And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth 
distress of nations, with perplexity…(St. Luke xxi. 25)
 
Advent is that season that is all about preparing for Christ’s coming. Christ is coming to us and is the Word of God that never dies. Last week we spoke of spiritual death to sin and Satan. Today we look more closely at the life that Christ brings to us. With eager expectation, we prepare for that life that came down from Heaven and brought eternity within man’s reach once again. But before we jump prematurely to that, on this Sunday of Advent we are called to prepare for Christ’s judgment of us. For we shall never begin the journey to His Kingdom unless we are prepared to be judged by Him, the Word of God. Today Christ the Word comes to us so that we might begin to measure our every thought and desire by His truth and to ensure that this Word is indeed our enduring hope.

In the Gospel appointed for today, Jesus establishes Himself as the Word spoken to those who will hear Him. He speaks of His own future coming, a final coming, when all things shall be measured and summed up in relation to Him. At the end of time, the Word of God, His rule and governance, will be established finally and definitively as what has always ruled and governed the universes and now will judge men’s lasting destiny. And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. (St. Luke 21. 27) Jesus will come to judge the world, to determine whether every man’s words and works are consistent with His will. Those who have been faithful and are deemed worthy will inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. Those who have been unfaithful and were the servants of false gods will be judged fit for Hell.

In the Gospel, Jesus states clearly that all men will be rewarded in a way that is suitable to their rational choices. But notice also the fear that will enslave some and not others. 
And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken. (St. Luke xxi. 25) 
 
Heaven will break open with Christ’s coming at the end of all time. Men who disobeyed, neglected or even rejected God’s existence will be full of anguish, anxiety, and affliction. These men’s hearts will be full of fear because then they will begin to feel the presence and power of God, who shakes the universe with his terrible wrath. The traumatic and paranormal seismic shift will herald the coming of Christ the Word as unrepentant sinners and unbelievers realize their error with unmitigated terror. Unfaithful earthly-minded men will see at last that their riches are lost, their power robbed, and their dignity destroyed.

At the same time, faithful heavenly-minded men will embrace the coming Glory as the reward for cleaving to the Word of God that never passes away. To them Jesus says, And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh. (St. Luke 21. 28) Though sinful men will be taken by surprise, as by a thief in the night, the faithful friends of Jesus shall be neither blindsided nor astonished. With faith and confidence, they shall begin to be swept up in their unfolding destiny because they have long since been judged, corrected, disciplined, and redeemed by the permanent and unchanging Word of Christ’s love. Jesus illustrates their spiritual state in the Parable of the Fig Tree. Jesus says, 

Behold the fig tree, and all the trees; When they now shoot forth, ye see and know of your own selves that summer is now nigh at hand. So likewise, ye, when ye see these things come to pass, know ye that the kingdom of God is nigh at hand. (St. Luke 21: 30, 31) 
 
Faithful men shall see that Christ’s coming kingdom is like the time when nature bears her fruits. They shall remember that the worship of earthly mammon led only to sterility and impotence. They shall remember that earthly honor, riches, and dignity always pass away because they have no root in God’s Eternal Word. Then, they shall realize more fully that the Word of the Lord alone endureth forever. And so, in the high summer heat of the Word’s return, the bright and burning truth of God’s Word of love shall bring those to life who can withstand the heat because they alone have been growing spiritually. With His coming, they will rejoice and be exceeding glad, for the world will be destroyed, but the dynamically penetrating heat of God’s loving Word shall summon the fruits of His Spirit from their hearts as harvest for the Kingdom. 

So how does the Word of God judge us now? How can we apply this Word of God to our lives now so that at the Judgment we shall be found worthy of salvation? Our Collect for today helps us. It exhorts us to a faith that seeks understanding and then generates hope in God’s unchanging Word, that never passes away.

BLESSED Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast, the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ.
 
The Word of God, His communicated Wisdom to us and most fully revealed in the life of Jesus Christ, is found through a diligent and persistent hearing and reading of Holy Scripture. Scripture is all about the Word of God and its fulfillment in the life of Jesus Christ. The Scriptures must be noted, learned, and applied to our souls for spiritual digestion. We are called to inwardly digest their content because they give us patience in adversity, the comfort of heavenly healing, and the courage to clutch on to our hope, which is everlasting life. We must find in the Scriptures a record of God’s persistent, unalterable, and enduring love for us and our salvation. We must discover that Jesus Christ, God’s Word made Flesh, has, in these last days, become not only the forgiveness of our sins but our resurrection and life, neither of which need ever pass away.                                    

Hope in eternal life must be the object of our desire. Earthly-minded man hopes for things that perish and puts his faith in earthly things that grow old and pass away. Earthly man grows old and when life grows short, his hope grows weary, as Joseph Pieper writes. But spiritual man grows young because he hopes in a life that is ‘not yet’ and shall be as long as eternity. (Faith, Hope, Love, II, 110-111) Spiritual man hopes in a life that is just now starting to be lived in and through Christ, God’s Word. Spiritual man hopes in the Word that even now begins to prepare him for everlasting happiness with God. He has the audacity and courage to hope for a life supernaturally above and beyond this transitory world with its fleeting promises. Spiritual man hopes in heavenly promises, and he begins to find true and lasting joy in the permanent things. Because spiritual man is forever reaching out towards the goal he has not attained, he is forever being rejuvenated by God’s Grace. He believes that what he learns from Jesus is making him better and better, and stronger and stronger because the Word of God that never passes away is leading him out of sin and into righteousness. And even when the pilgrimage calls for suffering and sacrifice, spiritual man learns to never count the cost but to wage war on sin courageously, intending finally to defeat it through the power of Christ’s death and resurrection.  The root of spiritual man’s life is hope in Jesus Christ, who takes his nature and rejuvenates him for Heaven. 

In this holy season of Advent, we are called to be transformed by the unchanging and enduring Word of God’s love in Jesus Christ. So let our judgment begin today. Let us judge ourselves according to Christ, the Word of God. Let us humbly fall down before Him now to confess our sins, receive His forgiveness, and endeavor to honor his counsel and correction. And let us remember always that the Word of God which never passes away is with us every step of the way with patience and comfort to help us, heal us, repair us, and redeem us because wants us as His own forever.

Amen.
©wjsmartin

Media vita in morte sumus.
(In the midst of life, we are in death.)
 
Our opening quotation comes from a Medieval Gregorian Chant. It is an antiphon for sinners who habituate themselves to spiritual death. 10th century Swiss soldiers used it as a battle cry until nervous bishops banned it. Today it forms our introduction to the penitential season of Advent. Advent means coming. In Advent, we prepare for Christ’s coming at Christmas. The Sundays of Advent are all about Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell, or The Four Last Things. On this First Sunday of Advent, we focus on spiritual death.
        
Living as we do in a world that is materially minded, spiritual death strikes us as an odd and alien concept. The only kind of death that we post-moderns tend to think about is the extinction of the body. Because our god is chiefly creaturely comfort, death to us is its cessation. Because we fear only earthly death, we are addicted to doctors, drugs, and diets, hoping to postpone its inevitable arrival. But no matter how hard we try to delay and avoid it, sooner or later, earthly death will get the better of us. And for as long as we are consumed with trying to beat it, another truth emerges. Carelessly, we have neglected the condition of our souls. What if the Bible is correct and life goes on? What if we shall be judged for our choices, good for Heaven and evil for Hell? Then, shouldn’t we be more concerned about the character of our souls, in relation to God at best, or at least in relation to other men? And if we aim to be good in relation to God and man, shouldn’t we be more focused on dying to sin and vice and coming alive to virtue and goodness?
          
We cannot presume upon God’s Grace and take it for granted. Superficial faith presumes that we have no role in our salvation. Superficial faith never even begins to work out sin and work in righteousness. Superficial faith assumes that because God in Jesus Christ has done all the dirty work, bloodied His hands, and laid down His life for us, there is nothing for us to do. But the problem with this view of salvation is that it doesn’t involve us in any way, doesn’t redeem our fallen natures, and seems to save us magically despite ourselves. It makes a mockery of our created integrity. It would seem to suggest that we are so far gone, so sinful, that we can only be saved like mad dogs being pulled from the fire, in which case we are dogs and not men.

Of course, this lets us off too easily. It undermines our calling to discover the good and to love it. It misunderstands our fallen natures and the nature of sin. Sin is a choice for division from God and confusion, in place of unity and understanding.  Christ Himself says to us,
Not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. (St. Matthew vii. 21)
 
And St. Paul reminds us that we must work out our salvation with fear and trembling. (Phil. ii. 12) And in his vision of the Second Coming, St. John the Divine hears the words of Christ again.
Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me. To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne. (Rev. iii. 20,21)
 
Christ and His spokesman, St. Paul, hold us up to a standard. Christ implies that having found God, we will be saved only by doing the will of the Father. St. Paul insists also that having discovered God in Jesus Christ, we must work with Him. Again, Christ says that if we open the door of our hearts to Him for spiritual strength, we shall overcome evil. In each case, we have a role to play in our relationship with Christ. Christians believe that salvation has been won for us by the death of God’s own Son, Jesus Christ, and that we are invited to embrace Him through the Spirit. The work of salvation that is offered to man involves willingness, obedience, fear of the Lord, and labor that overcomes vice with virtue through suffering and spiritual death.

Death for the Christian is not essentially the termination of life in the body. Death for the Christian has been made new by Jesus Christ. Because Christ has conquered sin, death now has a new meaning. O death where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory? (1 Cor. xv. 55) Christ went to the Cross for us to wage the final battle against sin, death, and Satan, and He conquered them all. For the Christian, death now becomes a spiritual work to be undertaken for salvation. The Christian is called to die to sin and come alive to righteousness. As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. (1 Cor. xv. 22) Adam willed death to God. Christ willed death to sin. We can choose either Adam or Christ. In Christ, we can obey God once again, willingly embrace His Grace, fear Him, and labor daily to die to sin.
             
In today’s Gospel, we study Christ’s labor for us as He enters into Jerusalem to embrace His death upon the Cross. Advent begins as a journey with Jesus up to death. Today, we are encouraged to find in Christ’s death a pattern for our own spiritual deaths. We read that Christ travels up to His death, meek and sitting upon an ass. (St. Matthew xxi. 5) Christ’s meekness, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, moderates anger. Meekness is a virtue that calms us in the face of evil and gives us courage to battle with sin spiritually. We must face spiritual death with meekness and courage. Too easily we become exasperated, resentful, and angry with our calling die a spiritual death. But Christ gives us a pattern for victory. If we would remember that He has conquered death and forbidden it to keep Him down, we might begin to see spiritual death as that virtue that is key to new life and salvation.
             
But too often we want to find a shortcut to Heaven that ignores Christ’s sacrifice in spiritual death to sin and His expectation of ours also. Notice what we read in our Gospel as Jesus entered Jerusalem.
And the multitudes that went before and that followed cried, Hosanna to the Son of David; Blessed is He that cometh in the Name of the Lord; Hosanna in the Highest. (ibid, 9)
 
We are fine with the Christ who rides meekly upon an ass into Jerusalem. We love to praise Christ and sing hosannas in the highest. But Christ insists that our joy and gladness must be tempered with suffering and death. As a precursor to the kind of death we must die, we read that Christ went into the Temple at Jerusalem and cast out those that bought and sold, overturning the tables of the money changers, and exclaiming, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves. (ibid, 13) Christ, the Son of God, who comes down from Heaven to save us, insists that prayer and not money-making will save us. We must wage war on sin and die to it, be it the false commerce of pseudo-religion in the temples of Jesus’ time or the lukewarm and superficial Christianity of our own. If we would follow Christ, we must be willing to go into battle and to die spiritually to all that stands between us and salvation.
             
In this morning’s Epistle, St. Paul likens the lives we have lived to sleep. Sleep is a state likened to death to God. Thus, he says that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. (Romans xiii. 11) We must awaken or come alive not because we were baptized and saved long ago, but because their worth must be tested for salvation or damnation every day! The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness and let us put on the armour of light. (ibid, 12) We are called to the daily, heavy labor of casting off sin!  Let us walk honestly, as in the day, not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. (ibid, 13) Any creature comfort pursued to excess threatens to damn us! But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof. (ibid, 14) We must choose to be clothed with Christ and His goodness now if we hope to be saved, taming the flesh and its passions.
             
Today, you and I are called to move into a season that will be crowned with Christ’s birth at Christmas. To receive it truly, we must embrace His Death as the pattern of true human life. We must cast away the works of darkness and put upon us the armour of light. (Collect, Advent Sunday) Spiritual death is a hard work that must become the habit of our lives if Christ would move us through His goodness to the Kingdom. To welcome the Christ child into our souls at Christmas, we must remember that Christ was born to suffer and die. And we too are born to suffer and die, not in an earthy sense, which is death to God, but in a spiritual sense that is life to Him, beginning now, and forever.

Amen.
©wjsmartin
 
          
 
 

 
Wherby He shall be called, The Lord our Righteousness.
(Jeremiah xxiii. 6)
 
Today is Stir Up Sunday, and on it we prepare for a holy Advent that makes us ready for Christ’s coming to us on Christmas. Stir up we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people. (Collect, Stir Up Sunday) Advent is coming, a purple season, in which we repent and prepare for Christ’s coming to us again at Christmas time. Advent will call us to look within, that the Lord may stir up our self-honesty, confession, contrition, and compunction for our sins. Repentance will then enable us to know our need for the Birth of Jesus Christ in the world once again.

But we cannot be stirred up spiritually until we refresh our memories with a few practical details about the condition of our spiritual lives. We must remember that God has made us for Himself, and that humanity’s chief calling is the good of the soul and its reconciliation with God. Yet, we must acknowledge that our vocation is handicapped by sin. Reason and free will are distracted and discouraged. We are made to be stirred up in mind and heart, to discover, know, love, and obey God. But we tend to be stirred up over earthly and mundane, worldly and profane ends. We know God, we claim to follow Jesus, we want the Holy Spirit, and yet, if truth be told, we keep God in a box. What I mean is that the God we worship is but one small compartment in our lives. We pull Him out on Sunday, for roughly an hour, and then back He goes into the box until next week. Or, if we are pressed with trials or tribulations, we might pull him out occasionally, though this has become far less common than it used to be. God in a box tends to be an occasional occupation at best.
Of course, this is nothing new. Man’s history is replete with the habit of unholiness, being in love with this present world, neither hot nor cold, but lukewarm. And it isn’t helped that today’s churches seem bent on accommodating the world. The Pope of Rome blesses a giant ice cube at the Vatican to endorse Climate Change. The first official statement of the newly chosen female Archbishop of Canterbury insists that we must baptize illegal migrants. The Patriarch of the East gives new meaning to the notion that all is mystery and unknown. Non-denominational Protestants continue to sell the Prosperity Gospel. And the mass of men, if they notice, are not much interested.  

So, it is not small wonder that the theme of being stirred up spiritually on this Sunday Next before Advent largely falls on deaf ears. The world is always being stirred up by earthly demons who distract us with false gods to worship. The devices and desires of our own hearts seem to begin and end with earthly riches. Creaturely comfort, financial security, the future of our nation, and so forth, claim too much of our attention. Numbskulls wonder how they will be remembered when they are gone. Salvation is never mentioned because we don’t fear damnation. Heaven isn’t thought of because we’ve forgotten the fact that most men go to Hell.

But it must not be so for us. And we are helped in our determination to be stirred up today by Jeremiah the Prophet, the son of Hilkiah. He lived some six hundred years before the birth of Christ in a nation whose spirit had given way to unbelief, treachery, and despair. As a result of Judah’s spiritual decay and disintegration, the Babylonian Nebuchadnezzars conquered Israel and Judah from the east with little resistance. Israel and Judah’s spiritual corruption had yielded a moral vacuum. Idolatry made both nations vulnerable to foreign conquest from without. Because they loved the world more than God, their spiritual lives were decayed and dead. Because they neglected their first call and vocation, God gave them up both to the Babylonians and Satan.

And yet, Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah had not forgotten his first love. He was moved and stirred up by the ever-present Word of God. The Lord stirred him up to remember that he came from God and was made to return to Him. The Word of the Lord had said to him, Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee, and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations. (Jer. i. 5) Jeremiah was stirred up to remember that the God of Judah and Israel, the Creator and Redeemer of the world, knew him and blessed him in the womb, and had called him to remind the Jews of their eternal calling and destiny. God stirred up Jeremiah to remind the Chosen People that they were specially called by God to future redemption and salvation.

BEHOLD, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth. In his days Judah shall be saved, and Israel shall dwell safely: and this is his name whereby he shall be called, THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS. (Jer. 23.5)
 
Jeremiah was stirred up to remind the Jews that God would save His people through the promise of a coming King. Jeremiah would stir up the Jews to believe that God would raise up a righteous branch from His Chosen People. He would prophesy the coming of a Jewish King who would bring judgment and justice to the earth. This King would judge them with mercy and righteousness. This King would enable man once again to know and love God for salvation.

On this Stir Up Sunday, you and I are called to remember that we come from God and were made for God. Like Jeremiah and the people in today’s Gospel, we ought to discover that we can never be made right with God until we feed from His Heavenly Hand. When Jesus then lifted up his eyes, and saw a great company come unto him, he saith unto Philip, Whence shall we buy bread, that these may eat? (St. John vi. 5)  Jesus, the Jewish King, prophesied by Jerimiah, has come down from Heaven to reconcile us with God. He knows that as God’s Word made flesh, He alone can satisfy man’s inmost hunger and thirst for that lasting nutriment that strengthens man for God. Earthly and worldly things can never satisfy man’s spiritual hunger for true freedom and deliverance from sin. Two hundred pennyworth of bread is not sufficient for them, that every one of them may take a little. (St. John vi. 7)

To be stirred up to hunger and thirst for what is more than the earth can give, we must seek out Heaven’s King and submit to His rule in all our lives. William Law says this.

True Christianity is nothing but the continual dependence upon God through Christ for all life, light, and virtue; and the false religion of Satan is to seek that goodness from any other source.
(William Law, The Power of the Spirit)
 
Our hearts must be stirred up to know that if our goodness comes from any source other than God in Christ, we are destined for Hell. Our life comes from God. Our light, truth, comes from God. Virtue, or goodness, to have any value, comes from God.  With Jeremiah, we must see how our sins have made a barren and desolate wasteland of death, darkness, and vice. Only Jesus Christ, God’s chosen heir, the Image and Likeness of God the Father, born of a woman by the Holy Ghost, can be that King who brings divine goodness and Heaven within our reach once again.

To be stirred up this day, we must, first, with the prophet Jeremiah, prepare for the coming of the Lord our righteousness with repentance. We must be determined to take a moral inventory, to confess our sins, and to admit that we have been stirred up in the pursuit of false gods. We must remember that we are not sufficient of ourselves to think anything as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God. (2 Cor. iii. 5) We must remember that if we do not confess our sins, we shall have no excuses when it is too late to change, when time for salvation has run out. Second, we must remember what the Lord our Righteousness, Jesus Christ, has done for us already. The facts of Christ’s most holy life – from the Cratch to the Cross, from Bethlehem to Calvary and beyond – must claim our attention with deepest thanksgiving. Christ has done for us what we could never do for ourselves.

Through His most holy Incarnation, Christ has won our salvation. Third, and finally, in earnest, we must prepare to welcome Christ once again in our hearts and souls. The Christ of history intends to come alive in all ages, but most especially in our hearts and souls now for our salvation. Christ doesn’t want us to keep God in a box. Christ wants all of us for God. If our souls are stirred up to welcome Him, we shall remember that all of life is like Advent leading to Christmas, a coming that leads to Christ’s holy birth. Christ has come into history. Christ comes to us now. And Christ will come in the end times to judge both the quick and the dead. Let us pray to have faith in His Grace that our wills being stirred up to plenteously bring forth the fruit of good works, we might be plenteously rewarded not for the time being but forever because Christ has been born in us.   

Amen.
©wjsmartin
 

I thank my God…being confident of this very thing, that he who hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ." - Phil. 1,3 - 6
 
Today we come together to examine the way that forgiveness received becomes love and hope that shape and mold our Christian lives. In today’s Epistle, St. Paul writes to the Church at Philippi. The Epistle was written during Paul’s final days of house arrest at Rome. In today’s reading he speaks of being in bonds. He has received a gift from the Christian Church at Philippi through Epaphroditus, who brought news of the state of the church in that place; Paul’s letter is a thank you note for the gift and a response to the news. It is full of good will and recollections of fond memories of times spent together. All this he writes, despite the fact he is in bonds and awaiting execution.
        
Philippi was a city in eastern Macedonia, founded by Philip, father of Alexander the Great, in the 4th century – some three hundred years before the birth of Christ. Later it was a Roman colony and was the scene of a great battle, in which Octavian (later Augustus) and Mark Anthony defeated Brutus and Cassius – the murderers of Octavian’s uncle Julius Caesar. Philippi was an important city because it stood at a break in the mountains where travelers would pass from Asia Minor and into Europe. In the Sixteenth Chapter of Acts, Paul had a vision telling him to pass into Macedonia. He and Barnabas set out, and the end-product was the conversion of Europe.
        
So, as we said, Paul writes from his imprisonment in Rome, where later he will be executed. And yet, in the midst of his suffering, with the executioner’s axe dangling over his head, he is writing a letter of friendship and spiritual comfort. And yet we wonder how he could be writing in such a spirit when his time on earth was about to come to an end. How can he give consolation to others when his own situation is so dire? How can he thank God for for their fellowship in the Gospel from the first day until now (Phil. i. 5) when violent death, no doubt, awaits him?
Paul persists in something greater. He prays that he who has begun a good work in them will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ? (Phil. i. 6) His attention is on his flock. His heart in on fire for their sanctification and salvation. It is meet for me to think this of you all. (Phil. i. 7) It is fitting that their sanctification and salvation are more significant than the suffering he was called to endure.
        
