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Trinity Sermons, 1997 Part IV
The Rt. Rev. John T. Cahoon, Jr. |
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Trinity Sermons, 1997 Part IV
The Rt. Rev. John T. Cahoon, Jr. |
Tomorrow will mark the fifty-eighth anniversary of the beginning of World War II. I was not alive during that war, but I know that one of the lessons we can learn from it is that when ethnic prejudice is allowed to run wild, horrible things happen. The success of the movie "Schindler's List" and the popularity of the Holocaust Museum on the Mall are helping to make the same point.
There was a tremendous amount of ethnic prejudice in first-century Israel, the society in which Jesus lived. Various Hebrew laws taught the Jews that anyone who was not a Jew -- that is to say, anyone who was a Gentile -- was unclean, and that associating with a Gentile could make a Jew unclean also.
The New Testament tells us that the Jews reserved their harshest ethnic prejudice for a group called the Samaritans. Given the way human nature operates, it is probable that the Jews hated the Samaritans particularly, because they were so much like them.
That is the same phenomenon I recognize in myself when I am out in the world -- say, at a cocktail party. If somebody says to me, "I am a Methodist" or "I am an atheist" or "I am a Roman Catholic," I am likely to smile and say, "Oh, that's nice." But if someone says to me, "I am an Episcopalian," I find myself getting on the defensive and ready to become belligerent if it seems indicated. We tend to have the hardest time with people who are like us, but not completely like us.
The similarity and dissimilarity between Samaritans and Jews stems from events which began to take place about a thousand years before Christ. When King Solomon died, the kingdom of Israel split in two. Solomon had not been able to produce a son who had the strength to keep the kingdom together.
The more northern tribes formed a confederacy which became known as Israel. Their capital was the city of Samaria, and their people were called Samaritans. The southern tribes of Judah and Benjamin formed an alliance which they called Judah. The capital of Judah was Jerusalem.
God gave Abraham Israel as the Promised Land, I suspect, because he knew that the geographical location of Israel meant that things there could never become dull. Any Asian power which wants to get into Africa has to come through Israel. Any African power which wants to make inroads into Asia has to come through Israel as well.
Assyria was the first nation which tried to make a military conquest of Israel after the kingdom divided. They were never able to defeat the southern kingdom of Judah, but they succeeded in overrunning and subduing the northern kingdom of Israel-Samaria in roughly 722 B.C.
Assyria then embarked upon a massive program of deportation and colonization. Many Israelites were moved bodily to Assyria, and many Assyrians moved into the conquered territory of Israel. When they started worshipping their own gods, the God of Israel sent lions to kill them. So the Assyrians decided that they should try to worship the God of Israel along with the gods they had brought with them. That created a mongrelized religion, which was, of course, abhorrent to that jealous and exclusivistic fellow we know as the God of Israel, the father of Jesus.
The accommodationist, syncretistic religion the Samaritans practiced was accompanied by intermarriage betwen Assyrians and Jews. So the holier-than-thou residents of the southern kingdom came to regard the Samaritans as people who tried to pretend they were Jews, but who did not really measure up. Our strongest prejudices are reserved for those who are most like us.
So you can see that today's gospel -- as well as one of Jesus' best known parables -- are given a further twist by the fact that the heroes of both are Samaritans. The parable is intended to make us realize that we have an obligation to help anyone who needs it. Making the supreme example of a helper a Samaritan was especially pointed for Jesus' original audience.
In the same vein, today's gospel lesson tells the story of how Jesus goes into a village where ten lepers call to him for help. Jesus yells back, "Go show yourselves to the priests." They are yelling at each other, because if they get too close, Jesus will become contaminated.
He tells them to go to the priests, because it was the priest's job to certify that someone had recovered from leprosy enough to be able to rejoin polite society and public worship. The willingness of the lepers to go to the priests showed they believed that Jesus was healing them. If they went to the priests while they were still unclean, they would contaminate them -- an even bigger violation.
As the lepers approach the priests they are, indeed, healed. But only one of them comes back to glorify God and thank Jesus. By now it shouldn't surprise you too much that the grateful leper was a Samaritan. The gospel encourages us to ask Jesus for help -- especially for physical healing. But it also reminds us to complete the circuit and thank him.
The point is not that the Samaritans were, in fact, better than Jews. The point is that Jesus came to earth to save everybody, and that anybody can respond to him with faith and good deeds and gratitude -- even Samaritans, even liberals, even (gulp) Episcopalians.
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
St. Bartholomew's Day/Trinity XIII, August 24, 1997
August 24 is St. Bartholomew's Day. The Prayer Book calls him an "Apostle." That means he was part of the original group of men Jesus sent out to spread the good news and establish the church. Tradition tells us that St. Bartholomew was put to death for his faith in Jesus -- as were all the other apostles except St. John. So we also call him a martyr and decorate the church in red on his day to symbolize the blood he shed.
We know nothing about Bartholomew from the gospels except that he was one of the twelve. He is not a fleshed-out and developed character as St. Peter and St. John are, and he doesn't even merit the brief mentions people like Andrew and the Jameses receive.
Church tradition also identifies Bartholomew with a character named Nathanael who appears in St. John's gospel. Nathanael is a Hebrew first name and Bartholomew is a modifying name -- like our last names. "Bar" means "son of," so it is possible that he was Nathanael, the son of Tolmai or Ptolemy.
In any event, some of Jesus' earliest followers tell Nathanael that they have met the Messiah, and that he is Jesus from Nazareth. Nathanael replies, skeptically, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" That is partly because Nazareth was a unpromising town out in the sticks, and partly because everybody knew the Messiah was supposed to come from Bethlehem.
Jesus knows the way to get Nathanael's attention is to flatter him, so he says, "Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile." That arouses Nathanael's interest, and he says, "How do you know me?" Jesus says, "I saw you over there under the fig tree." Nathanael responds, "Rabbi you are the Son of God, you are the King of Israel." Jesus tells him, "You're a pretty easy sell -- you mean you can believe all that about me just because I said I saw you under the fig tree? I am going to show you bigger things than that. You are going to see the sky open up and angels going up and coming down on me."
Jesus is referring to the vision Jacob had in the Book of Genesis when he saw a ladder which reached from earth to heaven. He is telling Nathanael Bartholomew, "I am Jacob's ladder. I connect earth and heaven. I reconcile God to man. I am the only one who can do that, because I am a human being, and I am also God himself."
The Epistle and Gospel for today don't mention Bartholomew specifically. They give us more general meditations on the role of apostles in the church. The Collect says that God gave Bartholomew the grace to preach his word, and so we ask God to help us love the word he believed, spread it to other people, and apply it to ourselves.
In our understanding of things, our connection to the original apostles is in our bishops. We have a doctrine we call "apostolic succession." That refers first to the tact that we can literally trace the lineage of our bishops back ' to the first ones. If we take the bishops who made me a bishop and then the ones who made them bishops and then the ones who made them bishops and so on, we can map an unbroken two thousand year chain.
The Prayer Book says our church is "apostolic," because it, "continues steadfastly in the apostles' teaching and tellowship" -- words the Book of Acts uses to describe the first church in Jerusalem. We find the apostles' teaching in the New Testament, and we find their fellowship in the succession of bishops and in Holy Communion.
Today's Epistle tells us what made the church in Jerusalem grow in the early days. It was the miracles the apostles were able to perform-especially hearings and the exorcising of demons. Jesus told them, "You will be able to do the miracles ( do and even greater ones when I have gone to my Father."
