A Bountiful Feast

A Sermon for the Sunday Next Before Advent

Anthony G. Cirilla

May the Words of my Mouth and the Meditations of my Heart be acceptable in thy Sight, O Lord my Strength and my Redeemer. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

When I was a young boy, I would often spend the holidays with my grandparents. My Grandma Patty was a deeply loving person – she delighted in showering her family with affection, and she took joy in getting ready for the holidays, putting up decorations, sending out cards, and meticulously planning gifts. And of course, like any Italian grandmother, she loved to feed her family, so Thanksgiving was, to say the least, a big deal. In the days leading up to the big day, she would be making enough cookies to fill up the dining room table and pies to take up the kitchen table – lemon meringue, apple pie, and my favorite, pumpkin pie. Not to mention all of the side dishes – the stuffing, the mashed potatoes, and, unfortunately, the green bean casserole. On Thanksgiving day she would be basting that beautiful turkey, and, because this was an Italian thanksgiving, there was going to be the lasagna. There are three certainties in life – death, taxes, and the Italian Thanksgiving lasagna. I remember Thanksgiving morning, after I was finished getting ready, my grandmother would take me by the arm and say, “Anthony, come here and take this in.” And we’d go to the top of the stairs where you could breathe in the inviting aroma of the dishes she was preparing. “Doesn’t it smell wonderful?” she would say, and it really did. At the time I remember joking that I would enjoy eating the food more than smelling it, but I don’t really remember eating it as distinctly as I do remember standing at the top of those stairs with her. What I saw in that moment was her delight in what it all meant to her – that it was an opportunity for her to share good food with people she loved. For her, feeding her family was more than an act of love. It was a way of creating a spiritual connection with the gratitude of the season. By preparing a bountiful feast, she was performing the ordinary miracle of making a day into a holiday. The pragmatic day to day need to eat becomes, on Thanksgiving day, a recognition that sharing in a bountiful feast together has a deeply spiritual meaning to it.

The natural miracle of human love made manifest in a carefully prepared meal had a higher, supernatural fulfillment in today’s Gospel lesson, where we read of one of Christ’s most discussed miracles – the feeding of the five thousand. Imagine if you had enough food set out for your household, and then all of your friends and relatives showed up for Thanksgiving dinner without any warning. The panic that would create would mirror how the disciples were feeling – they had no plan for this crowd’s needs. Jesus asks Philip where they could get enough food from, and you can almost hear the anxiety in Philip’s words: “Two hundred pennyworth of bread is not sufficient for them, that every one of them may take a little.” Not only do we not have enough food, we don’t even have enough money to buy the food! Andrew attempts to help but seems rather unconfident as well: “There is a lad here, which hath five barley loaves, and two small fishes: but what are they among so many?” In one sense, the concern of the disciples can be understood – with so great a number to feed, the disciples recognize their inability to meet the demand. But this fear also shows that the disciples have not been paying attention. In just the previous chapter Jesus had healed a man infirm from birth, and the chapter prior he had healed the official’s son on his deathbed. And there was an even more obvious experience which should have inspired confidence in them. Remember the miracle of Jesus turning water into wine in John 2? In verse 2, John records for us, “Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding.” They had already seen Christ work a miracle in providing wine for a whole wedding. Sure, the number of people in the crowd was greater, but if Christ could heal a man handicapped from birth, raise a boy from deadly illness, and transform enough water into wine to meet the needs of an entire wedding feast, why should the mere number of people present make a difference? They were looking not with spiritual eyes but with a fleshly vision at the problem. They weren’t looking at who Christ is but the situation they were facing, and like Peter looking at the turbulent waters instead of at Christ in the storm, they were sinking into anxiety. A mistake I can say I am all too familiar with.

Now here is what is amazing. Christ could have chosen to simply give enough food to sate their hunger – to create enough food even to give five thousand people a snack, so that they could go and find food on their own later. That would have been reasonable. Or, Christ could have given them enough for a square meal, so they would be full enough not to eat again until the next meal. But Christ goes beyond that – as he has the disciples distribute five loaves of bread and two fishes to five thousand people, it reads that the amount of bread and fish was “As much as they wanted.” Wanted there in the Greek is ethelon – as much as could be desired. That means that they ate enough that these five thousand people didn’t need or desire seconds – they were full! It reminds me of those Thanksgiving meals where we ate so much of the good things set before us that we were falling into a coma. You know, you stretch out on the couch and say, “Oh goodness, I couldn’t eat another bite.” And then, a few minutes later someone says, “Anybody up for pie?” And suddenly new energy takes hold of you and you sit up and go, “Oh yeah, I’m ready.” Then you eat that pie and you’re done. “I’m never going to eat again,” you say, as you revert back into a couch potato in front of the TV. An hour later maybe, “Turkey sandwiches, anyone?” Ugh. If I have to, sure. You’re at capacity – you can’t have any more. And yet there are still leftovers for days. Now I doubt the crowd was quite that indulgent, but the point is, they had eaten their fill and didn’t even want anymore, and having eaten that much, the disciples gathered enough leftovers for another feast and “filled twelve baskets with the fragments of the five barley loaves, which remained over and above unto them that had eaten.” The overwhelming bounty of God’s grace and love, planned even before the crowd knew they would be hungry, is on full display here.

We are like the crowd – we have many needs, and meeting those needs often presents a challenge, a challenge that might seem impossible to overcome. Like the disciples, we have the tendency to forget what we know. We have the complete record of Christ’s miracles, including this one. Notice here that God cared about the physical needs of his people. Yes, the ultimate concern should be our spiritual health, but it is appropriate to go to God, to set before Christ those troubles we have. Miracles of the sort recorded in the Gospel are rare, but often God uses the miracles of common grace to meet our needs, like my grandmother working to prepare the Thanksgiving dishes, which can be found if we are open to looking for them. Indeed, if our eyes are fixed on Christ, we can be the source of bounty for others when they are in need, like the disciples carrying the baskets of bread and fish to the crowd. We pray in the Lord’s prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread,” both because we need to cultivate thanksgiving for the daily bread that we do have, and because it is from God’s grace that all of the blessings in our everyday lives flow. That we are able to work, that we have an economy where even buying our basic needs is at all possible, that sometimes we even have enough to share with others – all of this comes from the means of grace which surround us all about. Notice that the disciples were not even able to pay for the food. Even if we grow our own food in our gardens, we can’t create from nothing the soil in which the food grows, or the sunlight which makes it flourish. The means of creation, both in nature and in human nature, the nutrition in food and the delight in providing for one another in the human soul, all of these things are an incredible bounty which all flows from the Throne of Bounty. How much more true is it, then, that we cannot pay for the bountiful grace which saves us from our sins, a certain salvation and the promise of a heavenly feast which the Lord’s Supper reminds us to look for. Gratitude to the Father of Heavenly lights, from whom comes every good and perfect gift, is the means by which we perfect and sanctify the pleasure we take from occasions like Thanksgiving Day.

Of course, it is not enough to talk about the meeting of physical needs. As Christ said, quoting the Book of Deuteronomy, Man cannot live on bread alone. As a kid, I used to make the joke at dinner – A man cannot live on bread alone – he also needs something to drink. At Thanksgiving the joke would become, Man cannot live on Turkey Sandwiches alone – he also needs a slice of pumpkin pie with ten pounds of whipped cream. But the reason why Christ met the physical needs of the followers was not simply to fill their stomachs, but to, through their stomachs, make them sensible of a spiritual hunger. Their response to the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand is fitting: “This is of a truth that prophet that should come into the world.” Many were there to hear the wisdom of Christ’s teachings, and perhaps some in the crowd who had been skeptical about the truth of his ministry found their faith confirmed by this physical manifestation of his divinity. Maybe they were only hoping for one of his increasingly famous miracles to be on display, but their quest for novelty became a realization that this was someone particularly marvelous to perform a miracle of such magnitude. But what those in the crowd who said this were recognizing was a deep connection between the physical and the spiritual. It’s easy to divorce in our minds our spiritual duties from the mundane bodily needs of ourselves and others, but Scripture emphasizes that this is a wrong way of thinking about it. James 2:15-17 says, “If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, 16 And one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit? 17 Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.” Christ did not say, I am here to teach you – you’re on your own when it comes to your needs. By seeing and being sensitive to the needs of others, Christ was modeling the Christian duty to reach out and bring others into the bountiful feast of God. The same delight my grandmother took in feeding her family is the spiritual joy we should find in doing works of love for our neighbors in need.

Important as exhibiting generosity in works of charity is to the Christian life, however, this point is not the true center of the miracle. The spiritual quality of meeting physical needs points to an even higher truth – the bounty to be found in dwelling in a life with Christ. The day after the feeding of the five thousand, Christ calls them out on a distorted motivation: “26 Jesus answered them and said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Ye seek me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were filled. 27 Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give unto you: for him hath God the Father sealed.” Their focus, like that of the disciples before, had drifted. They were turning to what we might call the prosperity Gospel, the false notion that God will always meet our desires in this life. Christ warns them not to be satisfied in meeting only physical needs, but that physical hunger itself is actually a manifestation of the deeper spiritual hunger that we all have as a result of the Fall. No amount of Thanksgiving dinner, however delicious, can meet that need. The crowd asks for a sign that Christ is the one who can meet that spiritual need, sort of a dull request when you think about it, because they were literally to see the miracle of the feeding just yesterday. But Christ uses this as an opportunity to teach them that they are ignoring the deeper need of their souls by pursuing him only for bread: “For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world.” 34 Then said they unto him, Lord, evermore give us this bread. 35 And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.”  Do we hunger and thirst after the righteousness of Christ even as eagerly as we hunger and thirst for normal food and drink, let alone for special holiday meals? Do I get as excited for Holy Communion as I do for Camarie’s pumpkin cookies? Well I should, and even more, because in Holy Communion we see the joining of the ordinary miracle of feeding the body with the supernatural miracle of feeding the soul. Christ said, 51 I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.” And when the crowd questioned this shocking saying, he asserted, 53 Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Some believe that the Lord’s Supper is only a memorial of the life-giving sacrifice of Christ on the cross, to remind us that Christ became the bread of life for us, so that by believing in him we can be fed in our souls to chase out the death of sin. And it most certainly is that. But as there were leftovers at the feeding of the five thousand, Holy Communion is also more than that. Christ says, 54 Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. 55 For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. 56 He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him. If taken, as the 28th of the 39 Articles says, in an heavenly and spiritual manner, the Lord’s Supper is a pouring out of a spiritual blessing, a miraculous encounter through the Holy Spirit with the presence of Christ.

Spiritual hunger is a real hunger, and so the Lord’s supper is a real spiritual meal. And as with bodily hunger, meeting the needs of our soul with malnourishment causes a bad appetite. We might not crave the bountiful feast of Christ because we are fouling our soul’s palates with spiritual junk food. This is why meditation on Scripture is so important – it trains our soul to desire the spiritual food of Christ’s truth. Also to really enjoy a meal you have to work up that appetite, to really feel the need. Don’t you notice that food tastes better when you’re hungry? Well, confession of our sins is the exercise which prepares us to long for the bounty of Christ’s presence to nourish our souls from the source of all plenty. When we participate in it fully, the very structure of our liturgy reminds us of a hunger for eternity which can only be met by the God of eternal blessings. A spiritual feast is being laid out for us, and we can come to this table and delight in it. We are content to feed our minds and bodies but God wants to feed our souls, the very core of our being. The world says, Feed yourself, because there’s only enough for you. False gods say, Feed me, or I will take away from you. The true God, manifested to us in the person of Christ says, Are you hungry? Is your plate empty? Is your cup dry? Then come to me, stand at the top of the stairs in worship and take in the good aroma, for I want to feed you. I want to fill you up, and use you to fill up others. In Scripture, in prayer and the sacrament of Holy Communion, we partake of a bountiful feast. Amen.

