Turn ye even to me with all your heart, and with fasting, and with weeping,
and with mourning: and rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto
the Lord your God: for he is gracious and merciful,slow to anger, and of great kindness,
and repenteth him of the evil.
(Joel ii. 12,13)
 
         Today is the first day of Lent. Ash Wednesday marks the first of forty days of Lent, in which you and I are exhorted to fast, abstain, and repent. Tradition has it that Pope Gregory the Great ordered the custom of keeping Lent in the West in the 6th century and was the first to call today the Dies Cinerum, or Day of Ashes. Ashes in the Old Testament were coupled with sackcloth, and they were outward and visible signs of repentance and the desire to be changed by the goodness of God. In the early Middle Ages, Aelfric, the English Benedictine abbot, wrote
We read in both the Old Law and in the New Testament, that the men who repented of their sins bestrewed themselves with ashes and clothed their bodies with sackcloth. Now let us do this little at the beginning of our Lent that we strew ashes upon our heads to signify that we ought to repent of our sins during the Lenten fast.

You will notice that the Medievals were sprinkled with ashes rather than anointed with oil and ashes, as is our contemporary custom. At any rate, the outward and visible sign is meant to lead us to inward and spiritual confession, contrition, and satisfaction.
        
The three parts of penitence come to us, again, from the Middle Ages. What is always the greatest danger with the Sacrament of penance or confession is, of course, its relation to the external and visible world of other people. The danger is heralded by our Lord in today’s Gospel lesson. Jesus is speaking about fasting, but Jewish Tradition of His day linked fasting to abstinence and penance. He says,

When ye fast, be not not as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance: for they disfigure their faces, that they may appear unto men to fast. Verily I say unto you, they have their reward. But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thine head, and wash thy face, that thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father, which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly.

Immature spirituality or bad religion is forever about keeping up appearances. Keeping up appearances is done only in relation to what other people think about us. Jesus is not interested in what others think about us but what God thinks about us. Fasting, abstinence, and penance are done in relation to God and for our betterment. The immature Christian is moved and defined by what other people think about him, or what he thinks other men ought to think of him! Our Lord makes clear that such outward and visible displays and parades of holiness are unholy and arrogant. The true meaning of penance or penitence must involve an inward turning of the heart or soul to claim and confess our sins, to be sorrowful over them, and to make amends by God’s Grace. Confession is all about the soul’s journey into God.
        
Our Lord’s admonition is not wholly dissimilar to what the ancient Greeks taught about self-knowledge. Originally, the Greeks appealed for Divine Truth at the Oracle of Delphi. From this place, tradition has it that the Seven Sages of Greece or the god Apollo, exhorted their Greek devotees with these words: Know thyself. Confession in Christianity and know thyself are really two similar concepts. In either case, we are encouraged to confess and admit who and what we are, our limitations, and our desire to be made better. Confession is self-knowledge. When we confess who and what we are, we are honest about what we have done and what we have left undone in relation to God and His goodness. When we acknowledge our limitations, thanking Him for strength, we nevertheless express sorrow or contrition over our weaknesses and failures. When we long to do better, to make satisfaction for our errors and sins, we desire to open ourselves to a process of advancement and betterment that the Divine or God alone can bring about. Neither the ancient Greeks nor the ancient Jews ever imagined becoming better without being made better by the Good or God.
        
But there is something radically new in what Jesus Christ brought into the world. As we prepare to undertake another Holy Lent that will lead us to Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday, we do well to inform our confession, contrition, and satisfaction with the remarkable facts of Christ’s most holy Incarnation. With the ancient Greeks and Jews, there was always the need for making atonement externally and visibly, through the offering up of sacrificed animals, to appease the Divine wrath or displeasure at man’s sins and failures. That the ancients could never make full atonement for sins is obvious from the fact that they sacrificed animals for as long as they lived. But even today, with Christ’s exhortation to a deeper and more personal relationship with God, our Lord is preparing us for His own Sacrifice, which would eradicate the necessity of all others. By rooting and grounding confession, contrition, and satisfaction with the Father, Christ is laying the groundwork for what He is always doing for us in His lifelong journey up to the Cross of His love.
        