It seems so strange to us. It appears that Paul has embraced a far more meaningful reality, a deeper truth which moves his heart. Paul has experienced the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ from the same Lord who knocked him off his high horse years before when, as a devout Jewish Pharisee, he was on his way to Damascus to round up and persecute Christians. The Lord had need of Paul in the missionary conversion of the world. He had forgiven Paul much and was determined to use him for the conversion of the nations. And Paul, ever conscious of his own past, full of wicked malice, envy, and fraud, was now as determined as ever to serve his Lord until his life should end. The healing redemption that Christ had worked into his heart was the fuel and substance of his desire to save others from certain Hellfire and damnation.  The mercy and forgiveness of God was a gift he knew he never deserved, and with such great treasure he was intent upon sharing it with the world. Like his Lord, suffering and dying on the Cross and forgiving all his enemies, Paul would do the same. From the inward security of His soul, held captive by Jesus, he will die doing the Lord’s work. I have you in my heart, he says, inasmuch as both in my bonds, and in the defense and confirmation of the Gospel, ye are all partakers of my grace. (Phil. i. 7) Paul is made to receive and impart the unmerited Grace of God to others; this must quash any sense of narcissistic selfishness. Paul prays always, with the author of this morning’s Collect, that he may be freed from all adversities, and devoutly given to serve God in good works. (Collect Trinity xxii) Of utmost importance to Paul is the Grace that must take root in other men’s souls so that they too might go out to convert the nations.
        
We too are called to look back and ask ourselves if Jesus Christ has called us out of sin and into redemption. Of course, Christ always offers forgiveness to those who repent, turn, believe, and follow. And not everyone will experience St. Paul’s dramatic conversion. But we must ask ourselves if we have a real relationship with Christ that is redeeming us now for salvation later. Of course, this question is urgent since our eternal destiny depends upon it.
        
What we must focus on is the perfection of our souls by God’s Grace, in that part of our being that no man can threaten or kill. The Apostle Paul can love and hope, yearn and long for his flock’s salvation, in the face of his impending demise, precisely because he has opened his soul to the mercy of God, and given his life to the power of conversion. His soul is aware of a new kind of love that breaks all bounds and surmounts all barriers. Love’s power is perfect, its zeal unabated, and its expanse infinite. It is the Divine Love made flesh that speaks to the soul of St. Paul, forgiving his sins and reforming his life. Christ’s merciful presence, thankfully received, then becomes the love that longs for salvation – not only his own, but that of all others.

But just as his soul was moved and impelled to express Divine love, so too can ours be. For, as Christ offered himself to St. Paul in a habitual manner two-thousand years ago, he does the same for us individually and collectively in fellowship each Sunday. The problem is that so many Christians never get around to receiving him. And they have never received him because they have never meditated long and hard enough upon the need for God’s mercy, its infusion of forgiveness, for the subsequent transformation of human life. They have never been grateful because they have never sought out or received the forgiveness of sins. For erroneously they have thought that they have no sins needing forgiveness. But the man who admits to no sin, needs neither mercy, forgiveness, salvation, nor, evidently, Heaven. The man who admits to no sin will be rewarded for his stupidity. He will enter Hell, where he will know his sin, forever regret his failure to confess it, and be forgiven for salvation.

We come here to seek salvation. We repent of our sins and supplicate God’s forgiveness. In earthly terms we deserve none of it; but God insists upon it. God’s love is more powerful than our sins. The forgiveness of sins is, of course, chiefly found in the suffering and dying Lord Jesus. On His Cross, Christ was tempted most not to forgive. But He both loves and forgives. Unlike any other man who has ever lived, Christ, the innocent Son of God, loves and forgives precisely because this alone, made flesh, can save man.


Of course, if we are thankful and receive Christ’s love and forgiveness, it should be a principle that moves and defines our souls. In today’s Gospel Christ gives a parable of a man who was forgiven much by his earthly master. But no sooner was he forgiven than he refused to forgive another man of his debt to him. He was not thankful for the mercy and forgiveness of his lord. Forgetting it selfishly, no doubt with a sense of entitlement, its power died on the vine. But it must not be so with us. We must remain vigilant. We must confess our sins to receive Christ’s forgiveness. And we must remember that as oft as we confess our sins, Christ forgives us. If there were a limit to Christ’s forgiveness, there might be one for us also. But there isn’t. The point is that it is God’s nature to forgive to perfect His creature. Of course, there will be a time when the benefit of forgiveness ceases. Once we die, we can no longer repent to find the value of forgiveness for salvation.

In this morning’s Collect, we pray that [God’s] protection might free us from all adversities that we might be given to all good works. (Collect, Trinity XXII) The good works which must characterize our lives is found chiefly in forgiving all men their trespasses against us. (St. Matthew xviii. 35) For, with St. Paul, we must be consumed with awesome wonder over God’s eternal forgiveness of our sins. Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. If God’s Grace in Jesus Christ forgives us as many times as we sin, the same love must move us to love and forgive all others. We must work on perfecting our gratitude. Next, we must take every opportunity to share the truth. If we receive healing redemption as a gift, we must see that it is too great a gift to be hoarded. Forgiveness is generous and magnanimous. Without its power for us and all others, we perish.  

Amen.
©wjsmartin

 
Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe.
St. John iv. 48
 
          Have you ever noticed how many people live their lives in search of miracles? MOst men want God to prove that He exists. More than that, they want Him to overturn the normal course of human life with supernatural wonders that benefit them. Most men –including no small number of Christians, await the one miracle that they think will confirm their belief or relieve their so-called earthly suffering. And yet how strange it is that no sooner are the miracles performed than their recipients will fall back into practical atheism and ingratitude. The happiness that miracles bring wears off almost as quickly as a new pair of shoes. And it’s not buyer’s remorse but a sign that those who seeks for signs and wonders are intellectually and spiritually lazy.
         
We find this in today’s Gospel. Jesus has just finished rebuking men for being miracle-seekers. We read that Jesus came again into Cana of Galilee, where he made water wine. And there was a certain nobleman whose son was sick at Capernaum… [who]went unto him, and besought him that he would come down and heal his son, who was at the point of death. (St. John iv. 46, 47) Jesus had just finished teaching the heretical Samaritans, who had been much more interested in what he said than in proving anything to them by way of miracles. But now back in Jewish Galilee, where Jesus made water into wine, He is confronted once again by a miracle-seeker. The Jews seem far more interested in ephemeral signs and wonders than with the Word which He longs to save them. So, Jesus is approached by a nobleman who entreats the Lord to come down to heal his son. Jesus rebukes the nobleman, saying Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe. (Ibid, 48) Jesus is clearly annoyed. Would that one Jew might ask Him to heal a soul. Would that the nobleman were concerned about his son’s spiritual state and future destiny. At any rate, the nobleman exclaims Sir come down, lest my child die. (Ibid, 49) Like the Galilean Jews, his hope hangs on extending earthly life. And, because he has no deeper sense of the transcendent and invisible power that can heal a man either from a distance or in a deeper, inward, and spiritual way, he demands that Jesus come down to his house. The end he seeks and the means to it are wholly caught up in the flesh.
         
In short, the man is rebuked for thinking first and foremost of his son’s physical and earthly healing. Signs and wonders are paranormal events sought out by those weak in faith for the relief of physical disease. Because he is so moved and defined by the earthly good, he takes no thought for his son’s spiritual future. If he knew who Christ was and what He was bringing into the world, he would have asked Jesus to come down to heal his son spiritually, so that he might die a good death in anticipation of a better reward in the future. Nevertheless, having rebuked the man, Jesus will not leave him without any hope.
         
Jesus will take the man in that state that he finds him and make him better. He knows that in the future, wherever and whenever this story would be told, there will be ample opportunity to find spiritual truth in it. To earthly problems, Jesus always brings spiritual remedies. Jesus takes this man’s earthly desire and transforms it to his spiritual advantage. The nobleman is not bereft of good intentions or even virtue. He loves his son and is determined to find whatever means necessary to save him from too early an earthly demise. He believes that Jesus alone has the power to heal where the physicians had failed. But he tries to tell Jesus how to heal his son – by coming down to his house. We ought not to tell Jesus how to do his work.

If his son is anything like him, they are both in need of the true spiritual healing that only Jesus can provide. So Jesus says to him, Go thy way, thy son liveth. (St. John iv. 50) Jesus means for the nobleman to trust in His Word and believe it to discover its power. To his credit, the nobleman does not hesitate with doubt or question Jesus any further. And the man began his journey home, putting his trust in the words Jesus had spoken to him. (Ibid, 50)

What is truly miraculous is not so apparent in our casual reading of the text. Notice how the nobleman is trusting in the Word that Jesus speaks. Jesus would not come down to his house and yet would work a miracle. Archbishop Trench reminds us that His confidence in Christ’s word was so great that he proceeded leisurely homewards. It was not till the next day that he approached his house, though the distance between the two cities was not so great that the journey need have occupied many hours; but ‘he that believeth shall not make haste.’ (Trench, Miracles, p. 93). The man is rebuked. Something has begun to stir in our miracle-seeker’s soul at the gravity of Jesus’ command. Christ’s Word has slowed him down and moved him to wonder. When Jesus speaks, he hears, obeys, and trusts. The spoken Word has conquered and subdued his unbelief, fear, and doubt. This hearer’s belief rests in the spoken Word. The real miracle is the birth of the nobleman’s faith in the Word which had transformed his spiritual character and disposition. The nobleman had forgotten that he needed Jesus to come down to his house. Rather, Christ has come down to his soul, intending to heal his heart. With this, all other things will fall into place. As St. John Chrysostom says, The nobleman’s narrow and poor faith is being enlarged and deepened (Trench, Mir’s. 93) as he hastens home slowly under the protection of Christ’s Word.
         
So, as the nobleman returned home, his servants met him saying, thy son liveth. Then inquired he of them the hour that he began to amend. And they said, yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him. (St. John iv. 51, 52) The nobleman’s question confirms his belief that the healing of his son had been instantaneous. The son did not begin to amend, but rather the fever left him completely the day before when Jesus had said thy son liveth. Jesus’ Word brings about two miracles. That Word had cured his son immediately from a distance. That same Word becomes dearer to the man than his son’s life. Its strength and might have subdued and conquered his fear. That selfsame Word traveled two distances. It healed the flesh of the son in an instant. It converted the soul of the father in the steady progress of a longer journey home.
         
St. Thomas Aquinas reminds us that we should prepare our souls through prayer and come to God through our desires. For this is what the [nobleman] did. (Comm. Joh. iv) Prayer is the first movement of the self towards God. Desire is the faculty that seeks out the healing that Christ alone can bring. Of course, our chief prayer should be for spiritual healing. Rather than focusing on earthly miracles, we ought to pray for the spiritual and heavenly purification of our affections. Again, with St. Thomas, as the nobleman desired the healing of his son, so we should desire to be healed from our sins. ‘Heal my soul, for I have sinned against thee.’ (Ps. xl. 5) (Ibid) Next, like the nobleman we ought always to be desperately persistent, since without Christ’s Grace, we cannot help ourselves. The nobleman’s son was close to physical death; we, like his father, are near to spiritual death. So, we must pray to Jesus, Sir, come down, before I die in my sins. We must pray always, and not lose heart. (Idem)
         
Of course, while we must run in haste to find healing from the Lord, with today’s nobleman we must embrace patience as our trust and obedience in Jesus matures. That we desperately need His healing power is one thing. That it takes time is another. Jesus says to the nobleman and us, Go away. Go away, thy son liveth. (Idem) He means for us to go away for our souls still live. We must learn to obey, trust, and believe. If we do, Christ will give us patience. Patience teaches the nobleman that he must put on the whole armour of God to stand against the wiles of the devil because we wrestle [not] against flesh and blood, but against principalities… powers… the rulers of darkness in this world. (Eph. vi. 10,11) What really threatens us is that temptation to evil that would so fill us with fear over earthly  that we forget whether our souls are alive to God for Heaven or dead to God for Hell!
        
Needless to say, Christ will not heal all children on the verge of death. To die young is not a tragedy but part and parcel of a world in which earthly death will get us all. The real tragedy is found in man’s fallen will when he refuses to get right with God. The nobleman’s son might have been saved from earthly death only to die a year later. Or the nobleman himself might have died shortly after his son’s healing. In either case, whatever might have transpired after, we know not. What we do know is that the nobleman believed along with his whole house, (ibid, 54) now prepared to die a good earthly death at whatever time because they were alive to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
©wjsmartin

See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools,
But are wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil.
(Ephesians v. 15, 16)

In this morning’s Epistle, St. Paul exhorts the Ephesians and us to walk circumspectly. Circumspection comes to us from the Latin word circumspecere. It means to look around, to be cautious and watchful. St. Paul is urging his Greek audience to proceed with caution. Of course, St. Paul uses the word walk in a spiritual manner, and he means proceeding with wisdom and prudence supplicating God…through [His] bountiful goodness…to keep us from all things which may hurt us. (Collect, Trinity XX) We must walk circumspectly, being ready both in body and soul to cheerfully accomplish those things which [God] wouldest have done. (Idem) Otherwise, we turn into fools. Fools do not embrace Divine Providence. They are swift to speak and slow to hear. (St. James i. 19) Fools are consumed with the things of this world, refuse to see the world in and for God, and hang upon what is impermanent and uncertain.
         
Circumspection is fueled by God’s wisdom so that we might not play the part of fools. Wise men know that the world around us is full of temptations to gluttony and greed. Because the world belongs to God, everything in it is to be used in His service for salvation. Utility forbids excess. Excess bespeaks idolatry. Thus, wise men learn how to redeem the time. Redeeming the time is the best use of this world in preparation for the next.

St. Paul tells us this morning that we are called to be not unwise but understanding what the will of Lord is…and to be filled with the Spirit. (Ibid, 18) But what is the nature of this filling? Paul Claudel tells us that

the Holy Spirit is ardent, luminous, and quickening by turns, who fills man and makes him aware of himself, of his filial position, of his weakness, of his discontent in his state of sin, of his dangers, of his duty, his unworthiness and the inadequacy of everything around him.

The Holy Spirit enables us to find ourselves in Jesus Christ. We come to understand our need for Christ because everything around us is inadequate. Neither food, drink, sex, nor money can save and deliver us from sin. Neither can they enable us to embrace the spiritual goodness and virtue that are necessary for our return to God.  
         
God’s Providence reveals to us how He sees us and how He intends to redeem us. Providence means seeing into things and grasping their meaning. Circumspection leads us to learn how God sees us and intends to help us to reach him. Jesus illustrates it in this morning’s Gospel. The kingdom of heaven is like unto a certain king, which made a marriage for his son, and sent forth his servants to call them that were bidden to the wedding….(St. Matthew xxii. 2) God sees us as those in need of an invitation and considers us important and worthy enough to ask us to a great occasion. He invites us to the nuptials of his son. Through the Holy Spirit, God sends out invitations through His servants. Yet we read that those invited would not come. (Ibid) A second invitation is sent out because God knows our weaknesses, and He thinks that this might stir us to the urgency of the event. But we read that those who were invited, made light of it, and went their ways, one to his farm, another to his merchandise, and the remnant took his servants, and entreated them spitefully, and slew them. (Ibid, 5, 6)

The Parable really speaks first about those who are too busy to make any time for God and His gracious invitations. It reveals also how sinful we human beings are since, with those in the parable, we violently reject Him by slaying His messengers. When we violently put ourselves before God and his generosity, God the Father will sends forth his armies of angels to destroy us and burn up [our] city. (Ibid, 7) Fools always bring on their own destruction. Those who cannot be bothered with God, who have better things to do, or who resent the presence of God in life, will be rewarded for their foolishness. They may be fair-weather Christians who are neither hot nor cold, lazy pagans who are spiritual but not religious, or they may be card-carrying Atheists who, for whatever reason, hate God for His love. In either case, those who have no time for God will be rewarded with destruction, or Hell.

But before we get too excited about what this means for us churchgoers, we must read the rest of the Parable. God’s wisdom and love are still alive in the hearts of His friends through the Holy Spirit. He sends them out again. 

Go ye therefore into the highways, and as many as ye shall find, bid to the marriage. So those servants went out into the highways, and gathered together all as many as they found, both bad and good: and the wedding was furnished with guests. (Ibid, 9, 10) 

Remember, with those first invited, some have refused to come and some have become violent with the messengers. Now the invitation is extended to new guests who will be found in the highways, no doubt a reference to workers, the poor, the uneducated, strangers and foreigners, outcasts, and even notorious sinners like us. The new guests are all those who live in the world, both bad and good, whom God wants for Himself. 
But what do we read next?

And when the king came in to see the guests, he saw there a man which had not on a wedding garment:  and he saith unto him, Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment? And he was speechless. (Ibid, 11-14) 
 
What is this business about the wedding garment? It seems that in the end, both the bad and the good, not playing the fool, but walking into the wedding with circumspection, must be clothed with a spiritual disposition that seeks God’s Grace. St. Gregory the Great tells us that this wedding garment is charity, or the love of Christ offered to the Bride. 

The wedding garment is that charity of God which adorns the soul with God’s Grace. Those who have charity have been clothed with love and are thankful for it. They are more thankful because they know themselves to be unworthy of the invitation. After all, they might have been left in the highways, trudging along as those who might never have received such an invitation, and never to know the gifts of the king.

So, the man not wearing the wedding garment had not put on the adornment of the new and spiritual man. (R. C. Trench, The Parables, The Marriage of the King’s Son.) He thought himself good enough to have been invited, and he rested in his own goodness. He was a taker and not a giver. Because he did not walk circumspectly, surveying the landscape, he forgot the generosity of the giver, and did not imagine what the king might have in store for his future. He had learned too late that the king called him friend for a reason.
 
St. Paul insists that those of us who have been invited to the wedding of God’s Son must walk circumspectly, redeeming the time. This is St. Paul’s way of saying that we must be clothed with a wedding garment. The wedding garment is an inward and spiritual state of gratitude, prudence, and moral effort. To be clothed in the wedding garment means to participate in the wedding and learn what it means. That the king does not rebuke his messengers for bringing this man to the wedding tells us that the wedding garment is not physical clothing. Rather, the king is concerned with the clothing of the soul. He sees the thoughts of this man’s heart, whether he was circumspect or not, prepared to redeem the time or not, inwardly intending to be clothed with gratitude to the king or not. If we are not clothed in the wedding garment, we are left speechless. Then said the king to the servants, bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. (Ibid, 13)

Today, if we are circumspect, we shall begin to redeem the time. Many are called but few are chosen. (Ibid, 14) They are chosen who are clothed with righteous zeal for God, consecrating the time and returning His love. If we put on the wedding garment, we shall be given moral strength, our characters will be redeemed, and we shall be ready to bear all adversities and suffer gladly, with renewed vigor as we discover our new lives with and for Jesus Christ, the bridegroom. God intends for us to clothe ourselves with His love. Of course, the wedding feast is an image of our communion with Jesus. This communion will reveal Christ’s faithfulness to us, His bride. We will even go with our beloved to His Cross where we will learn of His love for us to the point of an unjust death. If we remain faithful to Him in love, He will keep us fast at His side and lead us through death and into resurrection and return to God. Then, rather than playing the part of fools, by His Grace we shall have been wise for salvation.

Amen.
©wjsmartin

Lord we beseech thee, grant thy people grace to withstand the temptations
of the world, the flesh, and the devil; and with pure hearts and minds to follow thee. (Collect Trinity XVIII)


In the Gospel from last Sunday, you and I were bidden by our Master to take the lowest seats at any grand dinner, the place of least importance in the eyes of the world, and to embrace a character of humility and meekness to better situate ourselves in relation to God’s Grace. Our Lord, using the Parable of the Wedding Feast, intended to teach us that Divine mercy alone can invite us to go up higher into the Kingdom. He elevates only those who are humble and meek, rather than the proud and hubristic who reckon that they have earned a high place in his presence. This is practical advice of the greatest spiritual value: God alone is above all and alone provides; God alone can lift man out of the lowliness of alienation from Himself and into the presence of His Eternal Love. Man should humble himself before God and know that he is not worthy to eat of the crumbs that fall from God’s table. Man must acknowledge with meekness that he cannot save himself and needs God’s coming down in Jesus Christ to redeem and save him.

This week, we continue to pray that our hearts and minds might be open to the Divine Mercy in Jesus Christ. God’s coming down in His own Son, Jesus Christ, is a hard truth for most of us to swallow. We believe that an all-perfect God would never dirty or demean Himself with our suffering and sinful human nature. We have trouble seeing how Jesus Christ can both be the Second Person of the Trinity, God’s eternally begotten Word, and the suffering servant who takes the lowest seat in creation by suffering and dying innocently for all of us, pouring out His blood to pay the price for our sin, to ransom and redeem us, and to reconcile us to our Heavenly Father.

And Jesus Christ seems to make matters worse by testing our faith in Him. Today, He asks the Pharisees, What think ye of Christ? Whose Son is He? (St. Matthew xxii. 41, 42) With the Pharisees, most of us respond, the son of David (idem) -which is to say a great man. Christ then pushes us harder. How then doth David in spirit call him Lord, saying, The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool?  If David then call him Lord, how is he his son? (Ibid, 43-45) David calls Christ his Lord and yet it is prophesied that Christ shall also be one of his descendents. How can Christ be both the Son of God and the Son of Man (David)? Of course, this union of contraries is hard for us mere mortals to imagine ever being possible!