Complete Love:

A Sermon for Trinity 18

Anthony G. Cirilla

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord my Strength and my Redeemer. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Though distorted fundamentally by the fall of mankind, our hearts were built and made to love the eternal majesty of the Trinity, and to be cloaked in the light of God’s holiness. And not only that, but our hearts are also made to love the shared act of loving God together. Christ teaches us in the two greatest commandments that we must love God completely, with all aspects of love we are capable of, and that this first commandment cannot actually be fulfilled if we fail to love the neighbors who bear God’s image. So I want to focus this morning on the words that we hear every Sunday: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” In these words of such paramount importance, we discover what it means to love our Lord with a complete love.

1. Love the Lord with all thy heart.

The Greek word, kardia, means, as it does today, the heart in both senses of the word – the physical heart, and the seat of emotions. The Pulpit Commentary says, the heart can be understood as “the seat of the understanding” and “the home of the affections and the seat of the will.” On this point we must exercise some caution, because the relationship between faith and emotions in Christianity has been distorted. There are those who would supplant biblical, spirit-filled faith with a vapid, emotionally driven faith which does not meet the standards Scripture sets for belief. Hebrews 11:1 defines faith this way: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” The things hoped for have substance – they have a rich combination of historical evidence, philosophical support, and poetic wisdom which come together to establish that our God and his Gospel are rightly the target of all of our emotions. Ultimately, of course, the gift of faith comes from the Holy Spirit, but we can take responsibility for cultivating in the seat of our understanding a rich faith that holds before our imaginations the nature of God so that we can inculcate love for him at the very core of our outlook. Last Wednesday we discussed Psalm 29, and the 2nd verse reads, “Give unto the Lord the glory due unto his name; worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.” Loving God properly requires that we learn to cultivate within our hearts, from Scripture, a deep sense of God’s absolute holiness – his goodness, his truth, his beauty, the wonder of his omnipotence, the wisdom of his omniscience, the fullness of his omnipresence. We love Him because anything which in this world seems worthy of love is at best only an image of the worthiness of love of which God supremely deserves love and is the ultimate fountain of all other things which merit love. This is, I think, one aspect of what John meant when he wrote in his first epistle, “God is love” – that is to say, he is the fulfillment, the pinnacle, the complete unity of all objects of affection. He is in fact what our hearts long for, and that is why, whenever we replace the true God with a God of our own making, whether literally or any other heart idol, we see devastation and despair everywhere we look. We are heartsick, in a spiritual but very real sense, for the one true font of satisfaction. But though we have turned our hearts to lesser loves and malnourished our spirits by feeding on the false gods of reputation, money, things, or whatever, God, despite needing nothing from us, took the initiative to restore the affections of our hearts. As 1 John 4:9-10 says, “In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” It would be enough to love God for the fact that he merits love in the highest, but even more amazingly, though we often have rejected God’s love in our hearts, though we have fed our hearts with love of sin which rejected his goodness and his glory, he saw you in the midst of your sin, and thought, “I love that sinner, and I am going to conquer the rebellion of his heart and take him back.” And the second Person of the Trinity, who receives perfect and holy love as He deserves from the Father, submitted himself to the wicked hatred of our hearts so that the seat of our affections could be restored. That is why we must love God with all our hearts.

2. Love the Lord with all thy Soul.

The word translated soul in Greek is psyche, and can refer both to the literal breath in our lungs and to the spiritual component of our nature. The Pulpit Commentary explains that the soul can be understood here as “the living powers, the animal life.” Genesis 2:7 reads, “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” If the heart is the seat of affectionate understanding, the soul is the very breath of life which gives us power to will and act out our affections and desires. Sometimes we fall into the trap of thinking that powerful feelings about a moral issue is sufficient for the good life – how outraged we are is a sign of how moral we are. But just as with the body, with the spirit, living life requires action. For the health of the body, we should force ourselves to move so that we have to take in more air, to work the life within our limbs to make that life strong. Likewise, we must live out, with intentional choice and assertion of will, the affections of the heart we discussed cultivating. Even in the body there is a connection between the heart and the breath. As an asthmatic I well know the challenges which damaged lungs can put the heart through. We may have soaring feelings of affection for God while singing in Church, and those soaring feelings are a good thing, but only if we find a way to put our soul where our heart is. We have to use this place, these acts of worship, as a training ground to ready us for a bold show of faith in the view of a world often skeptical of our beliefs. If I run out of breath too easily, I know I might need to take my asthma medication. Just the same, if we grow weary too quickly of thinking of the things of God, then it is time to start doing the things of God. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 9:24-25, “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever.”  Spiritually, after all, we are all asthmatics, but Paul made no provision for exemption from running the race in the Christian life on the basis of a wheezing soul. And if our soul is wheezing, then we may need to back up and check on our heart again – have we failed to establish a routine of worship, prayer, and living in God’s word dedicated to growing the affections of the heart? Then our spirit will be weak. And if we are always building up love of the Lord with our hearts but never striving to live it out, then our hearts will fall into doubt and confusion. And that is a dangerous place to be, because trials are coming. James 1:12 reads, “Blessed is the one who perseveres under trial because, having stood the test, that person will receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love him.” That is why we must practice and persevere in loving the Lord with all our soul.

3. Love the Lord with all thy mind.

The word translated mind in the Greek is “dianoia,” and has a more specific meaning than “nous.” The word “nous” would simply mean the mind, but “dianoia” takes it to another level. Strong’s concordance indicates that it means the exercise of deep thought. It’s to think in a way that requires that you furrow your brow and give it full attention, and really use, as they say, the brain that God gave you. Just to clear the air on this point, I am not saying that you have to have a towering intellect like Deacon Kenyon to fulfill this commandment. God is not commanding us to be smarter than we are. We aren’t all going to be professors or have PhDs in theology. That’s okay. We have a variety of duties and callings, and a world full of Deacon Kenyons would be very loving and very brainy, but it would not be the diverse world of people God intended us to have. But make no mistake. To love the Lord our God with all of our minds means that we will not be complacent in our knowledge as Christians. It means that we will have to really think, as best we can, about hard passages of Scripture that confuse us. It means that we should find the time to read quality books about Christianity, about Church history, about theology. I’m not saying to read thirty books a week like Deacon Kenyon, but maybe pick out an approachable Christian book like Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, or Basic Christianity by John Stott, and read it over the course of a year. Read the entirety of the Gospel of Matthew over an extended period of time and study how Matthew used the Old Testament prophecies to precisely and thoroughly document that Christ is the Messiah. You don’t have to jump in headfirst and do a book study on the Book of Revelation, though you might. But start with an approachable book like the Epistle of James and read it in an undertone day and night, and really think it over and shape in your mind an understanding of what Scripture is asking for. Being a good Christian is not about being a know-it-all. While we don’t all have to be Bible scholars to read the Bible or professional theologians to understand essential doctrine, we do need to be intellectually engaged as time, circumstance, and ability allow. After all, how can our hearts learn to have affection for the true God if we are not studying who He truly is? How can we faithfully live out loving God with all of our spirit if we do not properly understand what He is asking us to do? Such confusion on its own weakens our confidence, but even worse is the fact that our own confusion will be the target of predatory voices who seek to lead us from Christ’s path. We need to be prepared for those who might seek to distort the Gospel with notions that take our sight from Christ on the cross and put our hope in human means only. Ephesians 5:6 reads, “Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of such things God’s wrath comes on those who are disobedient.” If our minds are unprotected by knowledge of God’s truth then our hearts will be vulnerable and our souls will be weak. To love God with our whole heart and our whole soul, then we must also love God with our whole minds.

4. Love thy neighbor.

The second greatest commandment reads, “And the second, like it, we must love our neighbors as ourselves.” Suppose you came to my house and you saw something strange. Imagine that every picture I have of Camarie was defaced. I had either turned pictures of her backwards or upside down, or drew mustaches and funny glasses on those pictures, or had cut her head out of some of them. Or suppose I just had no pictures of her at all. What if you said to me, “Tony, why do you treat your wife’s pictures like that? Don’t you love her?”, and I said, “Oh, those aren’t my wife – they’re just images of her. I can do whatever I want with her image.” I suspect you would find that a bit troubling. The fact is, we cannot fully and properly love God if we do not strive to love our neighbors. We cannot treat His image however we want and then claim to be followers of the Christ who died to restore that image. Our fellow humans are of course not God, but deserve a neighborly love which comes from gratitude and even a sense of awe. As C.S. Lewis said in The Weight of Glory, “We have never met a mere mortal.” Imagine if we really acted as if every person we met bore the image of the God who created volcanoes, thunder, and asteroids. Imagine, more importantly, if we regarded each other as worthy of the sacrificial love which Christ showed our neighbors on the cross. Forget John Lenon: I say, imagine a world where every Christian lived with a concern and a love for his neighbor that mirrored not only our love for God but the love we have for ourselves. I may not feel like I like myself very much, but I feed myself, clothe myself, clean myself – I make sure that I am taken care of. If I look at my neighbor and see my neighbor in need and see that my circumstances make it possible for me to help that neighbor, then I should. I’m not saying that we should render ourselves destitute in helping others, but that we should delight in finding ways to serve one another out of awe of the fact that they bear the image of God, out of an awareness that they suffer from the same vulnerabilities that we do, and out of a desire to model for those who are weak the strength which Christ showed for us on the cross. Notice that the complete love of God, loving him with all our heart, all our soul, and all our mind, should be modeled in miniature in how we love each other. We should love our neighbors with an affection for an understanding of how much God loves them. We should love our neighbors in an active, lived-out, soulful way, not just a back-seat driver’s abstract feelings. We should love our neighbors with our minds, with a curiosity about who they are, what they care about, and what physical, emotional, and spiritual needs they have. When we love God more thoroughly, we will love our neighbors more like how we love ourselves; when we love our neighbors in a manner more consistent with how we love God, then we will love God with a more complete, a more heartfelt, a more soulful, and a more mindful love. How will they know that we are Christians? They will know we are Christians by our love, by our love. They will know we are Christians by our love. Amen.

Walking in the Spirit:

A Sermon for the 14th Sunday After Trinity

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord my Strength and my Redeemer. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote, “It’s a dangerous business…. going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” Our sermon this morning will be focused on this morning’s epistle reading from Galatians 5, and I want to pay especially close attention to this simple command from St. Paul: “Walk in the Spirit.” In fact, more specifically, the Greek specifies that we are to walk by the spirit, which means Paul is telling us that there is a proper way to walk. Early Christians called themselves followers of the Way, or in Greek hodos. A way, a hodos, is a path. You might think of a well trodden hiking trail that you trust to get you out of the woods and back home. A way is a well-walked terrain by people who knew where they were going, and who have given us a way forward. One of my favorite verses in the Old Testament, Jeremiah 6:16, reads, “Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.” This Old Testament passage teaches us to ask for guidance in our walk, and Jesus Christ supplies the answer for what that way should be in John 14:6: “Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” If the Spirit is the means by which we walk the Christian life, Jesus Christ is the path we are to walk. So when Paul tells us to walk in the spirit, he doesn’t simply mean a directionless meandering with a sentimental sense of good feeling. A way, a path, is not just a description of the land you see around you. A way is a reliable guide, meant to shape how we walk. We could say that the effort of the Christian life is to, by God’s grace, conform the walk, our manner of life, to the way, the life to which Christ has called us.

There are three things to see about this idea of walking in the way. First, notice that walking in the spirit is not standing still. Being on the right path is not taking it. Imagine if you saw someone sitting on the side of a trail deep in the forest and you asked him, “Where are you going?” And he said, “I know the way here – I don’t need to do anything more.” You would be concerned for that person, as the light fades and the creatures of the night begin to stir while he sits idly on the path. So compare this idea of sitting still and not walking in the way with some of the works of the flesh listed in our epistle. Let’s take a simple one: adultery. If you are married, is walking in the spirit of your marriage simply not to commit adultery? Naturally not. “Sorry honey, I forgot our anniversary, but don’t worry – I didn’t commit adultery!” Good luck with that one, buddy. No – to walk in the spirit of matrimony is not an absence of adulterous behavior, but a presence, instead, of intentional behaviors of love for that spouse. In the same fashion, a Christian life is not an absence of ungodly actions, but a pursuit of the way of life Christ wants for us.

