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