We have, in a sense, domesticated our own apostolic miracles by experiencing them mainly in the decorous context of worship. But bread into flesh and wine into blood and the results of the laying-on of hands are no less miraculous just because we are used to seeing them every week.
In the Gospel, Jesus warns his disciples about the dangers of high office in the church. They have been fighting among themselves about which one of them was the greatest. It might also have been an argument over which one Jesus loved most. Even though there was no real power, let alone money or other rewards for which to compete, anyone who has brothers or sisters will understand their impulse.
Jesus tells them that his church isn't supposed to operate the way the world does. In the world the big shots with offices and titles show they are big shots by making other people do their will -- getting others to wait on them is the image Jesus uses. Among Christians, no matter what titles or offices there may be, the proper way to be a big shot is to help other people -- to wait on them, rather than to show off by making them wait on you. Jesus sets the example -- God washes men's feet and then dies for them.
So we thank God for the life and work and example of St. Bartholomew, Apostle and Martyr. Let us pray that our church will remain truly apostolic -- in what we teach, in the way we worship, and in how we act toward one another.
The Collect: Almighty and merciful God, of whose only gift it cometh that thy faithful people do unto thee true and laudable service; Grant, we beseech thee, that we may so faithfully serve thee in this life, that we fail not finally to attain thy heavenly promises; through the merits of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Galatians 3: 16 - 22
The Gospel: St. Luke 10: 23 - 37
The thread which connects this morning's Epistle and Gospel is that in both lessons we hear an argument about the relationship between the Old Testament and the New. When we talk about the Old and New Testaments, we don't just mean the collections of writings which make up the Bible. Old and New Testament refer also to covenants - agreements -- deals between God and his people which the Bible books talk about.
The covenant in the Old Testament which lasted the longest was the covenant with Moses. God and Moses met on Mount Sinai in Arabia just after the Israelites escaped from Egypt. God gave Moses a complicated series of laws of various kinds. The covenant the deal -- was that if the people would obey the laws, God would be their god and take care of them.
In today's Epistle, St. Paul is talking about Moses, and describing what he looked like when he came down Mt. Sinai carrying the stone tablets on which God wrote the Ten Commandments. Moses' face was shining so brightly that he had to put on a veil so people could look at him and not be blinded.
St. Paul calls the Ten Commandments "the ministration of death," "the ministration of condemnation." Those sound like harsh words for a code of behavior we thought we were supposed to take seriously. One of the greatest themes in St. Paul's teaching is that God gave us the Law to show us that we cannot keep the Law. That connects to last Sunday's parable about the Pharisee and the tax collector: remember the Pharisee bragged to God about how many laws he kept, while the tax collector knew he could only ask for mercy.
The Ten Commandments minister death and condemnation, not because there is something wrong with them, or that we should not try to keep them. They minister death and condemnation, because no matter how hard we try, we find we cannot keep them -- in thought or word, or deed. If we think we have to keep them perfectly to be on God's good side, we know we are in big trouble -- death and condemnation.
It is when we realize that we cannot keep the law that we should be willing to look for the help we need to get out of our predicament. Jesus brings us several kinds of help: he brings God's forgiveness for our failures to keep the law; he brings us the Holy Ghost to give us strength; and finally he brings us the assurance that God is going to take us to heaven not because we have kept the law but because he loves us and we love Jesus.
St. Paul concludes that if Moses' face shone so brightly when he wasbringing "the ministration of death," Jesus' face is even shinier. Jesus brings what St. Paul calls "the ministration of righteousness," "the ministration of the spirit." Of course, shiny faces are not the point -- the better covenant is.
The Old Testament itself says that it is not the final word, and that some day God will make a better covenant -- a new arrangement -- with his people. The prophet Jeremiah says God will write a new law -- this time on the fleshy tables of the heart rather than on tablets of stone. He and other prophets say that the new covenant with God will come to earth through a person -- God's anointed one -- the Messiah -- the Christ.
Among many other prohecies about the coming of the Messiah, Isaiah has this one: "Say to them that are of a fearful heart, 'Be strong, fear not: behold, your God will come and save you. Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing."'
This morning's Gospel is the account of a healing Jesus performs near the Sea of Galilee, after he has travelled through a Gentile region of Palestine. He comes upon a deaf man who has an impediment in his speech, and he heals him. That miracle was of obvious benefit to the man himself, and it was good advertising for Jesus since it astonished the onlookers who then went ahead and told everybody about it.
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.
Epistle: II Corinthians 3:4 -9
Gospel: St. Mark 7:31 - 37
Today's Gospel is a parable of the greatest importance. It describes the basic story of the gospels in a nutshell, and it gives the simple and direct Christian answer to the most fundamental of all religious questions: "Assuming there is a God, how can I get myself into a proper relationship to him?"
A person who knows the New Testament gospels only casually is always in danger of shock when Holy Week rolls around. Here is that nice man who was always helping and comforting -- how could those horrible savages treat him that way?
If you read the gospels, you realize that the crucifixion of Jesus was the end of a long and nasty process which involved constant squabbling between him and the people with whom he disagreed. The people with whom he disagreed sniped at him and tried to outdebate him, and they kept doing that for a fairly long time. When they finally realized that they were never going to beat him at that game, they knew the only thing left to do was kill him.
What was the basic issue of conflict? One way to look at it is to say that they were fighting over the fundamental meaning of the Jewish religion. Was it a system of rules which allowed some people to lord it over others because they were better at keeping the rules? or was Judaism the way God's people could learn about his compassion and his power?
Religious disputes among first century Palestinian Jews have a special claim on our attention. They matter because they are in the New Testament, but they are in the New Testament because they have do do with fundamental conflicts which go on in all human organizations -- especially religious ones -- and which go on to one degree or another in the heart of every human being.
The parable makes all that a bit clearer. St. Luke tells us what the audience for the parable was: "certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others." That gives the game away.
"Righteous" in this context means "in a proper relationship with God." So the parable is directed at people whose certainty that they are ok with God makes them look down on other people. I am not giving away too much when I tell you that this is not the group Jesus prefers.
At any rate, two men are praying in the temple. One of them is a tax collector and the other is a Pharisee. The Pharisees were the Jewish group which took the most care to obey not only all of the laws in the Old Testament, but also all the laws the rabbis taught.
The Pharisee tells God that he is grateful that he is not a great sinner as so many other people are--like this tax collector, for example. Then he rattles off all of his religious accomplishments. The tax collector cannot even look up, as he beats his breast and says, "God be merciful to me a sinner."
Now we know very well what is coming. But let us spend a moment admitting to ourselves that we have a certain sympathy with the Pharisee. We aren't such bad people ourselves when it comes to spiritual accomplishments -- and we would certainly have only a very little trouble pointing out people who are much worse. Why is all that so wrong?
Jesus, of course, says that the tax collector went home in a good relationship to God and the Pharisee did not. Was it because the Pharisee had lied about his good deeds? No. Was it because the tax collector had really done a lot more good deeds that the Pharisee had so he was really a better person? There is no reason to think so.
The tax collector was better off for a couple of reasons. First of all, he did not compare himself to other people, he compared himself to God. Compared to other people he might be better and he might be worse. So what? God is looking at how you handle what he has given you to do.
The main thing God wants you to realize is that nobody is perfect, and because nobody is perfect, nobody has anything to brag about in front of God -- who is perfect. The difference between God and us is that his perfection doesn't make him look down on our imperfection. Instead, he wants to share his perfection with us.