Second, although I have mentioned this already, notice again that this walk has to be in and by the Spirit. This means the Holy Spirit in particular. So this wording should make something of vital importance clear: when I say Christians have a duty to intentionally walk in the way Christ called us to, I am not saying we earn our way to Heaven. On the contrary, Scripture teaches that to think we are earning our way to heaven is to empty out the value of Christ’s sacrifice, as Paul teaches in Ephesians 2:8-9: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast.” Instead, the reason we are to walk in the Spirit is because it’s pleasing to the Savior who saved us, because it honors the Father who sent Him, and because it makes our lives better. It makes our hearts lighter, our spirits fresher, and our confidence in the destination of this path firmer when we are actively walking on that path well lit by the fires of the Holy Spirit.

Third, this passage teaches us about a war going on inside of our souls. When Paul says flesh here, he doesn’t mean our bodies exactly. Often in the New Testament, the word translated flesh, “sarkos,” is specifically used to mean our willful desires for worldly things which resist obedience to God. He isn’t saying that our souls are good and our bodies are bad. He is saying that we, as Christians, have a war occuring inside of our bodies between a split allegiance in our souls. There is a part of us, put there by the Holy Spirit, that longs to delight in and fulfill the law of God. There is a part of us, inherited through original sin, that wants to rebel and reject what God wants for us, and choose our own path. But notice that the passage does not talk about walking in the flesh. It only says that it lusteth, that is, desires against the spirit. Here’s a way to think about the picture being formed here. Imagine setting a plan for your morning walk, and you say, I don’t know where I’m going, but I know one place I am not going, so the only decisions you make are negative – away from the place you are avoiding. You won’t get there, but you have no idea where you are going instead. The Holy Spirit, through Scripture, and the church, and the promptings of conscience, gives us a direction. All the flesh does is stray against the path. Our sinful desire will take any alternative to what is good for us. The fleshly part of our will is like a dog that will eat anything off the path it sees or a child that will run headlong down what looks like a fine trail but ends in a dangerous ravine. Doesn’t know where it’s going, as long as it doesn’t have to go where it’s told to go. Jesus Christ explains this in Matthew 7:13 where he says, “Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it.” God is absolute unity with himself, so that means our rebellion is a longing for disunity with the path he wants us to walk in. If you want to build for yourself a picture of what Hell looks like, look at the list of the works of the flesh: “Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.” Think of all of the pain, the agony, which comes from being led down all of those paths, the conflict, the confusion that infidelity, unbridled anger, and poisonous envy can cause in our lives already. And then remove all of the means of grace in this earthly life which give relief to the effects of those choices. That is Hell. See, in this life, when we sin, the providential order of God’s creation often gives us some measure of relief from sin’s consequences. But in Hellfire, instead, we would have nothing between us and the full effects of those sins on our souls. That is the path we take when we choose to live outside of God’s saving grace. Oh sure, there’s a lot more options for our lives in that list, in one sense. There’s a lot less constraint on your movement, because you have the apparent “freedom” to do things like practice witchcraft or nurse hatred for someone in your heart. But there’s also a lot more constraint to your movement on a safe path than a deadly path. If I drop you into the sea you could go in a lot of different directions, a lot more than on a boat, which is very cramped by comparison. But on the boat you’ll get somewhere. The other way, you’re just playing a guessing game about where the currents will take away your life.

The fruits of the spirit, against which there is no law, involve a constraint of options which actually then makes us more free to live a good life. See the freedom which comes with constrained commitment to walking in the spirit: “love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.” You’re not free to be filled with strife if you’re filled with peace, for example. The cross is the ultimate symbol of constraint. Christ took the narrowest path a body can take – an excruciatingly narrow way. But he walked in the spirit in that direction to make us a path out of the chaos, to forge a target for us to hit in our walk. X marks the spot. The word crucial comes from the word cross – something of crucial importance is something so valuable you would die on the cross for it. To Christ, you and I were crucial. We were worth that path to him, and that’s why he walked it. And if we desire covenant with that amazing work of divine mercy, then the fitting response is to accept the crucial pain of fighting the fleshly desires because of our gratitude that Christ has made the fruit of the spirit available to us. So Paul writes, “And they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts.” You know, the Christian path has victory at the end, but the fact that it is depicted in terms of Christ on the cross means it will hurt sometimes. We will look at our sins and see that they’re intolerable, and think, why not just give up? Why not let the flesh have its way? But that’s just another trick of the flesh trying to cheat us out of the joys the Spirit has in store for us. It’s worth the effort to walk in the spirit, to resist the fleshly desires, because it’s in those fruits of the Spirit in this life that we get a glimpse of the end of the path. The love, the joy, the peace God wants us to have in Heaven, he also wants us to share in now. There will be adventure, danger, and even physical death on this narrow path, but danger and physical death is on the other, broader path too. But on this path, on this way laid out by the truth, there is the life in Christ, and that is where the faith resides that makes us whole, not only in that we know where we’ll end up, but in knowing that step by step we are already surrounded by the builder of our heaven and by the beloved fellow saints who have shown us the old, sure path. This way, when we reach the path’s end and see the fullness of the light of God shining on us so brightly and intensely that we too are set aglow, we will say, Our faith has made us whole – Glory be to God, for he is worthy to be praised! Amen.

A Sermon for the 10th Sunday After Trinity

All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I love planning gifts, and that’s a good thing because in the Cirilla house gift giving is almost an Olympic sport. Camarie’s birthday is December 11th, our anniversary is the 22nd, and of course then it’s Christmas. I grew up with the tradition of a small Christmas Eve gift and a bigger Christmas Day gift, so that means I have to plan four gifts in a row. So December is not a good time for me to be ignorant of gifts. And on my limited budget that means I have to plan way ahead of time – starting about now actually. But it’s such a joyful process because gift giving is a way to show Camarie that I am paying close attention to her, to what she likes. It’s how I show her that I’m not just thinking about books all the time. And she shows me the same love, where I know those gifts are measured not by their price but by their worth in showing that she pays attention to what matters to me. I’m sure that many of you have had similar experiences.

Not only do we have occasions when we give each other gifts, we also have places. There’s a restaurant we like to go to on our anniversary, for example, which has become a tradition. The place fits the gift, because it is a place with memories. In a few months it will be our four year anniversary, and when we exchange gifts, it will feel more meaningful because we built a little more on that tradition in our favorite spot, like a temple of memory for our growing history together. I’m not just trying to get sappy by talking about this, but I’m saying it because the familiar practice of a married couple having a restaurant they go to on their anniversary is a human parallel to spiritual gifts and their relationship to the space of the church. Often we hear that the church is not the building, the people there are the church, and that’s true. An anniversary isn’t a special restaurant either, but it’s a good practice because it gives a concrete place to fix the memory of what it means to give gifts on that occasion. A church isn’t a building, but although a house isn’t enough to make a home, a house is a fundamental means by which we build the protected and nurtured space for a family to dwell in and to give each other the gift of a loving home.

We see in today’s Gospel lesson that Christ took the time to clear out the house of his Father. Luke reports in the 19th chapter of his Gospel, “And he went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold therein, and them that bought; saying unto them, It is written, My house is the house of prayer: but ye have made it a den of thieves. And he taught daily in the temple.” The misuse of the space dedicated to God upset him, and he took serious action to set it right. A core component of what marks a temple space is gift giving – the offering of sacrifices and the receiving of atonement. By turning the temple into a place where people’s faith was being extorted, they were making a mockery of the sacred setting of the memories and the moments of worshippers giving their thanks to God and God giving grace to them. Now, of course, we don’t have the problem of making the church into a place where we extort money in exchange for the sacrifice of animals, though there certainly are churches overly concerned with making a profit rather than making prophets of the Gospel. But more importantly, we might have the wrong mindset when we bring our offering to God. We might think that we’re buying a seat in heaven or getting God on our good side, but that way of thinking closes our minds to the attitude of the gift exchange. We don’t make an installment for salvation or favor – we make an offering, an offering because we are thankful and we want to manifest to God the gratitude for the joy that we have in Him. God is not short on rent, and he doesn’t sell us the power of the Holy Spirit. That mistaken way of thinking was addressed by the story of Simon the Sorcerer, who famously tried to buy the power of the spiritual gifts. These are thought idols about spiritual gifts that need to be cleared out. In fact, the power to give with the right heart is itself a gift of the spirit, as Paul taught in Romans 12:8. And what the spirit-filled attitude of giving does, is it opens our hearts with the capacity to appreciate even more God’s gifts to us. It’s no accident that we sing the doxology in response to the offering – “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow.” When we are given the grace to give with a spirit-filled heart, then we experience even more fully the joyful heart with which God bestows the gifts of His Spirit on our lives..

As I looked over today’s Gospel and Epistle readings, I realized there was a profound connection between Christ cleansing the temple and the teaching of spiritual gifts by Paul. The simple truth is that, in the normative life of the Christian as envisioned by the New Testament, the Church is a fount of access to the gifts of the Spirit. I am by no means saying that gifts of the spirit only happen in church – not at all. The Holy Spirit is present everywhere. But it’s worth noting that the most famous and visible miracle in the life of the church, apart from the resurrection of Christ from the dead and his Ascension, was the bestowing of the Holy Spirit on the Body of Christ in the form of fire leaping on their heads, and this essential gift happened to a gathering of believers. In the powerful sermon which Peter preached extemporaneously in this event recorded in Acts 2, he said, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.”  Pentecost happened, by the way, in Jerusalem, a place known as the site of worship, and during the Feast of Weeks – an anniversary at a favorite restaurant, you could say. It was the perfect setting for the Spirit to set the default standard for where spiritual gift giving starts. Every miracle that happens in Acts, whether it be on the side of a road or in a house or a prison, flows from the moment at Pentecost where Christ gave the Bride of Christ an incredible gift in a special place at a meaningful time.

Today, we are celebrating a special occasion. It’s the first day of the week, and in Scripture we learn that Jesus Christ rose on a Sunday. He made his first corporate appearance to the disciples on that same day, as we learn in John 20:19: “Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you.” That’s why we hold church on Sunday, in remembrance of Christ appearing to his followers on the day of his resurrection. We walked into this church passing the baptismal font, a memory of when we and when we have seen others receive the visible sign of the invisible working of the Holy Spirit. That font recalls the moment when the Holy Spirit gave us the faith by which we say that Jesus is Lord, which according to what Paul said in this morning’s Epistle cannot even be said without a gift of God’s Spirit. We are going to be given in just a few moments, if I ever finish this sermon, a special meal, where we remember the fact that all provision comes ultimately from God and where we receive the spiritual presence of Christ. 

On this anniversary, one so important we celebrate it every week, Christ wants to give us gifts. What do we need? What afflictions do we have? I am not saying God will answer your prayer for those needs in the way you want, but He desires to give you gifts of the Holy Spirit in ways that are as real to your soul as this building, and as this meal we are about to receive, is real to our bodies. Are you in frightening doubts and unsettling confusion about what is true? The Spirit can give you a word of knowledge, if you ask for it from Scripture and from your fellow Christians. Are you unclear about what path you should take in life? Seek a word of wisdom from the strong believers around you and from the Word of God. Conduct a thorough research of the means of grace God has offered for answering those questions. Are you suffering from an illness of body or the mind?  Father Jim can anoint you with oil and pray with you, and direct you to places where you can find help. Now, I don’t want to create the impression that the Gifts of the Spirit are a guarantee of release from suffering. Certainly God can work miracles in our lives, but often the primary miracle which God wants to work in our lives is not necessarily a change in our circumstances, but a change in what our heart most relies upon for stability. In the first chapter of his epistle, James writes, “My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing. If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.” Wisdom, in a Christian sense, is the informed love for God’s good plan. The fact that James emphasizes that we ask God for wisdom and that Paul puts wisdom and knowledge first leads me to believe that, above all else, the main purpose of the power of the Holy Spirit is to make our hearts flow with love for our Creator and our fellow man, and especially the body of Christ. Look at the image Paul is giving in the first epistle to the Corinthians: the Spirit gives a diverse array of abilities, skills, and inclinations of the heart to members of the body of Christ. You know, later in this same passage, Paul writes, “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.” Rather than a convenient means to get us what we want, the spiritual gifts, the roles we are called to fill, allow us to bless the Body of Christ with our gifts, whatever they may be. A philosopher once said that to wrestle someone to the ground, you also have to abase yourself to the same level. The same is true the other way – by lifting others up and helping them on their walk to Christ, we take a bolder and more purposeful posture of worship through our service to our brothers and sisters.