Christ’s whole life is a fasting that always involves confession, contrition, and satisfaction. Of course, Christ might be tempted by sin but eschews it and cleaves to the Good. Christ knew no sin. But still, His whole life takes on our confession of sin, sorrow over sin, and satisfaction for it. Christ knows us and He knows our sin. He alone, therefore, can take it on, bear all its ugly effects, endure it, and finally conquer it. He is our confession of sin, our sorrow over sin, and He makes atonement and satisfaction for it. He does what we cannot do to establish a new pattern and model for the new life with the Father. He is doing what the first Adam should have done but could not do. He puts Himself in our shoes and walks us back to the Father who seeth in secret but will reward us openly. (idem) Again, as St. Paul says, in his own enigmatic way, For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. (2 Cor. v. 22) In some mysterious way, the Word of God made flesh, was able to suffer and endure our sin, express a sorrow over it that we cannot, and make satisfaction for it in a way that is beyond our fallen nature’s capability. This is the satisfaction that the God-Man, Jesus Christ, makes for us. He satisfies the need for sinful man to be returned to God. He takes on our sin, takes in our sin, allows our sin to have its best go at himself, and He finally conquers it through the purity of His heart and nature.
        
Today, Christ invites us to commence a Holy Lent. Our fasting and abstinence, our confession, contrition, and satisfaction must be done in and through Jesus Christ. In this season, we shall be invited to participate in the Salvific Life of our Lord. This means that our pious dispositions and intentions must be rooted and grounded in the One whose suffering and sacrifice alone give all meaning and hope to our redemption. In Gesima Tide, we learned to journey with faith that seeks understanding. Our faith believes that Christ has established a relation to the Father that He alone could effect. Fasting and abstinence enable us to make a good confession, contrition, and satisfaction.  Our pious exercises have eternal merit only through what Christ has done for us. Christ’s fasting and abstaining from the world, the flesh, and the Devil lead to the suffering and death that will win our salvation. Christ’s confession, contrition, and satisfaction while expressing no sin on His part, will be taken on by Christ as a confession of sin for us and on our behalf, contrition and sorrow for sin for us and on our behalf, and He will make satisfaction for us and on our behalf. In Christ alone, can we find the right relation of ourselves with our Heavenly Father. In Christ alone, can we find satisfaction for our sins, as He alone can return our humanity to God and re-present human nature to God for recreation and redemption.
        
Now, I realize, this is all very difficult to understand. But if we try to believe and imagine that He becomes something for us so that we might become something beautiful for God, we might find it a bit easier. We end all our prayers with the words through Jesus Christ our Lord. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, we believe that we shall have the confidence to be accepted by the Father, forgiven by the Father, resurrected by the Father, and redeemed and atoned to the Father.  Through Jesus Christ our Lord, we believe that we can

Submit ourselves to God, Resist the devil, and he will flee from us. Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to us. Cleanse our hands, as sinners; and purify our hearts, as double minded. Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let our laughter be turned to mourning, and our joy to heaviness. Humbling ourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift us up. (St. James iv. 7-10)

If we do this, our faith will find understanding in Jesus Christ, who has done for us what we could not do. If we do this, our fasting and abstinence, our confession, contrition, and satisfaction shall derive all efficacy from the good work of Jesus Christ for us, from the Father, and through the Holy Ghost. 
Amen.
©wjsmartin
 
 
          
        
 

And his disciples asked him, saying, What might this parable be?
(St. Luke viii. 9)

We said last week that the Gesima Season is all about embracing the self-discipline that will help us to keep a more holy Lent. Part of that discovery involves a real effort at persevering in our pursuit of understanding what Jesus Christ teaches us. Last week, we began our pursuit with Jesus’ Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard. As Archbishop Trench remarks, Jesus uses parables to withdraw from certain hearers the knowledge of truths which they were unworthy or unfit to receive. (Notes on the Parables, p. 7) Of course, being unfit or unworthy to receive means that their souls were neither ripe nor ready to think and pray about the truth. And in an age as intellectually uncurious and slothful as ours, this might seem to register as highly insulting. But we must remember that Christ, like Plato and Aristotle before Him, not to mention the Jewish prophets, was intent upon thinking faith. Thinking faith is wholly necessary to our salvation. By using parables, then, Christ leads men’s faith to search for meaning and understanding. With parables, much effort is required to move from the external and visible realm to the inward and spiritual.  

Notice, too, that the parables of the New Testament always make use of earthly and human illustrations to teach the truth. Jesus uses parables that are familiar enough to human life to reveal the moral truth and to elicit the willing of it for the sake of His Kingdom. Pope Benedict XVI says that Jesus can speak openly about the Kingdom of God to others or all sorts of people. But to those who will follow Him and become His disciples, He speaks in parables, precisely to encourage their decision, their conversion of the heart…. St John Chrysostom says that ‘Jesus uses parables to draw men unto him, and to provoke them and to signify that if they would covert, he would heal them” (Idem, cf. Homily on the Gospel of Matthew, 45, 1-2). Parables encourage us to think about what we believe, to discover the true meaning, and to will the truth of it all in our lives. Parables stir wonder, asking, seeking, and knocking. The man who seeks out their meaning is the one who desires to know and find happiness in the discovery of a truth that, at first, remains hidden to him. In the parables, each of us is given the opportunity to follow Jesus and to discover God’s hidden meaning, beneath the superficial layers of an otherwise emotional and appetitive existence.