But our problem, no doubt, originates in our fallen natures. We live in a time when most men put material comfort  before redemptive love. The world tempts us with the need to want more because we fear less by way of riches. The world tempts us with promised treasure, only to fill us with immediate fear of its loss. Prior to Jesus’ prophecy of His double-nature, Jesus answers the Pharisees’ lawyer with man’s call to a double-love. If we would only love God more, we would not find it difficult to see how God is made Man in Jesus Christ. The lawyer had asked Him Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus answered,

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 neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. (Ibid, 36-40)
 
Perhaps, What think ye of Christ? Whose Son is he? is more easily believed if we begin to ponder the double-love that Christ himself embraces. Christ teaches us that the activity of God’s Love should be alive in the heart of Man. Christ is the eternally begotten Word of Love, spoken from the bosom of God the Father perfectly and forever. He is Simple, High, Perfect, and Supreme. But Christ is the same Word of Love made flesh that dwelt among us, that came down from Heaven to reveal God’s love in dying for us, redeeming us, making atonement for our sins, and longing to save us forever. In loving God, when He turns to other men, He loves them also. In Jesus Christ the eternally begotten love of God is made Man for our salvation.

Why should this surprise us? Hasn’t the Word of God’s Love always come down from Heaven to make and create a world full of wonder? Did not God’s Word of Love speak to the ancient Jews in His promise to redeem them? Hasn’t the Divine Love always come down to communicate with priests, prophets, and kings? Even the Greeks, in Plato and Aristotle, had sense of God’s Word of Divine Love communicated to them as what moves the universe. Why, then, do we have so much difficulty with the Word of Love, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, being made flesh to suffer and die for us? Is this not the fullest expression of the Spirit of Love? Are not our souls struck with awesome wonder when we see that the Love that made us can become one of us, with us and for us, as He lives and dies to sweep us up into the Love that returns us to God the Father?  Shouldn’t we be overwhelmed by the Word of God’s Love that even welcomes us into a new kind of Love that enables us to die to sin and embrace goodness? Isn’t this the perfect Expression of Divine Love that God’s Word comes down to the lowest level of man’s suffering sin and conquers it on the Cross? Don’t we sense that this Love is a further expression of God’s divinity since it reveals that God will not be thwarted, even by sin, in His determination to offer salvation to His creatures?

Dear Friends, today we study the Love of God in the life of Jesus Christ, His Son. He is the Love of the Father in the flesh that came to us long ago and comes to us today. In His double-nature, Jesus Christ alone is the double-love for God and Man that is accessible once again to all mankind. In Jesus Christ, we find that Love for God the Father is simultaneously the Love that does what He must to win back the love of His neighbor. Christ loves the Father with all His heart, soul, mind, and strength. This same Love is returned to Christ as the Father’s desire for all men’s salvation. The Word of God’s Love dies to Himself in earnest of all men’s salvation. Loving God with all His being enables the Saviour to die to the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil for us. Such uninterrupted love for God will then soar into glorious Resurrection, Ascension, Pentecostal Return, and Intercession. In Christ alone, we can find the double-nature of Love, through whom we too can begin to love God more fully so that we cannot be restrained from loving all men in God and God in all men. Loving our neighbors in God, and God in our neighbors will be evidence that Christ, the Word of God’s Love, is being made flesh in us.

Today, we long to embrace the reality of double-love made one in Jesus Christ, God and Man, shared with us through the Holy Spirit. It inspires St. Paul in this morning’s Epistle. There, Paul reminds us we must receive the Grace and Love of God in Jesus Christ as a gift. If we do, it will enrich us with eloquence and knowledge of every sort, as we find our minds and hearts in union and communion with God through Christ. But its power shouldn’t stop with us. The electrical current gives us enough energy for ourselves and for others. Its energy and meaning power our journey to the kingdom with an increasing understanding of a current. The love of Christ for God and His fellow men is transmitted spiritually to us not merely as knowledge of what Christ has done for us already but how Christ’s Love continues to flow to us for others.

With St. Paul, Christ’s Love, a double love, must be confirmed in us, so that we come behind in no gift, waiting for Christ’s coming [daily], which will confirm us until the end [times] as blameless. (1 Cor. i. 4) For this reason, we pray in the Collect that God might give us His Grace and Love to withstand the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and with pure hearts and minds to follow Him. (Collect, Trinity XVIII) St. Paul urges us to embrace the double-love so that we might be blameless. To become blameless, as difficult as it may be, we must love all men in Christ, pray for their salvation, and so as much as we can to show God’s love to them in our words and works.
 
Amen.
©wjsmartin

©wjsmartin

Friend, go up higher: then shalt thou have worship in the presence of them
that sit at meat with thee. For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased;
and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.
                                        (St. Luke xiv. 11)
 
We open our sermon today at a dinner party. In it we find a humble man who is overawed that he was invited at all and takes the lowest seat because he deems himself unworthy. Next, we find that the host notices his guest and rewards his virtue by asking him to come up higher. The invited defers to the host for guidance as to where and with whom he should sit. Guidance is our theme for this 17th Sunday after Trinity. For Christians, guidance is sought out by those who are meek and humble. The need for guidance is central to the building of Chrisitan character.
Of course, guidance is not a popular virtue these days. Our society thrives on self-will run riot. The situation is so bad that prerational children’s appetites are deemed more valid than parental supervision. But self-will run riot ruins self-respect. For the self-respecting man uses his powers in the service of righteousness. Self-respect demands that meekness and humility search out guidance rationally to find the road that leads to all goodness. Homer, the greatest of the Greek epic poets, called upon the heavenly muses for guidance in writing. Virgil did the same. The Jewish prophets appealed for guidance from Yahweh Himself. Dante secured guidance from Virgil. Bunyan’s good will provided guidance to his Pilgrim seeking God’s kingdom. For Ancient and Medieval Man, humility and meekness always seek out guidance for wisdom that embraces righteousness.  

St. Thomas Aquinas writes that humility is a virtue that tempers and restrains the mind, lest it tend to high things immoderately…and strengthens the mind against despair [to] urge it on to the pursuit of great things according to right reason. (S.T. II, ii, 161, i.) And meekness mitigates the passions of anger and envy. Humility moderates and secures the mind in measured pursuit of goodness. Meekness defuses exasperated rage and malevolence. The two virtues inspire the soul to seek God’s Goodness with due measure and in proportion to human life. If a man strives excessively and immoderately after high things in ways beyond his capacity and ability, he will fall flat on his face. Beware of the ancient Greek Daedalus, who constructed the Labyrinth for King Minos of Crete to imprison the Minotaur. Daedalus’ clever craftsmanship got the better of him when it became his own prison because he had tried to kill the king’s enemy. Pasiphae, the Queen, released Daedalus, who then made wings for himself and his son Icarus so that they could fly from Crete. Daedalus, chastened and with newfound humility and meekness, warned his son to fly midway between the sea and the sky. Should he fly too close to the water, he would drown. Should he fly too close to the sun, his wings would melt. In the end, Icarus became so enamored of the sun’s beauty that he forgot himself, ignoring his father’s guidance. He was doubly damned. His wings melted and he fell into the depths of the sea. Man is made to acknowledge that heights and depths are revealed to human nature to find the mean between two extremes. If man is bound by fear and keeps too close to the water, he will perish. If man’s pride moves him to fly too high and close to the sun, he will perish. Humility seeks guidance to find God’s goodness. Meekness submits to it.

St. Anthony Abbott, the founder of Monasticism, whose guidance helped to form the soul of the early Church, had his own version of Icarus’ fate. He writes that because of the pride of angels and men, the heavens fell, and the earth’s foundations were shaken. As a result, Hell was made to house men and angels whose pride had rejected God’s guidance. 

In St. Anthony’s exposition of the Bible, pride is an intellectual vice that finds its origin in Lucifer’s first rebellion against God. Prior to God’s creation of all other things, angels submitted to God’s guidance. There was nothing to tempt or distract them away from God! Of course, God’s guidance is His power, wisdom, and love. The proud angels envied God’s nature and were angry that He alone was in possession of it. Because they rejected God’s Grace-filled guidance, they fell.
Man, too, has fallen. The humble man knows because all men have sinned with Adam, rejecting God’s guidance, they have fallen from Grace. With St. Anthony, he knows that fallen man has deceived himself into thinking that he can save himself. He needs meekness to submit again to God’s guidance. Meekness is a patient and calm disposition that prayerfully knows its weakness and the need for God’s Grace for wholeness. The humble and meek must reject self-will run riot and look for God’s assistance.

The humble and meek who know themselves to be powerless over sin without guidance are like the man with the dropsy in this morning’s Gospel reading. Dropsy is edema, a swelling caused by fluid in the body’s tissues. It renders a man incapable of movement. The humble and meek man identifies with the dropsical man and sees in his fleshly powerlessness a spiritual illustration of human weakness. He senses that the man with the dropsy is a spiritual image for his own swelling sin tormenting his soul. Like the man afflicted with the dropsy, the humble and meek man seldom finds healing and restoration on the Sabbath Day. The Sabbath Day for the ancient Jews and, sadly, for many contemporary Christians often seems more about ritual than redemption. Of course, in Jesus’ day, if the Pharisees’ asses, oxen, dogs, or cats needed rescuing on the Sabbath, the Pharisees wouldn’t hesitate to help them. But how little time they had for lowering themselves to stoop down, help, and minister God’s healing power to the suffering and afflicted, especially on the Sabbath Day.
 
Jesus is not like the Jewish Pharisees. He comes down from Heaven into our sickness and suffering every day, and especially on the Sabbath Day. Jesus brings down God’s healing power from Heaven, lowers Himself to find us, to minister to us, because He fully intends to ask us to come up higher. (St. Luke xiv. 10) Jesus always wants to lift us out of our spiritual suffering and onto the high road that leads us to the Kingdom.

Today we pray for the humility and meekness that needs Christ’s guidance. We must humbly confess that we are sick with the spiritual dropsy. We must embrace that calm, peace, and patience in meekness that will allow the Lord to heal our souls. We must become humble and meek like St. Paul in this morning’s Epistle. He is a prisoner of the Lord, chained by free will to the lowliness and meekness of Jesus Christ. (Eph. iv. 1) His humility and meekness enable him to imitate Christ on His Cross. Abandoning any pride in himself, St. Paul’s humility and meekness fall down and take the lowest seat at Christ’s crucifixion to submit to His guidance because He knows that Christ alone can conquer his sin and death.

Taking the lowest seat is a good place from which to contemplate Christ and His love. The lowest seat enables us to realize our earthly limitations and to pursue more earnestly Christ’s mercy. For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead: and that he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them, and rose again.(2 Cor. v. 14, 15)  From the lowest seat, we see that Christ has died for us. His guidance leads us to discover that His death has conquered our sin. His guidance invites us to join Him in His death. We take our low seats because Christ first took the lowest seat of unjust suffering and shame to destroy our pride. Christ’s guidance will strengthen our minds against despair and urge us on to the pursuit of great things…. (St. Thomas, Idem) 

The great things we pursue is the Kingdom of Heaven and communion with our God. Christ came down from Heaven to minister to those who are sick, need a physician, have been humbled by the humiliation of their sin, and are rendered meek in anticipation of what He might do. Through humility and meekness Christ lowers Himself to die to sin on the Cross. From here, He shares His humility and meekness so that we can die to it also.

Let us follow the guidance of Christ’s humility and meekness today as we confess our true nature and need. In Christ, we can accept God’s guidance with deepest gratitude. God’s wisdom guides us into His righteousness. Through it, we can leave behind the exaggerated ego’s soaring pride to embrace what we need most for salvation. If we humbly go with Jesus to His Cross, all earthly riches become worthless. If we go with Jesus to His Cross, we wait with meekness for Christ’s guidance to find a greater treasure. We pray that God’s Grace might always prevent and follow us, (Collect Trinity XVII) because this alone opens our eyes to Christ’s love. The invitation so overwhelms us, that we know not what to expect. But we are surprised by joy as we begin to see that Christ’s guidance on the Cross leads us into a good spiritual death, beginning here and now. We see that Christ was made low, but is in truth lifted up high, to invite us to join Him as we begin the journey home to Heaven, even on this the Sabbath Day.
Amen.
 
©wjsmartin
 

Jesus did not come to explain away
suffering, or to remove it.
He came to fill it with His presence.
Paul Claudel
      
Suffering is something that past ages endured courageously and our own flees from in cowardice. Perhaps the advent of modern technology has not been able to fulfill its promise that we won’t suffer. The problem is while technology has tried its best to enslave us to a kind of robotic insensitivity to those passions and feelings that make up human nature, still we have souls that cannot help but be touched by sorrow and sadness because something in us still suffers. Modern science eliminates babies in the womb and euthanizes pestiferous old people, and yet still a mother feels the loss of her child, and children suffer the loss of their parents. Science promises to tidy up the world and eliminate what it treats as nuisant lumps of flesh, but our souls suffer the loss of real people whose lives were cut short prematurely. Technology might do its best to desensitize us to suffering, but the soul protests. The closer the natural soul in every man is to his parent, child, or friend, the less it can avoid suffering and sadness.
         
Of course, what technology and the scientists want to generate in our world is a kind of death to suffering and sorrow. And, even more, technology encourages us to treat death itself as nothing. The funeral industry insists upon cremation as better than bodily burial because the body, our last connection with the earthly life of the deceased, must be removed swiftly so as not to cause undue suffering and grief. For all practical purposes, ashes scattered to the wind are more pleasant than bodies in the grave calling us to remember lost love and surrendered joy. Burial plots are a gruesome reminder that man was made for joy and woe.  

But for Christians, suffering and death are part and parcel of an honest assessment of human life. So significant are they to spiritual development that Christ Himself consecrates them by His own suffering and death. And more than that, He comes into our suffering and death, and rather than trying to eliminate them, He promises that for believers they can be made good or redeemed into the service of new life and lasting joy.

Of course, to the ordinary natural man without faith, such a proposal seems absurd. Most men think that with earthly death, all is lost, and there is no reason to think that anything can be made out of it. But there is something demonic in this assessment. Such a view would hold that human life has no lasting meaning to God beyond time and space or that man was made to suffer and die and to live on only in others’ suffering and grief.

So, we turn to today’s miracle to find a sign of what Jesus intends to do with suffering and death. Today, we find ourselves in the ancient city of Nain. Nain is an abandoned place, bereft of any civil society, and reaks of death. Even today, its only monument to Christ’s visitation is a Franciscan Church, reserved for occasional services that escape an otherwise oblivious village of few Muslims. The village and its church seem rooted in spiritual death. So, we read that when Jesus came nigh to the gate of the city, behold, there was a dead man carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow: and much people of the city was with her. (St. Luke vii. 12) Jesus comes into suffering and death. He finds a funeral procession with the body of an only child of a widow and gathered mourners. There seems to be an eerie silence. The mourners silently respect the sorrow of a woman who is now without husband or child. The wound was fresh because her nearest and dearest were gone. The loss is heart-wrenching, and the grief must be allowed to run its course. For now, there seems to be no consolation, relief, or hope.

But it is into this suffering of soul that Christ comes. And when the Lord saw her, He had compassion on her, and said unto her, Weep not. When Jesus approaches, we must cease our mourning to anticipate His love. He says, with St. Paul this morning, I desire that ye faint not at my tribulations for you, which is your glory. (Galatians vi. 11) Christ comes to take on our suffering and death. He came and touched the bier, and they that bare him stood still. (ibid, 14) We too must be still to allow the Lord to make something good out of our suffering and death. Christ’s mercy is on the move. And He said, Young man, I say unto thee, Arise. And he that was dead sat up and began to speak. (ibid, 15) Christ speaks the Word, and He breathes in new life into the boy’s living soul, which now quickens his dead flesh. Christ repeats the word of the prophet Ezekial, O ye dry bones, hear ye the Word of the Lord. (Ez. xxxiv. 7) And with St. John, the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they who hear shall live. (St. John v. 25)

The only words that emerge out of this situation come from the resuscitated youth. The young man speaks and mirrors the thoughts of his mother’s suffering heart. Oh, if only he might speak again now becomes a reality. The young man now speaks and can declare the Word of the Lord which has given him a new lease on life and the possibility of following Jesus into salvation. The mother’s suffering and spiritual death become new life in that of her resuscitated son. Both can follow Jesus into new life. And there came a fear on all: and they glorified God, saying that a great prophet is risen up among us; and, that God hath visited his people. (ibid, 16)
         
The point of this morning’s Gospel is about far more than bringing a dead boy back to life. Jesus’ miracle invites us to consider that suffering and death are common to human life, and they are not immune to His healing Grace. Think about the widow of Nain. Like her, we must endure suffering, sorrow, and death before we can be rewarded with new life. She is confronted with a spiritual problem; on the one hand, she can mourn, despair, and give up on life because the last source of her earthly happiness has been taken from her. Perhaps she has forgotten the power of God in human life. Perhaps nothing short of a dramatic surge of this power in her son’s resuscitation would pry her out of the jaws of his death, a death that even now is consuming and killing her. One thing is clear: Jesus will use the miracle to draw both her and us away from earthly mourning over earthly loss so that we might learn to lean solely on His eternal power to carry us through to another kind of suffering and death.
         
The Widow of Nain did not seek out Jesus. Jesus found her. He, the Lord of Life, encountered a train of suffering and death and reversed its course. Earthly suffering and death will visit us all. Sometimes it happens sooner and sometimes later. No matter how hard we try, in the end, it will get the better of us all. The best that technology can do is to delay its imminent arrival. But to what use? Today’s Gospel leads us into a far more difficult truth. Christ is Lord of life and death. True life involves suffering and death. He who comes into the Widow of Nain’s suffering and death comes into ours also. If we are alive to ourselves spiritually, we ought to be suffering and dying to the world, the flesh, and the devil. Beyond suffering the loss of other lives, which is valid enough, we must be suffering spiritually and dying spiritually to our sinful selves. Only those who are suffering so that the Word of God might come alive in them, dying to themselves and their sin, will be saved.

What kind of suffering does Jesus invite us into today? Jesus invites us to consider that without Him we are not better than those suffering in sin and spiritually dead. The suffering and death that should matter most to us are the Son of God’s suffering and death. This is the suffering and death found on the Cross of Calvary, which reveals that true Goodness and Love can come alive only once Christ has suffered and died for our sins.

Finally, we return to what St. Paul says to the Church at Ephesus: Faint not at my tribulation for you, which is your glory. (Eph. iii. 13) St. Paul is suffering to die to himself so that Christ may come alive in him and lead him beyond it. St. Paul has gone through his own funeral. Christ has enabled him to bury his old suffering and dead spiritual self. But, he suffers too that others might join him in the spiritual death that is the first step towards salvation. St. Paul is being sanctified and now suffers and dies in a new and quickening way. Having put off the old man, the man suffering in sin and spiritual death, now St. Paul, with Christ alive in his heart, suffers and dies to himself positively so that others may join him in following Christ home to heaven. Now suffering and death have been redeemed and made good as the safety of [Christ’s] succour with His necessary help and goodness. (Collect, Trinity XVI) This alone can enable us to resist the lies of Satan and the false promises of modern technology as we learn to suffer gladly for Christ and die to ourselves so that we and others might reach His Kingdom. 
Amen.
©wjsmartin
 

Trinity XV
September 28, 2025
 
Ye cannot serve God and Mammon (St. Matthew vi: 24)
Our Gospel lesson appointed for today comes to us from the Sermon on the Mount. And like all the lections of Trinity Tide, it helps us to understand our habituation to virtue. Today’s lesson is hard to study because it involves our relationship with two necessities of life, food and clothing. And our anxiety over these essentials is abruptly dismissed by our Lord. Jesus is far more concerned with the spiritual food and raiment that will nourish and clothe our souls for Heaven. He insists, You cannot serve God and mammon. (St. Matthew vi. 24) Simply put, you cannot serve God if you are more devoted to Mammon. He condemns the idolatry of mammon because He insists that if we first serve God, He will take care of the rest.

Perhaps we can better understand all of this if we recall the main reason for Jesus Christ’s Incarnation. Christ came down from Heaven to conquer our sin and reconcile us with God the Father. Moses’ depiction of Original Sin in the First Book of the Bible is brilliant. Man preferred to take a bite from a piece of fruit rather than obey God’s command. Man tempted his fate with something as small as a piece of fruit. Sin is always about preferring the little things of the creation to the will of the Creator. The frailty of man without [God] cannot but fall, we read in today’s Collect. Thinking that we are strong and can decide what is good and what is evil, however, reveals our true weakness. We obsess over small things, created natures, more than over our relationship with God.

And to be sure, God the Father knows our weakness and has mercy for us. You will remember that in Genesis I, God does not abandon Adam and Eve but confronts them. He does not leave us helpless but continues to be with us, even though He makes it clear that our journey back to Him will be difficult. Man’s return to God is a journey as long as the Old Testament. In it, God’s people, the ancient Jews, spend centuries being prepared for the coming of God’s own Son, Jesus Christ. Even when Christ comes down from Heaven, most men reject Him and prefer the created things to the visitation of the Creator.

Now, of course, it is not as if all ancient men neglected the soul’s knowledge and love of God. Great philosophers, like Aristotle, taught his students that all men by nature desire to know (980 a21), and that man naturally seeks happiness. (1097b) Not all men are incurably obsessed with food, drink, clothing, and material riches. Restless men have always sought out deeper spiritual happiness and knowledge. But even in ancient Greece, such men, like Socrates, Plato, and our Aristotle, were either executed or exiled. Pursuing spiritual truth threatens earthly-minded men in all ages. Aristotle himself insisted that knowledge and goodness alone satisfy the man who knows himself and lays to heart wisdom for happiness. Even the Ancient Jews persecuted their own prophets who tried to recall Israel to God. When the Jewish prophets, priests, and kings tried to warn Israel about the dangers of neglecting the spiritual life and the pursuit of God, they too were either abandoned, imprisoned, or put to death.