A final point I want to make about the Gospel lesson is that Christ’s motivation for cleansing the church is tied to hostility he knows they will be facing. We read in Luke today Christ’s lamentation over the city immediately before He set the temple right: “AND when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it, saying, If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes. For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round.” I confess, those words feel awfully true to me in these times. Just as a marriage will be more sorely tested by trials that inevitably come from external circumstances if the relationship is weak internally, the Bride of Christ has a harder time withstanding assaults from the World when she is not dwelling in the gifts of the bridegroom. The world wants to shake our faith in Christ, and the spiritual gifts are a powerful means by which God defends us by those attacks. So we must strive to keep our Father’s house a house of prayer and keep our hearts, minds, and souls thirsty for the knowledge, wisdom, and healing of the Holy Spirit, so that if we look up and see that we are trenched about with the enemies of the world, the flesh and the devil, we can say, I know who I am, I know where I am, and I know who has got my back in the midst of this turmoil. By drinking every day from the river of the spirit, our souls stay refreshed, and in turn we can share our diverse spiritual gifts with each other, to build each other up. See, spiritual gifts are much more powerful than earthly ones because the more we give from them, the more we have, and the more spiritual gifts we have, the more we are equipped to experience today, this anniversary of Christ’s resurrection, as a new day which the Lord has made and turn this house of prayer into a home of prayer. Amen.

The Measure of Grace: A Sermon for the Sixth Sunday After Trinity

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord my Strength and my Redeemer. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Suppose I were to ask you how long the front edge of this pulpit was. You might have a good guess, but the only way to know exactly would be to measure it with a reliable tool, like a ruler or a measuring tape, which had a standard that could be counted on to be accurate. Imagine if you hired a carpenter to do renovations to your house and you found him using his hands, thumbs, hips, and shoulders to guesstimate the measurements of your house. Quickly you would probably invite that person to take his skills elsewhere. You wouldn’t want to live in a house built by such guesswork – it wouldn’t be safe. Well, when it comes to the question of living a good life, which is far more complicated than building a good house, we have a culture which encourages moral guesswork. Like our imaginary carpenter who eyeballs what makes a reliable house, we look at issues of right and wrong and use an inner sense of what feels acceptable to us. But the problem is that with such guess work, we are building a house of cards. How can we build a good life on reliable principles? Well, just as the builder of a house leaves blueprints in case another person might come work on it, the author of life has given us Scripture to measure our lives, a theme which we can see at work in our Epistle and Gospel lesson today. The fundamental measuring tool of Scripture is grace, the grace God extends to us. This grace manifests in three ways: through the law, through the Gospel, and through our new life in Christ which flows out from that Gospel. We will look at each of these measures of grace today.

The Measure of the Law

It may sound odd to call the measure of the law a matter of grace, as often we hear these things set in opposition to one another. But in fact, as God is One, he is always consistent with himself, which means that the God who sets the standards of goodness also sets the standards of forgiveness and grace. Although it is vitally important that we do not fall into the error of legalism, we should also see in the Gospel that  Jesus does not teach that the Law has no bearing on our lives as Christians – rather, shockingly, he says, “Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.” We’ll discuss more what he means by that shortly, but the weight of this statement won’t hit us properly if we only think of the Pharisees as bad guys, as they often were in Christ’s ministry. They were in fact dedicated to the effort of measuring their lives by the law, and although they failed to submit that goal to grace, that effort had truth to it. See, as with the construction worker trying to build a house without good tools of measurement, in our efforts to build a good life, without a reliable guide we don’t know if we’re on the right path. We might be going astray, and Scripture is there to let us know – to be a light unto our path, as it says in Psalm 119. If someone you love is going the wrong way, you would tell that person as an act of love to put them on the right way. For example, consider what Christ says in our Gospel lesson this morning: “Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.” This teaching, which clarifies that God wants our acts of worship towards him to be done in fellowship, clarifies the point that we cannot fulfill the first greatest commandment when we neglect the second. Without God’s revelation, because of our moral confusion we wouldn’t know when we’re off track or not. So God revealed to Moses the right track, and this offers clarity as to where we are. And in many practical ways this can be quite the relief, because it answers questions about how to live that we would never know for sure. In this way, the measure of the law is a means of grace.

However, there is another, even more important way, though, too, which is that the measure of the law shows us the need we have for the Gospel. Which of us can say we know the law as well as a Pharisee did, or that we strive to live it out as ardently as they did? But Christ says that our righteousness must exceed theirs. And that poses quite a problem. See, Romans 3:23 teaches that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Think about how much impact a few small mistakes in building a house might have. A few weaknesses in the foundation and there might be a collapse. Some errors in the wiring and there could be an electrical fire. Such dangerous buildings have to be condemned. Well, measured against ultimate, perfect goodness, the blueprint which God has laid for individual righteousness, we are all building soul-shaped houses that on our own effort will receive, in view of the law, the same status: condemned. You know, people tend to speak as if the Old Testament law was impossible and Christ came along and made moral living easy. But actually, what he did was to show that the moral law is even harder than it appears. He says, “Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment: but I say unto you, that whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment.” I find it pretty easy to not kill people – so far I’ve managed to keep the letter of that law my whole life. But Christ teaches the spirit of the law is to not kill people with my words or with my heart, and I confess that in that respect, something is deeply wrong with my heart in a way that just obeying the commandment not to kill doesn’t fix. If it’s true that we’re all just basically nice people who just need some love and some kind words and some cake and coffee, then Christ dying on the cross seems like a lot of fuss over nothing. Mind you, I have nothing against cake and coffee. But what the law shows us is that we do not measure up to perfect goodness. And doing so awakens a longing to be set right, to have our hearts be restored to the way God meant them to be. And just as a broken house cannot fix itself, we cannot make ourselves worthy – we have to turn to a supernatural power that has righteousness which exceeds that of the Pharisees. It’s no accident that Jesus was a carpenter by trade – and he continues to be one, but in a greater, spiritual sense. We need to let Christ take over the project of renovating our lives. Knowledge of that comes from understanding the measure of the law.

The Measure of the Gospel

The Law alone can make our sense of shortcoming feel hopeless. How can we as sinners ever hope to approach God? We might refuse to see our own flaws, out of fear of seeing things we really don’t like. But fear of our imperfections is the wrong use of fear. Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and when we do fear the Lord, and fear Him more than we fear our own sin, we find that his perfect love drives out fear (1 John 4:18). Because God knows that we fall short and cannot make ourselves right with him, that is why he sent Christ, to do for us what we couldn’t do on our own: make us worthy to stand before the throne of the Father. This is what Paul is teaching in Romans 6:23, today’s Epistle reading, when he says, “KNOW ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.” So in proper Christian living, there should be no place for spiritual pride. We were all born with the same spiritual condition, and if we were born in a church going family, we should never think we are better than those who were not by virtue of any merit apart from our baptism into Christ. In the first generation of Christians, nobody was born in a Christian family. Every Christian individual or household was converted from a state of separation from God. We all start as pagans in our sin nature, and because God loves us, he is inviting us into adoption into his family through the finished work of Christ on the cross. When we see people outside of the church sinning, our attitude should be, I understand that struggle, because I have that same impulse in me. When we see people who are in church sinning, we should see that as fellow soldiers as part of the same fight. You in your sin are just as rescued by Christ as I am in mine. When I was younger, I sometimes wondered why when a person becomes a Christian God doesn’t just zap us and make our sin disappear. But Hebrews says we have a high priest who understands our condition – Christ knows what our temptations are like. And so every evangelist, every Christian has deep sympathy with the struggle of sin because he is still dealing with it, and so can say to the person seeking God who wonders, How could God ever accept me? The Christian can and should honestly reply, “I wonder that about myself too.” And the Christian who feels like a phony because he continues to sin has in his company St Peter, who lied about being Christ’s friend and Thomas, who doubted his Lord’s resurrection, and so many other examples of saved Christians who went to Heaven not because of what they did for God but because of what God did for them. There won’t be a single person who gets to Heaven because of what he did for God, not one. Everyone there is there because of the measure of the Gospel, which overwhelms our shortcomings and saves us from ourselves.

The Measure of Life in Christ

But if we turn to Christ and make him our Savior, that doesn’t mean we live in complacency with our sin either. One of the means of grace God provides through the Holy Spirit is repentance. What repentance does is relieve us from the burden of sin we might slip into while striving to live the Christian life. When we take our sin and measure it against our salvation, what we realize is that our sin is undesirable. Paul teaches, “For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection: knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin.” We discover that we don’t want sin around us, because it is deadening and we want to be alive in Christ. We don’t repent merely that we can be saved, but because the joy of a life in Christ is hampered by sins which separate us from him. Christ’s salvation secures our life after death, but we want to repent now because we want to have life before death! We want, and should want, to have it now! Christ wants us to live more abundantly, not just to be in a battle with our sin until we die! Paul said, “Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” When I read this Epistle I am reminded of “A Rose for Emily,” the story by William Faulkner. It recounts the funeral of an esoteric woman named Emily, whose strange behavior had become the talk of the town. After her death, they discover that she had been keeping her deceased husband’s corpse in her bed, and had been sleeping by it because she couldn’t bear to let him go. Disgusting as that image is, it is an evocative metaphor for what it’s like to keep our old man around in our hearts. Our old life of sin was never good for us, and continuing to invite it in is like sharing space with the corpse of a former life. The truth is, until Christ returns and we see the final consummation of the Church with Her Lord and Savior, we will always be fighting that old man. John makes this clear in his first Epistle, where he writes to the Christian community, “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.” Yes, we still struggle with the old man of sin. But we shouldn’t for that reason surrender to him. For the sake of an abundant life in Christ now, for the sake of our testimony to others, for the sake of our gratitude and joy at having our relationship with God restored through the cross, we should not be complacent with our sin. John goes on to say, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness,” and this is the important work we do in the prayer of confession and of humble access. This is where the measure of grace is most important, to realize that if any Christian sin, “we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the Propitiation for our sins.” And every time we stumble we can ask him to lift us back up, and to measure ourselves by the grace of God who loves us so much that he sent Christ to die not only for the sin nature we were born with but for every specific sin we would actually commit! Christ went to the cross knowing the sins of every wicked thought, of every harsh word, and every unwholesome deed we would each commit, and saw them as surely as he saw the soldiers crucified him and said, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Those words bring to mind one of my favorite hymns, which reads this way:

1 Ah, holy Jesus, how hast thou offended,
that we to judge thee have in hate pretended?
By foes derided, by thine own rejected,
O most afflicted!
2 Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon thee?
Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee!
‘Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee;
I crucified thee.

As it says in today’s collect, God wants to pour into our lives such good things as pass all understanding, by letting Christ’s victory against death on the cross bring us back to life. There’s no guesswork or faulty carpentry in God the Father’s Christ-centered plan for rebuilding our lives, which is for us to have an abundant life filled with love of our God and love of our neighbor – that is the miraculous measure of grace. Amen.