The way he shares his perfection with us is to get us to ask for it by admitting that we need it. We can't do it alone. We fail. We need forgiveness and help. The tax collector understood that, and the Pharisee did not. That is why the tax collector went home justified.
The Epistle to the Hebrews has this to say, "He that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him." In other words, if you are going to get serious about God, you have to think he is really there, and that he will help you if you seek him out.
The Pharisee and the publican both believed God was there, and they both wanted a reward. The problem was that one wanted congratulations and the other wanted forgiveness. God's word for those who want congratulation is, "They have their reward". For the rest of us, "This is a true saying, and worthy of all men to be received, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners."
The Collect: O God, who declarest thy almighty power chiefly in showing mercy and pity; Mercifully grant unto us such a measure of thy grace, that we, running the way of thy commandments, may obtain thy gracious promises, and be made partakers of thy heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
The Epistle: I Corinthians 15: 1-11
The Gospel: St. Luke 18:9-14
I want to confess to you an unsuccessful attempt at evangelism. The word "evangelism" always brings some unfortunate connotations along with it. But I think it is most helpful to think of it in terms of a definition I heard recently. "Evangelism is the process of getting people into church pews on Sunday morning."
With that understanding, it is easy to see that evangelism begins with ourselves, extends to the people with whom we live and for whom we are responsible, and then goes to other people with whom we come in contact. One of my first principles of evangelism is, "Every Episcopalian is looking for a good reason not to get up and go to church on Sunday morning. Our responsibility is to try not to provide one."
At any rate, last spring, just before we moved into our new church, a man I had never seen before came to church at St. Andrew's. I think he had seen our ad in the Washington "Times" -- which is, by the way, one of our most effective evangelistic tools. He reacted to the service with great enthusiasm -- I could tell he was actually paying attention during the sermon -- and he gushed to several parishioners during the coffee hour.
He was extremely wired up with excitement when he talked to me. I was afraid he was going to volunteer to organize an order of Jesuits and set off on a missionary journey right on the spot. Nothing would do but that I come to his house to have dinner at the earliest opportunity -- which turned out to be a couple of days later.
It was a very lovely and exceedingly civilized occasion. He took the opportunity to unleash a barrage of questions about me, about the congregation, and about the church at large. Of course, I welcome that. I have always thought that the most tragic indictment of a church is when someone says, "I had questions, but nobody was willing to answer them."
The long and the short of it is that I have never seen him again. We parted in a very friendly way -- he even loaned me a tape of his favorite radio preacher. As I have turned the dinner over in mind, I keep coming back to two questions to which I think I gave what were, in his mind, the wrong answers.
One of the questions was, "Do you think abortion is wrong?" Of course I said, "Yes." The discussion did not drop there -- we went off down the usual paths of public policy vs. private behavior; reasonable people being able to differ on political solutions to moral questions; the role of forgiveness; and so on. Though I do wish he had come back to church, I don't wish I had said I thought abortion is not wrong.
The answer I gave which I think shocked him even more was one which today's epistle brings up. He asked me, "Do you have people in your congregation who speak in tongues?" I said, "Yes," and when he seemed incredulous, I pointed out what St. Paul says to us this morning in the twelfth chapter of First Corinthians.
Those of you who have studied either of the letters to Cornith know that the congregation there was extremely badly behaved. Factions were struggling with each other, people were coming to church drunk, members were hauling one another into court, and the worship services were completely chaotic -- any Anglican would have found plenty of reason not to show up.
St. Paul was trying to get the Corinthians to take a different sort of look at the church, and at what being part of the church meant. He said that the church is not just a random collection of individuals, the church is a body -- a body like a human body. When a human body is healthy, all of its parts are working together for the good of the whole.
In the same way, God gives every member of the church -- each individual Christian -- things to do which benefit everyone else -- gifts they are supposed to use for the benefit of those around them. When everyone is concentrating on using his gifts and trying to be of help to others, it minimizes the focus on ego and power-hunger and resentment that ruins so much of life.
Many of us go through life and never realize that the things we do -- especially the ones which help other people -- are all gifts from God. They are part of the legacy Jesus left for the church, no matter how mundane and every-day they may seem to us.
But God -- complicated fellow that he is -- also sends weird and spectacular gifts to some people. Some people seem to know the right thing to say in difficult situations. Others have an unfailing gift for speaking the truth or discerning what is right. Some seem to be able to hang on to Jesus in faith when there seems to be no earthly reason to do so. Others can heal bodies and spirits. Some can speak to God in unintelligible languages -- and others can make them intelligible.
If God gives you the more spectacular gifts, don't forget that they exist to help encourage others, not to make you proud of how holy you are. The bigger point is that God works in the lives of everybody who is baptized to give us gifts which build up the body of Christ. St. Paul says that you can't even say that Jesus is your Lord without the Holy Ghost working in you.
Do we have people who speak in tongues? Surely. But what keeps us alive is when we show the world the best gifts -- faith, hope, and charity.
The Collect: Let thy merciful ears, O Lord, be open to the prayers of thy humble servants; and, that they may obtain their petitions, make them to ask such things as shall please thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: I Corinthians 12: 1-12
The Gospel: St. Luke 19: 41-46
One of my favorite saint stories concerns the Spanish Renaissance mystic St. Teresa of Avila. She was riding her horse through the countryside one day when she came to a stream. When she tried to ford at a shallow place in the water, her horse reared up and threw her off, and she was thoroughly drenched. When St. Teresa came up out of the water, she shook her fist at the sky and screamed at God, "if this is the way you treat your friends, it is no wonder that you have so few of them." If this is the way you treat your friends, it is no wonder you have so few of them.
King David likes to use the Psalms to complain -- especially when he thinks that he is being punished even though he has been good, while wicked people who don't care a bit about God seem to get along just fine. Paraphrasing Psalm 73, David says, "I am grieved at the wicked: I do also see the ungodly in such great prosperity/ While all the day long have I been punished, and chastened every morning/ I tried to understand this; but it was too hard for me." Why do bad things happen to good people while good things happen to bad people? If this is how you treat your friends, it is no wonder that you have so few of them.
Those are the issues that lie behind the mean-spirited behavior of the prodigal son's older brother in today's gospel. Jesus' magnificent parable is intended to help us to understand what our relationship with God is supposed to be. The younger brother says to his father, "Let's pretend you're dead, so you can give me my half of the estate." Then he goes away and squanders all the money. In a similar way, even though God gives us everything, we don't spend too much time worrying about what he wants us to be doing, so we act as though he did not even exist.
The younger brother finally wakes up, and he realizes that he is degraded and disgraced and starving to death -- and that there is no one to blame for it but himself. At that moment of awakening, he decides to go back to his father -- not even as a son but just as a hired hand. When our own situation gets so bad or when we become ashamed of ourselves or when we remember our Christian religion and we realize that we have allowed ourselves to get very far away from God, we wake up too, and then we go back.
The father meets his prodigal son with open arms, he receives him as a son, and he lays on a great banquet to celebrate. God always takes us back when we turn to him. Turning back with sorrow for what we have done wrong is called repentance, and repentance is the center of the Christian life. God always welcomes repentance. People say home is the place where when you go there they have to take you in. So home is where God is -- and he doesn't just have to take you in, he wants to.