The problem is that human beings are not just souls but souls in bodies. We depend upon earthly things to live and survive. But survival is one thing, while making gods out of earthly things is quite another. We acquire what we need by way of food, drink, shelter, and clothing. But we are not satisfied with what we need. We become desirous of material luxuries. They, too, however are unsatisfying. And we might be tempted to keep buying in order to temporarily bring happiness to ourselves.

But wise men in all cultures and ages know that man’s true satisfaction comes from finding God and learning more from Him about true happiness. Jesus came into time and space not only to defeat sin but also to help us to embrace a kind of spiritual death that opens a great spiritual horizon to us. Every one of us should know that sin separates us from God. For this reason, Jesus comes down from Heaven to help us to work out our sins and work in his righteousness, not only to avoid damnation but to find true joy and happiness. Today we pray for things profitable for our salvation, and such things bring a happiness that begins now and can be found forever in the happiness of Heaven.

But we do well to remember that Christ became men so that He might identify with our condition and help us to embrace His healing of it. And He did this not only to be tempted as we are tempted, but to reject sin because something more satisfying is intended by God for us. Always, He points us to life in the creation, not only as something negative and potentially damning but also positive and potentially saving! Consider the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. Jesus tells us to slow down, leave behind what we need, and open our eyes to nature. Look at nature, the flowers, the animals, and the birds of the air. We haven’t made nature or the animals. We don’t keep them alive. And for the most part, all are satisfied with the simplest things. God feeds, sustains, colors, beatifies, informs, and defines all of creation. Neither nature nor animals, birds, or fish are complicated. Each unique nature is defined by God the Father’s wisdom and enlivened by His ceaseless loving care. The birds neither sow nor reap and my Father feeds them. The lilies neither toil nor spin, and Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed by my Father like one of these. (St. Matthew vi. 26-29) Jesus brings before us the created things of this world and shows that they hang entirely upon the Father’s Wisdom and Loving Care for their being and beauty. He shows us that God orders all of nature providentially. He reminds us that the birds of the air are anxious over nothing and are fed. Similarly, the lilies of the field emit utter beauty without the slightest effort or toil. God provides for them and would do the same for us, if only we would have faith and trust in Him. Christ tells us to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all other things shall be added to you. (St. Matthew vi. 33) Faith in Christ means following Him, through nature and then beyond it, up and into the transcendent loving truth that enlivens and informs all things.

Why do we find this so difficult? We are too comfortable with mammon. Our souls have grown cold and have been dulled by the worship of creaturely comforts and earthly joys. We have been rendered slothful because we have forgotten whence we come and whither we go? Are we possessed by Mammon? Mammon is a false god or idol. We treat things as false gods or idols when we allow them to have lasting and essential importance in our lives. Idols, or false gods, are created things or creatures that might lend us some happiness and joy but, in the end, threaten our worship of the one true God. If we wish to stop worshiping Mammon, we must tend to the good of our souls.

Today, Jesus tells us that we cannot serve God and Mammon. Is not life more than meat, and the body made for more than raiment? (St. Matthew vi. 25) Jesus knows that Mammon has gotten the better of us and causes us to toil and spin with fear of losing it and anxiety over keeping it. We toil and spin because we have become so at home in this world that we have forgotten that we were made for another. Mammon has made a mess out of us all.

Ye cannot serve God and Mammon. (Idem) O how great is thy goodness that thou hast laid up for them that fear thy name. There is a loving kindness in God that is better than what meets our natural needs and provides earthly happiness. Redeeming Love enables us to feed on Christ’s victory over our sin and death. It promises to make us invulnerable to the pull of false gods. It settles the score of our fallen souls with God the Father and enables us to live not for things of the earth but for heaven. If we embrace it, earthly idols strike us as unreal and without value. We can become rich in heavenly things because their value is so real that it secures our salvation.

This morning, Jesus intends to anchor our minds and hearts in the reality of God’s Kingdom. With St. Paul we must try to glory only in God’s love. This love is perfectly expressed on the Cross of Christ. God forbid that I should glory save in Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world. (Gal. vi. 14) When we glory in Christ’s Cross, we value the treasure of His death, through which we too can die to the false gods of this earth, to sin, and through Him seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. (ibid, 33) When we glory in His Cross, we are intent upon dying to false gods and rising in Him, living in the day. When we glory in His Cross, our souls are intent upon finding all things profitable to our salvation.

Amen.
©wjsmartin


 

For I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.
(St. Matthew ix. 13)

Today we celebrate the Feast of St. Matthew the Apostle, and we are called to reflect upon his life and find some inspiration from him for our own spiritual journey. And to tell you the truth, it is difficult to give you a complete picture of his life because the historical information that we have about him is fragmentary and scarce. But from the Gospels, we can try to put together a picture of who he was.

For starters, the four Gospels tell us that he was one of the original twelve Apostles. We learn too that he was the brother of St. James, both the sons of Alphaeus. They came from Galilee, which was home to Jesus during most of His adult ministry. In Jesus’ time, Galilee was part of the Roman Empire and was ruled by King Herod Antipas, who killed John the Baptist and played a role in the Passion and Crucifixion of Our Lord. Matthew’s name means the gift of God. Matthew is also the author of the first Gospel in the New Testament. In addition, we know that he was a tax collector for the Roman overlords. As a Jew who worked for the Romans, Matthew was considered a sinner by his fellow Jews. And in addition to working for the Roman foreigners, Matthew’s profession was despised because Roman tax collectors not only collected taxes for Caesar but were allowed also by the Romans to charge interest arbitrarily. The interest the tax collector demanded was his salary. Tax collectors were extortioners; they charged more than was morally reasonable because of their greed. As you might well imagine, Jewish tax collectors were despised. Tax collectors were viewed to be about as virtuous as prostitutes in the ancient Jewish world.

So, Matthew’s conversion was going to be a hard sell for the Jews. The Pharisees were already unhinged by Jesus’ tendency to offer men the forgiveness of their sins. The Jews considered this blasphemy. Then we read of what happened to Matthew. Jesus was passing by the customs house; he saw Matthew, busy collecting his taxes and tips; their eyes met, and Jesus said, Come follow me. Matthew immediately abandoned his work, mesmerized by Jesus, and followed Jesus. Later, when Jesus was caught eating a meal in Matthew’s house, the Scribes and Pharisees judged Jesus to be one who ate and drank with publicans and sinners. Publican is another name for tax collector. But, not only did Jesus offer the forgiveness of their sins, but he promised sinners that He could make them better.        

Thus, we learn that Jesus called all kinds of men to follow Him. He was especially interested in sinners whom the Jews had condemned and shunned. Jesus never excluded anyone from His friendship. He says in response to the Scribes and Pharisees, They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. (St. Mark ii. 7) Jesus knew Matthew and understood how Matthew must have felt as an outcast and alien to his own people. And while the religious Jews might have been scandalized, this didn’t stop Jesus from calling Matthew forth into the new life. Later, Jesus even uses a parable about the Pharisee and Publican to describe why Matthew would have been more interested in what Christ brought into the world than the Pharisees. The Pharisees, as Jesus tells it, were full of themselves, proud, arrogant, and self-consciously holy and good enough. The publican or tax collector, tended to be humble, wholly conscious of his own sin, torn and conflicted between the Romans and Jews, able only to pray, God be merciful to me a sinner. The publicans, or tax collectors, like Matthew, were wholly conscious of their sinful lives, their compromises, and their greed. They were totally aware of their sins against God and their fellow men. Because they were shunned by the religious Jews, the publicans were ashamed, sorry, sad, and lost, like sheep without a shepherd.

Until Jesus passed by the custom house. Then, Matthew’s eyes met Jesus, and his spirit was arrested; his soul was apprehended in the act of his sin; his heart was taken captive by one who seemed to call him forth to find a treasure much greater than money. Matthew was caught. Jesus’ eyes penetrated Matthew’s heart, and Matthew knew that the Lord knew him. Matthew’s sin was public, notorious, and subject to rejection from his own people. But Matthew sensed that Jesus knew the secrets of his heart. Matthew knew that while his sins were many, God’s mercy in Jesus Christ was more. Unlike the rich man who couldn’t sell all he had, give it to the poor, and follow Jesus because he loved his money more than God, Matthew forsook all and followed Jesus. He didn’t flinch or hesitate, but dropped everything, left the custom house behind, and followed Jesus.

And we might ask ourselves today, how could Matthew do this? Can a man just drop everything –his job, livelihood, and earnings– to follow Jesus? I think the answer is found in St. Matthew’s soul. Matthew was honest about his own sin. The Jewish priests condemned his occupation, hated him for it, and banished him from the temple. Matthew knew that his life was conflicted and that he had betrayed his own people. To the Jews he was a Roman quisling; to the Romans he was a useful tool. And so, he must have been inwardly torn, sad, and lonely, a friend to all but a friend to none. And then came Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus didn’t judge or condemn him. He merely said, Come follow me. Jesus was interested in Matthew in a special way.

So, where does this leave us today? Jesus is passing by today at St. Christopher’s. He is looking at every one of us. He sees into our hearts. He knows that we are often torn, sad, and lonely. He wants us in a special way. He knows that we, like Matthew, have preferred to worship the gods of this world. He knows that we have divided loyalties, are conflicted, and have even worshiped money and mammon rather than God. But the message for today is that Jesus wants sinners for His Kingdom. Matthew was a self-conscious sinner who needed Jesus. Will we need Jesus also?

St. Matthew and his fellow Apostles forsook all and followed Jesus. The first Apostles were remarkable in their faith, hope, and love. Of course, not everyone will achieve their level of otherworldly austerity and self-renunciation. Jesus knows this too. But I would like to suggest that we can at least try to be a little bit more like them. With them we should try to begin to see that Jesus offers us something not temporary and uncertain but eternal and sure, not imperfect but perfect, not for the here and now, but forever in Heaven.

St. Matthew was arrested by a love that called him from the receipt of custom and into the new life that leads back to God. In our own ways, we too can be arrested and called by Jesus Christ. To be sure, St. Matthew had the benefit of being called by the historical Jesus. But Jesus calls us too from the pages of the New Testament. The New Testament is not just a history of ancient man’s relation to Jesus Christ. It is our story, and in it we can find ourselves. If we cannot relate to those whom Jesus called long ago, I would suggest that we have some real problems with arrogance and pride. By reading Scripture, we might just find that Jesus is calling us to know ourselves, be honest about our sins, confess them, and follow Him. We can learn too about what virtues He wants us to embrace. In so doing, the same love that arrested and possessed Matthew, might begin to repair, redeem, and save our lives for Heaven. 
 
Of course, if we would be more like Matthew, we must also remember what Christ has done for us. With Matthew, we must thank Jesus for dying for our sins and putting them to death. We must also ask Him to help us to see death in a new way, not as the dreaded end of earthly life, but as a daily invitation to spiritual new beginnings. We must ask Him to help us to be dead to sin but alive to righteousness. We must ask Him also to plead our cause with our Heavenly Father, and to assist through all our spiritual struggles, as we strive to reach His Kingdom.  

Today, my friends, we are called to consider how Jesus arrested and called St. Matthew. With St. Matthew, let us pray that we shall be unafraid to call ourselves publicans and sinners. Let us then be intent upon embracing the help and salvation that Jesus Christ alone brings into this sorry world. Let us be courageous enough to spend a less time on earthly treasures and temporal concerns and more time on pursuing Heaven’s riches and our eternal destiny. Then we shall be more diligent in allowing Jesus to take us, as he did St. Matthew, from sin into righteousness, from sickness to health, from brokenness to spiritual repair, and from the threat of Hell to the hope of Heaven.

Amen.
©wjsmartin
 



 

Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made.
He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one,
And to thy seed, which is Christ.
(Gal. iii. 16)
 
         As we have said, Trinity Tide is all about the application of God’s goodness to the heart of man. Our Collect for today insists upon the fact that God’s gift alone comes so that His faithful people might do unto Him true and laudible service. (Collect: Trinity XIII) The point of faith in God’s Grace is that we might praise Him. But our obligations to God don’t end with our relation to Him. The Collect continues to pray that we might faithfully serve Him in this life, that we fail not finally to attain His heavenly promises. We aim to translate our praise of God into virtue. The heavenly promises can only be fulfilled by those who have faith in God’s Grace praising Him and embracing His goodness.
        
So, we must turn to St. Paul for an explanation of faith in God’s Grace. Turning to the Old Testament, St. Paul reminds us that promises were made to Abraham and his seed. (idem) Seed means offspring. And Abraham was the father of the twelve tribes of Israel. When he was first called, he was named Abram, which name meant exalted father, shield, and protector. Abram lived around 1900 years before the birth of Christ. He was married to Sarai, who was barren. He was called by God’s Word to leave Ur of the Chaldees.

Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee:  and I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing. (Gen. xii. 1,2)
 
God’s Word promised to Abram that if he had the faith to leave behind his blood family, in him all the families of the earth would be blessed. The Word of God calls Abram to have more faith in God’s Word than in family relationships and ties. Abram’s faith was to be rewarded spiritually by God’s Grace. His relationship with God would mold and define his relationship with all other men. Abram’s spiritual wonder made him a wanderer, more determined to find truth not in hearth and home but in spiritual pilgrimage. Abram was the first to interact largely with Gentile nations for the purposes of establishing relations in anticipation of a future in Christ where there would be neither Jew nor Greek. (Gal. iii. 28) So, Abram believed in the Lord; and he counted it to him for righteousness. (Gen. xv. 6) His righteousness was the effect of his faith in God’s Grace. Abram’s name was soon changed by God to Abraham, which means the father of all nations or humanity. The alteration of his name would mean that the exalted father would become the father of all men.
        
What concerns St. Paul most in this morning’s Epistle is that we can become the sons of Abraham, in his son Jesus Christ, and heirs of His eternal kingdom, through faith in God’s Grace. The process is always initiated by God, lest we think that such a destiny can be achieved by our own good works. So, St. Paul says Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ. (ibid, 16) God’s promises were made to Abraham in his offspring, one human family. The promises would be fulfilled and perfected through one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the Son of St. Mary.
        
St. Paul emphasizes that the Law, given by God’s Word to the Jews 450 years after Abraham, could not disannul or cancel God’s covenant with Abraham. The Law was given to Moses for the purposes of disciplining the Jews, whose faith was to hope in the future coming of Messiah. If Abraham was to become the father of all nations, by faith, God’s children would not become heirs through the Law but by Grace. The Law was added because of transgressions or, as Monsignor Knox suggests, to turn our sins into transgressions, making us conscious of them as a breach in the divine law, and thus to show our need for redemption. (Knox Bible, Galatians iii) The Law was given to Abraham’s descendants to make them conscious that they were handicapped by the Original Sin that ends in death. Without faith in God’s Grace, in Jesus Christ, man could never hope to be saved by God’s love. St. Paul tells us then that the Law was ordained by angels in the hand of a mediator, following the Jewish tradition that the angels gave the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai. (idem, Knox) Moses was the mediator who carried the Law of God through angels to men. Since the Law came by angels to Moses, it was of less dignity than God’s Word of promise made directly to Abraham. If there had been a law given which could have given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law. (ibid, 21) But God hath concluded all under sin, that the promise by faith of Jesus Christ might be given to them that believe. (ibid, 22) The point is that the promises made to Abraham would be fulfilled only by the work of God to save us from the Law of Sin and Death through faith in the Grace of Jesus Christ.
        
In this morning’s Gospel, we find the theme of faith in God’s Grace continued and enlarged. Jesus says, Blessed are the eyes which see the things that ye see. (St. Luke x. 23) Faith is a kind of vision into God’s power, wisdom, and love. Faith in God’s Grace was sadly misunderstood by the Jews, the children of Abraham. Christ says that

many prophets and kings have desired to see those things which ye see and have not seen them; and to hear those things which ye hear and have not heard them. (ibid, 24)
 
Christ blesses those who have the faith to see the true spiritual nature of how He is the fulfilment of the promises made to Abraham. But the temptation is always, with the Jews, to think that the Law can save us. The lawyer in today’s Gospel tries or tests Christ with the question of what he must do to inherit eternal life? (ibid, 25) Christ asks him what is written in the Law since, as a lawyer, he would have been an expert in the law.

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself. (ibid, 26)
 
Christ says, this do and thou shalt live. But the lawyer, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour? (ibid, 27)
Christ clearly knows that no man can perfectly obey the Law and is a sinner in need of the Saviour.
He reveals this truth in the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
 A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. (ibid, 27)
 
Jerusalem is a symbol of the Kingdom of Heaven, where we all come from. Jericho is the sinful kingdom of this world. Man has fallen into the grips of the Devil and his friends, among thieves, who, as St. Augustine says, have robbed us of our immortality. They strip man of the clothing of God’s righteousness, his virtue. They wound him and ruin the gift of free will. And leave him half dead, pressed down with the death that sin brings. (Catena Aurea, Thomas Aquinas) That the Law and the Prophets do not love their neighbor as themselves, the man in the ditch, is symbolized in the fact that the Pharisee–the Law, and the Levite–the prophets, respectively pass by on the other side. (ibid, 31) The Law and the Prophets had long since forgotten about Father Abraham’s faith in God’s Grace. St. Augustine says that by the Law came the knowledge of sin but not its doing away. (idem) Christ continues.
But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him, and went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.  And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee. (ibid, 33-35)
 
Father Abraham would have found himself as the man left half dead in the ditch. The whole of his life was the story of how God’s Word, the good Samaritan, came to him with both miracles and promises. God’s Word prophesied that those who love their neighbors as themselves would be repaid in the end for their charity.
        
After telling the parable, Christ asks the lawyer,
Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?  And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise. (ibid, 36,37)
 
We can only and ever allow Christ the Good Samaritan to save us if we, like Abraham, have faith in God’s Grace. We cannot live up to the Law, and we cannot save ourselves. We find our salvation only in Jesus Christ, Abraham’s seed and offspring. As Prebendary Scott reminds us, Christianity was a reversion to the primitive type of religion, that of Abraham, and not the Law. Abraham had faith in God’s Grace. So, too, must we. Then too you and I, with Abraham, shall not be at home in this world but will prefer to join him as spiritual pilgrims and wanderers intent upon finding our way home to heaven.

Amen.
©wjsmartin
 
        
 
        
          

                 ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who art always more ready to hear than
we to pray, and art wont to give more than either we desire or deserve…
(Collect Trinity XII)
 
 
The Collect for the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity expresses a truth that is habitually rehearsed but rarely remembered. The truth it reveals is that it is God’s nature to be more ready to hear than we to pray because our condition is more often than not otherwise occupied and, thus, slothful in relation to our spiritual well-being. God hears to give, and what He gives is, as the Collect continues, more than either we desire or deserve. (Idem) The failure of zeal, alacrity, and dispatch is on our side. In desiring Him more, we shall receive the abundance His mercy and the intensity of its power. Thereby, we continue last week’s theme of embracing God’s Grace in the Trinity season. 
The deaf and dumb man described in today's Gospel is an image of that spiritual condition that neither desires nor deserves what God longs to give. The man can neither hear nor speak.  But just prior to this morning’s Gospel, we meet a Syrophoenician woman who had no problem speaking up and begging Jesus to heal her daughter, who had an unclean spirit (St. Mark vii. 25). She may not have felt that she deserved anything, but that didn’t stop her from desiring fragments of Jesus’ healing power for the healing of her demonized child. She was not a Jewish petitioner but a Gentile seeker. Jesus provoked her when he reminded her that [God’s] children should first be filled; for it is not meet to take the children’s bread and cast it to dogs. (Ibid, 27) Jesus was intent on eliciting from her a spiritual gem.  She said, Yes, Lord: yet the dogs under the table eat of the children’s crumbs. (Ibid, 28) Clearly, the Syrophoenician woman thought herself wholly undeserving of God’s Grace. But her faith persisted in procuring God’s Grace from Jesus. Her desire revealed a deep sense of God’s presence in Jesus which His own fellow denied. 

This morning, we encounter a Jewish man who cannot so much as express his desire, let alone think about what he might or might not deserve. He is in the sad and sorry state of being deaf. No doubt he feels great pain at his inability to communicate with the world around him. But there were some kind men who noticed his handicap and would help him to find a remedy. We read: And they bring unto Jesus one that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech; and they beseech him to put his hand upon him.(Ibid, 32) Jesus finds goodness in at least some of the Jews who would help their suffering compatriot. As yet, Christ cannot communicate with the deaf man. So Jesus offers a silent prayer to His Heavenly Father. Next we read that Jesus took him aside from the multitude, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spit, and touched his tongue; and looking up to heaven, he sighed….(Ibid, 33, 34)

Jesus took him aside from the multitude. Too much noisy and senseless talk from the multitude, who can talk but should be quiet, threatens the silence that Jesus needs to impart God’s Grace to us. So Jesus took him aside so that, in solitude and silence, the deaf man might be better able to receive the lasting impression of healing. Jesus does this with us also, taking us into a quiet place to treat our sicknesses and heal our souls. This man needed to encounter God, in Jesus Christ, for the very first time. Thus, in a very elementary way, He heals the man by making use of his operative senses to understand the blessing. The deaf man sees that Jesus put his fingers into his ears, as if to show him that He will open them to hearing. Jesus spits and touches his tongue to indicate that He intends to enable the man to speak. Jesus looks up to Heaven to show he man the source of his impending healing. Thus, the man knows what Jesus intends and accomplishes.

In this morning’s Epistle, St. Paul reminds us that we are not sufficient of ourselves
to think anything as of ourselves; [for] our sufficiency [comes] from God. (2 Cor. iii. 4) My Grace is sufficient for thee. (2 Cor. xii. 19) Christ comes to the deaf man and heals him only after awakening his soul to the source of the healing. Thus, this man realizes that God enables him to see and feel, with wonder and awe, as the approaching God in Jesus Christ opens his ears and unlooses his tongue. There is a double kind of miracle going on here. The man is healed physically but learns spiritually that his sufficiency, or ability to hear and speak, comes from God.
We read also that Christ sighs or groans before He brings about the healing. Christ loves us all truly and longs for nothing more than to heal us from the sad wreckage that sin has caused in the world.

