter why, Jesus tells him a story.

The story is, appropriately enough, about a king who has a servant who owes him an astronomical amount of money. The king says he is going to sell all of the servant's possessions and sell the servant and his family into slavery to pay off the debt.

The servant throws himself down on the ground and begs for time to raise the money to pay the debt. The king is so moved by his performance that he lets him off the hook for everything he owes.

On his way home to tell his wife to unpack, the servant runs into one of his fellow servants who owes him a relatively small amount of money. Servant A grabs Servant B by the throat and demands his payment. WhenServant B pleads with Servant A in exactly the same words in which Servant A pled with the king, Servant A tells Servant B, "Tough luck for you" -- and has him thrown into debtor's prison.

The other servants who are watching this sorry spectacle report it to the king. The king calls Servant A before him and says, "I forgave your debt because you asked me to -- shouldn't you have shown the same compassion and pity toward your fellow-servant that I showed you?" So the king sends Servant A off to jail until he can pay the original debt.

The parable should not be too difficult to figure out. The king is God, I am Servant A, and anyone who has wronged me is Servant B. If I accept God's forgiveness for the innumerable things I have done to disobey him, I should be willing to forgive other people for the relatively fewer things they have done to me -- seventy times seven times and more. "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us."

So the parable is in part about how God uses us in the world. He wants us to be channels of his forgiveness. The Holy Ghost works in us to try to make us more and more what God is. God forgives us, so to be like him we forgive others.

My years of talking with parishioners and hearing confessions have taught me that forgiveness is most people's biggest spiritual problem. We have a hard time believing God really forgives us, and that makes it hard to forgive ourselves. One of the more perverse aspects of human pride is to believe what you have done is so bad that even God can't forgive it. But that means your standard is higher than God's -- and that is absurd.

We also have a hard time forgiving other people for what they have done to us. We have the wrongheaded idea that forgiving means saying, "I guess what you did to me wasn't so bad after all."

But the truth is that if you don't forgive, you stay in prison. Forgiveness mainly benefits the one who forgives. He gets free of the chains of his own resentment -- and resentment can eat you up. Forgiving unhooks him from the hold over him the person who has wronged him has.

Forgiving is not the easiest thing to do -- it requires constant and conscious daily spiritual effort. But the results are worth it. We don't forgive people because they deserve it, we forgive them because it is best for us. We don't want to be where our friend Servant A still is.

And prison is where Jesus says we will be if we, "from our hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses."

The last line of this morning's Gospel reads, "This is again the second miracle that Jesus did, when he was come out of Judaea into Galilee." St. John arranges the first half of his gospel around a series of miracles. Each one of them helps to build St. John's double argument that Jesus is both the Messiah -- the Christ -- the savior the Hebrew Bible promised and the Son of God.

The first miracle St. John describes comes when Jesus turns water into wine at a wedding reception at Cana, a town in Galilee. Without being too mechanical about it, it seems that that miracle's main point is to show that since Jesus has control over the processes of nature, he must be God.

The beginning of the second miracle also takes place in Cana of Galilee, but its effect is felt in the town of Capernaum, which is about eighteen miles away. A man from Capernaum, who has a sick son there, approaches Jesus in Cana and asks him to come over and heal his son.

One of Jesus' more maddening characteristics -- both then and now -- is not to answer requests immediately. He seems to like to delay things. Often he makes us wait while he tests how much we really want what we are asking for. In the case of the man with the sick son he seems to want to engage him in a debate about religious psychology.

Instead of saying immediately either, "Of course I'll come and heal him," or, "Forget about it," he says, "I guess none of you is going to believe unless you see signs and wonders." Jesus does the miracles to get people's attention and to show who he is. In the most honorable sense of the word, Jesus' miracles are advertising.

Miracles can attract us to Jesus, they can help deepen our faith and trust in him, and we should expect them and look for them in our lives. But we need to pray for the kind of confidence in him that is there even when we are not seeing any obvious miracles.

The man says in effect, "Let's talk theology some other time -- come with me so my son won't die." Jesus says, "Don't worry about it -- your son is going to be fine." St. John says that the man believed Jesus. We see that in the fact that the man did not rush home to see if Jesus was right, but, instead, waited to make the fairly short trip from Cana to Capernaum until the next day.

When the man finally gets home, his servants tell him not only that his son is still alive, but also that he is getting better. The man asks when the recovery began, and they tell him it was yesterday at one in the afternoon. When the man realizes,"That is exactly when I was talking to Jesus," not only is his belief in Jesus strengthened, but also his whole household is convinced to believe in Jesus too.