A Sermon for Trinity Sunday

Anthony G. Cirilla

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord my Strength and my Redeemer. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

I was raised hearing that the Trinity was a mystery that Christians had to believe in. I was also taught that it was a biblical doctrine. I never really had much trouble believing that aspects of God would be mysterious to us. I mean, just think about how much we don’t know. Even when it comes to the total of what humans do know, we have still ourselves each only encountered a small fraction of the vast quantity of information available out there. In our short lives we will only know a small part of all of the human-gathered knowledge. And all available knowledge is itself limited. Think of how much science has progressed only recently! There is so much mystery out there in realms of this physical world that we haven’t reached. All of that mysterious world, of which we have grasped so little, was made by God. So God, who authored the entire matrix of all things that puzzle and confuse us about this world, had better be mysterious. If you are worshiping a God you can fully understand, I would argue you’re not worshiping God. Anselm said God was the greatest good that can be conceived – and that his goodness is greater than can be conceived. The Bible tells us this too. In Isaiah 55:8-9, the Lord declares, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” So take it as a comfort: if you are troubled by the fact that the Trinity is mysterious, I would argue that this is actually a profound piece of evidence that you’re actually seeking God. He has to be as mysterious as the world he created, and he has to be more mysterious than that because he has the powers of creation. It just follows logically that any account of the Creator will be surprising, and the Trinity is quite a surprise. It was a surprise even for the Jews, who were God’s chosen people.

For a long time, though, I struggled with the Trinity. That was partly because I didn’t understand the concept, but it was also because I couldn’t see the evidence in Scripture. It wasn’t that I didn’t know the Bible verses related to the Trinity, but hadn’t been given a persuasive explanation of how the verses taught the Trinity. When I was younger, I encountered an argument against the Trinity which claimed to be based in Scripture, and those who promoted this teaching denied the full divinity of Christ and they also denied the Personhood of the Holy Spirit. And they had explanations as well for any Bible verse you could think of that the verse in question was not in fact teaching the Trinity. Because I was confused by the Trinity and had not been given a sound foundation in how to answer these arguments, for a time I was lost, confused, and without a church home as a result. Ironically, when the grace of God brought me back to historical faith, the name of the church he brought me to was Holy Trinity Anglican Church. But before that, when a false teacher came with a skewed interpretation of Scripture, I wasn’t prepared to give an answer for my faith, and it harmed me spiritually. So as Christians we need to know the Bible deeply, because we need to be on guard against those who may know the Bible well but may have an interpretation which distorts the full presentation of Scripture. 

Of course, Scripture is complicated and some guidance in reliable interpretation of it is profoundly helpful. This is why the Church has developed the Creeds – particularly the Apostle’s Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed. As Anglicans, we use the Creeds, the Book of Common Prayer, the 39 Articles, and the Book of Homilies to summarize the best, traditional, most universal interpretations of Scripture that have been tested by the generations of the best readers of the Bible throughout the centuries. In fact, that is what the word catholic means in a Christian context – the word catholic means universal, and as Christians we strive to take the most universally received interpretation of Scripture found among those writers who established the process of reading Scripture. We don’t accept every idea that comes out of tradition because tradition is imperfect and only Scripture is the perfect revealed word of God, but we do have humility in our effort to interpret Scripture because it is so important to Christian life to consider the wisdom which the Church has provided when approaching Holy Writ. And so through these documents, the Creeds and the Articles, we express our assent to the best informed explanations of the Bible that can be found in the early church. In that sense, one of the most universal, Catholic, essential teachings of Scripture is that God is One God, and Three Persons. God is a perfect unity of three – a tri-unity, which is where we get the word Trinity. So what I am going to do today is present from the Bible this truth: that God is One, that the Father is God, that the Son is God, and that the Holy Spirit is God, and knowing this perfects our intimacy with our Creator.

God is One: Deuteronomy 6:4 reads, “The Lord is our God, the Lord is one!” Christ reiterates this truth in Mark 12:29: ” ‘Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is one Lord.” The fact that God is One is a truth of incredible benefit both psychologically and morally. From a psychological point of view, to live in a polytheistic world is distressing because we don’t know what standards to live by. As Plato pointed out long ago, to live in a world of many gods is to live in a world of confused standards, because those so-called Gods do not agree with themselves. One god says to kill, another says to be peaceful. One god says to be faithful to your spouse and another celebrates promiscuity. What’s the truth in that system? Now, today the danger of literal polytheism is less than it used to be. But Christ made it clear that the problem of idolatry as a sin in the human heart doesn’t just go away when he warned us that we can’t serve both God and Mammon. The fact is, idolatry shows up in our hearts when we have loves in our lives which compete with the first and greatest love, the love we owe to God with our whole heart, soul and mind. When love of money, or reputation, or influence, or any of the gifts of this life which come from God become a rival to our love for God, we become divided in our souls. Our minds become confused, agitated, and stressed, because we don’t keep our eyes trained on the singular, unified light that is God’s love. We don’t love our neighbors properly when we don’t love God more than other goods because we start to see other people as an obstacle to the things we want instead of fellow bearers of the image of the oneness of God. Listen to the words of Paul in Ephesians 4, who brings home the incredible benefit to not only us as individuals but to the Christian community when we center our hearts around the Oneness of God: “walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”

Now, in His complete oneness, the three persons of the Triune God also have what the illuminating theologian Augustine called missions, or purposes in respect to Creation. So we should see first the Scriptural basis for the divinity of each Person of the Trinity, and how they, in total unity with one another, work to lead us into God’s love.

The Father is God: We see a picture of the divinity of the Father in today’s epistle lesson. “a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne. And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald.” From Revelation 5:6-7 we have an indication that this may be a representation of the Father specifically, because it reads, “I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain… And he went and took the scroll from the right hand of him who was seated on the throne.” The Lamb is of course Christ, and so here we have an image of the Father and the Son interacting in their missions as distinct persons of the Trinity. What is interesting is what is written on that Scroll, which reads this way in Revelation 5:9-10: “Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation.” Sometimes as Christians we tend to think of Christ as simply rescuing us from the wrath of the Father, and it is true that Christ’s sacrifice removes the penalty of wrath for sin. But that sacrifice, as it is depicted in this scene from the heavenly court, points out an important truth: the Father authorized, signed, and sealed the salvation which Christ provides. This moment in Revelation takes us deeper into John 3:16 which you know says, “For God so loved the world, that He sent his only begotten son, that whosoever shall believe in him shall not perish but shall have everlasting life.” The Father desired our salvation! Listen to the beautiful love the Father has for us which Paul explains in Ephesians 1: 3 “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ: According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will.” Think of a good father who goes out and works and prepares the way for his children’s needs to be met, who ensures that there is a home for his children to come back to, who takes care to nourish his children and devotes his time and his thoughts to their well being, and you have there a glimpse, an image of what love God the Father has towards us as his children. God the Father loves us and elects us for our destiny as joint-heirs with Christ.

The Son is God: In today’s Gospel Christ makes a fascinating connection between himself and the snake in the wilderness. He says, “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” This references an event in Numbers 21 where the Jews wandering in the desert were being killed by the venomous bites of serpents. As an act of compassion, God commanded Moses to bronze a serpent and lift it up on his staff, so that when anyone was bitten they could look at it and be healed. The bronzed serpent had been endowed with God’s power, so that gazing upon it was a conduit of bodily salvation in response to the serpent venom. Christ compares this to how the Father sent Him to be sacrificed for our sins, and when we gaze upon the work he did for us there and believe in our hearts that because of that our sins are redeemed, like the Israelites spared from serpent venom we are spared from the damnation which comes from the venom of our own sin. But the comparison also invites an important contrast. With the bronzed serpent what happened, instead of giving glory to God for using this means of grace to heal them, they began to worship it. And so it was taken away. So consider something. If Jesus is less than God, then what God has done is commanded us to continually be grateful for the sacrifice Christ made for not only our bodies but also our souls!…. Without worshiping him? Out of gratitude for their physical life being saved, the Israelites struggled not to worship a dead snake on a stick. Christ, on the other hand, is alive in his human body at the right hand of the Father, and he prepared a way for us as our high priest, and is the propitiation for our sins. Are we to not respond to Christ by worshiping him? As the snake was taken away, would Christ be taken away from us if we worship him? The answer to this question is answered by the author of the Hebrews, who tells us that God the Father has said of Christ, “But about the Son he says, ‘Your throne, O God, will last for ever and ever; a scepter of justice will be the scepter of your kingdom.’” Remember the throne in heaven we mentioned when discussing God as Father? In Revelation 7:17 it says, “For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters.” The Lamb is in the midst of the throne because he shares in the full authority of the Godhead. God the Father has, through God the Son, revealed His own character so that drawing nearer to Christ draws us nearer to the father. Growing up I remember hearing this phrase about a father’s son: he’s his father’s spitting image. Well, Hebrews 1:3 says something along the same lines but in more beautiful language: “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.” That Christ is God in the flesh, Son of God and God the Son, not only makes possible the cleansing of our sins in him but also provides in human flesh a body we can relate to. See, Scripture says that God is  Spirit (John 4:24), and because we are physical beings it can be hard to relate to a Spirit. So the Second Person of the Trinity manifested God to us in the Incarnation so that, in Christ, we can fulfill both the first and second greatest commandments at once by loving God with our whole strength, heart, soul, and mind, and loving our neighbor as ourselves. If we are joint-heirs with Christ, then Christ is our neighbor, and if Christ is God in the flesh, then God is our neighbor. This is the beautiful intimacy with God that is made possible by the truth that Jesus Christ, Son of God, is God the Son in whom our Father is pleased and by whom can be pleased in us.

The Holy Spirit is God: In my sermon on Ascension Day, I mentioned that we can see the divinity of the Holy Spirit in Hebrews 3, where the Holy Spirit identifies Himself with God by saying, “That is why I was angry with that generation; I said, ‘Their hearts are always going astray, and they have not known my ways.” The Holy Spirit claims the just ways of the fulfillment of the Law with His own will. We see how the Holy Spirit is associated with the Throne of God in today’s epistle reading, where it says, “there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God.” One commentator explains that ‘The Spirit of God in His manifold powers is thus described under emblems of fire,” so the seven lamps represent seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, possibly those enumerated in Isaiah 11:2: “The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of might, the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord. And his delight will be in the fear of the Lord.” Wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, knowledge, fear of the Lord and delight in Him are here seven spiritual blessings of the Holy Spirit. John the Baptist said Christ would baptize us with the Holy Spirit and with fire, and as we saw with Pentecost the Holy Spirit manifested in the image of fire as well. The Holy Spirit’s fire of wisdom burns away our folly, his understanding burns away our confusion, his counsel burns away our concerns, his might burns away our weakness, his knowledge burns away our ignorance. The Holy Spirit’s fire uses fear of the Lord to burn away fear of men and to light a fire of delight and joy in desiring God. Our Gospel lesson today teaches that the Holy Spirit is the means by which we are born into the Kingdom of God, and the lamps of fire symbolize that it is by the Holy Spirit that we can live out and grow in the godliness which the Father wants for us. God the Holy Spirit works in us the regeneration from our sins by means of the sacrifice of God the Son, to put into action the plan of God the Father which from before all worlds he designed to bring us to salvation.

Today we have seen that God is One, that the Father is God, that the Son is God, that the Holy Spirit is God, and that through Scripture these three distinct persons can be proved  to be one God. But though it is assuredly biblical, the doctrine of the Trinity still perplexes us because it is a spiritual truth and we still see the world through a glass darkly, our vision clouded by the world, the flesh, and the devil. But if we seek God, relying on the redeeming blood of Christ and the sanctifying fire of the Holy Ghost in order to delight in the throne of the Father, then one day we will stand before the throne that flashes lightning and the light will break out before us and we will see the full unity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost manifested there, and seeing the fullness of that glory we will laugh at the thought that once we could not understand. In this life, to reference something CS Lewis said of Christ himself, the mystery of the Trinity is somewhat like the sun – it’s hard to look at it directly, but because it’s there it keeps us in the light, keeps us warm, keeps our whole world going. In the light, warmth, and strength of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, we can say now as we will more perfectly say then, “Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure we are, and were created.” Amen.

One for the Lonely:

A Sermon for the Sunday After Ascension

Anthony G. Cirilla

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord my Strength and my Redeemer. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Today we stand between the commemoration of two important occasions, Ascension Day this past Thursday and Memorial Day tomorrow, both of which in my view involve loneliness as a major factor. Although Memorial Day can be a lot of fun for families, who go on BBQs or picnics, for many it is a crushing reminder of those they have lost who laid down their lives for this country, who for their fellow man went into fatal danger to exhibit the love of John 15:13. Everyone admires the young soldiers who sign up to serve, but as they stand there, handsome, beautiful, and brave, their families know there’s a chance they won’t return. Spouses, children, parents, and others face a fearful loneliness, and those for whom that fear came true spend Memorial Day with an acute pain that is hard to fathom if it hasn’t been experienced. I’d go so far as to say that even those who have experienced it still cannot fathom it.