No doubt, we must conclude that physical handicaps like blindness, deafness, and others come from a fallen world. The sadness and sorrow we feel as a fallen race are real and palpable. With St. Paul, we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body… [For] we hope for [what] we [do not yet]see…[and so] we with patience wait for it. (Romans viii. 23) And so, as the Venerable Bede teaches us, [Jesus] looks up to Heaven to teach us that is from there that the dumb must seek speech, the deaf hearing, and all who suffer healing. He [sighed or] groaned, not because he needed to seek with groaning anything from the Father…but that he might give us an example of groaning, when we must call upon the assistance of the heavenly mercy…. (Ibid, 2). Jesus sighs to show us that we must, with deepest inward sighing and groaning, supplicate Heaven for whatever healing we desire. Jesus sighs or groans because He loves us more than we love Him and longs to give to us more than we desire or deserve. (Collect) 

The words of other men have started today’s miracle on course to fruition. But to become conscious of the power of God’s Word, we must ask it for ourselves. Our Collect reveals the kind of miracle that we need. Pour down upon us the abundance of thy mercy; forgiving us those things whereof our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things which we are not worthy to ask, but through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord. (Collect) Beyond and more important than our earthly handicaps, our souls fear past sins and the wreckage that we have wrought by them; the remembrance of them is grievous unto us, and the burden of them is intolerable. (General Confession: HC Service, BCP 1928) When we are given spiritual ears with which to hear the truth about ourselves, we become conscious of the horror and shame of the past lives we have lived. Our consciences are afraid; they tremble before the presence of Almighty God. In the presence of God’s Word, Jesus Christ, we pray for those good things which we are not worthy to ask. (Collect) We do not deserve to hear, and yet God desires to open our ears. We are ashamed to speak, and yet His Word slowly but surely gives us those words that can establish friendship with Him.

Jesus says Ephphatha, that is, Be opened. And straightway his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain. (St. Mark vii. 35) Jesus hears the Word of the Father and speaks His Word. The man now can both hear and speak. The deep impression of God’s heartfelt desire for his salvation now opens his heart to follow Jesus.  

And he charged them that they should tell no man….(Ibid, 36, 37) The new miracle will take time to perfect. Without any fanfare or boasting, we must patiently allow God’s Word made flesh, Jesus Christ, to give us the words with which to approach Him. Perhaps, we are deaf to God’s Word and cannot speak His truth. But Jesus knows all this and wants to help us to learn to speak with Him. Ephphatha, Be Opened, Jesus says. Jesus longs to open the ears of our souls so that we might begin to desire what we don’t deserve but what He insists that we should learn to have.

In the simplest of terms, we begin to hear Christ’s words, Come follow me. Christ calls us to follow Him quietly in the journey up to His Cross. There, we shall see and hear how He offers Himself completely to us. There we shall see and hear how quiet He becomes as the whole world turns on Him. Of course, He isn’t deaf to the accusations of sinful men. Rather, He knows that they are deaf to God’s Word and so cannot speak the truth. So, He is intent upon accomplishing His own work as God’s Word, made flesh, spoken and shared to be heard by those who, in faith, will hear and understand the meaning for salvation. Then, with redeemed words, because we have heard, we shall exclaim, He hath done all things well: he maketh both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak. (Ibid, 37)
Amen.
©wjsmartin

And he spake this parable unto certain which trusted in themselves
that they were righteous, and despised others.
(St. Luke xviii. 9)
 
         The Lectionary for Trinity Tide is rooted in love of God, duty towards God, and the Grace that enables us to love God and do our duty. On the 11th Sunday after Trinity we are taught the tools to embrace God’s Grace. The Gospel exhorts us to conquer pride and embrace humility. Pride is the deadliest of all the mortal sins and threatens to land us in Hell Fire and Damnation. Humility is the chief of all virtues, which opens our souls to God’s Grace. Humility must conquer all pride if we hope to reach the Kingdom of Heaven. Pride is a difficult habit to shake. Humility is an equally hard habit to acquire. Aristotle reminds us that we become good by doing good things. His point is that we must form and practice good habits.
        
In this morning’s Gospel, Christ shares a parable with us to reveal the cause for either pride or humility. He pictures the vice and the virtue in two very different men. We read that two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a Publican. (ibid, 10) We shall learn much from the way that each man prays. Their words will indicate where their souls are in relation to God.
Jesus tells us about the first man, a Pharisee.

The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess. (ibid, 11,12)
 
That the Pharisee is standing should not surprise us. Both ancient Jews and Christians stood to pray; kneeling was a later custom in the Western Church. But the Pharisee here takes his stand to pray. (Notes on the Parables, Ch. 29) No doubt, he chose a place of prominence so that others might see and notice him at prayer. He is much like contemporary Christians who have their seat in church, front and center, marked out for prominence, so that people may see how important they imagine themselves to be. The Pharisee segregates himself from all others, at a noticeable distance from all immoral and unclean sinners who must pray in the back. The Pharisee is full of pride. Pride is superbia in Latin and means haughtiness or pomposity. We hear about it in his words. God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are. (ibid, 11) The Pharisee considers himself to be better than and superior to all other men. He doesn’t measure his life against God’s perfect purity but in relation to other men. Since he is unconscious of any sin that would need any mercy, he thanks God that he is not a sinner. God is his cheerleader who is called in to bless his good life. Like all proud and arrogant men, he vaunts himself and boasts, to convince himself of his own goodness. I thank thee that I am not as the rest of men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this Publican. (idem) He judges himself in comparison to notorious sinners. He notices the Publican at the back of the church and is sure that he is not as sinful as he. Because the Publican looks down and beats his breast, the Pharisee concludes that sins must be notorious.
        
If that wasn’t enough, the Pharisee will not only tell us what sins he never commits but what virtues he exemplifies. I fast twice in the week (ibid, 12). More than Moses’ fasting once a year on the Day of Atonement, the Pharisee does better. I give tithes of all that I possess. (idem) He gives not only one-tenth of his produce and cattle, but he even gives gold. The Pharisee thinks himself not just good but very good. He is determined to hide any hint of weakness or sin from all other men, from himself, and from God. He is full of arrogant hubris, or pride. At the root of his soul, we surmise that he must be a very insecure person. Insecure people have to count up and calculate evidence of their quantitative goodness.

Next, we see the Publican. And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner. (ibid, 13) The Publican has nothing to count up. He has little to say on his own behalf. He can lift neither his head nor his hands up to Heaven. He is full of remorse and sadness because he knows himself to be a sinner in need of God’s Grace. He reminds us of the prophet Ezra.
O my God, I am ashamed and blush to lift up my face to thee, my God: for our iniquities are increased over our head, and our trespass is grown up unto the heavens. (Ezra ix. 6)
 
His sins are too many to name. He is honest about himself and the condition of his soul. He dares not count up any good deeds because, still, he could be so much better and needs to perfect so much more virtue. Father, I have sinned against Heaven and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son. (St. Luke xv. 21) Compared to what God expects of him, he has failed. In the presence of God, he is worm and no man; the very scorn of men and outcast of the people. (Ps. xxii. 6) He judges himself by God alone and cannot compare himself with all other men. From God alone he begs mercy, because from God alone can he find Grace to help in time of need. (Hebrews iv. 6) He has humbled himself under the Mighty Hand of God. (1 Peter v. 6) His prostration in humility alone can open to the door of God’s healing. He stood afar off, not because he was forbidden to come closer, for he was a Jew. His own humility keeps him at a distance from the front rows of the church because that might make him proud and arrogant. To come up higher or take a prominent seat is God’s alone to give. He smote upon his breast, knowing that God should smite him into Hell. He is not insecure but honest. He cannot tell us how good he is since in relation to God he is a sinner. But he does not despair. As far from God as he has traveled, still he pleads for God’s mercy.
        
Jesus tells us that this man, the Publican, went down to his house justified (ibid, 14) and not the Pharisee. Justified means made right with God. Went down to his house means having received the forgiveness of God in time and space, and not only in Heaven. This man was justified as forgiven and, thus, senses the inward presence of God’s Grace.
        
The virtue of humility is reinforced by St. Paul in today’s Epistle. He writes, For I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. (1 Cor. xv. 9) St. Paul was originally a proud Pharisee who also persecuted Christians. More than just comparing himself with the Publicans as their superior, he persecuted them. The Publican is a model for the humble Christian who absolutely needs God’s Grace. St. Paul rounded Christians up for persecution and even consented to their deaths. (Acts viii. 1) Of course, eventually, Christ finally slew Paul in the spirit, on the Road to Damascus. This Pharisee of the Pharisees would be thrown off the high horse of his own pride. This Pharisee of the Pharisees would discover humility. Paul would have to be humbled to become a true Christian. He tells us that
But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me. (ibid, 10)
 
Finally, St. Paul embraced the Grace of God like today’s publican. Only God’s Grace could make Paul good. He was justified, or made right with God, only once he realized that his self-conscious righteousness must be put to death. His humility enabled him to receive God’s Grace. St. Paul, with today’s Publican, knew that humility alone can pray
Mercifully grant unto us such a measure of thy Grace, that we, running the way of thy commandments, may obtain thy gracious promises, and be made partakers of thy heavenly treasure.
(Collect: Trinity XI)
 
God’s Grace alone enables us to move and even run in the way of His commandments. God’s Grace alone begins to bring His promises to life in our hearts. God’s Grace alone showers us with heavenly treasures. We must pray for this Grace. But first, with today’s Publican, we must sit at the back of the church, beat our breasts, confess our sins, claim no goodness, compare ourselves with no other men, but admit who and what we are in the presence of God’s perfect purity. Only then can the sweet forgiveness of God pass from Him to us as the gift of love for our salvation. God be merciful to me a sinner.

Amen.
©wjsmartin

Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when ye fail,
they may receive you into everlasting habitations.
(St. Luke xvi. 9)     
 
In last week’s Gospel, we prayed that God’s never-failing providence that ruleth all things both in heaven and in earth [might] put away from us all hurtful things and [might] give to us those things which are profitable (Collect: Trin. VIII) for our salvation. And this week Jesus shows us how God’s providence demands stewardship and responsibility. Through the Parable of the Unjust Steward, Christ commends the virtue of prudence for our consideration.
         
The Parable of the Unjust Steward tells how the steward of a rich man’s treasure has been accused of wasting his master’s goods and mismanaging his estate. The rich man summons his employee to call him to account. How is it that I hear this of thee? Give an account of thy stewardship; for thou mayest be no longer steward. (St. Luke xvi. 2) The rich man has discovered a truth about his steward that shocks him. He placed great trust in his steward only to learn that his monies have been misused. The employee is struck dumb with fear over what his master has learned and what steps he might take. He can make no excuse for his sin. So, he says to himself, What shall I do? For my lord taketh away from me the stewardship: I cannot dig; to beg I am ashamed. (Ibid, 3) Digging ditches will not make him right with his lord. Begging will likewise only humiliate him. He has a good mind and so intends to make right with his master.

I am resolved what to do, that, when I am put out of the stewardship, they may receive me into their houses. So he called every one of his lord’s debtors unto him, and said unto the first, How much owest thou unto my lord? And he said, An hundred measures of oil. And he said unto him, Take thy bill, and sit down quickly, and write fifty. Then said he to another, And how much owest thou? And he said, An hundred measures of wheat. And he said unto him, Take thy bill, and write fourscore. 
                                                                                                   (Ibid, 4-7)

Though he has failed to manage the rich man’s business properly in the past, he will nevertheless use prudence to make up for his corruption by calling in some portion of his master’s debts. So, he makes a deal with others who have loans with his master to repay what they can. He ends up collecting fifty percent of what one man owed, eighty percent from another, and returns to give an account of his stewardship. So, the lord commended the unjust steward because he had done wisely. For the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light. (Ibid, 8) He has used unrighteous mammon and made friends through it to win back some favor with his lord. He has made friends through the mammon of unrighteousness (Ibid, 9) that his employer might show some mercy and forgiveness.
          
But what does Jesus mean when he says that in this instance the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light? (Ibid, 8) And why does He say that we are to make us friends with the mammon of unrighteousness? (Ibid, 9) It seems contrary to His habitual claim that ye cannot serve God and Mammon. (St. Matthew vi. 24) First, Jesus is not commending the children of this world’s wisdom absolutely. He is making a comparison to exhort us to use prudence. Insofar as the children of this world are prudent in their use of earthly mammon, they are to be commended. If mammon is king, they are prudent in finding ways to rescue themselves from the misuse of it. The children of this world are wiser [or more prudent] in their generation [or in their worldly things] than the children of light are in heavenly things, as Archbishop Trench writes. (Notes on Parables: Chapter xxv) Unrighteous mammon is a term used to describe material wealth. In the Parable, Jesus suggests that the prudence of the unjust steward is a virtue to be imitated. Of course, it is not the unjust steward’s end, his own earthly occupation, that interests Jesus. It is the prudence used in calling in his master’s material debts to regain favor with his earthly master. The unjust steward is still unjust, and the unrighteous mammon is a real threat to the greatest treasure to be found in Heaven. It is false mammon, ‘the meat that perishes’, the riches of this world, perishing things that disappoint those who raise their expectations from them. (M. Henry. Comm. Luke xvi.) But Jesus does insist that worldly men are more prudent over earthly and temporal mammon than Christians are in acquiring its heavenly equivalent. Again, with Trench, [here] the children of light [are] thus rebuked that they give not half the pains to win heaven which ‘the children of this world’ do to win earth. (Idem)
        
Our Gospel concludes with Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations. (Ibid, 9) Jesus is concerned here not with the unjust steward but with just one. Something greater than what the unjust steward did must be learned by those who would be just stewards of God’s Grace. The unjust steward made friends with unrighteous mammon such that his master’s debtors were relieved and benefited of their earthly debt to his lord and would receive him into their houses because of his prudence. So, too, the just steward can have a friendship with unrighteous mammon that is spiritually sound, using earthly and temporal riches properly so that those whom he has helped might welcome him into the kingdom because of his spiritual prudence.

It turns out that unrighteous mammon figures prominently in the economy of our salvation. Because the love of money tempts all men as a chief source of damnation, we must come to understand the meaning of making friends with the mammon of unrighteousness. William Tyndale writes:
‘Make you friends of the unrighteous mammon;’ that is, shew your faith openly, and what ye are within the heart, with outward giving and bestowing your goods on the poor, that ye may obtain friends; that is, that the poor, on whom thou hast shewed mercy, may at the Day of Judgment testify and witness of thy good works…that thy faith…in thy heart before God, may there appear by thy fruits openly to all men. (W. Tyndale, The Parable of the Wicked Mammon)
 
The prudence in the parable restores the unjust steward to his lord or master. Jesus encourages us to translate the unjust steward’s prudence into Christian prudence. St. Thomas Aquinas tells us that prudence is the application of right reason to action. Prudence is a virtue that makes its possessor good and his work good also. (ST: II, ii, 47, 4) Right reason will make us and others good. A prudent man, knowing the danger of using unrighteous mammon for selfish purposes, nevertheless uses reason to befriend it and make good use of it. Jesus says that he that is faithful in that which is least, is also faithful also in much. (Ibid, 10) Prudence knows that unrighteous mammon is the least of riches, to be used only as it aids the pursuit of heavenly treasure. We can use unrighteous mammon to help the poor without resentment and bitterness to reveal to them that our chief end is seeking first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. (Matt. vi. 33) In helping others, we can make friends for Christ. Charity and generosity will overcome other men’s basic needs so that their souls can join ours in laboring [spiritually] not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life. (St. John vi. 27)

The prudent spiritual man, like the unjust steward, acknowledges his imperfect stewardship and will be determined to make right with his Master, God. The prudent spiritual man knows himself as always an unjust [spiritual] steward of God’s gifts because he is fallen. He knows that he can never repay His Master for God’s Grace and Mercy. Like today’s unjust steward, he pleads for patience and mercy from the Lord. Like the prudent unjust steward, he will help his neighbors, now with unselfish motives, because together they seek the treasure of Heaven.
Prudence is the spirit to think and do always such things that are right and what enables us to live according to [God’s] will by His Grace. (Collect: Trinity IX) Prudence is also the right reason that discerns that the Devil will tempt us to dig ditches or beg, indulging self-pity and despair. This morning, St. Paul reminds us that  

There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it. (1 Cor. X. 13)
 
Prudence opens our hearts to the Lord Jesus Christ in prayer as we plead His Grace to fight off the temptation to worship mammon. Prudence, using right reason, knows that the temptation to worship mammon is common to all men. Prudence remembers that God’s Grace will always provide a way to escape. Earthly prudence enables us to consider our fallen natures realistically and to remember that by God’s Grace we can use our earthly principles in our spiritual quest after God and His goodness. As we put our old friend mammon in his proper place and imitate the diligent and determined prudence of the unjust steward, we shall put today’s parable to work in our lives.  

Amen.
©wjsmartin  
 

O God whose never-failing providence ordereth all things
both in heaven and earth, we humbly beseech thee to put away
from us all hurtful things, and to give us those things that be
profitable for us…
(Collect: Trinity VIII)

We concluded last week’s sermon with an exhortation to zeal. Having learned that the Divine desire for all men is that they faint not but rather feed continually on the living Word of God, we opened our souls to the ongoing nutriment that overcomes sloth. With zeal, we prayed: graft in our hearts the love of thy name, increase in us true religion, nourish us with all goodness, and…keep us in the same. With zeal, we prayed that the providence that ordereth all things in heaven and in earth, might rule our hearts and souls.

But what is this never-failing providence that we pray should overcome things hurtful to our pious zeal? Providence comes to us from the Latin providentia, and it means looking for or seeing into. In former times the word was used to describe God’s knowledge of all things – past, present, and future – in the eternal now of His perfect vision. Some theologians used it to defend Divine Grace against the claims of free will. The doctrine of Divine providence insists that God knows everything in every age in His eternal now. Perhaps a simpler way of putting it is that nothing ever has or ever will escape His all-penetrating knowledge. Nothing escapes God’s knowing, because his never-failing providence orders all things in heaven and earth. Whether men acknowledge it or not, God’s knowledge is the cause of all created possibilities. What happens in the universe is always subject to God’s will. Even evil itself –a rejection of God’s Wisdom and Will, much to its own rage and resentment – is a product of the Divine Logic.

Now, to be sure, we might find this view of Divine Providence not a little bit disconcerting and intimidating. The all-seeing eye of God makes us nervous. And well it should. Postmodern, materialistic Christians are too apt to treat God like Santa Claus. They fancy that God’s chief role in the universe is to ensure earthly comfort. Of course, what they have forgotten is that God made things of the earth to better perfect our knowledge of and desire for heaven. Knowing what things are and for what purpose helps us see them as temporary means to an eternal end. Earthly comfort must never be our end.

Earthly temporal happiness is not what God intends for us to be consumed with in this life. God’s all-seeing eye knows the devices and desires of our own hearts, or our intentions and motives. Not only does He know, but He judges. What does He judge? He judges whom we love or what gods define our lives. God is nothing if not fair. St. Paul reminds us: Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting. (Gal. vi. 7,8) What man sows means the seeds we plant and grow for our happiness. If we are bound by earthly happiness, we sow the seeds of temporary comfort. If we intend to reach heaven, we sow the seeds of eternal joy.

The choice is ours. It would be a pity if we neglected salvation for our own selfish desires. After all, Hell is forever. What we should be working on, then, is our knowledge and desire. What I mean is that we should discover what things are and how they might affect us. Next, we must learn how to use them appropriately. Put away from us all hurtful things and give us those things which are profitable for our salvation. Providence, again, is God’s Wisdom that reveals to us what created things are and for what purposes God intends for us to use them.

The Old Testament authors tell us that man best begin to open to Divine Providence through the fear of the Lord. All wisdom cometh from God and is with Him forever. (Ecclus. i. 1) We ought to fear God’s Wisdom or knowledge. This means that in awesome wonder, we ought to be reminded that God knows perfectly how created things can be used in His service or not. Air is necessary for ongoing life. Fire is made to rise and to heat. Water is made to nourish and fertilize or to cleanse and to purge. Man is made to know also that air can contaminate, fire can burn, and that water can drown. Knowledge of other things should give us reason for caution also. The fear of the Lord is that healthy virtue that puts created things to heavenly use. Whoso feareth the Lord, it shall go well with him at the last. (Ecclus. i.  14) The fear of the Lord is a salutary reminder that we ought to use the creation only in God’s service to better enable our souls to worship Him. God has made us for Himself. I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones. (Isaiah lvii. 15) The fear of the Lord engenders humility and lifts us into God’s presence. Humility of heart knows the truth and intends to will the best. The fear of the Lord is to hate evil: pride, and arrogancy, and the evil way, and the froward mouth, do I hate, [saith the Lord]. (Prov. viii. 13) Pride, arrogance, and evil ways disregard God’s role as judge of all we worship and do.

God’s providence is His Divine Wisdom. St. Thomas Aquinas, quoting Aristotle, sets it as man’s proper end. The name of the wise man is reserved for him whose consideration is directed to the end of the universe, which is also the origin of the universe. That is why, according to the Philosopher, it belongs to the wise man to consider the highest causes. (SCG i. 1) The wise man finds his beginning and end in God’s Wisdom. The wise man knows that it belongs to the gift of wisdom to judge according to the Divine Truth. (Eth. i. 3, ST, ii, ii, xlv. 1) Of course, the pattern and model of the wise man has been given to us in the life of our Jesus Christ. In Christ, we find the Divine Wisdom ordering human life perfectly. And God intends that His Wisdom should rule us also. He teaches us that we should be debtors not to the flesh, to live after the flesh. (Romans viii. 12). Rather, the Divine providence intends that we should be illuminated and liberated by Christ the power of God and the Wisdom of God. (1 Cor. i. 24), remembering that if we through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, we shall live. (Romans viii. 13) Wisdom intends that we should live for salvation. In this morning’s Gospel, the wise man is compared to a good tree that bringeth forth good fruit. (St. Matthew vii. 17) The good tree bears good fruit because we have welcomed the planting of God’s Word in our souls. God’s Word, or Wisdom, intends to bear fruit in our souls meet for salvation.