I am grateful that our parish knows Jesus the healer. I am extremely gratified that you accept the ministering of prayer for healing that we see here on Sunday mornings, and in my hospital visits, and any other place it seems appropriate.

Because our diocese was the host of the Provincial Synod, I was the celebrant at the primary celebration of Holy Communion, which was attended by several hundred people. That gave me the opportunity to lay on hands for healing, and that attracted attention -- I trust it was good advertising for Jesus. People are beginning to know, for example, that one of our bishops was healed miraculously through the laying on of hands this past summer. Jesus gives his healing power to his church.

The less obvious message of the healing of the nobleman's son has to do with, you will forgive me, inclusiveness -- one might almost say multiculturalism. The man with the sick son was a Gentile -- not a Jew. Jews of Jesus' time had a tendency to think that God belonged to them. They were his chosen people, so they had the exclusive franchise.

Now there is plenty in the Old Testament -- especially in the writings of the prophet Isaiah -- to suggest that God is interested in Gentiles -- the nations -- the others -- the people he created who are not Jewish. But we all tend to overlook and ignore things we don't want to hear about.

The Jews just weren't terribly interested in hearing that God loved Gentiles too. That would have forced them to reevaluate their prejudices against at least the Romans and the Samaritans, and nobody really likes to reevaluate his prejudices. Nonetheless, Jesus healed a Gentile.

St. Paul talks this morning about putting on the whole armor of God. We need to wear the whole armor of God if we are going to fight effectively against evil -- whether it is the evil we perceive in the public sphere, or the evil we perceive in other people -- or, most importantly, the evil which is in ourselves.

The two weapons we pick up from today's Gospel are, first, the confidence that Jesus the healer hears what we ask him and acts on it, and, second, the knowledge that God is interested in everyone and in everything that happens -- that he wants to save everybody and bring good out of every situation.

Those weapons build up our faith, and St. Paul exhorts us, "Above all, take the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked."

Marriage -- and especially Christian marriage -- has been a hot topic on tv and in the newspapers lately -- mainly because of the Promise Keepers rally on the Mall last Saturday. I am waiting to find out what God thinks of the fact that while that event was going on, I was here at church blessing hamsters and German shepherds. I don't think he's angry at all, really, but I am also quite delighted that one of our members did go to the Mall.

The Promise Keepers seem to emphasize the moral and ethical aspects of Christian marriage, and we should be very glad about that. But we must not ever forget that the Bible sets the ethical responsibilities that marriage places upon both men and women in a context. The context is this: the marriage of a man and a woman represents the relationship between God and his people -- between Christ and his church -- between the Holy Trinity and each individual one of us.

Marriage is not just a human institution which we believe is the bedrock of orderly society, marriage is also a sign of the presence of God among us. It is the clearest way of showing on earth what the ultimate destiny of human beings in heaven is.

The section of the New Testament which brings this all together is in the fifth chapter of St. Paul's letter to the church at Ephesus in present-day Turkey. He sets forward the most familiar -- and most important -- ethical demands of Christian marriage. They are, "Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands" and "Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for it."

That is clearly not a license for one partner to tyrannize or dominate the other, but a call to mutual service and cooperation. The wife submits to her husband while the husband dies for his wife -- an even exchange. Now at the risk of offending, I must tell you that St. Paul's teaching about marriage is in almost exclusively sexual terms.

In First Corinthians he says that God doesn't care whether you are married or not. Every believer should figure out whether he is the marrying kind or not, and then be that. The determining factor is your sexual drive. People who want sex should be married. People who aren't particularly motivated in that way will save themselves a lot of difficulty if they don't bother. God is happy with you either way.

Returning to Ephesians, St. Paul says that it is the mutuality of the sexual intimacy between a husband and wife that shows us the closeness of Christ and believers. He writes, "A man (shall) leave his father and mother, and shall be joined to his wife, and they two shall be one flesh." One flesh -- not one spirit -- not one candleflame put together out of two. Then he applies the clincher, "This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church."

The beginning of the Prayer Book's wedding service lays out the Biblical reasons we perform marriages in the church. Among other things, we say that marriage is "an honourable estate, instituted of God, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his church." The relationship between husband and wife is the earthly image of the relationship between Jesus and ourselves. Nothing is of more importance.

We see marital imagery all through the Bible. Today's Gospel is a parable in which Jesus likens being offered salvation to being invited to a wedding. The Hebrew Bible describes God as the husband of Israel. Jesus does his first miracle at a wedding.

In St. John's Gospel, John the Baptist says that he is the best man at the wedding where Jesus is the bridegroom and the church is his bride. Revelation tells us that in heaven the marriage will be consummated, and, as Jesus also suggests, there will be the reception to end all receptions.

