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Trinity Sermons, 1997 Part III
The Rt. Rev. John T. Cahoon, Jr. |
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Trinity Sermons, 1997 Part III
The Rt. Rev. John T. Cahoon, Jr. |
Feast of St. Matthew (Trinity XVII), September 21, 1997
Today, September 21 is the feast of St. Matthew. The Prayer Book calls him "Apostle," because he was one of the twelve original followers whom Jesus later sent out, and it calls him "Evangelist," because he wrote the first of the four New Testament gospels. We can properly also call him a martyr, because tradition tells us that he was put to death for his witness to Christ -- though our sources differ as to exactly where and when he died.
One of the church's greatest treasures is in the lives and examples of the saints and in the way they can influence us. People who name their children after saints are making a conscious gesture in that direction. During our twenty-eight years of marriage my wife and I have always owned at least one cat, and we have always named the cats after saints. When Margaret, our second daughter, was bom, one of my wife's friends asked her, "When are you and John going to stop naming your children after your dead cats?"
We have never named a cat Matthew, and we have had only daughters, but we did live for fifteen years in a town in California named for St. Matthew. The parish from which I left the ministry of the Episcopal Church just about twenty years ago was called, "the Church of St. Matthew." That was not just pomposity. It also served to differentiate it from the other most powerful church in town, known to us as "St. Matthew's Catholic."
The Prayer Book's collect for any particular saint's day tries to focus our attention on some aspect of his life, and it usually encourages us to pray for the grace to act as he acted. St. Matthew's collect -- which is an original composition by Archbishop Cranmer -- prays that we will have God's help, "to forsake all covetous desires and inordinate love of riches; and to follow" Christ.
St. Matthew brings the issues of coveting and riches to our minds, because he was a tax collector. None of us is a particular fan of our present-day tax collectors, but tax collectors in first-century Israel were far worse. They worked for the despised Roman occupation government, their dealing with the Gentile Romans and handling coins with pagan images on them made them unclean, and they kept back a percentage of the money they collected for their own use.
Jesus walked by one day as Matthew was plying his trade, invited him to follow, and Matthew didjust that. He gave up ajob in which he was not only getting money rather unfairly but also exploiting his fellow Jews. He came in for further criticism when he invited Jesus to dinner to meet some of his fellow workers in the Roman IRS.
The mean-spirited, legalistic, killjoy Pharisees asked Matthew and other of Jesus' followers, "If your master is so holy, why does he eat with tax collectors and other notorious sinners?" Jesus answers them himself, saying, "I am talking to people who know they need what I have to give them. There would be absolutely no point in spending any time with you -- you think you are perfect already."
The presence of Matthew among the disciples during the rest of Jesus' ministry made a very profound point for anyone who was paying attention. If Jesus could get an unclean, treacherous, rip-off artist like Matthew to turn himself around, there was hope for anybody. Jesus says, "I will not turn my back on anyone who turns to me -- no matter what there is in his past." That was true in the first century, and it remains true two thousand years later.
Four mysterious beasts appear both in the book of the prophet Ezekiel and in the Book of Revelation. The church has always used them as symbols for the four gospel writers. St. John is the eagle, St. Luke is the calf, St. Mark is the lion, and St. Matthew is the man.
St. Matthew is the man because his gospel begins with the human lineage of Jesus -- the family tree of the son of God. As you read through his gospel you see that his main appeal is to people who are familiar with the Hebrew Bible. He is concerned to show all of the ways in which the events of Jesus' ministry reveal that he is the anointed saviour-king God promised his chosen people.
We know that Jesus is God, and he is also man. But Jesus is not just a generic human being, he is a first-century Jewish man from northern Israel. To qualify as a Jew, he had to be able to trace his family tree back to the patriarch Abraham. To qualify as the Messiah-Christ, he had to be able to trace his descent from Abraham through King David. St. Matthew provides the results of his genealogical research for us.
So we give thanks to God today for the example and the writing of St. Matthew, apostle, evangelist, and martyr. Why not resolve to read his gospel? -- it is surely no longer than a magazine -- and measure yourself by his example. Am I consumed with my desires for material things? Am I trying to get more money than my family or I could possibly need? Should I be giving more of it away?