Think about how very hard it is to decide to follow Jesus, to find the meaning in his Parables, and to embrace the truth for our lives. Last week, we prayed for the temperance that runs after God’s justice. This week, we are reminded that self-discipline is no easy business. This morning, St. Paul takes up the point as he addresses a community of new Christians in Corinth who are being swayed by false prophets to believe that no moral effort or self-discipline is needed at all. They were telling St. Paul’s Corinthian converts that he was blowing the process of conversion out of proportion. True Christianity, they insisted, involves really nothing more than a kind of new-age mysticism that assents to the truth without any need for applying it to human life. True Christianity, they insisted should involve an easier, softer way that shouldn’t command any moral effort or suffering at all. 

But St. Paul respectfully disagreed. St. Paul had digested the Parables of Jesus. For Paul, the life of Jesus Christ itself was a Parable intended to lead men to the long and hard study that should elicit imitation! Far from wishing to justify himself, St. Paul even desired to use his life as a kind of parable that might lead other men into the imitation of Christ. Remember, the parable uses real human experience to carry the seeker’s mind into spiritual wisdom. St. Paul’s life is used as a parable to teach his flock what Christian conversion entails. He shows us that true discipleship requires the same effort that discovers the meaning of any good parable and applies it. He asks, Are they ministers of Christ? (I speak as a fool) I am more; in labours more abundant, in stripes above measure, in prisons more frequent, in deaths oft. Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one. Thrice I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck…in perils of robbers, in perils of waters, in perils by mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen…in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness…(2 Cor. 23-27) St. Paul’s conversion and discipleship involved running the race with temperance in all things to obtain an incorruptible crown. In other words, true conversion and discipleship will demand the training and discipline for running a spiritual race. This will require suffering and toil. As Paul suffered to die to himself and come alive to Christ, he was rejected by the outside world. Paul knew that the world and its pleasures threaten the presence of Christ within. Who is weak, and I am not weak (Cor. xi. 29), he asks? This business of becoming a Christian and staying the course are as real as the parable that his own life reveals. In other words, it hurts. Yet, he concludes, that the end justifies the means. If I must needs glory, I will glory in the things which concern mine infirmities. (2 Cor. xi. 30) The parable of Paul’s experience teaches us that with prudence and in humility Christ comes to implant God’s hidden Word, which is to be known and obeyed with the deepest sense of honor and privilege.     

St. Paul’s life and witness comprise a parable for us all. But why were his Corinthian converts so easily swayed by new teachers with a message of comfort and ease? I think that we can find all or part of the answer in this morning’s Gospel Parable of the Sower. Jesus tells us that A sower went out to sow his seed. (St. Luke viii. 5) At first, some fell by the wayside; and it was trodden down, and the fowls of the air devoured it. (Idem) Some of the Corinthians had heard God’s Word superficially; the soil of their souls was like the wayside, trodden down by the ongoing traffic and business of this life so that they could not hear the Word. They had exposed their hearts as a common road to every evil influence of the world, till they had become hard as the pavement, till they had laid waste the very soil in which the Word of God should have taken root…(Parables, Trench, p.60) Such men, in every age, are always prey to the Devil and his minions since they live in a world that has been hardened, cold, and indifferent to the Word of God in Jesus Christ.

Next, …some [of the seed] fell upon a rock; and as soon as it was sprung up, it withered away, because it lacked moisture. (Ibid, 6) Others had hearts like gravely rock. For them, the Word of God in Jesus Christ was first received with joyful expectations because it seemed so full of immediate gratification. They prematurely anticipated its benefits without counting the cost of growing the seed in the soul. They fell away because they would work out [their] salvation….with fear and trembling. (Phil. ii. 12) Salvation, they soon discovered, is a parable of real life, full of pain and suffering, doubt and confusion, hard labor and effort. Thinking is painful and costly. Like the sun scorching the blade that has no depth in the earth, these men’s hearts [are] failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth….(St. Luke xxi. 26) 

Next, we read that some [of the seed] fell among thorns; and the thorns sprang up with it, and choked it. (Ibid, 7) Perhaps not a few of the Corinthians honestly received God’s Word but choked and killed it with cares and concerns of this life. Here the Word grew for a season but only alongside inner anxiety and fear over the cares, and riches, and pleasures of this life (St. Luke viii. 14) that killed the growth of the Word within the soul. They were crushed, as the Gospel says, for the old man was not dead in them; for it may have seemed dead for a while…but unless mortified in earnest, would presently revive in all its strength anew. (Ibid, p. 65) These thorns and briars take the form of earthly happiness, to be found or lost. In either case, they had neither been killed nor banished from the soil of the soul, and so the Word could not grow. One or all these kinds of hearing, might explain what happened to St. Paul’s young flock and what can happen to us.