I have never served in the military, not being cut from that sort of cloth. But I do know something about loneliness, though it is not associated with such honorable commitments. My relationship with loneliness is much more common. Today I have a beautiful and caring wife, a warm and welcoming church, good friends, and a great community among my colleagues at work. But feelings of loneliness still visit me on occasion, and sometimes it’s hard to put my finger on why. I remember, though, times in my life where it was much worse. I have gone through times when the loneliness was so deep, so bitter, so overwhelming, I thought it would just swallow me up. I remember times when I would try to find an isolated place because being around others actually made me feel more lonely.

This sermon is one for the lonely, because I know, too, that all of you struggle with loneliness of different kinds. Perhaps it is Memorial Day loneliness – someone you lost through their patriotic service. Or you lost someone through illness or other kinds of tragedy. Maybe you’re suffering the fear of a different kind of loss – the fracturing of a relationship that once meant so much to you, but trauma and tension has made that relationship difficult. Or perhaps you’re suffering the loneliness of an outlook on life others around you just don’t seem to understand. I know, when I was at a secular college, I often felt lonely as a Christian surrounded by atheists and agnostics who openly sneered at my faith. Once a classmate said she thought Christians should be burned at the stake like witches. To say I felt lonely when others laughed at her comment really hardly captures how frightfully isolated that comment made me feel. Maybe you are the only Christian in your place of work, or maybe it’s even other Christians who make you feel lonely by not listening to your different opinions or taking an active enough interest in your life. Maybe sometimes, the loneliness just can’t even be explained – it just comes over you sometimes, and you don’t know why.

By no means do I mean to assert that this is the only or even the most important aspect of today’s Epistle and Gospel lessons. But as I read today’s readings and thought about the meaning of Ascension Day and the specific association between the Ascension of Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit, I pondered how this passage is a powerful response to the problems of loneliness we all face. To put it in perspective, remember that 40 days prior to the ascension of Christ was the Day of his resurrection. The day prior to that was Holy Saturday, the day when Christ lay dead in the tomb. It is actually before his Crucifixion that Christ speaks these words of comfort concerning the Holy Spirit. I have often thought about the devastating, traumatic loneliness the disciples must have felt on that day. Can you imagine having the Savior there with you in the flesh, to teach your mind with his words, to soothe your spirit with his truth, to touch you with his comforting and loving hands – and then he is gone, dead, after a brutal execution? The 12 Apostles and Christ’s other disciples on that day went from walking and talking with God in the Flesh to having him sealed away through the greatest isolating force in human existence – death itself. The relief of seeing Him returned from the dead was in a sense almost as traumatic. It reminds me a bit, though the mood is very different, of “The Story of an Hour,” where Kate Chopin tells the tale of a woman who believed her husband dead, and when she sees him alive again it’s so startling she dies from a heart attack. So the disciples had to go through the heartbreaking trauma of losing Christ, and then the heart-stopping joy of having him back again – and for forty days no less, just enough time to get used to having him back, maybe even to start to take it for granted. And now, having gone through all of that, they discover that He is to leave again! Certainly there is joy – he goes to prepare a place for them, and that’s exciting. But it also means they won’t have him there until he returns on the last, triumphant day. 

I think it would be fair to assume this was something of an emotional rollercoaster for the disciples. When I left for Buffalo only a couple of weeks ago, Camarie was not happy. And I was glad about that – to think we’ve been married three and a half years and see each other virtually every day, and she still misses me even when I go to work for the day, nevermind going to Buffalo for a week. What a blessing! It’s such a privilege to be loved that way, and a gift to have someone to love that way. But the absence, whether temporary or lasting, is all the more difficult to bear when the bond is strong. Christ knew the hearts of his followers, and he knew the grief of loneliness that would be left behind when He ascended to the Father’s right hand. Among other things, I think that is one reason He assured them of the presence of the Holy Spirit. Christ knew that His disciples, and the Christians they would convert, would struggle with the cold pain of emotional, physical, and spiritual isolation. Today’s Gospel ends at John 16:4, but in 6 and 7 he goes on to say: “6 But because I have said these things unto you, sorrow hath filled your heart. 7 Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you.” To ease the sorrowful burden of their Lord and Savior’s absence, He assured them that they would not be alone – the Holy Spirit would be present with his followers as a companion, a comforter, and a guide.

Before considering how exactly the Holy Spirit offers comfort in loneliness, we must define who He is. Often when we think of God, I think our attention tends to fix on God the Father and God the Son – we desire atonement with the Father, and we gaze with adoration upon what Christ has done to make that atonement possible. But we need to remember that the Holy Spirit is by no means the third wheel of the Trinity. First, the Holy Spirit is fully God, and second, the Holy Spirit is a Person distinct from the Father and the Son. We can see both of these truths in the third chapter of Hebrews, where in verse 10 the Holy Spirit says of the disobedient Israelites who committed idolatry while Moses received the 10 Commandments, “Wherefore I was grieved with that generation, and said, They do alway err in their heart; and they have not known my ways. So I sware in my wrath, They shall not enter into my rest.” Notice that in His own words here the Holy Spirit identifies Himself with God – they have not known His ways, and so they were rejected from entering the promised land. The fact that the Holy Spirit speaks these words testifies that He is a Person and that He is God. But He cannot be the same person as Christ, because Jesus has clearly told us that the Comforter cannot come unless he leaves. He also is not the same Person as the Father, because His duty is to testify of the Father. And so, although He is as God fully one with the Father and the Son in terms of his divinity, He is also a unique Person with a particular mission, as the great theologian St. Augustine put it, towards us as believers.

I believe that an element of this mission is to see us through the painful period of loneliness which began when Christ ascended to the right hand of the Father until He shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead. See, I think loneliness really stems from one of three things: a sense of separation from God, a sense of separation from our neighbor, and a sense of purposelessness that leaves us feeling adrift. Concerning the first one, I think it is beneficial to consider loneliness as a gift from the Holy Spirit which actually compels us to seek God more earnestly. In Matthew 4:1, we see that it is the Holy Spirit which actually led Jesus into isolation: “Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.” In our world of psychologists and self-help gurus, we might think of loneliness as a mental plight that needs to be immediately remedied. With that way of thinking, it becomes all too easy to try and cover up the loneliness with distractions – with vapid entertainment, busywork, or seeking out a shallow interaction, rather than stopping to consider that maybe who you’re feeling lonely for is actually God rather than man. 1 Corinthians 2:10-11 reads, “For to us God revealed them through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so the thoughts of God no one knows except the Spirit of God.” Ecclesiastes 3:10-11 tells us that God has put the desire for eternity in our hearts, which means that our hearts are actually lonely for a relationship with an eternal person. So while human fellowship is certainly essential to the Christian life, we should also turn in to the Holy Spirit, who is promised to be our guide by Christ later in John 16, verse 13: “when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth.” When our faith wavers and we feel uncertain about whether God is really there, when we feel like we are alone and there is no one interested in our well being, we can pray in the Spirit to ask for the comfort of confidence in the promises of God.

Loneliness can also be provoked by our duty to proclaim the truths of the Gospel in a culture increasingly unfriendly and suspicious of our beliefs. Christ says, “ye also shall bear witness, because ye have been with me from the beginning. These things have I spoken unto you, that ye should not be offended. They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service.” In the task of bearing witness of Christ, Christians in many countries risk intense persecution. I read a statistic that said that 360 million Christians faced significant religious persecution in the global scene in 2021, which was a 24% increase from the previous year. Now, we need to be careful as Christians not to cultivate a persecution complex. Someone disagreeing with us is not persecution. A TV show deciding to portray practices we know are not biblical is not persecution. But these things can make us uncomfortable, and we may find ourselves having painful conversations with friends or family members when we explain that we have to reject something the culture is pushing. I pray that the sort of persecution of Christians we are seeing in the global scene will not come to American soil, but protecting our right to speak our beliefs requires that we speak. If we stay silent and do not proclaim Christ and His Gospel, the culture will take silence as consent in the face of attitudes at odds with a biblical worldview. And when we articulate why we cannot go with the flow on certain things, we will find that some we talk to will respond negatively, sometimes harshly. This response is all the harder to bear because of our duty to exhibit love towards those we meet, because we feel vulnerable when we speak speech seasoned with salt as Paul commanded and we are met with anger and scorn. Such treatment, or even just fear of it, can make us feel desperately alone. But Christ warned us that this would happen: “And these things will they do unto you, because they have not known the Father, nor me. But these things have I told you, that when the time shall come, ye may remember that I told you of them.” And in John 16:14 Christ promises, “[The Holy Spirit] shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you.” If you stay in the Word and in fervent prayer, the Holy Spirit will give you confidence in God’s promises in the face of adversity, whatever form it may take.

So we have seen that loneliness can come from the Holy Spirit making us aware of an unacknowledged desire for intimacy with God. It can also come from alienation experienced from those who lash out when we proclaim our faith with boldness and love – in which case we are comforted by the steadfast companionship of the Holy Spirit. What of the personal loneliness of our need for friendship and love? What are we to do when we miss a loved one, when we can no longer hold or be held by that beloved soul? What are we to do if we feel separated or alienated from our fellow Christians by differences of perspective or life situation? Even here in this church, full of love though it is, we may notice that we don’t look at things the same way, and that can be hard to bear or to understand. But if we see our fellowship with members of the Body of Christ as an extension of our fellowship with God by the promptings of the Holy Spirit, then we can see that the Spirit is able to forge unity in spite of and often even out of our differences. Ephesians 4:4-6 reads, “There is one body and one Spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all.” Unity would be no impressive achievement if we were all the same. Just as God can make the material world harmonize despite differences into one created order, just so in the Body of Christ He is the architect of a unity through the headship of our Lord and Savior Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, that supersedes those things which threaten to drive us apart. 

I don’t mean to say, by the way, that if you are suffering from acute loneliness that it’s a bad idea to seek out therapy. It isn’t – a therapist can help you to sort out your emotions. But that should be supplemental to, rather than a replacement for, our walk with God and the Body of Christ. Often one of the best remedies for a burden of the heart is comforting someone else who has the same burden.  If you feel alone, reach out to someone who looks lonely. Maybe your loneliness is a means by which the Holy Spirit is calling you to serve the Body of Christ in a new way. In our Epistle reading Peter tells us, “And above all things have fervent charity among yourselves: for charity shall cover the multitude of sins. Use hospitality one to another without grudging. As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.” Such gifts, we are told by Paul in 1 Corinthians 12:4, “Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit.” I want to recognize those of us who do so much for this church. I believe it is the Holy Spirit which gave Jane the heart for fellowship that inspired her to suggest game night. I believe it is the same Holy Spirit which gives Judy the gift of hospitality that prompts her to help with hospitality during the coffee hour. The members of the altar guild, the members of the vestry, those in the music ministry, those who help with Sunday School, our lay readers and our clergy are all listening to and responding to promptings from the Holy Spirit to serve God in a manner consistent with the teachings of Scripture. These are more than kind gestures – these are all important labors in the Body of Christ, and we are so thankful for what all of you do. If you are feeling lonely, maybe that is God’s way of telling you to become more active in the opportunities God has put before you to be involved in this Church, or perhaps simply to realize that much of the loneliness is really an illusion. 