The name "Matthew" means "gift given by God." St. Paul writes in the economic terms Matthew would have appreciated when he says, "The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord."
The Collect: Lord, we pray thee that thy grace may always prevent and follow us, and make us continually to be given to all good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord.Amen
The Epistle: Ephesians 4: 1 - 21
The Gospel: St. Luke 14: 1- 11
Trinity XVI, September 14, 1997
Last week we heard Jesus tell us to "consider the lilies of the field." Considering the lilies will increase our faith in God. Faith in that sense is the confidence that God will take care of our material needs -- that he will supply our food, our drink, and our clothing.
But there is more to our relationship to God than relying on him for material well-being -- important as that is. Jesus himself asks, "Is not the life more than the food, and the body than the raiment?" Other things happen to us every day which are not directly related to food, drink or shelter. We need to know what faith in God has to do with those things.
The Wednesday evening Bible Class has just finished a stimulating, though somewhat maddening, study of the Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes. Reading Ecclesiastes always gets at least some people extremely angry and agitated. That is partly because Ecclesiastes does not have the sunny, Pollyanna, Hallmark card, optimistic attitude toward life that many people think a pious, religious book should display.
In fact, Ecclesiastes is quite often a bit of a downer. King Solomon's constant refrain is that life is absurd -- vain--fleeting, and that there is nothing anybody can do about it. In the face of absurdity, the best thing to do is to eat, drink, and be merry, and enjoy the fruits of your work. Later on he expands on that, and says that the duty of human beings is to fear God and keep his commandments.
It is grossly unfair to expect Ecclesiastes -- or any other Old Testament book -- to be Christian. Given what he knew, King Solomon was not wrong. But he lived a thousand years before God revealed that there was something beyond absurdity and vanity. In Jesus, God shows that he has a plan -- that everything that happens fits into an overall scheme which was in his mind before he made anything.
The part of faith in God that goes beyond considering the lilies is the confidence that that plan exists -- that even though what goes on in life may always seem absurd to us, God is in charge, and he knows what he is doing. St. Paul tells us that in heaven we shall see things as clearly as God sees them now. Faith is the confidence that everything that happens does makes sense in terms of how God is working things out, no matter how hard it may be for us to see it.
Ecclesiastes tells us that the ultimate absurdity in life is death. As the bumper sticker says, "You're born, you work, you die anyway." Today's Gospel is the story of a woman who is confronting that final absurdity. She is a widow, and her only son has just died. Besides the sting and sorrow of separation from him, she now has no one to take care of her. Her immediate personal tragedy is going to be compounded by long-term economic consequences.
The dead man's funeral procession happens to pass by Jesus, and, when he figures out what is going on, he has compassion on the mother and tells her to stop her weeping. Then Jesus approaches the corpse and says, "Young man, I say unto thee, 'Arise."' St. Luke reports, "The dead man sat up, and began to speak. And (Jesus) delivered him to his mother."
God's answer to the absurdity of death is resurrection. Our faith that God has a plan and that, absurd as things may seem to be, they will untimately work out according to his plan -- that faith is rooted in the resurrection of Jesus.
The most absurd event in human history was the public capital punishment which was meted out, perfectly legally, to the Son of God. God's response was not to wring his hands but to raise Jesus from the dead. If God can bring meaning and good out of that greatest of all absurdities, he can surely bring meaning and good out of the lesser absurdities which plague us every day.
What Jesus did for the widow of Nain is a preview of what he will do at the end of the world. At the end of the world, Jesus will raise the dead and reunite families. After we are - raised, we shall be able to look back on everything that happened to us and see that there was a pattern in it and that it all did make sense. Faith in God is seeing what will be true at the end in what is happening now.
King Solomon's challenge is, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." St. Paul's reply is, "Yes, 'in Adam, all die; even so, in Christ, shall all be made alive."'