Finally, today’s Parable concludes with, And other [seed] fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bare fruit an hundredfold. (Ibid, 8) The Parables are always about real life. In real life, seed can grow up effectually only in deep, dark soil that has been weeded and fertilized. Thus, in the soul, the seed of God’s Word can grow in our hearts only with much care, cultivation, and determined effort. Like St. Paul, we must expect both punishment from without and suffering from within if the Word of God in Jesus Christ is to spring up and bear fruit in our souls. With reason, each one of us can see the temptations that threaten the meaning and operation of God’s Word in this morning’s Parable. With St. Paul, we must proclaim, If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things which concern mine infirmities. (2 Cor. xi. 30) To will the good against all temptations is to find glory in the process.

In admitting that we are weak, Christ responds to us with the love that alone can grow His Word. God has made the soul; God plants His Word in it to save us. If we begin to hear God’s Word, to clear and cultivate the soil of our souls with sorrow and repentance, to tend the seed with carefulness and devotion, and not superficially and carelessly, by God’s grace we shall bring forth fruit with patience. (St. Luke viii. 15) Then you and I shall become a parable, where we hold the Word in earthen vessels. And we can ask with Milton:

…What if earth
Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein
Each to other like, more than on earth is thought? 
(Paradise Lost: v, 574-576)
 
Earth is a parable for the soul. In this morning’s Collect, we pray that the soul might be defended against all adversity. (Collect) We are protected against all adversity when our souls, in all humility, suffer to know the Word and will it by God’s Grace alone.  
 
Amen. 
©wjsmartin
 

​Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst not thou agree with me for a penny? Take that thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as unto thee. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good? So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.
   
We have just completed our journey from Advent through to Epiphany tide. In it, we contemplated Christ’s coming to us and manifesting Himself as the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. (John i. 14) Now we turn to the period spanning between Septuagesima Sunday and Ascension Day. Septuagesima Sunday is the beginning of our short Gesima season; Gesima means days. Septu means seventy. So today is the 70th day before Easter. On these three Sundays, we prepare for Lent, Holy Week, and Easter Sunday. Our pre-Lenten season is probably a Western Latin approximation of the Eastern Church’s much longer Lent. In the West, it bridges Epiphany Tide with Lent. It is a season for self-discipline and for embracing the four Cardinal Virtues of temperance, prudence, justice, and fortitude.  

The Four Cardinal Virtues come to us from the Latin word cardo, which means hinge. These virtues are the hinge virtues, without which we cannot hope to lay a foundation for the Three Theological Virtues of faith, hope, and charity. Just as the Gesima Sundays hinge one season with another, the Cardinal Virtues comprise the hinge that opens the door to deeper union with God. The Cardinal Virtues are derived from Plato’s Dialogues, were later refined by Aristotle, and were then part and parcel of the Graeco-Roman world’s pursuit of the Good or God. The early Church Fathers designated them as Cardinal Virtues and acknowledged their indebtedness to Greek Philosophy for providing forms that enable the mind to journey to God. For the Church Fathers, the Cardinal Virtues provided a stimulus for fallen man’s mind to discern God rationally at work in the world. These virtues generate a limited but valuable relationship to the Divine by way of reason. The Cardinal Virtues enable fallen man to find God and to will His goodness, if it be ever so partially. The goodness that they establish teaches the soul both its strengths and its weaknesses. The Cardinal Virtues, in a Christian context, lay a kind of foundation for knowledge of the good, the extent to which we can will it, and the vast gulf that remains between us and God. 