But the behavior of the older brother puts a bit of a spin on the otherwise simple story of a wastrel's penitence and a father's forgiveness. He is mentioned in the first line of the story "a certain man had two sons," but he disappears from the narrative until after the party has started. The older brother has been out in the fields working, when he comes back to the main house to hear the sounds of music and dancing. When he asks the servants what is going on, they tell him that his brother has returned and that his father has killed a fatted calf to celebrate.
The older brother is enraged, and when his father comes out to implore him to join the party, he snarls, "I've worked for you for years. I've always done everything you told me to do, and you never let me have a party with my friends. But as soon as your son (note that he doesn't say my brother" but "your son") comes back after he throws away all of your money (note that he doesn't say "his inheritance" but "your money") you have raided the meat locker and invited people to a dance."
The older brother is resentful and nasty, and in light of what he knows so far, he is resentful for a pretty good reason. He has been good, but he doesn't think his virtue has been rewarded His brother has been bad, and it appears that his bad behavior has been rewarded. Why do we see the heathen in such prosperity while the righteous are punished every day? If this is how you treat your friends, it's no wonder you have so few of them.
But the father is not rewarding bad behavior. He is responding to confession and repentance. Those are two very different things. God never rewards bad behavior -- no matter what it may look like to us. God is just and God is righteous and God hates sin. But he deals with it in his own way -- often just by letting sinners go on sinning and then live with the consequences. And don't forget that everyone is going to have to give a final accounting to God at the end.
The older brother thinks the prodigal has gone directly from the pig sty to the banquet hall and that his sentimental fool of a father has chosen to overlook his rotten actions. But he is wrong. His younger brother said he was sorry, and he threw himself on his father's mercy. And so his father sets his older son straight. "It is meet that we should make merry and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found."
The Collect: Grant to us, Lord, we beseech thee, the spirit to think and do always such things as are right; that we, who cannot do any thing that is good without thee, may by thee be enabled to live according to thy will; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: I Corinthians 10:1-13 The Gospel: St. Luke 15: 11-32
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It is hard to listen to today's gospel and not think about Little Red Riding Hood. The gospel comes from the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus tells his listeners to be very careful when someone comes along who claims to speak with the authority of God. He says that many such prophets are dressed in sheep's clothing, but underneath they are like wild and predatory wolves. What big eyes they have. What big lips they have. What big teeth they have.
His point is that anyone who claims to be speaking or acting on God's authority can be given a simple test. The test is, "What is the effect of what they do?" If what they say conforms to the word of God, and if what they do is motivated by love and a desire to save people and build up the church, then you can conclude that they do have God's authority. They are true prophets.
But if what they have to say has no root in the Scriptures, and if their actions hurt and divide people, you can be sure they are not from God, no matter what they say. Clergymen and church leaders are the first category of people which comes to mind, but the test applies to anyone who claims to be doing the will of God.
Jesus uses some colorful imagery to underline his point. "You don't expect thorn bushes to bear grapes or briar bushes to bear figs, do you?" My main information about horticulture comes from the Bible, so I don't really expect much of anything in this line. But even I know that good trees produce healthy fruit and bad trees produce unhealthy fruit. The point is that you can tell what a person really is by the effect of what he does.
We see this all the time in the church and in religion generally - even among people who never appear on television. People join the church, and they claim to be believers, but after awhile you come to realize that all they are interested in doing is stirring up trouble and antagonizing other people and getting their own way. All clergymen wrap themselves in the cloak of God's authority, but we are not all exactly carbon copies of Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother.
Soon the church will celebrate the feast of the Transfiguration of Christ. At the Transfiguration Jesus took the inner circle of the disciples -- Peter, James, and John -- up a mountain with him to pray. As they prayed, the disciples fell asleep, but Jesus' face began to change, and his clothing shone with light. While all that was going on, Moses and Elijah appeared. They represented the Law and the Prophets, and they had come to talk to Jesus about the fact that he was soon going to die in Jerusalem.
When Peter woke up and saw all this, he became excited, and said to Jesus, "This is great -- let's hold onto this experience -- we'll build three tents -- one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah." (St. Luke adds that Peter spoke "not knowing what he said.")
But a cloud came over all of them, and God spoke from the cloud, saying, "This is my son whom I love, listen to him." And when the cloud lifted, Moses and Elijah had disappeared and Jesus was alone.
The biggest issue that faced the disciples at that point was that Jesus had told them he was going to Jerusalem to be killed. They refused to believe him. They thought he was really a prophet from God, but they could not imagine that the fruit of his ministry was going to be execution. So the Transfiguration served as a way of trying to convince the disciples that Jesus was really going to die in Jerusalem. His death was the will of God, and the Scriptures -- the Law and the Prophets -- bore witness to it.
It is not always easy to discern what the will of God is. We cannot always be certain that any particular thing we say or decision we make or act that we perform is going to produce good fruit and make us appear as good trees in the forest of God. But we are called to try.
The way we begin to get insight into God's will is by reading the Scriptures. There is no substitute for that. Then we ask for the power of the Holy Spirit to do what we can to apply what we learn in the Scriptures to what actually faces us in our daily lives.
Jesus ends the section with these rather chilling words, "Not everyone that saith unto me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven." What he means is that just dropping his name is not enough. When we come before the seat of judgment, it won't be enough to say, "Oh, of course I am a Christian. I was on the church mailing list. I came whenever it was convenient. I prayed any time I was in trouble. I gave some of the money I had left over after I paid my bills. I didn't know I was supposed to be a fanatic about it." It is not even going to be enough to say, "Of course I love you, God, I got ordained. I even joined the Continuing Church."
Namedropping God and lukewarm commitment are not enough. God wants us to be engaged actively in trying to find out what his will is and then doing it. He does not count points off if we fail, but he does count points off if we don't really try.
In today's epistle, St. Paul says that if we let the Holy Spirit lead us into God's will, we shall have nothing to fear. "Ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, 'Abba, Father." Ye shall know them by their fruits.
The Collect: O God, whose never-failing providence ordereth all things both in heaven and earth; We humbly beseech thee to put away from us all hurtful things, and to give us those things which are profitable for us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Romans 8: 12-17
The Gospel: St. Matthew 7:15-21
This morning's Epistle comes from the sixth chapter of Romans, just as last week's epistle did. A week ago we heard what St. Paul has to say about the meaning of baptism. Today he continues his argument, telling us that baptism does not make you into a robot for God. Even after you are baptized, you continue to have the day-to-day, moment-to-moment choice of obeying God or not obeying God -- of serving God, or serving sin.
That implies that a baptized person has the ability to make rational moral choices. Babies do not have that ability, yet we baptize them anvway. We believe the grace God gives in baptism works in babies until they are old enough to choose for themselves. The New Testament also says that to be saved one has to make a public acknowledgement of Christ as one's Lord and Saviour.
Confirmation is where those issues are resolved. Confirmation is the time when, among other things, a baptized person stands up and says, "I acknowledge that Jesus is my Lord, and I acknowledge that Jesus is my Saviour. I mean this. I take this on myself. I am now ready to make my moral choices based upon that commitment. I am glad the bishop can pump me up with the Holy Ghost, because to keep that commitment I need help."
Today St. Paul says that the ongoing moral dilemma all Christians face is a choice between two kinds of slavery. Again, remember that we are making moral choices all the time -- choices about what we think and what we do and what we say. The choices may rarely be dramatic ones, and they may also rarely even be difficult ones. But they are always there.
In his terms, we can be slaves to God or slaves to sin. What is a slave? A slave is a person who obeys his master's will without thinking about it and without questioning it. When someone becomes a Christian, he stops being a slave to sin, and he becomes a slave to God.