So, this morning we must ask ourselves some hard questions. Do I humble myself before the never-failing providence that orders all things in heaven and earth? If not, why not? Is my intention one with God’s intention for me? Do I want to be saved for eternal bliss and happiness? Do I remember that I was born to be a child of God forever? As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. (Romans viii 14) Proverbs reminds us that the Spirit of Wisdom cries after us. How long, ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity? And fools hate knowledge? Turn you at my reproof: behold, I will pour out my Spirit unto you, I will make known my words unto you. (Proverbs i. 21-23)

God’s Wisdom is a rebuke to our hellish designs. But as William Law never tired of writing, submission to Divine correction requires good intention. If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God first, it will in the end make no difference what you have chosen instead. We must intend to please God in all our lives. (A Serious Call…) Any difficulty with it must never dissuade us. Last week’s zeal must be adjusted to God’s Wisdom in Jesus Christ to give us courage with humility, because we intend to reach His Kingdom above all else.
Amen.
©wjsmartin
 

 Graft in our hearts the love of thy name, increase in us
true religion, nourish with all goodness, and of thy great mercy
keep us in the same.
(Collect: Trinity VII)
 
         
When we read the Epistles of St. Paul, you cannot help but come away with a sense of the Apostle’s uncanny ability to unite spiritual contraries to make his point. Perhaps this is a natural consequence of his momentous conversion, when, in a fit of zealous hot pursuit of Damascene Christians, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, he was thrown down from the high horse of his feverish pride onto the dry and desolate road of his own sinful undoing. Paul the zealot, Paul the Pharisee, Paul the persecutor of Christians endured an extreme turnabout or volte-face of his entire character. He who thought he understood all things, was three days without sight, and neither did eat nor drink. (Acts. ix 9) He who by the law judged that his righteousness gave him license to hunt sinners, became the sinner whom Christ hunted. One man, slowly but surely, became another. In time, the zeal with which he persecuted Christ became that zeal for all men’s conversion to Him. His zeal became contagious because his life testified to the power of the love of Jesus. Jesus used him as [His] chosen instrument to proclaim [His] name to the Gentiles,… their kings,… and to the people of Israel. (Acts ix. 15)    
          
Zeal is the virtue opposite to sloth. Sloth is a mortal sin, and it is to that sin that we must turn before considering the zeal that we must embrace. You might think it odd that we must study sloth today, since it seems to contradict St. Paul’s zeal before and after his conversion. In the Gospel, we read that a great multitude of people had been following Jesus for three days in the wilderness. (St. Mark viii. 2) With zeal they had been pursuing the truth that they found in Christ; with zeal they hoped that He was the promised Saviour. Like St. Paul, their zeal was the passion that comes from seeking the truth in Christ for salvation. Because of their zeal, the multitude in today’s Gospel were willing to fast as they fed on the Word of Jesus. Because of their zeal, their fast was endured with neither regret nor resentment. So intent were they upon the pursuit of their spiritual good that physical nutriment was ignored, if not entirely forgotten.  
         
But Jesus, perceiving an imminent danger, says, I have compassion on the multitude, because they have now been with me three days, and have nothing to eat: And if I send them away fasting to their own houses, they will faint by the way: for divers of them came from far. (St. Mark viii. 2, 3) Jesus comes not to destroy human nature but to redeem it. He intends to bring to completion the good work which he has begun in them. (Phil. i. 6) They are in danger of fainting. To faint in Scripture means to fall by the wayside spiritually, to lose spiritual steam, and to become weak, languid, exhausted, and feeble. To faint means to lose one’s zeal. Men faint when they are hungry. One who faints has a faith that is in danger of dying and whose pious zeal might wither because the body needs food. Jesus knows the danger that looms in the hearts of those who are pursuing Him with zeal. The author of Proverbs says, if a man faint in the day of adversity, his strength is small. (Prov. xxiv. 10) Adversity here might be as basic as physical exhaustion, hunger, or thirst – the heat of the day. Should the soul’s good be pursued at the expense of the body, the earnest pilgrim might faint, fail, and fall away from Christ. He might be overwhelmed by sloth.
          
Potential fainting that threatens those who have followed Jesus into the wilderness is a temptation to sloth. Sloth is one of the Seven Mortal or Deadly Sins. Most people identify it as laziness or indolence that leads to physical neglect or even gluttony. The body’s vengeance upon spiritual asceticism – the imminent danger in this morning’s Gospel – certainly contributes to sloth. Physical hunger from fasting can generate ill temperedness, peevishness, and resentment. But the true nature of sloth is a far more debilitating and destructive mental condition. The fainting that Jesus seeks to combat most of all is spiritual sloth. He fears that the Word, which He has planted in the hearts of His followers, might die. Dorothy Sayers tells us that 

sloth is the sixth deadly sin. In this world it is called tolerance, but in hell it is called despair… . It is the sin which believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and only remains alive because there is nothing it would die for… . It prevents men from thinking. Sloth persuades us that stupidity is not a sin but a misfortune. (An Address… October, 1941) 
 
Sloth is a deadly sin because it refuses to consider the truth, find it, apply it, or even fight for it. Zeal’s discovery of the truth in Jesus Christ might soon wither on the vine. Zeal needs to be cultivated and grown. If the proper conditions of human life are not met, sloth might turn it quickly into a superficial and short-lived fad. Sloth convinces the soul that its zeal for the spiritual good is too hard to practice. Sloth, according to St. John of Damascus, is an oppressive sorrow. (De Fide Orth. xiv) It convinces the soul to be sad and to despair of zeal’s intention to obtain salvation.
          
Today Jesus would rescue us from sloth. He desires that we faint not by the spiritual way. He knows, with St. Paul, that we are weak because of the infirmity of our flesh and are tempted to yield our members servants to uncleanness, and to iniquity unto iniquity. (Romans vi. 19) For St. Paul, sloth is born of despair, found in the servants of sin, [who] are free from righteousness and live in spiritual death. His extreme zeal for the Gospel is triggered by Christ, who is freeing believers from sin to become the servants of God. (idem) He has been arrested on the road to Damascus by the love of God in Jesus Christ. Paul’s love in return generates fortitude, as Chaucer says, that causes us to undertake hard things, or grievous things…wisely and reasonably. (The Parson’s Tale) Zeal conquers sloth with the courage to endure hardship and penance for salvation. Zeal is the fire that must continuously fuel the mind to know God and enjoy His truth.
         
Jesus fed the four thousand long ago to overcome their temptation to sloth and perfect the virtue of zeal. Then, He took seven loaves of bread and a few small fishes to satisfy their earthly hunger and perpetuate their zeal for the Word of God. Divine generosity triggered zeal in them and should do the same for us. Christ, who nourishes our souls with His teaching, will feed our bodies also if we believe in Him. In fact, if, with the multitude in today’s Gospel, we are so caught up in learning the truth from Him, Jesus might have to remind us that we need to eat to fend off the dangers of fainting with sloth and being tempted to despair.

St. Thomas Aquinas tells us that zeal arises from the intensity of love, because the more intensely a power tends to anything, the more vigorously it withstands opposition and resistance. (ST i. ii. 28, 4) Zeal is the virtue that arises from the intense power of love for Jesus Christ. Zeal increases in strength and desire the more intent a human being is in finding the truth from Him. If we put Jesus Christ first in our lives because we would learn the way to salvation from Him, our zeal will conquer our sloth. Zeal is a virtue when its energy is directed to being with Christ and persisting in finding what He longs to give. It will enable us to seek…. first the kingdom of God and His righteousness…. (St. Matthew vi. 33) And like the four thousand, we shall take no thought of what we shall eat, and what we shall drink. For our Heavenly Father knoweth that we have need of such things. (Ibid, 31, 32) All these things shall be added unto us as what strengthens the body that houses a soul, with zeal conquering sloth.
 
So today, let us qualify and adjust our zeal to heavenly ends. Let us not spend our zeal and spirits for earthly but for heavenly things, not for our own lust and honor but for God’s blessed will and pleasure. (Jenks, 274) Then, we shall embrace the gift of the Zeal of the Lord of Hosts in our souls, which will graft in our hearts the love of His name, increase in us true religion, nourish us with all goodness, and of [His] great mercy, keep us in the same, for salvation through Jesus Christ our Lord. (Collect: Trinity VII) 

Amen.
©wjsmartin.

 O God who hast prepared for them that love Thee
such good things as pass man’s understanding…
(Collect: Trinity VI)
 
          
Trinity tide is all about fertility. It is the green season, and in it we focus on God’s spiritual harvesting of virtue in our souls. The green vestments and Altar hangings of this season remind us of spiritual growth as we move from things earthly to things heavenly. Thus, we are to be moved and inspired to grow the fruits of God’s seed, His Word, in our hearts and souls. Yet the end of our spiritual endeavors relates specifically to certain Divine promises – such good things as pass man’s understanding. Today’s Collect tells us that loving God above all things is the key to obtaining His promises, which exceed all that we can desire.
          
Of course, loving God above all things is a high calling indeed. Most of us, if we are honest with ourselves, don’t love God above all things. We love our spouses, our families, and our friends more than we love God. We love our earthly riches and our possessions, with the comfort they bring, more than God. And as noble as these passions might be, they are ends within our understanding and adjusted to our desires. Furthermore, they are bound to disappoint us. Who is not frustrated with unrequited love from spouse or family members? Who is not disappointed that earthly riches don’t bring spiritual happiness? And who is not surprised by joy when he realizes that God loves us with a perfect love, never changing, never diminished, always faithful and always true? Who is not elated when he realizes the extent of God’s love toward us, in that He send His only Son to die for our sins, to open the door to His Kingdom, and to seal us with the ever-present determination of the Spirit to help us to embrace His love? On the one hand, we shall always be disappointed by lesser loves. On the other, we should be overjoyed that God wishes to give us true love, love that can redeem and save us forever. 

So, the point of the Incarnation is to secure us within that true and lasting love which can satisfy our desire to know God and love Him in return. We hope to love God above all things, because He desires for us to obtain His promises. His promises comprise salvation. And as we all know, salvation will free us from all toil and labor, struggle and sacrifice, sadness, disappointment, and despair. Salvation will fill us with peace, fulfillment, joy, and unending love.
But to have God’s promises fulfilled in us, we must work with Jesus Christ to obtain them. In this morning’s Epistle, St. Paul reminds us that if we hope to be saved, the all-saving facts of Jesus Christ’s life must be alive and operative in ours.

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. 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. For he that is dead is freed from sin. (Romans vi. 3-7) 
 
Baptism into the death of Christ is necessary for new life that leads to God’s kingdom. Christ died once for all to sin, death, and Satan. He invites us to partake of the merits and blessings of His death. In Christ, we too can be dead indeed unto sin but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. (Romans vi. 11) In Christ, we can be freed from sin and its diabolical hold over us. But to be freed, we must desire the effectual operation of Christ’s Grace in our hearts because serving sin is evidence of the lesser loves that bind and disappoint us.
        
Dying to sin thus enables us to live in Christ. But living in Christ is a call to embrace those virtues that always moved and defined Christ in His earthly pilgrimage. The exact nature of them comes out in our Gospel for today. Jesus reminds us this morning that except [our] righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, [we] shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven. (St. Matthew v. 20) He means that we must embrace a kind of righteousness that is equal in quality with God’s love. Righteousness for the ancient Jews – of the Scribes and Pharisees – was the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. This was the Law of Moses and was administered by the scribes and pharisees. It was punitive and exacting. But Jesus found something lacking in it. Ancient Jewish Law was obsessed with finding sin and punishing it. The exercise was wholly negative. No thought was given to God’s mercy and love and how they could be applied to the sick soul of a sinner to help him out of his sin and into righteousness. The Temple’s ministers, the Scribes and Pharisees, had become possessed by evil and unrighteousness in other men’s lives. Their control over it ensured their power. Thus, by the time of Jesus, the Jewish religion had lost its way. Her ministers were full of arrogant pride, and poor sinners had little by way of help out of their sinful lives. Judgmentalism reigned supreme. The system was so corrupt that publicans and sinners in Jesus’ day had come to despair of any real hope for redemption or salvation.

But Jesus came into the world to break the chain of sin and unrighteousness through the spirit of love and the forgiveness of sins. Today, He teaches that the problem with the spiritual character of the scribes and pharisees’ righteousness is that it is bound up in judging others with anger.
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: (Ibid, 21)
 
Jesus noticed that the religious elders of his own day were angry with their brothers without a cause. The Jewish priests judged the common lot of men, who had done them no wrong. And they certainly showed no love for sinful men by helping them out of their sin. They judged and condemned others. While they might have been angry about sin, they certainly should have loved the sinner. God is merciful and patient with all men. God in Christ showed the same. Furthermore, when Jesus tells us that our righteousness must exceed that of the scribes and pharisees, (Idem) He means that our righteousness should exceed that of those who don’t honor their own teaching, for the scribes and pharisees are hypocrites who tell others to follow the moral law, when they themselves disregard it, as St. Augustine reminds us. (C.A.)

Jesus goes on to reinforce his point. He says that Whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council….(Ibid, 22) Raca is tongue-murder, as Matthew Henry puts it, and cuts down other men as unworthy of God’s Grace. Jesus concludes with, but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire. (Idem) When our anger concludes with thou fool!, we have despaired of God’s Power and grieve the Holy Ghost. And it all begins, again, with angrily judging other men as evil, without cause, since we must hate the sin but not the sinner. Jesus insists that righteous anger and indignation against sin must never become unrighteous disgust of others that treats them as incurably damned.  
        
Jesus teaches us that the real threat to loving [God] above all things is internal and spiritual. Anger or wrath threatens to damn us all. Its loveless judgment, its malicious council, and its Hellish despair should terrify us all. Anger or wrath kills the soul inwardly and spiritually. When we are angry at other sinners, we forget our own sin. Jesus insists that we be reconciled with [our offending] brother… [and] agree with our adversary quickly… lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison. (Ibid, 24,25) Enslavement to anger and judgment might bring upon us an exacting sentence beginning here and extending into Hell’s eternal grip.
        
God’s wrath against our sins has been crucified in Jesus Christ. Christ brought God’s wrath against our sins to death on His Cross. When we begin to remember that in Jesus Christ God’s anger against our sin is overcome with His Love for our salvation, we cannot help but die in Him to be freed from our sin. Here is found a very good thing that passeth man’s understanding. Here is the reward of obtaining God’s promises because we have loved Him above all things. Here the limited imagination and desire of fallen human nature can be crucified with Christ and come alive to righteousness in His forgiveness of our sins. Here we will come to know that the only form of anger and judgment suitable for our spiritual journey is what we direct against ourselves as we persistently seek to conquer our own sins.
        
Agree with thine adversary quickly. (Idem) St. Augustine teaches us that in doing so we are really seeking to be reconciled with the Image and Likeness of God in our neighbor. (Idem) What we ought to love in all men is Christ’s Righteousness waiting to be brought alive by by faith in His Grace. For God in Jesus Christ wants us, through faith, hope, and love to imagine such good things as pass man’s understanding for ourselves. Loving Him above all things we pray that we might obtain His promises which shall exceed all that we can desire. And this desire for miraculous incorporation into the new life of Jesus Christ makes enemies friends and all of us heirs together of His eternal promises because He transforms our righteousness [to] exceed that of the scribes and pharisees (Idem).    

Amen.
©wjsmartin

 
 …The people pressed upon him to hear the Word of God…
(St. Luke v. 1)
 
Trinity Tide, as we have said, is all about growing in the knowledge and love of God the Holy Trinity. We wear green vestments during this season to symbolize harvest and fertility. What should most concern us in this season is the harvest and fertility of goodness or virtue in our souls. The virtue we must grow and perfect in our hearts is essential to our hoped-for salvation. But we cannot find this virtue or goodness in ourselves. Human goodness doesn’t save. Divine goodness does. The latter is found in Jesus Christ. Jesus brings God’s goodness down from heaven to save us from ourselvses. To encounter this goodness, we must press upon Jesus to hear the Word of God. To grow and harvest its goodness in our lives, we pray for God’s Grace. Jesus gives it and we must use it.  St. James tells us today to be…doers of the Word, and not hearers only. (St. James i. 22)

Of course, God’s goodness in Jesus Christ can come to us only once we’ve realized our own limitations and utter need for it. In today’s Gospel, we see a picture of how men come to experience both. Jesus uses nature and man’s life in it to generate both knowledge and desire. Jesus never destroys nature but perfects it. Today, he uses the natural world and men’s occupation in it to lead His Apostles from nature to Grace, from the earthly to the heavenly, and from pursuing a limited good to finding the means to an eternal one.

So we read that Jesus comes into the fishing village of Gennesaret. Next, He entered into one of the ships, which was Simon’s, and prayed him that he would thrust out a little from the land. (Ibid, 3) If men would press upon [Jesus] to hear God’s Word, they must allow Peter, Christ’s minister, to thrust out a little from the land (Ibid, 3) away from the hustle and bustle, confusion, and noise of human life, to be freed from those earthly preoccupations that would distract us from Christ’s work. God’s Word must stand alone with men of prayer to address them from a place of concentration, that they might learn the truth and experience its power.

Notice that in today’s Gospel, some are on shore and some are in the boats with Jesus. Some can only hear the Word. Others, who have been with Him and studied His Word, can now benefit from its power. Peter, James, and John are with Jesus in the ships.  And while the faith of both groups is intended to be harvested by Christ, or to be caught up in the net of Christ as his spiritual fish, as Archbishop Trench reminds us, the Apostles must be converted first so that they may then become Christ’s doers of the Word and, thus, fishers of men. Saints Peter, James, and John represent the Church’s ministers. The people on the shore represent the fish that will be caught up on land once the Apostles have been caught up in Christ’s Net from the deeper spiritual waters of the sea. There are different levels and stages of faith, trust, and obedience that pass first from Christ to His Apostles, and then from His Apostles to all others who would be saved. Some men are ready to hear but not yet digest. Others will hear the Word and then experience the Power of its Love.

First, the faith of the Apostles, who have thrust out from land and onto the sea with Jesus, must be tested. We read: Now when He had left speaking, He said unto Simon, launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught.  (Ibid, 4) Simon, like his fellow fishermen and unlike the crowd on the shore, has had a long and unsuccessful night of fishing. Most of the other fishermen are on the shore, exhausted, cleaning their nets, licking their wounds, and perhaps downcast at another night of failing to catch any fish. Matthew Henry tells us that One would have thought this should have excused [the Apostles also] from Christ’s sermon; but it was more refreshing and reviving to them than the softest slumbers. (Comm. Luke V) The fishermen on shore did not see much sense in thrusting off onto the waters again with Jesus. But the Apostles did. While others slept, Christ would use the Apostles’ powerlessness, failure, and fatigue as a tool for growing and harvesting their faith. The Apostles worked their bodies hard to catch fish, but when they failed, fully spent, they turned to Christ for the reviving of their souls. Christ knows our weakness, but will use our weakness to exhibit the strength of His Grace. His Grace will conquer our weakness and grow our faith.

Simon Peter responds to Jesus: Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing: nevertheless, at thy word I will let down the net. (Ibid 5,6) Peter is weak but Christ is strong. And when they had this done, they inclosed a great multitude of fishes: and their net brake. And they beckoned unto their partners, which were in the other ship, that they should come and help them. And they came, and filled both the ships, so that they began to sink. (Ibid, 6,7) Peter, James, and John are overwhelmed by the catch. They called on their partners to bear the weight of the treasure trove of fish that was sinking their boats. Where the Apostles’s human ingenuity and reason had failed, God’s Grace in Jesus Christ would triumph. 

When Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord. For he was astonished, and all that were with him, at the draught of the fishes which they had taken: and so was also James, and John, the sons of Zebedee, which were partners with Simon. (Ibid, 8-10) 
 
St. Peter is overwhelmed by the Power and Love of God in Christ and nature’s response to it. Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God (1 Cor. i. 24) is the Lord of nature and the meaning He will cull from it. Human ingenuity is one thing, but to be caught up in the provision that God’s Word yields is quite another. Peter feels his own deep sense of unworthiness as radically other than the Power and Love of God in Jesus. He falls down as one undeserving of such a gift. Archbishop Trench tells us that the deepest thing in a man’s heart…is a sense of God’s holiness as something bringing death and destruction to the unholy creature. (Miracles, 102) The faith in Peter that Christ grows and will harvest is a miracle far greater than the draught of the fishes. Peter knows himself as an unholy creature in the presence of an all-holy God. God’s Word in Jesus Christ is heard, and its power felt.

The fish that Peter, James, and John have caught are still alive, flailing, thrashing, and thwacking with all their might to return to life in the sea. Peter and his friends begin to realize that they symbolize fallen men to whom they will minister, but whose resistance, obstinacy, and determination to return to their earthly gods will be difficult to overcome. God’s Grace alone can accomplish it.