Today, in his First Epistle to the Corinthians, Chapter IX, St. Paul introduces us to the first Cardinal Virtue that we must study. He tells us that our pursuit of the Good or God is like the spiritual and bodily preparation made by ancient Greek runners who competed in the Isthmian Games. Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? (1 Cor. 9. 24) Using an earthly paradigm, St. Paul inspires us to run so that we might win a prize. His illustration relates to a competition in which one man is determined to win the laurel wreath, the crown of triumph and victory. The desired end is the prize of a crown and the means is running.  St. Paul knows that all men run to obtain some reward. And no man can run without hope. So, with hope we must run to obtain whatever crown we seek. So run, that ye may obtain (Ibid, 24), St. Paul insists. Yet, our running must be ordered and tamed. Every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. (Ibid, 25) As it turns out, temperance or moderation must condition our running in hope towards our end. Our end is not the corruptible crown of the laurel wreath that commands the admiration, wonder, praise, and veneration of earthly athletic enthusiasts. That end is corruptible and passing. Our end is incorruptible and lasting. And this was the end for Plato and Aristotle as well. The problem for them was that all the efforts of reason’s appropriation of temperance, prudence, justice, and fortitude couldn’t generate lasting union with God. For Christians, moderation and temperance are fueled by more hope. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown, but we an incorruptible. (Ibid, 26) The Apostle urges us to make use of Greek Moral Theology for the pursuit of an incorruptible crown.

The temperance and moderation that we embrace must be applied to our souls as well as our bodies. The runners at the Isthmian Games kept to a strict diet and discipline. They refrained from food, drink, and sex to stay focused. How much more, then, should we Christians keep to a strict diet and discipline as we condition our bodies to serve our souls with hope of obtaining the incorruptible crown?Thus, the Apostle warns us against that incautious and immoderate indulgence of the world that is always at enmity with God and likely to distract us from running the race. 
 
I therefore so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air: but I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection, lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a cast-away. (Ibid, 26, 27) 
 
Runners’ arms beat the air as they push their legs onward to obtain a corruptible crown. Christians, with certainty through hope, run all together, tempering their bodies through self-discipline, hoping to gain one reward. Paul uses the Greek runners to illustrate the focus, dedication, and discipline or temperancewhich is key to obtaining any crown.

Moderation and temperance condition our body to serve our soul’s end. For the Greeks there was one crown for one runner. But for St. Paul an incorruptible crown is promised to all who run the Christian race. The ancient Greeks all cultivated the same virtue in pursuit of their end. And so too must we. But we have an added interest in helping one another to moderate and temper our earthly passions and appetites so that we all can appreciate more fully the crown that awaits us. Our crown is the gift of God the Giver. We do not deserve, earn, or merit it. 

We have been invited to run or to labour in the Vineyard of the Lord, as today’s Gospel would have it. For the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which went out early in the morning to hire labourers into his vineyard.(St. Matthew xx. 1) The offer to work in the Vineyard of the Lord is God’s gift. The work is offered at different times of the day or always along the lines of any man’s life in the morning, noontide, or evening. Those who come first to work are promised a penny. They have been awakened by the Lord in the morning of their lives, and so come early to run the race or work in the vineyard of the Lord. Others are roused or stirred later in the day of their lives. They have been idle, negligent, slothful, careless, or ignorant. Nevertheless, they are given a chance to run the race or work in the vineyard of the Lord. They are told that they will receive what is right in payment for their labour. Others are found at the sixth and ninth hours of their lives. Some are even found in the twilight of their lives, at the eleventh hour or the end of the day. They too are welcomed to run the race or work in the vineyard of the Lord. They too will receive what is right as a reward. These men are even rebuked for their sloth. Why stand ye here all the day idle? (Ibid, 6) Yet the householder’s desire for the work is greater than his bewilderment at their delay in accepting the offer to run to the work that leads to an incorruptible crown. 

In today’s Gospel Parable, at the end of the day, all are paid. The last to come are paid first, and the first to come are paid last. The moderation and temperance that have conditioned the running and working of the Johnny-come-lately men are of equal value and worth to the first in the heart of the householder. Every man receives a penny. Every man receives the same reward. All run. Some come early, and some come late. All are called to work for one end. 
But when the first came, they supposed that they should have received more; and they likewise received every man a penny. And when they had received it, they murmured against the goodman of the house, saying, These last have wrought but one hour, and thou hast made them equal unto us, which have borne the burden and heat of the day. (Ibid, 10-12)
 
Christians are called to run and work without envying and begruding that all may run together to receive the gift of one and the same prize, an incorruptible crown. The householder responds: 
Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst not thou agree with me for a penny? Take that thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as unto thee. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good?  So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen. (Ibid, 13-16)
 
Moderation and temperance prepare us for the virtue of justice. Strictly speaking, as fallen and sinful men, we deserve nothing but just punishment for our sins. That is earthly justice. God’s justice, however, is always tempered by His mercy. He takes our Cardinal Virtues and rewards them with the hope of gaining His goodness. He offers us an incorruptible crown as the reward of being invited into the hope of running and a work that leads back to Himself. God tells us that if we accept the gift of His invitation, to run and to work, we shall be rewarded with a crown, whose worth and value far exceed anything that is right or just for us. And, as St. Gregory says:
He who desires to escape the fires of jealousy, let him seek that love, which no number of shares in it ever narrows. 