I have now told you what the Bible says about these matters. I hope you can see that the stands our church takes on such matters as the ordination of women and the blessing of homosexual relationships in the church are based upon these Biblical foundations.

It should not be surprising that the movement to ordain women and the movement to get the church to accept active homosexual behavior arise together. Both of them suggest that the sexes are interchangeable -- that it is perfectly proper for a woman to take the role of a man or a man to take the role of a woman. It seems very clear to me that God has a different view of the matter, and any church ignores what he has told us at great peril.

But we are not here to congratulate ourselves on what we are against. We thank God that he has given us a whole range of things to be for. What we need to do is increase our own commitment -- go from merely sounding off 'about what we stand for to actually believing it and practicing it.

Today's Gospel warns us that God can recognize a commitment which is no better than lukewarm. God's verdict on any person who accepts the offer of salvation only halfheartedly is, "Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many are called, but few are chosen."

Today's Gospel tells us about one of Jesus' healing miracles. He meets a paralyzed man, he tells the man to get up, pick up his futon, and go home -- and the man does just that. Jesus promised his disciples at the Last Supper that when he went to heaven he would send them the Holy Ghost. When the Holy Ghost came down on them they would be able to do all the miracles he did -- and even greater ones.

I do my best to believe in Jesus' promise -- especially in regard to healing. Jesus told his apostles that they would lay hands upon the sick and that the sick would recover. The Epistle of St. James recommends prayer and anointing for the sick.

Sacramental healing -- whether by laying on of hands or by anointing-is part of what you are entitled to as a member of an apostolic church. We might be tempted to associate anointing with Roman Catholicism, and laying on of hands with trailer parks and tv evangelists, and the whole matter with weirdness and superstition -- but both practices are properly Anglican. They are in the Bible, and they are in the Prayer Book.

I can tell you about absolute, flat-out, instantaneous cures I have seen. I can point you to any number of people who will tell you they are alive and in as good shape as they are because of the ministry of healing. But anointing and laying on hands is a matter of obedience -- we do it because the New Testament tells us to -- not because we necessarily understand why or how it works or because we are putting God's promise to some sort of test.

What distinguishes the miracle in today's Gospel is the teaching about how sin and sickness are connected. "Sin" is the word the Bible uses to talk about the general imperfection of human existence. Sin is the condition of rebellion against God that the original disobedience of Adam and Eve brought about.

The condition called sin is manifested in many different ways -- it is a disease with many symptoms. One symptom of the condition of sin is sickness -- Adam and Eve needed no HMO -- at least in the beginning. Another symptom of the condition of sin is death. Another symptom is how hard it is to earn money and grow food.

Labor pains are another symptom. The symptoms of the disease of sin with which we are always in touch are our own individual acts of rebellion against God -- what we call our sins. If we don't get rid of our sins, they will block the flow of God's grace and his healing power.

With that background, let us look more closely at today's story. Some people place in front of Jesus a man who is paralyzed and lying on a sort of mat. They assume Jesus is going to pray for his healing in some way. Instead, Jesus says, "Don't worry, son, your sins are forgiven."

St. Matthew doesn't tell us how the young man or his friends reacted to that, but we can assume they thought something like, "What's all this about sins? -- we want this man's paralysis to go away."

We do know how some scribes -- Jesus' enemies -- reacted. They thought he was out of line in saying the man's sins were forgiven. Only God could forgive sins, so by claiming one of God's powers for himself, Jesus was committing blasphemy.

Jesus knew what they were thinking, so he said, "What are you upset about? Which do you think is easier -- to say 'Your sins are forgiven,' or to say, 'Get up and walk?"' Time out now for us to try to answer his question. It is obviously easier to say, "Your sins are forgiven," because there is no way to know for certain. If you say, "Get up and walk," it will quickly become apparent whether you can make it happen.

In any event, Jesus goes on to say, "I will show you that I have the power to forgive sins." That is when he tells the paralyzed man to get up and go home, and he does. By Jesus' own testimony, his power to heal reveals his power to forgive sins.

Illness and individual sins are connected because they are both symptoms of the condition of sin. Jesus conquered the condition of sin-or, put another way, he broke the power of the devil -- once and for all on the cross. He shares his victory with his church in many ways. The paralyzed man's forgiveness and healing are the ones today's Gospel reveals.

That is why the ministry of healing takes place most often at Holy Communion, where there is always a confession of sin and an absolution. When healing is ministered outside of Holy Communion, we rely on the Prayer Book's prayer that the person needing healing be released from sin.