You are not alone, because the Holy Spirit is grieved by your grief and longs to let Him hold you if you miss someone. He calls you to spend more time with God in intimate friendship through reading Scripture and personal prayer. He calls you to not let how others might see you from faithfully and joyfully proclaiming the salvation of our Risen Lord. He calls you to share your gifts of personality and presence with this church and with those you meet. Through the liturgy, we are reminded of God’s presence in every facet of our being – even in our sin. Our sin can be a chief and great source of isolation, because Satan uses it to trick us into thinking that we’re alone, that we’re cut off, that we aren’t worthy to be a part of all of this because of how we have fallen short. But Christ instituted the Lord’s Supper because He knows we’re lonely in our sins and He wants us to come to Him, to have fellowship with Him and His Body, to fall on our knees with His Body, to Break Bread with his Body, to drink Wine with His Body, to praise Him as part of His Body.. The 39 Articles explain that when we partake of the Lord’s Supper we do so in a heavenly and spiritual manner, which means that it is by the Holy Spirit that partaking of the bread and the wine together our loneliness is driven out by God’s unifying love as he brings us closer and closer together. You are not alone, because Christ is at the right hand of the Father where he ascended to make a place for you. You are not alone, because the Holy Spirit is available to you to help you draw closer to God. You are not alone, because here you have fellow lonely lovers of god and lovers of neighbor who want to serve you and whom you can serve. You are not alone, because there is a testimony of angels, archangels, and the whole heavenly host, who with you testify the lordship of our Savior Christ. You are not alone, because Christ is with you until the end of the age, and the Holy Spirit is here, through all of these means, to let you live confidently in service to your God, “that God in all things may be glorified through Jesus Christ, to whom be praise and dominion for ever and ever.” Amen.

The Prince and the Pauper

A Palm Sunday Sermon

Anthony G. Cirilla

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord my Strength and my Redeemer. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Before I begin, I want to give you a piece of instruction. Whenever I say, “Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord,” I want you to wave your palm branches and say, “HOSANNA IN THE HIGHEST!” A hosanna, by the way, is a song of praise. Let’s practice.

The prince had all he needed – a comfortable home, plenty of food, honor, and dignity. Where he went, people followed and took care of his needs. When he gave an order that order was obeyed. At home he had respect, trust, good will, and, above all, love.

The pauper, a young, poor boy, had nothing. He had a cruel home where his abusive father who drank too much took little interest in taking care of his son. Where he went, people chased him away as if he were a pest. When he asked for something he was sent away empty handed and with an empty stomach. In his home he had fear, uncertainty, ill will and malice that plagued him all the time.

One day the prince and pauper met and they were fascinated by each other. They looked like twins, but their lives were total opposites. Curious to experience life in each other’s shoes, they traded places, and discovered a whole new world. The pauper discovered a world of wealth and comfort, and the prince discovered a world of pain and heartache. He could not believe what his lookalike had to deal with. When he resumed his rightful place on the throne, the prince become king elevated his lookalike to the station of King’s Ward, and ruled with compassion over his people because he had experienced what it was like to live without the benefits of royalty.

I was very sad, though not surprised, to discover that the comparison of this story to the life of Christ has already been made, but I think it gives us a useful way to think about the specific readings for today. In Twain’s famous novel, The Prince and The Pauper, Edward VI and a young pauper named Tom Canty trade places. Twain has in mind, I think, a reminder to those in high social standing to remember people who do not share their good fortune. But in today’s reading, we see the ultimate Prince and Pauper story: Christ, Son of God, becomes a pauper even though he is a prince rather, the Prince. In fact, Palm Sunday is a crucial day because it recognizes Christ as both prince and pauper – the God-Man, coequal with the Father in majesty, riding on a donkey. Though those in the audience on the original Palm Sunday didn’t know it, they were not simply celebrating the Messiah but the ruler of the universe, present among them. They correctly praised him, “Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord,” but did not realize that he not only came in the name of the Father and was himself Lord.

This is why the Epistle Reading was chosen for today, to underscore Christ’s princely divinity and the significance of his decision to let himself suffer disgrace despite the fact that he merits the highest honor. We read in Philippians 2:6 that “Christ Jesus, who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God.” The word for being in Greek here is hyperarchon, and it is in what grammarians call the present participle. What that means is that Christ was before his Incarnation, and was during his Incarnation, and is continuing now to be in the form of God. Elliott’s Commentary on this verse says, “The word ‘being’ is here the more emphatic of the two words so translated, which lays stress on the reality of existence.” The word form might seem to undercut this – playdough can be shaped in its form to one thing and another. But the Greek word here is morphe, and Elliott likewise comments on this by saying, “in classical Greek it describes the actual specific character, which (like the structure of a material substance) makes each being what it is.” The Pulpit commentary likewise writes that we should take this idea of “being in the form” as asserting “the sum of its essential attributes: it is the form, as the expression of those essential attributes, the permanent, constant form; not the fleeting, outward…fashion,” which is mentioned later. Christ is in the form of God, but takes the fashion of humanity on for our sakes.

So to get the full implication, the weight of this truth, you have to put yourself deeply into the truth of John 1:1 which says that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” On page 603, the first Article of Religion teaches that Christ has this relationship to God: “in unity of Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” Philippians 4:6 is a major text where this teaching becomes clear: Christ, who exists by his essence in the form of God as the Second Person of the Trinity, has a right to all of the glory, dignity, joy, and exaltation that comes with being God. From eternity to eternity, Christ receives the perfect and pure light of the love of the Father, and has by his nature a right to bliss in that relationship infinitely superior to any pleasure any earthly prince has ever felt. Imagine giving up your house for charity to live in the streets, and you’ll get only a meager glimpse of just what Christ surrendered to walk in the fashion of man here on Earth. Everything that was made by God, everything we enjoy, was made by God, which means it was made by the Second Person of the Trinity! It’s said that Shakespeare sometimes acted in his own plays – imagine the genius, gifted, brilliant playwright becoming just another actor on the stage. And often he took minor, unimportant roles rather than the roles of the main characters. On a far greater magnitude, the all-powerful and all-satisfying divinity of Christ didn’t stop him from humbling himself and becoming a character in his creation, an object of scorn when he should be an object of praise, subjected to mortal pain when he is the author of godly pleasure, put to death when he is the font of life. Isaiah called him the Prince of Peace, but for us he became on the cross a pauper of agonizing propitiation.

Christ’s procession into Jerusalem mirrors this – he processes as a prince of Peace instead of a warlord. It has often been observed that Christ rode on a donkey in reference to the tradition of kings processing into a city to show that they had no intent of bringing military action against the city. Palm Sunday is such an important event that it is recorded in all four Gospels. The designers of our liturgical calendar thought it was so important that it would begin the liturgical year, with the first Gospel lesson in Advent being the account Matthew gives in Chapter 21, which you can find on page 91 in your Book of Common Prayer. It says, “ And a very great multitude spread their garments in the way; others cut down branches from the trees, and strawed them in the way. And the multitudes that went before, and that followed, cried, saying, Hosanna to the son of David: Blessed is he that cometh in the name ‘of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest. And when he was come into Jerusalem, all the city was moved, saying, Who is this? And the multitude said, This is Jesus the prophet of Nazareth of Galilee.” Coming in humility and peace, in the form of man, Christ the King of Creation receives here a foregleam of the prophecy given by Paul that will only be completely fulfilled in the end times: “Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him and given him a name which is above every name: that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow… and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” His death is less than a week away, his humanity is beset by all the fragility common to man, he rides on a donkey instead of a valiant steed, and yet, even then, he is still essentially being in the form of God as he receives the praise, “Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.” Holding these palm branches, shouting out “Hosanna in the highest,” we are partaking in prophecy – worshiping the Prince who for our sakes became a pauper.

You see, Palm Sunday commemorates a moment in Christ’s story that also captures the entirety of the Gospel. The shocking truth of human nature is that we are more than paupers in our bodies – we are paupers in our souls. We are so impoverished in our moral natures because of original sin that we merit total rejection from the treasures of life in heaven. Romans 6:23 says that “the wages of sin is death,” and 1 John 1:8 says that “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” There’s a phrase about Americans that says that we tend to live as if we’re embarrassed millionaires. You might say that the sentiment of the thought is that we live like we’re royalty, like our bank accounts right now are just a circumstance and eventually we’ll get back to that material prosperity we all deserve. But the fact is that the default setting on life is poverty. We are born with nothing by our own rights, and it is only through the means of grace that we have through our families and communities any sustenance at all. But because of Adam’s sin we are born with a greater spiritual poverty than our bodies – we are born with a proclivity to rebel. God is King, and if we lay bare the hard, cold truth, we will see that we have broken the King’s laws. That’s why it’s so important to reflect on the Decalogue and the Summary of the Law. In some fashion, we are all criminals in the court of divine justice. Job struggles with this problem, when he says of God in Job 9: “32 For he is not a man, as I am, that I should answer him, and we should come together in judgment. 33 Neither is there any man betwixt us, that might lay his hand upon us both.” You see, each of our sins is an infraction against the perfect justice of God. As humans we like to live in the gray area and see morality as a muddled confusing mess. But before the throne of God there is no gray. Our sins are filthy in the sight of God, and before the judgment seat there will be no excuses – sin is rebellion against the immutable laws of God’s holy nature. 

So what are we to do? Make ourselves holy? But every effort we take to do so will be interspersed with the same sinful nature that caused us to sin to begin with. Is God to simply forgive, to just let it go? But He cannot because that would be inconsistent with His nature. God is perfectly holy, and creation belongs to him, and sin which happens in his creation is an infraction against his court of judgment. As a righteous God he cannot let unrighteousness slide. This is why we must understand that the Trinity is not just some strange, obscure doctrine for theologians – God is a Trinity huh? That’s confusing. Anyway, let’s just focus on Jesus’s death for us. No. Wrong. The Trinity is the first Article listed in the Articles of Religion for an important reason: If Jesus is not God, then his death doesn’t mean anything, other than being just one more sad example of bad things happening to good people. The theologian Anselm made this clear: if Jesus was just a good man, or even some kind of angelic being, then his death cannot satisfy God’s justice. If he wasn’t God, we couldn’t be saved. Think of it this way: if you overdraw on your account, the bank charges you a fee. The fee is proportional to the bank’s authority over you: they help you to manage and protect your money, and if you mismanage it, then they can charge you a certain amount. But if you overdrew a dollar and they charged you a thousand dollars, it wouldn’t be proportionate. That’s because the bank doesn’t own you or all of your resources. But if you sin against God, you are making an infraction against an infinite being who provided you with all you have. God is absolute and as Scripture says he is holy, holy, holy, and so any sin, however small, incurs an infinite penalty. So if an infinite penalty has been incurred, how can the death of an animal, a man, or even an embodied angel pay for that? If I am overdrawn on the bank, I have to put into the account what I overdrew and the penalty amount. But how can I pay back an infraction against the infinite justice of God? This is why God, in spite of asking for sacrifice in the Old Testament, also underscores that no sacrifice of lambs or other animals can save the soul. An actual lamb does not have truly infinite value, and so cannot pay for the sins of the world. Even a good man does not have the property of infinitude. Some have argued that Christ is less than fully God, but we have seen in our reading of Philippians that that cannot be so. But it relates to us immediately that Christ is the incarnate God Man, the Second Person of the Trinity. If he was the Father, how could he intercede for us for our sins? But he is not the Father – he is the Son. But if he were not God, how could he offer infinite payment for an infinite penalty? So he must be God and not be the Father. And he must be Man, Son of God in a real man’s body, for he must have a mortal nature to be able to die and he must be of the human race to pay the penalty for humanity. So if Christ wasn’t fully God and wasn’t fully man, we couldn’t be saved. This is why we must worship God as Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and confess the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity, who through his continued divinity could lay himself open to death and become the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. He is the Divine Prince become the Mortal Pauper, so that we paupers of sin could become Christ’s joint-heirs through his sacrificial salvation. This is why we say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord: Hosanna in the Highest!