Christ catches Peter, James, and John in His Net. They find themselves 
 
in a state of Grace, in which all the contradiction is felt, God is still a consuming fire, yet not anymore for the sinner, but for the sin…[for they are in] the presence of God…[whose] glory is veiled, whose nearness…every sinful man may endure, and in that nearness may little by little be prepared for the…open vision of the face of God. (Trench, Idem) 
 
Jesus says, Fear not; from henceforth thou shalt catch men. (Ibid, 10) Jesus intends that Peter, James, John, and the other Apostles should come alive as fishers of men.
Peter had begged Christ to depart from him, because he was a sinful man. (idem) Christ and His Grace have a greater work for Peter and his friends to do. So, we read that when the [Apostles] had brought their ships to land, they forsook all, and followed Him. (Ibid, 11) The Apostles were called to be fish out of water  –to leave behind their earthly work for a heavenly catch of men. They were called to be all of one mind, having compassion one of another, loving as brethren…pitiful…courteous; not rendering evil for evil…but contrariwise blessing…eschewing evil, ensuing good, seeking peace and ensuing it. (1 Peter iii. 8,9) Forsaking all means leaving behind fishing for fish, to fish for men. Forsaking all will mean coming to know God’s goodness in Jesus and embracing the virtue in their hearts for the salvation of the world. We press upon Jesus to hear the Word of God (Idem), leave our earthly occupations, and thrust out a little from the land. (Idem) We launch into the deep with Jesus and cast our nets out for a draught. Trusting with faith in the Word of the Lord alone can sink the ship of our sinfulness so that we might be caught up in Christ’s Net. Faith in God’s Grace can flourish and bloom [only if] it is welcomed; it can act [only if] it is activated, [for] all the infinitude of its power comes from the adoring passivity in which it lies open to God. (Mouroux, p. 217) The Apostles could have returned to fishing for fish. But another miracle is at work here. God’s Power in Jesus Christ will grow and harvest their faith.

Fear Not. The Son of God alone, wholly removed from His natural glory and bliss in Heaven, is the real fish out of water. We can become fish out of water also as Christ catches us up in the Net of His death for our future life in Heaven. Being caught up into Christ’s Net, His power will enable us to be followers of that which is good…suffering for righteousness’ sake…so that happy we may be (Idem), serving Him in all godly quietness (Collect) and fishing for men.

Amen.
©wjsmartin

Trinity III
July 6, 2025
 
Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God,
that he may exalt you in due time: 7
casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you.
(1 Peter v. 6,7)
 
         The first half of the Christian Year ends with our vision of God the Holy Trinity. The second half begins from the same vision and encourages our moral effort and responsibility. In Trinity Tide, you and I are encouraged to translate our vision of God into virtue. What this means is that our God intends not only to be known but to be loved, as we desire to acclimate our hearts to His nature. And God intends to be loved not for His own need but for ours, for with His love alive in our souls, we hope to reach His Kingdom. On Trinity I and II, we contemplated the love of God that moved our Maker to send His son to save us. Our first two Sundays after Trinity involved remembering that we love God because He first loved us and sent His Son to be a propitiation for our sins. (1 John iv, 10, 19) If we love God, we keep His commandments and love one another (1 John iii. 23, 24). Then, the principles of God’s love are alive in our hearts. Next, starting today, we gain a deeper sense of God’s love as the Grace that seeks us out, finds us, and makes us right with God. Today, we are encouraged to contemplate God’s Grace as the fire of His love, which touches us to inspire not only our adoration but also that humility which will ensure its effectual operation in our souls.
        
Beginning with today’s Gospel, we read, then drew near unto him all the publicans and sinners for to hear him. (St. Luke xv. 1) The love of God as Grace is most appreciated by those who need it most. The publicans and sinners, like you and I, are those who have a natural aversion to the religious elites in every age, the scribes and pharisees in Jesus’ time, and pompous clerics in our own. We flee them mostly because we do not detect that they carry the love of God to our sorry and sinful condition. Like today’s publicans and sinners, let us listen to Jesus. For while the self-righteous and envious clergy fear what Christ may do for us and murmur against Him, we must seek His help.
        
Jesus gives us two parables. In the first, He compares Himself to any good shepherd. What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it? (St. Luke xv. 4) Like any good shepherd, Christ loves us so much that He is willing to leave His pious flock to find you and me as individual sinners. Note, our sin is never so great that He does not seek us out to find us in the wilderness of our sin. Each and every one of us is so loved by Jesus Christ, that we must never consider ourselves as outcasts to His Grace. And far from expecting us to find Him, first He sets out to find us, knowing that by reason of our sins, we are weak, confused, lost in darkness, and on the precipice of despair. The Church too often tries to limit God’s Grace, those whom Christ is always in search of for salvation. But the parable gives us hope because in it Jesus reminds us that He is forever searching for each one of us. When He finds us, He layeth us on His shoulders, rejoicing. (ibid, 5) Next, He returns home to the Father and the Spirit, enjoining them to share in His joy. I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance. (ibid, 7) When He finds us, He intends that we should repent because He has found us in our sin and rescued us from it. We need not only His love as Grace, but we need repentance, or to confess our sins and sorrow over them. Our true need is to be found by Jesus Christ. We don’t deserve His Grace, but we desperately need it for the repair and redemption of our lives.
        
Next, Jesus tells another parable, that of the lost coin. He compares Himself to the woman who has ten pieces of silver and loses one. (ibid, 8) Christ is comparing us to something of great worth and value to Him. We are so precious to Him that, like the woman, He will light a candle, and sweep the house of the world, and seek diligently till He finds us. (ibid, 9) In the illuminating light of the Father, through the Spirit, Christ will labor persistently until He finds us. The light is needed to shine in the dark world of sin, where we are lost. His determination to find us reveals the love of His Grace. God’s Grace is not limited by time but reveals His ongoing tenacity. The light of the Father is Christ as God’s Word and Wisdom. The labor of His love sweeps away the dust of sin until He finds us. With the woman, there is rejoicing at having found her lost coin. With Christ, in Heaven, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth. (ibid, 10) God’s joy is always shared by the good angels, our fellow creatures. God’s joy is personal, because, as Canon Scott reminds us, it is not we sheep who are lost, but it is God who has lost us. The loss is His, and the joy is His. (M. Scott, Harmony of the Collects, Epistles, and Gospels) Through these parables, we must see the perfect love of God in Christ, who ceaselessly searches for us to save us from our sin. Similarly, we are bidden to rejoice with Christ, to find our joy in His love for us.
        
But there is more. Having been found by Jesus Christ, the good shepherd, and the conscientious woman, we must make good with His Grace. St. Peter reminds us this morning that because of what Christ has done for us we must be clothed with humility, for God resisteth the proud and giveth Grace unto the humble. (1 St. Peter v. 5) We can only be exalted if we are humbled. And we are humbled if we recognize that God’s love as His Grace has found us to habituate us to His nature for the salvation of our lives. As He has cared for us in finding us, so He continues to care for us in giving us His Spirit, the Spirit of rejuvenation, repair, and redemption. We are not once saved, always saved, as some proudly imagine. Rather, we are works in progress, slowly but surely learning to surrender to God in Jesus Christ by heartily praying (Collect Trinity III) for His Grace each and every day of our lives. St. Peter also reminds us that we shall be tempted to sin and distracted by the Devil.

Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: whom resist stedfast in the faith, knowing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren that are in the world. (ibid, 8,9)
 
Humility demands moral effort on our part. We must be prepared to resist the Devil with our steadfast and determined faith. As Christ persisted in finding us, so we must persist in His Grace, ever determined to allow His goodness to mold and shape the new lives that He has won for us with the Father. And lest we become proud and self-pitying, we do well to remember that temptation as affliction is common to all men, and especially to the Saints, whom the Devil detests.
        
In summary, St. Peter reminds us that the God of all Grace…hath called us unto his eternal glory by Christ Jesus. (ibid, 10) In Christ, we are justified and made right with God the Father. But our justification needs sanctification. Our being made right with God requires us to say yes to the Spirit, who intends to make us better and better, having suffered a while, making us perfect, stablishing us, strengthen us, and settling us. (idem) Without moral effort and cooperation, our having been found will be to no effect.
        
And so today, we pray that by God’s mighty aid, we might be defended and comforted in all dangers and adversities. (idem) Because we have been saved by Jesus Christ does not mean that we must cease to heartily desire to pray and supplicate Christ. A hearty desire to pray is the habit of life that must characterize our spiritual lives. It will seal us until the great and dreadful day of Judgment. It will reveal that, truly, we are always in need of being found by Christ and given ever-increasing value that will move from us to others, who will, we pray, find their need for Him also.

Amen.
©wjsmartin

St. Peter’s Day
June 29, 2025

Wherein ye greatly rejoice, though now for a season, 
if need be, ye are in heaviness through manifold temptations: 
that the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold 
that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise 
and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ….
(1 St. Peter i. 6,7) 
 

Concerning the Saint whom we celebrate today – St. Peter – we know more than about the other Apostles or even the Mother of our Lord. We don’t know anything about Saint Peter’s wife, except that he had one, and that her mother was once sick and Jesus healed her. Saint Peter’s original name was Simon. He was the son of Jonah, had a brother named Andrew, came from the village of Bethsaida, and had a fishing business along with James and John, the sons of Zebedee. Simon was later called Peter. The word in Latin is Petrus, derived from the Greek Πετροσ and related to the Aramaic word for kepa, which became, again in Greek, Κηφασ, all basically meaning rock. So we read of either Simon Peter or Cephas in the New Testament as the rock upon whom Christ Jesus intended to build his Church. 

The rest of what we know of Simon Peter can be read in the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles of St. Paul, and St. Peter’s own Epistles. Suffice it to say that St. Peter was an eyewitness of the adult life of Jesus Christ, denied the Lord whom he knew, witnessed His Resurrection, received the Holy Ghost at Pentecost, and then went on to contribute in no small way to the conversion of the nations. Tradition has it that he died a martyr at Rome, crucified upside down by the Emperor Nero between 64 and 67 A.D. He was crucified upside down because he did not deem himself worthy to be hung right-side-up like his Lord. 

What is most remarkable about Saint Peter is this. Far beyond the miracles that he performed or any details of his personal life that the Scripture reveals, Saint Peter came to embrace the living Christ fully in his heart after much trial and tribulation. His faith was tried with fire. (idem) We know that Peter was full of impetuous and impulsive energy, whose passions too often overran wisdom.

St. Peter’s faithful zeal and passion for Christ needed to be moderated by prudence before he could become a true disciple and shepherd of the embryonic Church. The Peter who should be the rock on which the Church would be built had to be completely broken and ground to powder before converting truly to Christ. When later, Peter exhorts his friends to come to Christ, as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God and precious (1 St. Peter ii. 5), he speaks as a man who had at one time denied Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, that precious stone, the head of the corner, had been to him a stone of stumbling, a rock of offence, because he had stumbled at the Word [of God in Jesus Christ], being disobedient. (Ibid, 8)

St. Peter, chosen by Christ, knew only too acutely and piercingly his own sin against the Master. When Jesus was undergoing interrogation for crucifixion, Peter denied that he knew the Lord three times, and when the cock crowed, Peter went outside and wept bitterly. (Ibid, 62) Jesus prophesied that Peter would deny him, but He said also, Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift all of you as wheat.  But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers. (St. Luke xxii. 31) Satan would try Peter’s faith much in the same way that he had tested Job’s.
        
So Peter did, as prophesied, indeed turn back to the Lord; he repented, waited, watched, and finally was converted through Christ’s Resurrection and the descent of the Holy Ghost into his soul. Like the woman who bathed Jesus’ feet with her tears, Simon [whose] sins which [were] many, [were] forgiven; for [he] loved much. (St. Luke vii. 47) But St. Peter’s conversion would be an ongoing process, in constant need of readjustment and reform.
What is most remarkable about Saints Peter’s faith is that it was accompanied by humility. Holding tenaciously onto his old Jewish religion, St. Peter had to learn to humbly cede Jewish tradition to Christ’s Grace. The nature of his eventual mission to the Gentiles came only once his prejudicial bigotry was wholly conquered. That the Gentile Christians were to be treated as equals, fellow sinners in need of Christ’s redemption, equally capable of revealing Christ’s power, came to St. Peter slowly.

What St. Peter learned was in large part due to the conversion of St. Paul. Following his conversion and baptism at the hands of Ananias in Damascus, St. Luke tells us that Paul proved his courageous faith through preaching. He began to preach Christ in the Synagogues, that Christ was the Son of God…increasing in strength and confounding the Jews at Damascus. (Acts, ix. 20, 22) Paul escaped from Damascus by the skin of his teeth. St. Barnabas brought him to Jerusalem and presented him to the Apostles. Peter and his fellow Apostles were skeptical of Paul’s conversion until Barnabas revealed that he had preached fearlessly in the name of Jesus. (ibid, 27) When Paul began to debate with the Hellensistic Jews of Jerusalem, the Apostles saw that his faith in Christ was unwavering since the Jews sought to kill him, requiring the Jerusalem Church to send Paul home to Tarsus for a season. The Church was beginning to realize that Paul’s mission might very well be to the Gentiles.

At the same time, curiously enough, St. Peter’s faith was being tried and tested to align with St. Paul’s wisdom. Peter was called up to the newly established Christian community of Lydda. There he met a Hellenistic Jew named Aeneas, who kept his bed for eight years and was sick of the palsy. (ibid, 33) Peter would engage Christ for Aeneas. He said to Aeneas, Jesus Christ maketh thee whole: arise, and make thy bed. And he arose immediately. (ibid, 34) Aeneas means praiseworthy in ancient pagan Greek and carries our minds to the great Trojan warrior who founded Rome.

Next, the church in Joppa had petitioned Peter to come to them because a Hellenized disciple of Christ named Tabitha, full of good works and alms deeds, (ibid, 36) had died. The church at Joppa had washed her body and laid it in an upper chamber. (ibid, 37) These early Christians had not buried her immediately because they had hoped that Peter might come to work a miracle to bring her back to life.  Peter arrived at Tabitha’s home, where he found the mourning widows. But Peter put them all forth. (ibid, 40) Peter would not seek his own vainglory by performing before the whole congregation. This was a time for prayer and solitude with Christ. Peter kneeled down and prayed, and turning him to the body said, Tabitha, arise. And she opened her eyes: and when she saw Peter, she sat up. (ibid, 40) Tabitha means gracious. Contact with both Aeneas and Tabitha was considered proper by St. Peter. Aeneas was a Jew who was healed for conversion; Tabitha was a Jewish Christian whose service of the Gospel would continue.

But St. Peter’s faith needed further strengthening. Twelve miles north of Joppa a Hellenized pagan or righteous Gentile, a Roman Centurion, a leader of the Italian band was stationed. His name was Cornelius. Cornelius would be the first Gentile on record to have become a Christian. Cornelius received a vision from God because he was a devout pagan, who served God with all his house, gave alms to the poor, and prayed constantly. (ibid, x. 2) An angel of God instructed him to send for Simon Peter, who was at Joppa. The next day, we find Peter going up to pray at noon, overcome with hunger, and falling into a trance. Peter, too, received his own vision. A great sheet descended from heaven with all manner of birds and beasts upon it, both clean and unclean in his Jewish eyes. He heard a voice saying, Peter, rise, kill, and eat. (ibid, 13) But St. Peter’s Jewish blood resisted contamination with anything unclean. Peter said, Not so, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean. (ibid, 14) God responded, what God hath cleansed, that call thou not common. (ibid, 15) In Christ, Peter would be called to see that nothing that God has made is common or unclean, beyond cleansing, be it food to eat or a Gentile to be converted. In Christ, Peter would be called to welcome the Gentile embassy and travel with them to meet the righteous Cornelius and bring him to baptism. St. Peter was called to make contact with what his Jewish sensibilities forbade. He had to see that the Gentiles were neither common nor unclean, but as equally in need of Jesus Christ as any sinful Jew.

From St. Paul, St. Peter would learn about the universality of the Gospel and the need to go forth and teach all nations. Through a trial by fire, the spiritual facts challenged his cherished Jewish prejudices. Cornelius was sent by Christ to Peter that Peter might learn that the Gentiles would also have their share of Christ’s redemption. Peter’s loyalty to Christ’s promises made to the Jews would need to expand beyond racial and cultural boundaries. Peter needed to learn that Christ is the source of greater promises for all men. In the end, since Cornelius was commanded to send for Peter, he would press Peter for his share in the Gospel truth with a desire for Christ that would overcome Peter’s sinful judgment of the Gentiles. Peter learned that what he called common and unclean could be cleansed.
        
As tradition has it, Saints Peter and Paul would be exiled from Israel, their own native Jewish land, where God’s own chosen people persisted in rejecting Christ. Both would learn, too, that not all Gentiles welcomed the Gospel. Christ was as offensive to Caesar and the Jewish Rabbis alike. Gentile and Jew alike could accept or reject Christ. St. Peter, with St. Paul, was tried by fire. St. Peter would learn that if he would be faithful to Christ, he must never deny the benefit of the salvation to any man, be he Jew or Greek. For before his eyes the Holy Ghost descended upon Cornelius and his Italian Band, unloosing tongues that glorified God and desired Baptism, which Peter could not deny but would hereafter offer to all willing.
Today, let us give thanks to God for the life and witness of St. Peter, for his repentance, honesty, and willingness to have his faith increased and perfected for redemption of the Jews and conversion of the Gentiles beginning in Jerusalem and continuing in Rome, for the West and beyond.
 
Amen.
©wjsmartin

 
 
    
 
 
  

Trinity I
June 22, 2025
 
Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst 
thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: 
but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented.
(St. Luke xvi. 25)
 
Last week we were invited to contemplate the life of God the Holy Trinity, one God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. We have entered Trinity Tide. Trinity tide is all about belief that grows into God’s Wisdom and Love. Trinity tide is about entering the life of God the Father, through His Wisdom in the Son, and by the Love of the Holy Ghost. Our season of Trinity is the longest in the Church Year because it mirrors our lives, the span of which must be devoted to the constant and habitual return of our hearts and souls to God.
Being born again into the life of God, discerning God’s Wisdom and applying His Love to our lives takes time. In the seasons prior to Trinity, we behold the facts of Christ’s most holy Incarnation. We move from His birth, through childhood, into His adult ministry. We see that He has taken on our human nature to reconcile it with the Father through the Spirit. We discern that nothing, even unjust and unmerited suffering and death would stand int the way of His determination to defeat sin, make death into the seedbed of new life, and put Satan in his place. From Christmas to Pentecost, we study the life of Christ, which begins and ends with God. Christ rose from the dead and remained with His friends for a mere forty days. He ascended to the Father and sent the Holy Ghost into the Church. And this is where we find ourselves today.  

But Trinity Tide cannot begin without a keen sense of God’s goodness and our need for it. In Christ alone we find God’s goodness. In Christ’s enemies, namely the Pharisees, we find its contrary. Prior to today’s Gospel, Jesus has issued a warning: Ye cannot serve God and Mammon. (St. Luke xvi. 13) Mammon means both riches and possessions in both the Hebrew and Greek. It can also mean that in which one trusts. Throughout the New Testament, we learn that while the Pharisees lived austere and puritanical lives, their chief sin was covetousness. They did not value God’s goodness enough. Their hearts were set on this world and their earthly power. Their faith was weak, and they took refuge in their view that the Law brought them closest to God. They jealously coveted their hold on God through the Law, as a result, they enviously resented God’s Wisdom and Love in the life of Jesus Christ.

So, Jesus gives them a parable. There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day….(St. Luke xvi. 19) St. Thomas Aquinas tells us that the worship of Mammon is here illustrated in the prosperity of the wicked by way of temporal success. (St. TA: Hom. Trin. I) The Pharisees were rich with worldly power. They were attired in the fine and costly garment of the Law. They feasted on it as what enabled them to lord God’s power over all other men.

We read also that there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at his gate, full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores. (Ibid, 20,21) Against the Pharisees, we have the image of Lazarus. His name is mentioned because his name is written in the Book of Life. Lazarus means the one whom God has helped. He is a beggar because every poor Christian soul needs God’s goodness and pleads for His mercy. He was full of sores (Idem) because his life is forever wounded by the Devil. He is laid at the rich man’s gate (Idem) because the rich man’s gate should men the door that leads to Heaven. Lazarus longs to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table since in time and space every Christian soul needs only the fragments that fall from Christ’s table. That only stray dogs came and licked his sores, reveals that the Christian will be rejected by most men.

So, we find a great contrast between the rich man and Lazarus. The rich man, like the Pharisees, has no little acquaintance with God’s goodness. Lazarus, the true Christian, desperately needs it. Lazarus symbolizes the poverty of spirit that is a prerequisite to God’s Grace. Unless fallen man knows his spiritual poverty, he shall never be made rich in soul with God’s goodness. St. Thomas says the life of a Saint is found in contempt of this world. ‘Lazarus was laid at his gate.’ ‘We are made as the filth of the world and are the offscouring of all things unto this day.’ (idem, 1 Cor. iv. 13) If men follow Christ, they will be ignored, abandoned, and left half dead at Heaven’s gate by the world. They will endure bitterness of tribulations and afflictions –‘Full of sores.’  But the Christian remembers also, whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth. (Hebrews xii. 6)

Next, we read, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom. (Ibid, 22) Lazarus is a vision of the Saint who dies and is taken to Paradise. We learn also that the rich man died and found himself in Hell whence he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. (Ibid, 23) St. Thomas reminds us, Lazarus was received with honor and glory by the Angels. The rich man was buried with honor and glory by unnamed earthly men...only to end up in Hell. (Idem) Lazarus’ name is written in Heaven, and we hear no more from him because God’s goodness is now his treasure. The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God and there shall no torment touch them. (Wis. iii. 1) But the Rich Man, like the covetous Pharisees, is left out. His soul and body are tormented because he coveted his share of earthly goodness but neglected to see that all goodness comes from God. To make matters worse, he has a vision into the Paradise he rejected and knows that Lazarus is in a better state, having been relieved of his spiritual suffering and poverty. So, he cries, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame. (Idem, 24) The Rich Man cries out for relief because, still, he maintains his earthly importance and believes that Lazarus is now most fit to become his slave.