Running the race with temperance is the unmerited gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast. (Eph. Ii. 9) The last shall be first and the first last. (Matthew xx. 16) For the Christian, work or running the race is never to be quantitatively measured by the time spent but by the freed gift of God’s Grace. If we cherish and treasure the honor and privilege of working in God’s vineyard and running the spiritual race, we might even forget whether we started at the first hour, the third, the sixth, the ninth, or the eleventh. Whatever hour we came, our attention is on the Giver and His Gift. 

Amen.
©wjsmartin
 

​

Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate.
Be not wise in your own conceits. (Romans xii. 16)

Thus far in the season of Epiphany, we have been invited to believe and come to know the revelation of God’s power, wisdom, and love in the life of Jesus Christ. We have followed the Star that drew the Wise Men to the origin and meaning of all truth in the Infant Babe of Bethlehem. We have seen his star in the east, and art come to worship him…(St. Matthew ii. 2) We have discovered, also, God’s life in the young Jesus, listening and responding to the Doctors of Theology in the temple. Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business? (St. Luke ii. 49) We have gleaned that God’s Word was made flesh to redeem us all in the potent new wine of His blood. But thou hast kept the best wine until now. (St. John ii. 10) Love, wisdom, and power reveal themselves to us in Epiphany as marks of Jesus’ intention to do even greater things than these. (St. John xiv. 12) The greater things than these will involve not only what God does in Jesus Christ then and there, but what Jesus will do in us here and now. Epiphany is not only about vision but is also, and more importantly, about the redemptive power of God’s Grace in your life and in mine.
         
Today, having traveled from the manger to the temple, we move from the Wedding in Cana of Galilee to another Epiphany in Jesus’ encounter with a Roman Centurion. A Centurion was a professional officer in the Roman Legion who commanded roughly one hundred men. He, like the soldiers under him, would have been a celibate – Roman soldiers were not permitted to marry until active duty was completed. For the Roman Centurion in this morning’s Gospel, his family was the Roman Legion –soldiers and servants committed to his paternal care. And when Jesus was entered into Capernaum, there came unto him a centurion, beseeching him, And saying, Lord, my servant lieth at home sick of the palsy, grievously tormented. (St. Matthew viii. 5) Capernaum was the home of Peter, Andrew, James, John, and Matthew, the tax collector. It also housed a Roman garrison. Oddly enough, the pagan Centurion approached Jesus and addressed him as Lord. Jesus responds and says, I will come and heal him. (St. Matthew viii. 7) But the Centurion protests, Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof: but speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed. (St. Matthew viii. 8) The Centurion trusts that Jesus’ word will be enough to save his suffering servant. 

Prior to his appeal, the Centurion would, no doubt, have known of Jesus’ reputation. He must have had a deep sense of the holiness attached to Jesus’ person. Thus, he ranked himself unworthy for the Lord to come down to his house and heal his servant. The Centurion believed that because Jesus was all-holy, he himself was unworthy of Jesus’ visitation. Thus, in humility, he begs Jesus to speak or send His Word only, that his servant might be healed. Only humility can win from Christ the transformative power of God’s Grace. Today, more than experiencing only the manifestation and revelation of God’s power, wisdom, and love in Jesus, the Centurion reveals to us something of the spiritual character that will secure Jesus’ healing power. Clear-headed about his own moral and spiritual weakness, emptied of any pretense to self-importance, and uncertain of his spiritual fate, the Centurion reveals to us what it looks like to become the space that will be filled with the Epiphany of Christ in His word. For I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me: and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it. (St. Matthew viii. 9) This Centurion knows the power of his own words. In the earthly domain of Caesar, his words bear authority, and they are obeyed. He speaks and it is done. Yet, notice how he says: I am a man under authority. He too must hear the commands of words of one higher than he and submit himself to their power. But like his own sick servant, he too is a servant, whose words are powerless to command a cure. 