This is why on Palm Sunday, the day that recognizes Christ’s princely decision to accept humiliation by receiving praise while riding on a donkey, we read of Christ’s death. Because where he had been recognized as the blessed one who comes in the name of the Lord, he is sarcastically recognized as the King of the Jews in his crucifixion. But you see, even there prophecy is being fulfilled. Even if it was written in sarcasm, the sign nonetheless claimed Jesus as King of the Jews. Only the death of the sovereign God, Prince of all Creation, could fulfill the mission of the one who comes in the name of the Lord. Every prophet came to foretell this fact – only Christ came to accomplish it. But here is where another mistake must be rejected. The death of this Christ is not a metaphor, or a myth, or a symbol. Today you will have some well meaning individuals who want to see the death and resurrection of Christ as some kind of psychological symbol. But our sins are not symbolic – they are real. If Christ only paid a symbolic penalty, then our soul’s real poverty has not been paid and then Jesus was only another pauper like us. Death on the cross only means what it does if Jesus was God in the flesh. Paul warns against symbolic interpretation in extreme terms when he says in 1 Corinthians 15:14, “And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.” We simply don’t have the option of thinking that Christ was just a good man with nice teachings, because if so it invalidates his own teachings about what his death meant. Did you notice that Paul said that “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth”? He is referencing there the second commandment: “Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image, nor the likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath.” Paul intentionally uses language that evokes the second great commandment against false worship because he regarded Christ as fittingly worthy of the same worship given to the Father. And so his death is a princely price that can pay the king’s penalty, and rescue us from our pauper’s debt of sin. The emotion of gratitude for that realization is what should be behind us saying, Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord: Hosanna in the Highest!

Christ is the prince who became a pauper for us. But we are already paupers. We are poor in spirit. Notice what Paul is commanding us: “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.” What Christ did on the cross for us was foreshadowed by what happened upon his death: “many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.” There is no greater poverty than death, but so great was the power of Christ’s sacrifice that people rose from the dead at the very moment when Jesus laid down his life. That same power, that brought the actual dead out of their graves, is what Christ wants to share with us: he wants to make us princes and princesses in the kingdom of God. We are low and full of sin; he wants to lift us up and crown us with glory. When we hold these palms in our hands we recognize that Christ is the crown prince of the paupers, who makes us joint heirs with him. Christ was fulfilling a prophecy, but right now, as you hold this palm, you are a fulfillment of Paul’s prophecy too. So let’s obey Paul and let the mind of Christ be in us, as we say together, BLESSED IS HE THAT COMETH IN THE NAME OF THE LORD – HOSANNA IN THE HIGHEST! Amen.

Sin is Dumb:

A Sermon for the 3rd Sunday in Lent on Luke 11:14

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord my Strength and My Redeemer. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

When I was a teenager, I said a lot of dumb things. Sometimes I remember them vividly and cringe to recall that I actually said that. So I’ll confess one dumb thing I said, and it really is painful to admit. I was having an argument with my mom. I don’t remember what it was about anymore. But in a desperate bid to win the argument, I said something really stupid. I said, “I hate you,” and I slammed the door behind me as I marched outside. What happened next is sort of funny. Contrasting the dark clouds of emotion in me, the sun was shining, the sky was blue, and our neighbor, who had heard my foolish, immature outburst, was peacefully watering his flowers. I felt so silly. There was this mismatch between my anger and standing in the light. I just knew the two didn’t go together – it was like burping at a fancy restaurant. It just didn’t fit. My sin had made me feel dumb, and I wanted to get rid of it. So I went in and apologized to my mother.

Before I get started let me address how my title might be misunderstood. When I say sin is dumb, I am not saying the issue of sin isn’t a serious one. I am also not encouraging judgment of others who are struggling with sin. The biblical response to other people’s sin is, “But for the grace of God there go I, and as a matter of fact, my righteousness is already filthy rags.” So my point is not to encourage calling others who are sinning dumb, because they aren’t any dumber than you. And that leads to my second point. If you are struggling with sin, I am not insulting you, because when it comes to sin, you are not any dumber than me. When earnestly dealing with sin in yourself you should never berate yourself or let toxic guilt or self-shaming abuse take hold – and you shouldn’t do that to someone else, either. Although I wrote it to get our attention, let me be clear: the dumbing effects of sin afflict us all, and we should look at our own sin and the sin of others with a compassionate heart for the weakness of our flesh, combined with an earnest desire for the improvement of our state, just as we would hope for someone dealing with a serious illness to get better. So let’s look at how the Gospel and Epistle readings illustrate the dumbing effect sin has on us.

1. Sin mutes our voices. “JESUS was casting out a devil, and it was dumb. And it came to pass, when the devil was gone out, the dumb spake.” Like this example of demonic possession, sin takes away our voice. We tend to think of sin as part of us – part of our identity. Maybe we fall into thinking of our sins as particular little qualities that just go along with our personalities. But that’s a mistake. Sin actually chokes out our ability to be who we are. It distorts our words. Much like with how I spoke in a sinful fashion to my mother, when we are in sin, we don’t communicate in a healthy manner. In the Epistle of James we read, “And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell” (James 3:6). Have you ever noticed that when you don’t acknowledge your sin, you tend to lash out a little more? Your tongue is like a knife, that cuts and pokes at another person’s weakness, to distract yourself from the guilt? Or maybe you withdraw, because you don’t want to go through the painful process of confessing your sin to your loved one. Like a river choked by garbage. James goes on to write, “10 Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be. 11 Doth a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter?” When we let sin rule over us, when we don’t admit our error to God and to our close Christian family and friends, we pollute our testimony, and the river of good speech is choked out. This is why it is so good, before God and each other, to “acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness” in the public General Confession of Sins. We’re clearing our spiritual throats, so that our voices can be free to speak the pure words of our Lord.

2. Sin is dumb in that it encourages us to think we know better than God, who is all-knowing, which we see in the reaction of Christ’s detractors. “But some of them said, He casteth out devils through Beelzebub the chief of the devils. And others, tempting him, sought of him a sign from heaven.” The first group of people think they’re being clever, trying to turn Christ’s good work into a sign of why he shouldn’t be trusted – he drives out a demon by the power of a more powerful demon. Jesus points out their faulty logic: “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and a house divided against a house falleth. If Satan also be divided against himself, how shall his kingdom stand? because ye say that I cast out devils through Beelzebub. And if I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your sons cast them out?” Satan isn’t going to undo his own work. That should be obvious, but the nature of sin is that it distorts our view of what should be obvious. It should have been obvious to Eve that she didn’t need anything more than what God had given her – she already had a perfect relationship with God, a perfect relationship with her husband, and a perfect garden to feed her. Adam, who was made first, should have known even better. But Adam’s reaction, when he knew he had sinned, was to try and hide behind a bush from the all-knowing, all-powerful God with whom he had spoken and whose miracles he had personally witnessed when he had sinned. Not too bright, and what’s worse is his response when he finally fessed up: “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.” I tend to imagine God’s eyebrows lifting up at that – Oh, it’s my fault that I miraculously crafted a perfect wife from your rib, so you just had to break the only commandment I had for you? Which consisted of not eating one fruit in a giant garden filled with tasty food? But let’s not get too judgmental towards Adam and Eve. We have six thousand years of human history, the benefit of the lessons of history, including the Fall, and we still sin. Look at the world, the state it’s in – that’s man’s way, the sinful way. Shouldn’t we know better than to choose our way over God’s by now? But every time we do give in to sin, whether we admit it or not, in our mind we are thinking, “I know better than God. He says this is bad for me, but I think it’s good for me.” As if we were the first ones in history to think we knew better than God. Again, it’s not too bright, but here we are, doing it again. The rebellious desire of sin leads us to get prideful, and pride and wisdom just don’t go together. Sin renders us unintelligent, and we need to return to Scripture constantly to restore wisdom to how we think.

Before I move on from this point I want to show you something else. They just saw Jesus drive out a demon, and while one group foolishly asserts that he does this work by Beelzebub, another group of people ask him for a sign from heaven. Jesus is a lot more patient than I am because I would go and knock on their heads and say, Hey, you’d like a sign from Heaven would you? How about I, oh I don’t know, drive out a demon from a possessed man right in front of you? Such sin isn’t as obvious as denying Christ’s power altogether, but it still shows a reluctance to trust in Him. Perhaps we don’t sin by thinking we’re smarter than God, but we sin by thinking God has to do something more to appease our wisdom. Give me another sign God, and maybe then I’ll do what you ask of me. No. We don’t need another sign. We have His Word, and we know what we’re called to do. We need to stop trying to outsmart the obligations which the Gospel places on us.

3. Another way in which sin is dumb is our more common use of the term – not unspeaking or unintelligent but not respectable. For this point I want to turn to the epistle reading, which relates to the Gospel directly: ”But fornication, and all uncleanness, or covetousness, let it not be once named among you, as becometh saints; neither filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor jesting, which are not convenient.” I think that people who would see a demon cast out before their eyes and immediately respond with scorn towards the one who worked that miracle have failed to recognize the truly repugnant nature of sin. By contrast, look at the dire consequences Paul outlines for sin: ”For this ye know, that no whoremonger, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God. Let no man deceive you with vain words: for because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience.” Often in today’s society we laugh at sin. We treat it as an old fashioned idea, and even as fun. In my time as a college student I’ve heard professors mock the idea of virtue as silly and talk about biblical values concerning sexual morality as worthy of ridicule – deceivers with vain words. How much of our entertainment is based in romanticizing infidelity, greed, cruel jokes, in loving what God hates? Where is our conscience when we watch that stuff? Contrast the attitude of your every day, uncontroversial sitcom to what Paul says about sin: “And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them. For it is a shame even to speak of those things which are done of them in secret.” We have to be careful not to let the world influence our minds about our attitude towards sin. Sin is shameful. It isn’t funny, or sophisticated, or daringly edgy to glorify sin. We need to rethink how we look at sin, and through repentance and the light of God’s grace have no fellowship with it in our hearts.

4. Another sense of dumb is to be struck silent. One thing sin does is tempt us to be silent in prayer and try to set it right without God. Christ points out this in his discussion of demonic possession: “When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he saith, I will return unto my house whence I came out. And when he cometh, he findeth it swept and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first.” The man released from the demon tried to set his life right by worldly means. There are a lot of wonderful self-help gurus out there who will give you rules for life or steps for improving yourself, and they have a lot of good human wisdom. I remember hearing a statement in a movie, “If everyone just kept their front porch clean, the whole world would be a lot better of a place.” And surely there’s truth to that. But when we are confronted with our sin and our shortcomings and we think, okay, it’s up to me. I’ll just commit myself to better habits, to better thinking, to a set of philosophical principles to better living – you think you’re casting out the demons, but you’re really just cleaning up the house to make it more comfortable for them when they return. It’s like trying to get rid of ants by just cleaning your house more thoroughly. It won’t be enough, because even if you get rid of the crumbs you’re leaving behind, the ants left a chemical trail that will keep bringing them back no matter how clean you keep the house. You need to apply a more powerful cleaning agent to destroy the connection those ants made with your kitchen. In the same way, you can’t discipline yourself into holiness once sin has made its way into your soul. The only cleaning agent powerful enough to make that happen is Christ’s blood, applied by the Holy Spirit as you undergo the painful, submissive experience of repentance. Trying to deal with sin without prayer is like trying to deal with conflict with a friend or family member by just not talking to them about that problem. Use that strategy enough and the conflict will build and build, either until it explodes or you just never talk to them. Better to take the direct path – don’t be silent. Tell God that you’re not worthy to gather up the crumbs under his table, and he won’t treat us like pests even though we are. Instead He will share with you His mercy that endures forever.

Sin is darkness that clouds the mind; Christ is light that drives those clouds away. In the light, we can see who Christ is and who we are without Him and we will know who we are with Him. In the light, we can see what is unwise and better govern our response to sinful desire and to how we speak of sin. When we let Christ be our light, the overwhelming feeling of silence that comes with the shame of sin won’t keep us from prayer. Abandon mere shame, which can be a guilt-ridden excuse to keep sinning though at least you justify yourself by saying at least I feel bad about it. So much greater and more relieving than shame is repentance, which says that you love being free of your sin in the light of Christ more than you love wallowing in the darkness of guilt where you pretend your sins are hidden. Sin stuns us, and it stunts our minds, and it stops us from seeing that we can’t beat it. We can’t sweep it clean. If we could, God would only have given us a broom – which is the Law. But he didn’t give us a broom – he gave us his son’s body and blood on the cross, to remind us that when we get stupid with sin, Christ can cast it out and make us free again. Amen.