That is fairly colorful language for what is in fact a fairly simple matter. Every one of these choices we have been talking about is the choice between doing what God wants and not doing what God wants. St. Paul asks us, "Would you really rather go back to the time when you never considered at all what God wanted you to do? Did that satisfy you? Was that a fulfilling and worthwhile way to live?"
As is my usual pattern, I am composing this sermon on a computer. The computer has various settings which are called "default." "Default" means that the computer will do the thing it is already set up to do unless you take steps to change it.
The default setting for the human moral computer is, "Do what looks to be in my best interest." That means that left to our own devices we will do what looks to be the best thing for ourselves -- that is also called sin, disobedience, being a servant of uncleanness, a slave of iniquity. When we are baptized, the Holy Ghost gives us the capacity to change the default setting.
We are no longer imprisoned by our knee-jerk reaction of selfishness. Now we can ask, "What would Jesus do? What would God want me to do?" If we ask those questions, and get answers, and also apply the answers we get, we will be allowing the Holy Ghost to make us into what St. Paul calls "servants of righteousness unto holiness."
We are not talking about something that happens easily overnight. Letting God change you into what he wants you to be is a process which goes on for your whole lifetime and is never completed in this world. The sacramental moments of baptism and confirmation are when we say -- in one way or another -- "God, I want you to give me the help I need to become the person you want me to be."
St. Paul closes with a line which summarizes the Christian view of the consequences of our moral choices. "The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." Wages are what one earns. What we earn by disobeying God is death -- separation from him in this world and hell in the next world.
But in Jesus, God gives us the opportunity to receive not what we have earned, but what he is willing to give us because he loves us. What a person gives you that you have not earned in any way is called a gift. We have earned death, but God wants to give us life. To get life we must accept Jesus and be baptized.
As St. John puts it, quite directly, "God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son of God hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life."
The Collect: O God, whose never-failing providence ordereth all things both in heaven and earth; We humbly beseech thee to put away from us all hurtful things, and to give us those things which are profitable for us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Romans 8: 12-17
The Gospel: St. Matthew 7:15-21
On this Fourth of July weekend, I think we should take note of the fact that no government official read this sermon over to help him decide whether to give me permission to preach it to you. There was also no policeman standing at the church door this morning writing down your names. Not all Christians everywhere in the world enjoy such freedom.
We enjoy that freedom because our government is founded in part upon the idea that we should have it, and because people have been willing to die to defend it. Let us be properly grateful for the freedom we have, and also dedicate ourselves to doing what we can to share that same freedom with others.
I looked at today's lessons and asked, "What could any government possibly find threatening about what these lessons teach?" The Epistle makes it very clear that if you are going to be a Christian, your first loyalty cannot be to any other human being or to any human system or government. A Christian's first loyalty is to Christ himself.
St. Paul argues that the main reason our first loyalty is to Christ is quite practical -- Christ is the reason we are alive. He teaches in this passage the most deeply mystical reality about Christian baptism. When we are baptized we die, quite literally. We don't stop breathing, but we do die the death we fear -- the death that is the fair punishment for disobeying God -- the death that means we are lost and cast away from God's holy presence forever.
In our baptisms we die, and St. Paul says we die the same death Jesus died on the cross. He died to show us we don't need to be afraid of death -- and the devil's greatest weapon over us is to make us fear death. We die with Jesus, we also live with Jesus. He shares his resurrection with us just as he shares his death with us.
Our eternal life does not begin when we die. Eternal life begins when we are baptized. We share the eternal life of Jesus from that point on. He is not going to die any more. We are not going to die any more. Of course, unless he comes back, we still'Imust go through the sting of physical death.
But we can face that death with complete confidence, because we know it cannot separate us from the love of Christ. And we know that physical death is the end of one chapter and the beginning of another -- in the end we shall be resurrected in bodies just as Jesus was, and we will be together in heaven with him.
St. Paul is by no means anti-government -- it is he who tells us that "the powers that be are ordained of God." And St. Paul taught that while he lived under the domination of an empire which not only outlawed the Christian religion, but went so far as to cut St. Paul's head off for practicing it. He knew his real citizenship was in heaven -- no government, whether good or evil, has any ultimate claim on us or power over us.
Jesus had more negative things to say about the leaders of the Jewish religion than he did about the Roman government under which he lived. He called King Herod a fox, to be sure, and he was less respectful toward Pontius Pilate than at least Pilate himself thought he should be. But Jesus concerned himself more with the problems which are in the hearts of everyone -- whether public officials or anything else.
Today's Gospel is taken from the Sermon on the Mount. The scribes and the Pharisees were the most holier-than-thou people in Judaism, and yet Jesus says that if you want to go to heaven, your righteousness has to exceed the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees -- an arresting, and, seemingly, impossible requirement.
Jesus says that the Pharisees and people like them -- and there are people like them always -- can think they are so moral only because they hold themselves to a low standard. They think that if they have just not literally broken one of God's laws they have kept it. Jesus says that if you have even thought about breaking a law, you are guilty of having broken it.
Pharisee and scribe-types think they are good. But by the standard Jesus lays down, nobody can say he is good. The way your righteousness will exceed theirs is if you know you need forgiveness from God. The path to true righteousness lies in knowing you are not righteous.
At the end of the Gospel Jesus argues in favor of Christian solidarity and group identity. One can see that a government could perceive a threat to its own power if they know that Christians put their identification with the church ahead of their political attachments. Jesus' emphasis is on reconciliation between and among Christians -- an idea which is built into the Prayer Book's requirement that a person who receives communion be in love and charity with his neighbors.
If we have a grievance against someone -- or if we know that someone has a grievance against us, we should try to get the problem worked out as soon as possible before the rift can do real damage and before it becomes too late. We should not want to die unreconciled to other people. We should not want to hold grudges beyond the point where it becomes impossible to get rid of them.
This country in which we live gives us the freedom to apply all these Scriptural teachings to our lives. Let us not waste the opportunity.
The Collect: Lord of all power and might, who art the author and giver of all good things; Graft in our hearts the love of thy Name, increase in us true religion, nourish us with all goodness, and of thy great mercy keep us in the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Romans 6: 19-23
The Gospel: St. Mark 8: 1-9
St. Peter's Day (Trinity V), June 29, 1997
The New Testament revolves around three primary characters-Jesus, St. Paul, and St. Peter, whose feast is today. Simon Peter appears in both of the major parts of the New Testament: first the Gospels, which are about the life and the earthly ministry of Jesus; and then the Book of Acts and the epistles, which tell us what happened to the church after Jesus went back to heaven. John the Baptist is the bridge character between the Old and the New Testaments, and St. Peter provides a bridge between the two sections of the New Testament itself.
Whenever Peter appears in a story in the Gospels, we should always first try to identify ourselves with him. He is so much like us -- he wants to be loyal and good, but he doesn't always understand too clearly what is really going on -- and, also like us, Peter has some difficulty facing up to his shortcomings and his real motives.
After the Holy Ghost comes down upon the apostles at Pentecost, Peter is different. He understands the Scriptures more clearly than ever before; he has a more definite sense of what God is up to in his life; and he shows new capacity for growth and change. The more we get to know Peter as the New Testament portrays him, the more he becomes the image of what the Holy Ghost can do in your life if you cooperate.