But he has heard of a Man whose words have power to transform and to heal. He has faith in the Man, Jesus Christ, and believes that His all-holiness manifests, reveals, and shows forth the power, the wisdom, and the love of God. He believes that Christ possesses such Divine power that His words alone are sufficient to help. So, with faith, he reaches out humbly to Jesus for the healing of his servant. The overwhelming otherness that the Centurion finds in Christ will bring a cure. He believes and seeks; he seeks and finds; he finds and knows. In powerlessness, he moves from self-knowledge to faith, through faith to knowledge, and with knowledge to healing love. His self-confessed weakness reaches out to touch the Word of redemption that Christ brings. The Epiphany manifestation that we find today, then, is twofold. First, we learn of the powerless state of sinful man. Second, if we claim it ourselves, in all humility, we discover God’s response to it in Jesus Christ.   
        
But as Archbishop Trench reminds us, Jesus perceives another facet in the Centurion’s soul. Speak (or send) the Word only, and my servant shall be healed. (St. Matthew viii. 8) Indeed, every little trait of his character…points him out as one in whom the seed of God’s word would find the ready and prepared soil of a good and honest heart. (Trench: Miracles, Chapter XI) According to St. Luke’s version of today’s miracle, the Centurion was a righteous Gentile, who loved the nation of Israel, and had built the Jews a place of worship for the worship of the true God. In addition, he had earnest care and anxiety, not to mention love, for his servant. (Idem) Epiphany Tide reveals to us that character of soul that is needed for Christ’s healing visitation. The Centurion’s soul is ripe for the planting of Jesus Christ’s Word in the soul. And this is all the Centurion asks: speak and send the Word only and my servant shall be healed. (Idem) The Centurion reveals his humble assurance and confidence in Jesus the Word. Jesus reveals and shows forth His amazement. He marvelled, and said to them that followed, Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel. And I say unto you, That many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven.  But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.  (St. Matthew viii. 10, 11) What is revealed to Jesus is Gentile faith in the power of Jesus’ Word. What Jesus finds is the character, state, and condition of soul in which the healing Word of God, Jesus Christ, can be planted to bear fruit! 
          
This is the message of our Epiphany-tide. But it comes also with a real warning. Jesus says that the Centurion’s gentile faith in God’s Grace will lead to His Kingdom. He tells us too that the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. (St. Matthew viii. 12) What He means is that there were too many Jews then and too many Christians now who never experience their own Epiphany – one that manifests to them their need and another that reveals the cure. Their faith is not rewarded because they have not had an epiphany of their own sinful powerlessness. And their faith finds no healing because they have not had an epiphany that reveals their own state of being under authority. Christ tells us that those who consider themselves to be the children of the kingdom, are not. They think that they are good enough, and thus Epiphany’s light has not shed its light on their sorry state. Furthermore, these religious people do not love others enough to seek out a cure because in others they see only men sorrier than themselves. They who have nothing of the Centurion’s humility, faith, and love.

Jesus says, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. (St. Matthew vii. 7) Epiphany teaches us that salvation is for the humble. Salvation is for the needy. Salvation is for those who know that they are weak and who know that God in Jesus Christ alone can save all men. Our Centurion saw God’s Epiphany in Jesus Christ, and with humility, believed that Christ need speak the word only and his servant would be healed. (Idem) From the ground of humble self-emptying, he reached out with every fiber of his being to procure healing from Christ the Word. Touched by that Word in the poverty of his soul, his faith found healing, not only in the life of his servant but within himself. His servant was healed. But he too was healed because his faith was enlarged as he made room for Jesus in his soul. He was healed because his hope was strengthened, and his love was not disappointed. In the Centurion we find a miracle even more significant than that of his servant. 

Be not wise in your own conceits, but… condescend to men of low estate. (Romans xii. 16), St. Paul says this morning. He means that we should, with the Centurion, bow down, and realistically discover in the suffering of others, those less fortunate than ourselves, servants -men of low estate and our absolute need for Christ’s Word to heal them and us! He means that from this low and humble seat we ought to seek out God’s mercy with all faith, hope, and love. Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof but speak the Word only and my servant shall be healed. (Idem)

Today we must ask ourselves, Do we find and discover ourselves truly in the Epiphany illumination that reveals our own deepest need for Christ the Word? Are we pouring out our complaint to Christ?  What we need is the humble faith of today’s Centurion. What we need is that humility that rests not in paranormal miracles but, rather, on faith in Christ the Word. Then humble faith with love for all others will seek a cure for the sin sick soul in Christ. Then, with the Centurion, we shall experience the Epiphany of God’s Word in Christ, who says, Go thy way; and as thou hast believed, so be it done unto thee. And his servant, [and his own soul], were healed in the selfsame hour. (St. Matthew viii. 13) 
Amen.
©wjsmartin
 
 
 