The parable gives us a vision of the hard truth of God’s goodness. Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented. (Ibid, 25) They who settle for earthly goodness end up in Hell. They alone who suffer, struggle, and are poor in spirit can receive God’s goodness for eternal happiness. Men have one life to live, and at death they shall be judged. When a man dies, he is either taken up or cast down. If he is taken up, he cannot descend to help his lost brothers; if he is cast down, he cannot ascend. At the end of life, man’s relation to Christ shall be rewarded with Heaven or Hell. The rich man, realizing his fate, calls to Abraham to rescue his earthly family. Send Lazarus to my brethren that he might serve up the truth to them (Ibid, 29), for if they see Lazarus risen from the dead, they will believe. (Ibid, 30) Abraham assures him that they will not be persuaded though one rose from the dead since they did not hear Moses and the Prophets. (Ibid) Even a vision of Christ’s Resurrection seldom saves covetous ‘good men’. For I say unto you that unless your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. (Matt. V. 20) We have a vision of this in Christ on His Cross where, though He became Lazarus, poor and abandoned, in the poverty of His death, He was already hard at work doing for poor fallen men what they could not do for themselves.

In this life, Lazarus was poor, but he is now rich in Paradise. The rich man is now poor in Hell, clinging arrogantly to the vision of God that rejects His Wisdom and Love in Jesus Christ. The rich man is destined to live forever in the illusion of his own goodness. He that loveth not, knoweth not God; for God is love. (1 John iv 8) The rich man, the Pharisee, could not see that God is Love. The rich man, the Pharisee, did not realize that God’s goodness is found in Jesus Christ, and
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. 
(ibid, 9,10)
 
Today, by God’s Grace, let us acquire a vision of ourselves in poor Lazarus, reaching out to Christ alone, knowing that we cannot pass through Heaven’s gate unless we obtain Heaven’s mercy, ‘hoping to obtain crumbs that fall from [God’s] table. We detect a deeper symbolism. Lazarus, full of sores, is like Christ on His Cross, longing to make His death into new life. In Lazarus and in Christ, we desire to eat of the crumbs that fall from [God’s] table. Like Lazarus, if I have no strength of will, no nobility of disposition, no excellence of character, Christ says, “Blessed are you”, because it is through this poverty that I enter His Kingdom….I can only enter His Kingdom as a pauper. (O. Chambers, August 21) Lazarus the pauper is a vision of Christ who became poor, that [we] through His poverty, might be rich. (2 Cor. viii. 9) Lazurus is you and I.

Amen.
©wjsmartin
 

After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, Come up hither, and I will shew thee things which must be hereafter. (Rev. iv. 1)
 
            
Today is Trinity Sunday, the beginning of Trinity Tide. Trinity means three, and Trinity Tide is an invitation to enter the threefold life of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. On Trinity Sunday, a door is opened from Heaven to earth, and we are summoned to go up or to move above ourselves into the source of all reality and goodness.
Christianity is a religion founded on the facts of Divine Revelation. Its God is a God who wishes to be known. (The Christian Year, p. 142) Heaven’s door is opened to man in God’s revelation of Himself. Christians believe in one God. The Bible teaches us that one God lives, knows, and wills. The substance and nature of God is one and simple. But the same God who wishes to be known reveals Himself to the minds of men. God is being or life; He is the I Am revealed to Moses. God is Word, Logos, or Truth; I Am informs all life with meaning and purpose. God is Spirit, the lord and giver of life. The life is the Father, who begets His truth – the Son, by the Spirit. The Spirit proceeds from the Father to the Son and from the Son back to the Father. Through the Spirit of love, the Father lives to think, and Son thinks to live. One God is life and thought through love. One God is Father, Word, and Spirit. There are not three gods but one God. The inner relations or operations of the Godhead we call Persons of the Trinity.

No doubt, this doctrine is confusing and difficult to comprehend. God is a mystery. In this life, we can never hope to understand God as He understands Himself. But because we worship a God who intends to be known, we must struggle to understand something about Him. St. Paul says we know in part (1 Cor. xiii. 9) St. John tells us that No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath made Him known. (St. John i. 18) For Christians, the knowledge of God comes through the Father’s revelation of Himself in the life of His Son, His Word made flesh, Jesus Christ. A door is opened from Heaven to earth in the life of Jesus.

In Jesus Christ, we begin to learn that God not only exists or lives as the Father but knows as the Son and loves as the Spirit. In Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, we come to know the Son of the Father by the Spirit. In coming to know the Son, we discover our own place in relation to God the Father, as His potential children. We were made to become the sons and daughters of God the Father. In Jesus, we can come to see and know who and what we must become if we would be God’s offspring once again. In Jesus, the knowledge of God is made man. This knowledge as the way, the truth, and the life enables us to return to God.
 
Christians believe that the God of Scripture intends not only to be known but to be loved. Christians believe that God the Father sends His Son in the flesh to repair, redeem, and return Man to himself through the Spirit of His love. This morning, Jesus reveals to us the way of return. We read that a Pharisee, a ruler of the Jews, named Nicodemus came to Jesus by night. (St. John iii. 1) We all come to Jesus by night, under the darkness of our own fallen human condition, in the quiet of the truth about our sinful selves, neither seeing nor knowing how to be reconciled with God. St. Thomas Aquinas tells us that coming to Jesus at night symbolizes that honest state of obscurity and ignorance in the Christian soul who seeks to know and love God. (TA: Comm. John iii.) In the night, Nicodemus approaches Jesus. Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him. (St. John iii. 2) But Jesus, sensing Nicodemus’ ignorance, insists, verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God. (St. John iii. 3) Man must be born again, a second time, from above, and by the Spirit, if he would know the way home to our Father. Nicodemus is confused: How can a man be born again when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb? (Ibid, 4) Nicodemus knows that he exists, knows, and wills in an earthly manner, but cannot fathom how he can be born again and live, know, and will in a spiritual way.

Jesus tries to help Nicodemus to understand what moves and defines His life. Jesus will help Nicodemus move from the flesh to the Spirit. Jesus continues, verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. (St. John iii. 5-7) As Water cleanses the body, the Spirit must cleanse the soul. As water cleanses Christ’s body, Spirit forever keeps him spiritually pure with God. Man is born of the flesh, is a fallen son of Adam, and must be cleansed of his filth by Water. Man is a spiritual creature and so must be made pure inwardly by the Spirit to become a son of the Father once again.

Jesus continues, Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit. (St. John iii. 8) Jesus says that the wind comes and goes mysteriously like the air we breathe and can never be traced or captured. The Spirit is invisible also and moves in secret, hidden ways. Jesus says, If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things? (St. John iii. 12) Nicodemus is a religious ruler in Israel who should remember that the Father informs the world through His Word and moves it by His Spirit.

We speak of what we know, and bear witness of what we have seen. (Ibid, 11) The Word of God made flesh, the Son, knows all things from the Father by the Spirit. Nicodemus does not yet know that no man hath ascended up to heaven, but He that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man, which is in heaven. (Ibid, 13) Man has fallen from God; he cannot know or will the good. The Son of Man must come down from Heaven to take on man’s fallen flesh and redeem it with the Spirit’s Love on the Cross. That which is born of flesh is flesh; that which is born of Spirit is Spirit. (Ibid, 6) Man’s flesh can return to the Father only if he is born of the Spirit to embrace Christ’s Death as what alone conquers sin, to be born again, to know and will the good, and to be lifted into Christ’s Resurrection and Ascension for reconciliation with the Father. Behold a door is opened, as God makes all things new.

God, the Holy Trinity, invites us to participate in His life through the very faculties we use daily to exist, know, and will much lesser goods. Behold a door is opened. Cardinal Von Balthasar reminds us that only on the basis of the Divine Trinity can there be something like Grace in our lives. (H.V.B. Sermon on the Trinity) Our God, the Holy Trinity, offers us His Grace to conquer sin through the knowledge of the Son and the quickening of the Spirit to return to the Father. This calls for nothing short of our willingness to born from above. Being born again means that we can exist, know, and will to be redeemed and saved by one God. The Father, who is God, lives to reveal Himself to us in the Son through the Spirit. The Son, who is God, knows us as the Father’s potential children through the Spirit. The Spirit, who is God, desires and wills the Father’s goodness in us in the Son. As such, we shall be saved by the only source, meaning, and activity capable of making something abundantly good out of our fallen natures through the intimate life, light, and love of God the Holy Trinity.   

Amen.   
©wjsmartin
 
 
 

The Sunday after Ascension
June 1, 2025
          
Ascension Tide is one of the shortest of Church’s liturgical seasons, lasting only ten days. On the fortieth day after Easter, Christ ascended to the Father. Ten days later, He sends the Holy Spirit into the Apostolic Church on the feast of the Pentecost, or Whitsunday. So we have but a few days to examine the significance and meaning of the Ascension for us.
         
The Ascension of Jesus Christ restores human nature to God the Father. Then, ten days later, Christ will send the Holy Spirit into the newly formed Church in order to incorporate believers into the life of the Holy Trinity. In the simplest of terms, Christ, the Son of God, fully Glorified as the Son of Man, returns to the Father to establish a permanent home for the Saved or God’s Elect. Every aspect of Human Nature in need of repair and restoration has been Redeemed in Christ and now sits at the Father’s Right Hand. Human life is now returned to the Father’s presence in the heaven that Christians will call home. Christ our Saviour now intercedes for us and prays for our salvation. Christ prays the Father that we might freely will to go where He has gone.
         
But back to the Ascension itself. On Ascension Day, we tried to hint at the sovereignty of Christ that is manifested gloriously in His return to the Father. Christ returns to Heaven as its Lord, having subdued the earth, reclaimed it for God, and redeemed His fellow men. Christ had secured His lordship over the souls of His Apostles, His Mother, and the holy women. Now it was up to his followers to persuade the world to submit to His lordship. His Ascension seals the fate of the universe. Christ, who humbled Himself to redeem mankind and creation, would now assert His rule from Heaven until His coming again, to judge both the quick and the dead. The extent to which His followers could convert the nations would depend upon His continued rule of their hearts and souls. Without the rule of Christ in human hearts, His most Holy Incarnation would be left without witness and success. As Paul Claudel writes,

Jesus Christ, the Man-God, highest expression of creation, rises from the depths of matter where the Word was born by uniting with woman’s obedience, toward that throne which was predestined for Him at the right hand of the Father. From this place He continues to exercise his magnetic power on all creatures; all feel deep within them that summons, that injunction, to ascend. (I Believe…159)
 
To be sure, all creatures have always felt the magnetic power of Christ, the Logos, the Word, and the Wisdom of God that defines and perfects all creatures in an imperfect world. No apple tree, no farm animal, and even no man escapes the rational power of God in Jesus Christ to bring each respective creature to its appointed end, in imitation of perfection. The apple tree, following laws written upon it by God, grows to produce fruit and then to drop seeds as it imitates God’s power to reproduce and perpetuate the life that it owns. Farm animals, in addition to providing all manner of nutriment to men, reproduce themselves to continue a cycle of provision to the creation that imitates God’s good will for the earth. Even men, as inclined to wickedness as they may be, at a bare minimum reproduce themselves, no doubt subconsciously deriving some satisfaction in the reproduction of the species. All creation follows the Lordship of Christ by laws written on their natures or with some hint of a higher good found in the desire to make themselves in their children.

But beyond this, for man, there is much more to be discovered in the magnetic power of Christ. For men who are searchers, seekers, and explorers, in Christ the magnetic power is offered from God to them for the deeper satisfaction of their restless souls, which long for union with the divine. St. Peter says this morning that the end of all things is at hand. (1 St. Peter, iv. 7) Something has been accomplished and finished in the life of Christ which promises to carry men away from their earthly limitations, their sin, their death, the ongoing assaults of the Devil, into a lasting peace with God forever. For St. Peter and all faithful followers of Christ, man’s alienation from God has been overcome, his sin has been conquered, his death has taken on new meaning, and Satan has been put in his place. For St. Peter and all faithful followers of Christ, repair, redemption, and salvation have now become a real possibility through God’s Grace. The rule and governance of Christ, the Logos of the universe, now has special meaning for man. Now the human life of Christ is offered to all men as the way home to Heaven and the instrument of deliverance. For those who follow Christ, there is a summons and call to ascend with Christ in heart and mind, and with Him to continually dwell. Thus, above and beyond the contours of human existence in time and space, man is now invited to live above and beyond himself, through Christ, in the presence of God the Father.   

But, as St. Peter continues this morning, Ascension for Christians means more than gazing up into the Heavens. Ascension Tide is a call to be born again, that we might live out a life of obedience to Christ. St. Peter insists that if we would follow Christ home to Heaven, we must be sober and watching unto prayer. (idem) And if the magnetic power of the Ascended Christ is understood as God’s charity made flesh for us, then His love must define our lives in the Church, the new body of Christ. We must have fervent charity amongst ourselves, for charity covereth a multitude of sins. (ibid, 8) The gift of charity is fully expressed in Christ’s death on the Cross, where His love has conquered all sin and made death into the seedbed of new life. The gift of charity is God’s love for us men and for our salvation. This gift is given to be shared with one another. What we speak and what we do are to reveal that the Ascended Christ rules and governs our hearts and souls. Christians are called to reveal the Ascended Christ in thoughts, words, and works. In Ascension Tide, Bishop Westcott reminds us, we are encouraged to work beneath the surface of things to that which makes all things, all of us, capable of consecration. [For] Christ is not only present with us as Ascended: He is active for us. (Sermons…) Beneath the surface of life in the body, we Christians are called to find that love that begins to return our hearts and souls to God.

As our Lord Jesus Christ has ascended back to God the Father to prepare a place for us, we must in heart and mind thither ascend, and with [Him] continually dwell. We must set our hearts on things above and not things of the earth. (Col. iii. 2) Again, with Paul Claudel, we must confess that too long in this low place, we have been the slaves of gravity and the law of matter. Too long have we been at the mercy of chance and vanity. The time has come for us to take our flight, body, and soul, toward our Higher Cause. (I Believe, 160.) In Christ, we must ascend back to the Father. Christ now reigns gloriously in the greatness of His power and majesty and desires us to have our conversation with Him in Heaven, to love His appearing, and to be dissolved into His love. (Jenks, 352) We must ask Him to begin to reign and rule as King Supreme from the thrones of our hearts. We must begin to feel the powerful attraction of Christ’s Grace and Holy Spirit, to draw up our minds and desires from the poor perishing enjoyments here below, to those most glorious and everlasting attainments above where Christ sits at the right hand of God. (Idem, Jenks) 

Of course, the Holy Ghost cannot be of much use to us until we have ascended with Christ back to the Father. We must first ascend if a suitable place in our hearts and souls is to be made ready for the indwelling of the Holy Ghost. If we would ascend with Christ to Heaven, we will have placed ourselves in subjection to Him. Christ who was once an earthly lord to the Apostles is now believed and known to be the Lord not only of life and death, but the Lord of Heaven and Hell. Christians believe that Christ is the Judge Eternal, throned in splendor. In time and space, we continue to fight the good fight of faith for eternal judgment.

Today, Christ promises us that from His Ascended Glory, He will send the Comforter to us, the Spirit of Truth. (St. John, xv. 26) The Spirit will testify or give witness to Christ’s salvific purposes for us. The Spirit will establish the truth of the Ascended Christ’s magnetic power in our hearts and souls. And if we would be ruled and governed by the Ascended Christ, we cannot remain faithful without the Holy Ghost. Christ prophesies that the world and men who forget, disregard, or reject the magnetic power of Christ, will persecute us.

They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service. And these things will they do unto you, because they have not known the Father, nor me.

If the Ascended Christ rules our hearts and souls, we should expect nothing less than suffering. Christ warns us that the pattern of suffering, sacrifice, and death is normative for those who would follow Him, imitate Him, and be saved.
        
The Ascended Christ pleads our cause at God’s right hand in Heaven. To be acclimated to this eternal resting place, we must allow Christ’s character to rule and govern our lives. Bishop Whichcote said long ago, heaven is first a temper, and then a place. A temper is a disposition. May our tempers, then, secure us as Christ’s servants, living above ourselves and ruled by Heaven’s ways. For when the Holy Ghost comes to us, we pray that He finds our hearts and minds intending to live in conformity to God’s will, ever longing to reveal to others that the Ascended Christ so rules our hearts and wants to rule theirs also.

Amen.
©wjsmartin


        

Ascension Day
May 29, 2025
 
Grant, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that since we do believe
thy only begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Chrsit, to have ascendended
into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend,
and with Him continually dwell,
who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost,
one God, world without end. Amen. (Collect, Ascension Day)
 
        
Today we celebrate the Ascension of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. The imagery is, of course, that of rising back and returning to God the Father. Christians believe that Christ, the eternally begotten Son of God, came from the Father and now goes back to the place of His origin. So, the Word, the Logos, having been made flesh, made man, now unites Himself with the incorruptible, perfect, and simple origin of His meaning and mission for us. What has come from God, for us men and for our salvation, now unites Himself with the source of our redemption and salvation. Thus, today, we must study Christ’s return to God, His call for us to follow Him, and the character of soul that will ensure our eventual home with Him in Heaven.
        
Christ’s return to God is the reconciliation of His person with the Godhead. His person, in time and space, was, of course, human, and so with Christ’s ascension we celebrate the return of glorified man to the Father. What we believe in the Ascension is that there is a return of man to God, in Jesus Christ. What this means is that man’s nature has been rendered complete in Jesus Christ. Being made complete means that man is once again made whole and one with the Creator. And this healthy restoration means that man once again can live in the presence of God the Father forever, not limited to the conditions of the creation, but with the Creator in Heaven. That the Ascension, in literal terms, is the God/Man’s reconciliation with Heaven, gives our minds an image of Christ’s return to what is above, superior, greater, better, and most perfect. The outward and visible Ascension of Christ draws our minds to what signifies perfection, to the grand expanse of the universe above our heads and into vast heavenly galaxies, and then beyond that into Heaven itself.
        
But the significance of the Ascension is found in Christ’s intention for us. His Ascension is not the record of a selfish Son of God returning to the state of His own primordial Goodness alone. Christ calls us to follow Him. The Nature of God is that perfect love that longs eternally for his creatures to be one with Himself, in knowledge through His love. Christ Himself had promised the Apostles and Disciples that His most holy Incarnation, His being made man, was for the express purpose of sharing the blessings and benefits of His life and death with those who would believe and follow Him. Having been crucified by man’s sin, Christ returned in Easter Tide’s Resurrection to reveal His victory over sin, death, and Satan. Rather than expecting his followers to honor a dead hero, Christ invited his followers to enter into the new life that He had won for them. At this time, to his Apostles, Christ

shewed himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God: and, being assembled together with them, commanded them that they should not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father, which, saith he, ye have heard of me.
 
The Apostles were eyewitnesses of Christ’s Resurrection from the dead. To them, Christ promised the coming of the Holy Ghost, that they might share in His risen life. And to ensure that they might partake of the merits and blessings of His Resurrection, Christ would have to leave them. From Heaven, with the Father, Christ’s Incarnation would expand and grow in the hearts of all men who would believe and allow His union with God to change, transform, and perfect their lives for a future with Him in the Kingdom. Christ was then calling them, and men in all ages, to prepare for the coming of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost. He was inviting them in heart and mind to thither ascend, to follow Him in His Ascension back to the Father. By ascending back to the Father, as St. Leo reminds us, Christ was not abandoning us but providing us with a more universal and sacramental presence. (De Resurr. Sermon II). In His Ascension, Christ is no longer demanding His physical presence in time and space for comfort, relief, and happiness. Rather, in His Ascension, Christ now will be present to us inwardly and spiritually, in heart and mind, in as many places as there are believers in the world. Rather than limiting Himself to ancient Palestine, two thousand years ago, now Christ promises to be present to all believers in all places until His coming again. But what is key, is that He will be present only in hearts and minds that thither ascend, rising up and into the presence of His union with our Father in Heaven. With willing desire and strong belief, you and I are invited to ascend into the presence of God the Father, through Jesus Christ our Lord, by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost. Again with St. Leo, Christ ascended that faith might be more excellent and stronger, sight gave way to doctrine, the authority of which was to be accepted by believing hearts enlightened with rays from above. (idem) True faith in Christ was to be perfected not by the outward and visible presence of Christ the God/Man but by His inward and invisible presence in the soul.
        
But lest we mistakenly believe that our belief in the Ascension is solely about Christ in Himself and for Himself, our Collect reminds us that the end of the Ascension is that we should with Him continually dwell. The Ascension reveals to us Christ’s sovereignty over all human life, which he now returns to the Father. He returns it to the Father so that we might embrace His power over sin, death, and Satan in our lives for as long as we live. Redemption and salvation are habits of soul which can be perfected in us, here and now, if we dwell in Christ. Belief in the ascended Christ will be followed by signs and confirmations of our dwelling in Him. In today’s Gospel, Christ promises that

In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. (St. Mark xvi, 17, 18)
 
If we continually dwell with Christ, His Grace shall enable us to slay all our devils, speak with new tongues in a new language about His wisdom, power, and love alive in us, destroy the attacks of any serpentine generation of vipers, and if we drink any deadly poison, our faith shall remain strong and secure.  
        
My friends, Ascension Day exhorts us to ascend and dwell with Christ who pleads our cause at the right hand of the Father. St. Paul asks, If God be for us, who can be against us? (Romans viii. 31) In Christ, we find the love of God made flesh, the love of God who died for us, slayed sin, made death into the seed bed of new life, and put the devil in his place. In Christ we find the love of God as man returned to God to prepare a place for us. In Christ we find the love of God still with us and for us in the coming of the Holy Ghost. If we continually dwell with Christ, He will repair and redeem us for salvation and ultimate union with the Father. And then, also with St. Paul, we shall believe and know that

neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (ibid, 38, 39)
 
Amen.
©wjsmartin