The Gospel for St. Peter's Day is rather brief, but it is full of enormously important teaching. Jesus asks the disciples what the people in the crowds he attracts are saying about him. He is not running for office, but he does want to keep his finger on the pulse of pubic opinion-and he is setting up the way he can reveal something crucial.
The disciples report that some people are saying he is John the Baptist, some are saying he is Elijah, others are saying he is Jeremiah or one of the other Old Testament prophets. Jesus does not dwell on any of that. Instead, he turns the question around on the disciples and asks them, "But what do you think about me -- whom say ye that I am?" And Peter blurts out, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God."
St. Peter's reply to the question lays out the two main t ings we believe about Jesus: first, he is the Saviour God promised Israel in the Old Testament; the Messiah, the anointed one, the Christ -- and, second, he is God, God the Son, the Second person of the Holy Trinity.
Jesus says, "You are a happy man, Simon, son of John, because you must have got that answer directly from God -- no one else could have told you, and you could never have figured it out for yourself."
Then Jesus gives Simon a nickname and proceeds to make a pun with it. The Greek word for "rock" is "petra." So Jesus says, "You are Peter - Rocky -- the Rock; and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it."
People use this verse in debates about the pope. Tradition tells us that Peter was pope -- the Bishop of Rome. The Roman Catholic Church makes claims about his successors in that office based in part on the fact that Jesus said he would build the church on Peter. Others argue that the rock was not Peter himself, but what Peter said about Jesus.
There isn't any doubt that Peter was the chief disciple, and there isn't any doubt that Peter was in on the founding of many of the most important churches in the apostolic age -- Jerusalem, Antioch, and Rome being only the most obvious examples. We can acknowledge that Peter was, in that sense, the rock on which Jesus built the church.
But that does not mean we have to accept the more extreme claims about the pope. Nothing in the Bible or in the early traditions of the church suggests that any man who is a successor to St. Peter as pope is automatically the bishop of everybody everywhere or that he is incapable of being wrong when he speaks authoritatively.
At the end of today's Gospel, Jesus gives Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven. The key to heaven is forgiveness. Jesus gave Peter the authority to forgive sins, and he gave the same authority to the other apostles later on. In a little while I shall exercise that authority for you, because the church has passed it to me. I will make the sign of the cross to assure you that what Jesus did on the cross forgives your sins.
The church is built upon both rocks -- both the man and what he said about who Jesus is. The Prayer Book says the church is apostolic, because we continue steadfastly in the Apostles' teaching and fellowship. The teaching of the Apostles is in the New Testament. The fellowship of the apostles is in the succession of believing bishops. Both the teaching and the fellowship trace back directly to the rock, who is Peter himself. The core of the teaching is that Jesus died to forgive us. The fellowship is the way the forgiveness gets to us.
As Jesus says in another place, "Whosoever heareth these sayings of mine and doeth them, I will liken him unto a man, which built his house upon a rock: and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not; for it was founded upon a rock." And that is why -- no matter how bad things may ever look -- the gates of hell will not prevail against the church.
The Collect: O Almighty God, who by thy Son Jesus Christ didst give to thy Apostle Saint Peter many excellent gifts, and commandedst him earnestly to feed thy flock; Make, we beseech thee, all Bishops and Pastors diligently to preach thy holy Word, and the people obediently to follow the same, that they may receive the crown of everlasting glory; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Acts 12:1- 11
The Gospel: St. Matthew 16: 13-19
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Trinity IV, June 22, 1997
The last part of this morning's Gospel lesson is directed at people who tend to be extremely critical of others. We may not know any such people personally, but we have all heard that they do exist. Jesus is saying that if you are mercilessly critical of others, that is a sure signal that there is something about yourself that you have not dealt with.
That is what he means by the mote and the beam -- the speck and the log. He cautions us not to be too quick to tell other people what is wrong with them, and how, in our great wisdom, we might be able to help them out. Jesus suggests that when we are tempted in that direction, we should first ask ourselves, "is it possible that the thing that drives me crazy about this other person may be something of which I am guilty -- but I would rather point it out in him than face it in myself?"
His advice is, of course, to face it in ourselves, confess it, and try with the Holy Ghost's help to do something about it. Then we shall be ready to straighten everybody else out. He concludes, rather acidly, "Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother's eye."
This coming Tuesday is the Prayer Book's feast of St. John the Baptist. He is a crucial figure in the drama of Advent, but it is good to have another chance at the opposite end of the year to give him some thought. John is the character who most clearly connects the Old Testament to the New, and Jesus says of him, "Among them that are born of women, there hath not arisen a greater than John the Baptist."
The lesson about the mote and the beam is not particularly applicable to John -- even though he wound up losing his head because he criticized the king's adulterous marriage. The New Testament portrays John as a man fueled with a sense of divine vocation and almost devoid of egotism -- that is to say, there was no selfish element in his criticism of the king or anyone else.
John is an Old Testament prophet who has wandered onto the pages of the New Testament. His birth -- to aged and previously barren parents -- echoes that of Isaac. His father prophesies at his circumcision that he will fulfill the prophecies of both Isaiah and Malachi -- namely that God would send someone along before the Messiah to get everything ready for him.
John appears on the stage of history dressed up like the Old Testament prophet Elijah -- whom Malachi said would come back just before the Lord's appearance. Like the prophets of centuries before, John pronounces God's judgment, and he doesn't seem to care whom he might offend. His opening words in St. Luke's Gospel are "O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" Few professors of preaching would counsel addressing one's hearers as, "Sons of snakes."
The most significant thing John did to get things ready for the Messiah was to set up the stage on which he came into public view -- and to attract a public to view him. John preached that the Messiah was coming, and that people needed to get themselves ready for him by repenting, and that the way to show they had repented was to get themselves dunked in the Jordan River. That brought the crowds.
After the baptism, John said that what he did was on the direct authority of God. "That (Jesus) should be made manifest to Israel, therefore am I come baptizing with water . . . . I knew him not, but he that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me, 'Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and remaining on him, the same is he which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost.' And I saw, and bare record that this is the Son of God."
Later on, John began to lose some of his followers to Jesus and fell behind him in the number of baptisms performed. He reassured his friends that that was all part of what God intended. Jesus is the groom at the heavenly wedding, where John is only,the best man. When the groom appears, he takes center stage. John, told them, "He must increase, and I must decrease."
I quoted Jesus earlier as having said, "Among them that are born of women there hath not arisen a greater than John the Baptist" -- but he finishes that thought up with the words, "notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he." John is less than the least person in the kingdom of heaven for chronological, rather than moral, reasons.
The kingdom of heaven arrives fully with the death and resurrection of Jesus and the coming of the Holy Ghost. John was not alive to know about those things or to benefit from them as we have. Jesus is not attacking John the Baptist or trying to make us think he is not going to heaven in the end. He wants us to see that getting saved and going to heaven are not rewards for being good -- even if you are as good as John the Baptist was. Getting saved is better than a reward -- it is a gift.
Jesus sums it up for us, saying, "Ye sent unto John, and he bare witness of the truth . . . he was a burning and shining light; and ye were willing for a season to rejoice in his light. But I have greater witness than that of John . . . the works which the Father hath given me to finish."
The Collect: O God, the protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy; Increase and multiply upon us thy mercy; that, thou being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal. Grant this, O heavenly Father, for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
The Epistle: Romans 8:18-23
The Gospel: St. Luke 6:36-42
Fathers' Day is not a completely inappropriate day on which to ask a riddle about egomania. It is one I hope my children don't ask too often about me. Question: What is the difference between Daddy and God? Answer: God doesn't think he is Daddy.