The larger insight here is, of course, that a human being is not just his body, and not ust his mind, and not just his spirit. All three are intertwined and intermingled to make up the whole person. It follows that if there is trouble in one area, it will affect the others.

Toothaches make it tough to think straight. Depression can make you sick. Unabsolved sins and unworked-through problems weigh on every aspect of your life. Jesus wants to heal you. Confessing your sins and asking for healing are the right way to start getting what he wants you to have.

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

Trinity XVIII, September 28, 1997

Last week on St. Matthew's Day I suggested that a good way to celebrate the feast would be to go home and read his gospel. St. Matthew wrote today's gospel lesson. This lesson is the dramatic climax of the whole Gospel, but you need to have read the whole work to get that point. It is not at all obvious from just the passage itself.

During the three years between his baptism and his crucifixion, Jesus spent a good bit of time performing various kinds of miracles and casting devils out of people. He also did a great deal of teaching. That is why one of the terms of respect with which people addressed him was "Rabbi" -- "Teacher."

What rabbis did then is what they do now -- teach and discuss the scriptures. Though the Prayer Book's form for ordaining priests and bishops does not use the word, it is clear that it intends that bishops and priests be rabbis. That follows St. Paul, who tells his young clergyman friend St. Timothy to concentrate his own efforts on preaching and teaching.

The fact was that nobody in Israel could out-rabbi Jesus. We are continually hearing stories about scribes and lawyers and Pharisees -- all of them rabbis in one way or another -- trying to catch Jesus in an inconsistency, or suggesting that he was breaking some obscure or not-so-obscure law, or that he was violating a hallowed tradition.

But Jesus always had an answer. He would either quote some even more appropriate scriptural verse, or he would reveal the hypocrisy of his opponents, or he would further show that despite all their pretensions, they really just did not know what they were talking about. The other rabbis, of course, did not like any of that a bit.

The action in today's Gospel takes place during the first Holy Week -- the days between Jesus' triumphal ride into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and his crucifixion on Good Friday. The way St. Matthew tells the story, each of the three major parties within Judaism takes one last crack at trying to make him look bad -- to "out-rabbi" him.

The Herodians, who supported the Roman occupation government and the puppet King Herod, try to trip Jesus up by asking him a trick question about paying taxes. Round one to Jesus. Then the Sadducees -- the antisupernaturalistic Jeffersonians of Judaism -- ask him a question which ridiculed his teaching about the resurrection. Round two to Jesus.

Finally the heaviest hitters of all weigh in. The Pharisees--the supreme experts in the Hebrew Law -- ask him the innocent-sounding question, "What is the greatest commandment in the Law?" The question is, in fact, not so innocent. The rabbis taught that the Law is like a seamless garment in which every individual regulation is an essential thread. No law was, in fact, greater than any other, and to say so was blasphemy.

Jesus says, "There is not one commandment that is greatest. There are two: love God and love your neighbor as you love yourself. These two commandments summarize the whole law." His statement should sound vaguely familiar to people who arrive near the beginning of our usual Sunday service.

The Pharisees don't respond, and when they don't respond Jesus asks them a question. The question is about how they interpret the first verse of Psalm 110. Everybody agreed that Psalm 110 was a prophecy about the Messiah -- the Christ who was going to come some day to save Israel. Verse one reads, "The Lord said unto my Lord, 'Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool."'

Jesus poses a problem in logic for the Pharisees. Since King David wrote the psalm, he is speaking. "The Lord" refers to God. "My Lord" refers to the Messiah. Yet the Pharisees had just told Jesus that the Messiah was going to be a descendant of King David. And everyone knows that no one ever calls one of his descendants "Lord." So how can the Messiah be David's Lord and David's descendant at the same time?

St. Matthew reports, "And no man was able to answer him a word, neither durst any man from that day forth ask him any more questions." The question about David and the Messiah was the end of any idea anyone might have had that somehow they would be able to out-debate or in some other way out-rabbi Jesus. The only thing left to do was to kill him and shut him up once and for all, and they proceeded to do just that.

Of course, Jesus' question about Psalm 110 is a good one, and it isn't really a trick at all. The only way to be both someone's Lord and his descendant at the same time is to be both older and younger than he at the same time. Jesus is himself the answer to the question. He is David's Lord -- and, therefore, older than David -- because he is God and he existed before all worlds. But he is David's descendant -- and, therefore, younger than David -- because he was made man a thousand years after David lived.

The Pharisees weren't too stupid to answer the question. They could not accept the implications of the answer. They could not face the idea that God could become a man. We accept it and rejoice in it, because we know God became a man so he could die to forgive our sins and give us the promise of heaven -- where we can hope the Pharisees will finally have swallowed their pride.