The Collect: O Lord, we beseech thee, let thy continual pity cleanse and defend thy Church; and, because it cannot continue in safety without thy succour, preserve it evermore by thy help andgoodness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Ephesians 3: 13 - 21
The Gospel: St. Luke 7:11- 19
About two-thirds of the way through this morning's Gospel, Jesus calls his listeners, "Ye of little faith." Ye of little faith. Jesus is preaching the Sermon on the Mount to what is not a particularly hostile crowd. This is not one of the many times when Jesus is trading insults with his audience.
The subject he is talking about shows us what he means when he says that his listeners are "of little faith," so it gives us the opportunity to measure how much faith we have ourselves.
In this context, faith is the confidence that God will take care of your material needs -- for food, for drink, and for clothing. Jesus bases his argument upon the two main things we believe about his Father. First of all, he is the creator of all things visible and invisible -- everything in the universe from birds and flowers to human beings. And, second, because we are part of Jesus' body, his Father is also our Father.
Because God the Father is the creator, he knows what every part of his creation needs to keep going. Because God the Father is our Father, he sees to it that we get what we need -- as any loving human father does.
The measure of your faith is the extent to which you live your life as though you really believe God will supply what you need. So the obvious conclusion is that we are all "of little faith." Jesus knows that, of course, and he is only bringing the issue up so we can face it and then find out how we can get some more faith.
The first part of his prescription is to ask ourselves, "What is the most important thing in my life? What is it that really, ultimately, finally determines what I think, what I say, and what I do?" Jesus says that there cannot be more than one real answer to those questions. "No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other."
Then he says, "Ye cannot serve God and mammon." "Mammon" means "riches," "money," "wealth." He is saying you can't both put God first and put money first, but he is not attacking making money, or money itself.
It is obvious to me, for example, that the main way God keeps his promise to provide for the material needs of my family is to give my wife and me the ability and the opportunity to earn money so we can buy them. Trusting that God will provide is not a license to sit around and do nothing. This is how the need to make money serves a godly purpose.
A common misquotation of St. Paul is, "Money is the root of all evil." The accurate quote is, "The love of money is the root of all evil." If you forget that God created money to serve his purposes, you fall into the trap of amassing money for its own sake. Money takes God's place. You may also come to believe that you are taking care of your material needs and the needs of those around you all by yourself. Then you take God's place.
Jesus refers to the birds of the sky and the lilies of the field to underscore his point in an exaggerated way. The birds don't store up grain, they don't harvest crops, they don't even plant, and yet God feeds them with the seed they need. The lilies don't work, they certainly don't use spinning wheels or sewing machines -- and yet they are dressed up more elegantly than the richest king in Israel's history.
Jesus makes the somewhat politically incorrect claim that human beings are more important to God than either birds or lilies. He asks, "if God takes such good care of the birds, and if he gives such an glamorous look to flowers which are here today and gone tomorrow, don't you think he is going to do much more for you -- O ye of little faith?"
Faith is confidence in God. Trusting that he will provide for our material needs is one aspect of faith. If we can learn how to trust him as a father in that way, we can extend that faith and trust and confidence to other aspects of life. The opposite of faith is worry -- anxiety.
Jesus asks what good worrying ever does us. Can we make our lives longer by worrying? He says the disposition to worry makes us borrow trouble and get upset about things that may never happen. That is why he counsels us not to be anxious about tomorrow. Tomorrow will bring its own trouble when it comes. We have enough to do to trust God in the midst of what is going on today.
Pollsters are always telling us what a religious people we are, and their evidence is that 95% or so of the American population thinks that God exists. But thinking God exists is a long way from having faith in him. The issue of faith is not so much, "Is there a God?" as it is "Does he know what he is doing? Does he care about me?"
The truly faithful person is confident that God will supply the material things he needs, because God is our Father. The truly faithful person is also confident that no matter what happens -- even things that are heartbreaking and seem unspeakably bad -- no matter what happens, God can bring good out of it, also because God is our Father.
The only way we can learn how comforting it is to trust God is to go ahead and trust him -- and to back it up with prayer and studying the Bible and coming to church and doing something for somebody else. If you find yourself off that track, the way back on is simple -- just behold the birds, consider the lilies.
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
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