In this morning's Epistle, St. Peter counsels, "All of you be subject one to another, and be clothed with humility." Humility is not exactly one of the more popular Christian virtues. We have grown to believe that any show of humility at all must be phony. Nearly every influence around us teaches that the most important thing in life is to feel good about yourself.
Prayer Book revision in the Episcopal Church got some of its greatest mileage out of the claim that our 1928 edition is excessively penitential--that phrases such as, "miserable sinners" and "we are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table" and a confession of sin in every Communion service were just too much for contemporary people to swallow.
A wise Christian writer pointed out to me that "humility" comes from the same root word as "humus"--earth. Humility implies receptivity. As humus finds its true purpose as it is receptive to seed and to sunlight and to rain, so humble people find their true purpose when they are receptive to the help and the guidance of God.
People of a literary bent may think of the way humility is exemplified in the Charles Dickens character Uriah Heep. Uriah Heep is named, most ironically, for one of the truly most humble men in the Bible. Heep spent all his time telling everyone how humble he was. That perverse variety of showing off is not, of course, real humility. It is just another dreary form of pride.
Our model of humility is Jesus. But even the most superficial examination of the Gospels shows that Jesus is not at all humble in anything approximating the popular, or the Uriah Heepish, sense. Jesus is opinionated, forthright, argumentative, even verging upon insulting and downright nasty.
His humility, as the New Testament means it, is something St. Paul explains in Philippians. Even though Jesus was God's equal, he was willing to lay aside all of the power and privilege and prerogatives his position gave him. He became a weakened, limited human being--who lived and suffered and died.
Jesus is humble, because Jesus did what his father wanted him to do. Jesus is humble, because Jesus did not say, "My will be done, " but, instead, "Thy will be done." If we act upon what we pray in the Lord's Prayer, we shall be well on our way to displaying the true humility God--and St. Peter--want us to have.
If we refuse even to try to be humble in that sense, then God and our knowledge about him and our relationship to him can never do us any good. If we set ourselves up as being too strong, or too independent, or too selfsufficient to need help from God, we can be sure that we will not get it, because he will never force it on us.
St. Peter writes, "God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble." That doesn't mean that God punishes proud people by denying them his help. By definition, proud people set themsieves above and apart from God's help.
One way to measure your own humility quotient is by how you react when people say, "I am not religious, because religion is just a crutch for weak people." I am perfectly comfortable saying, "Of course I use religion as a crutch. If I didn't have it I couldn't walk." That humble, yet clever, response fills me with a deep sense of pride.
We need to learn how to identify ourselves properly with the two parables Jesus tells as this morning's Gospel--the ones about the lost sheep and the lost coin. We are not to suppose that we are among either the ninety-nine safe sheep or the nine protected pieces of silver.
We are the lost ones. And by the very fact that we are sitting here in church, we know that somehow Jesus came looking for us, and he found us, and he got us here. True self-worth comes from knowing God loved you enough to send his son to die for you.
So "Humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time, casting every care upon him; for he careth for you."
The Collect: O LORD, we beseech thee mercifully to hear us; and grant that we, to whom thou hast given an hearty desire to pray, may, by thy mighty aid, be defended and comforted in all dangers and adversities; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: 1 Peter 5:5-11
The Gospel: St. Luke 15:1-10
Trinity II, June 8, 1997
"One was a doctor and one was a queen." Our beloved Margaret, Queen of Scotland --a woman who had children and a husband, and still became a saint -- has her birthday this Tuesday, and we shall celebrate it at the coffee hour today. Wednesday, June 11, is the Prayer Book's feast of St. Barnabas the Apostle, and I want to spend some time with him this morning too.
Two of the great divines in colonial America were named Mather, men especially memorable for their first names, Cotton and Increase. I've heard of other people named -- or, at least, called --"Cotton," but never another Increase. One of the pieces of trivia I picked up in our nighttime Bible class's recent study of Genesis was that "Increase" was the Mather family's translation of the Hebrew name "Joseph."
Joseph was the name of a Levite from Cyprus whom the apostles nicknamed "Barnabas." "Barnabas" means "Son of Consolation," or, perhaps, "Reassuring one, " "Comforter," even "Peacemaker." He appears first of all in the Book of Acts where his first act endeared him to his fellow clergymen for all time. St. Luke tells us that Barnabas, "Having land, sold it, and brought the money, and laid it at the apostles' feet."
The next two characters St. Luke introduces are a married couple named Ananias and Sapphira. In contrast to Barnabas's mode of giving, Ananias and Sapphira sell an unspecified possession of theirs and keep some of the money back. The newly emboldened St. Peter tells Ananias, "Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost," and both he and his wife are struck dead. It is almost redundant for St. Luke to add, "And great fear came upon all the church, and upon as many as heard these things."
So Barnabas was a well-liked and respected man. In the terms of today's Gospel he accepted God's invitation to supper, that is to say, he wanted to have a fully committed relationship to God. St. Luke will say of him later on, "He was a good man, and full of the Holy Ghost and of faith." Barnabas capitalized on his reputation in the next thing he did for the apostles.
Saul of Tarsus was a well-known enemy of the new Christian movement. He was there when the Jews beat St. Stephen's brains out for testifying to Jesus, and he had set out to go north to Damascus with warrants for the arrest of Christians there. On his way, God knocked him off his horse and converted Saul to Christ.
When Saul came back to Jerusalem claiming to be a Christian, the apostles didn't believe him, thinking he was still a hit-man for the high priest. Barnabas apparently talked to Saul, decided his story was true, and vouched for him to the other apostles. So Barnabas is the man responsible for St. Paul's joining the church -- not a small accomplishment.
Later on the apostles sent Barnabas up to Antioch to see if it was true that Gentiles were becoming Christians there. That visit inspired him to go to Tarsus to get St. Paul out of his self-imposed exile. Paul and Barnabas spent a year teaching in Antioch, went to Jerusalem with relief money for the church there, and then set out on what we call St. Paul's first missionary journey.
The apostles would go first into synagogues to preach because the people there would presumably be more receptive to what they had to say -- they were at least familiar with the Hebrew Bible and the idea of a Messiah. On one occasion in Asia Minor the opposition from the local Jews was so strong that Acts says, "Then Paul and Barnabas waxed bold and said, 'it was necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken to you: but seeing you put it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles."
Barnabas leaves the New Testament story on slightly down-beat note, which may tell us more about St. Paul than it does about him. After the Council of the Apostles in Jerusalem resolved the issue about Gentiles, Paul said to Barnabas, "Let's go back and visit all the churches we saw before to find out how they are doing." Barnabas wanted to take John Mark along, but St. Paul was still angry that Mark had left them during their previous journey. St. Luke says, "The contention was so sharp between them, that they departed asunder one from the other." Barnabas sailed with Mark to his home in Cyprus and out of the New Testament. Mark and Paul were reconciled in Rome later on, but the New Testament tells us nothing more about Barnabas.
I think the main thing we learn from St. Barnabas's life is that the church is built upon good men -- good people -- who are full of the Holy Ghost and faith -- which means they are the last people to suppose they are especially good. We need them to give their money, and we need them to give their insight into what is really going on, and we need them to lend their energy and their good reputation to the church's work."For the saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one too."
The Collect: O LORD, who never failest to help and govern those whom thou dost bring up in thy stedfast fear and love; Keep us, we beseech thee, under the protection of thy good providence, and make us to have a perpetual fear and love of thy holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle. I St. John 3: 13-24
The Gospel. St. Luke 14:16-24.
Trinity I, June 1, 1997
One of my favorite words in the Prayer Book is "transitory." "Transitory" is not a word most people use much in normal speech, but it is also not particularly obscure. Mass "transit" is the way people get from one place to another. "Transitory" means "moving from one place to another in time," "elapsing," "passing away."
The word comes up most prominently in the Prayer for the Church, as we ask God to, "comfort and succor all those who, in this transitory life, are in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness, or any other adversity." This life we live has nothing permanent about it -- it is fleeting, passing away, this life is transitory.
The psalm which I find most helpful in reminding me about the transitoriness of life is Psalm number 90. Psalm 90 contrasts the permanence of God with the impermanence of human existence: first saying of God, "Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made, thou art God from everlasting and world without end;" then of us, "As soon as thou scatterest them they are even as a sleep, and fade away suddenly like the grass. In the morning it is green and groweth up; but in the evening it is cut down, dried up, and withered."
Psalm 90 reminds us that there are boundaries set on the length of human life: "The days of our age are threescore years and ten; and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years, yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow; so soon passeth it away, and we are gone." That is to say, no matter how vigorous you may continue to be beyond the age of seventy, you know you are on the home stretch. Or as my brother asked me on my thirty-fifth birthday, "How does it feel to be on the back nine?"
The point of all this is, of course, that the quicker we realize that life is, in fact, transitory, the better off we will be. One of the characteristics of youth is the confidence that time is endless, and that death is something which only happens to other people. Age is supposed to bring wisdom if only in the growing knowledge that life is not going to go on forever.
And so Psalm 90 goes on to implore God to, "teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom." If we realize that each day we live is a gift from God, but that those gifts are going to run out at some point, we will think about things more soberly; and we will reflect upon what we are doing and on what course our life is taking; and then, ideally, we'll decide that the very best thing to do is to try to live each day in a way that is pleasing to God.
The dead man in today's Gospel is a perfect example of someone who did not number his days or apply his heart unto wisdom while he had the chance. He begins to wake up to reality only after it is too late to escape the consequences of his frivolity and thoughtlessness.
His story is simple. He was rich, but he wouldn't give any of his food or any of his money to help to relieve the suffering of the poor and the hungry. Nobody asked him to impoverish himself or his own family. Nobody asked him to propose the filthy beggar at his gate for membership in his club. All he needed to do was obey the Biblical command to feed the hungry. He wouldn't do it, and so he ended up in hell.
In the New Testament's terminology, the rich man refused to love his neighbor as he loved himself. What Jesus means when he commands us to love our neighbors is that we should want what is best for the other person and then do what is best for the other person. To love is to put the needs of the other person ahead of your needs -- God sees the evidence of your love in what you do for the other person, not in how you feel about him.
St. John goes on at some length about love in this morning's Epistle. He reminds us that the ability to love is itself a gift from God. We are not loving by nature. We are selfish by nature. We are not going to love our neighbors unless we get some help. St. John makes this simple argument: God loves us, and we know he loves us, because he sent Jesus to die for us. Because God loves us, we should love one another. God gives us both the inclination to love and the ability to love when he puts his Holy Spirit inside us at baptism.
What is going to count at the day of judgment is how much you loved your neighbors -- how much you acted toward other people the way Jesus does. St. John says that if we let God love other people through us with his own love, we won't need to be afraid of the final reckoning.
The best way to evaluate your life is always to ask yourself , "Am I really trying to do what is best for other people?"When this transitory life is over, the question God is going to ask is, "Did you love your neighbor?"So we pray, "teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom."
The Collect: O GOD, the strength of all those who put their trust in thee; Mercifully accept our prayers; and because, through the weakness of our mortal nature, we can do no good thing without thee, grant us the help of thy grace, that in keeping thy commandments we may please thee, both in will and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: 1 St. John 4: 7-21
The Gospel: St. Luke 16: 19-31.
Trinity Sunday, May 25, 1997
It is hard to figure out exactly what Nicodemus was hoping to accomplish when he first went to see Jesus. St. John says Nicodemus was a prominent man in Israel, and he was so scared of what people would think if they knew he was talking to Jesus that he approached him after the sun had gone down. Jesus doesn't say anything about that at first, but later in the conversation he remarks, "Men love darkness more than light, because their deeds are evil."
Nicodemus opens with a smarmy compliment, "Rabbi, we know that you must come from God, because nobody could do the miracles you are doing unless God were with him." Jesus' oblique response is, "Nobody can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again." In other words, "Don't be so quick to drop God's name. There is more to what is going on here than you may think." Nicodemus takes him far too literally, and asks, "How can someone be born after he has already grown up? Is he supposed to crawl back into his mother and come out again?" Jesus replies, "You have to be born of water and the Spirit before you can see the Kingdom of God."
At the most obvious level, this is where Jesus decrees that the essential first step in becoming a Christian is to get yourself baptized. You are born when you come out of your mother, you are born again when the Holy Ghost comes into you at baptism. The first birth carries with it a sentence of death. After you experience the second birth, you know you are going to live forever.
I think the Prayer Book makes the story of Jesus and Nicodemus the Gospel for Trinity Sunday for a fairly simple reason. The main temptation connected to the idea of the Trinity is to treat it as an abstruse theological puzzle -- one only professional religious fanatics would even try to figure out -- in any event, something with absolutely no practical significance or relevance.
The Trinity does indeed tell us what God is like in himself. The Trinity would live and continue to exist even if creation did not exist. But we know creation does exist and that we are part of it. So the Trinity also explains how we become one with God, and nothing could be more practical and relevant than that.
We can never even begin to understand what Christianity is all about if we persist in the idea that God is separate from us. Thinking about the Trinity helps us to see how God lives his life in us and through us. When we are baptized we become a grafted-on part of the body of Christ, who is the second person of the Trinity. We know human bodies are alive because they are breathing. The body of Christ is alive with the breath of God which is the Holy Ghost, the third person of the Trinity.
God the Father, who is the first person of the Trinity, loves his Son, and because we are part of his Son, he loves us too. God the Father does his work in the world through the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is in us, and he works through us whenever we choose to cooperate.
After we are baptized and as we receive Holy Communion, we are one with God -- he dwells in us and we dwell in him, as the Prayer Book puts it. Jesus is not just a great moral example - whom we get frustrated trying to imitate. Jesus is. inside us by the Spirit working and trying to make us as pleasing to the Father as he is. St. Paul reminds us, "We are members of his body..we have the mind of Christ."
The last thing Nicodemus says to Jesus is, "How can these things be?" But something obviously clicked in this strange conversation. Later on, when his fellow Pharisees want to arrest Jesus, Nicodemus demands that he get due process, asking, "Does our law judge a man without giving him a hearing and finding out about him?"
Then on Good Friday afternoon Nicodemus comes out of the crowd with a hundred pounds of perfume to be used to anoint Jesus' corpse. When we get to the heavenly throne room, and we sing, "Holy, Holy, Holy" with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven, let us hope Nicodemus will be there too -- finally born again, out in the clear light of day, in front of God and everybody.
The Collect: O GOD, the strength of all those who put their trust in thee; Mercifully accept our prayers; and because, through the weakness of our mortal nature, we can do no good thing without thee, grant us the help of thy grace, that in keeping thy commandments we may please thee, both in will and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: 1 St. John 4: 7-21
The Gospel: St. Luke 16: 19-31.