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You can only apprehend the Infinite by a faculty that is superior
to reason, by entering into a state in which the Divine Essence
is communicated unto you."
(Enneads: Plotinus)
         
Illumination and enlightenment are the themes of Epiphany tide. Επιϕανια is the Greek word for Epiphany, and it means manifestation, revelation, showing, or shining forth. For Christians, Epiphany reveals God’s love, wisdom, and power in the life of Jesus Christ – the Divine Life alive in the humanity of Jesus and calling us Home to our Heavenly Father. It is like the sun that opens the eyes not only to sight but understanding. Its rays carry the eyes of our minds into understanding God in Man. This illumination or enlightenment gives us not only knowledge but also the power to change and convert. Through it, men sense and perceive the Divine Essence through which we all can be changed in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye. (1 Cor. Xv. 52)

Yet the light through which Christ reveals God’s life to us is not easily apprehended. If it could be, reason would understand it perhaps as swiftly as it assents to the proposition that two plus two makes four. But, as Plotinus reminds us, a faculty greater than reason is needed to apprehend God, discover His presence in Jesus the Man, and embrace His will. That faculty is called faith. Faith alone believes what it cannot prove and does not yet know. Take the example of the first moments of attraction to another. When a man is first drawn to a woman who arrests his attention, he is drawn to her both externally and visibly. He is intrigued with wonder. We might say that he has faith in something mysterious waiting to be discovered and known in his further pursuit of the woman. His faith believes that there is something worth finding out, knowing, and loving. His faith seeks to know in order to love.

God works in the same way. He intrigues us by calling us forward to search Him out with faith. Our faith believes there is someone to know. What is waiting to be discovered is the inward and spiritual nature of God. We can find Him only if our faith believes that someone beautiful and meaningful intends to be known. If all that there is to know about Him were revealed externally, visibly, and instantaneously to the human mind, there would be no place for a faith that follows and a love that grows.   

In Epiphany tide, our faith believes that God is at work in Jesus Christ. We seek to know Him more intimately. Yet on the first three Sundays in Epiphany we feel a degree of confusion. In our Epiphany readings, we are confused and hopefully intrigued. We have not reached understanding, but our faith must continue in hot pursuit of God in Jesus. The Wise Men ask Where is He that is born king of the Jews? We have seen His star in the east and have come to worship Him, (St. Matthew 2. 2) We believe but where is He, that our faith may know Him? They believe that an extraordinary Star calls them forth to find and know an unusual king.  They carry sacred gifts with mystic meaning because they believe that this king will bring them out of darkness into His own marvelous light.       
 
Confusion and intrigue are the hallmarks of a faith that seeks understanding and knowledge. Last Sunday we found that Joseph and Mary were alarmed and frightened at the prospect of having left their son Jesus behind in the Temple. They sought Him not only out of confusion but also out of fear. Their faith was weak, but still they followed it. They hurried back to Jerusalem because they believedand hoped that their son was safe. They sought Him out with trembling faith and then were sore amazed with where they found Him and with what He was doing. Their faith was rewarded fwith relief. Still, they were upset. Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us, behold thy father and I have sought Thee sorrowing. (St. Luke 2. 48) His answer: Why is it that ye sought Me? Wist ye not that I must be about My Father’s business? (Ibid, 49) confused them even more. Mary and Joseph understood not the saying which He spake unto them. (Ibid, 50) But Mary’s weak faith still sought to know and to love her son more fully.She kept all these sayings in her heart. (Ibid, 51). 

Jesus is the Wisdom of God that is not self-evidently known or understood immediately. Jesus is also the Power of God who comes to transform the world. In today’s Gospel, some years later, Mary, having kept Jesus’ sayings in her heart, believes that, finally, she knows Her Son. Today she is with Him at a wedding in Cana of Galilee. The wedding party has run out of wine. She knows and remembers the Divine love that her Infant King revealed to the Three Wise Men. She knows and remembers the Divine wisdom in her twelve-year-old son when he rebuked her for her unbelief and ignorance. Now she believes that she knows Him. She will enlist His Divine power to furnish a Sacramental event with added bliss. Being a good Jewish mother, she believes that she must verbalize what Her Son surely knows! Son, they have no wine. (St. John, ii. 3) The Mother knows that Her Son can overcome every earthly need. Here, she believes He should do so. Mary has deep faith in what her son can do. Her faith has pondered much in her heart. Surely, He can use His Divine Power to forestall looming embarrassment for the bridegroom and his family, whose poverty, no doubt, accounts for the depletion of the wine. This, she thinks, is not too much to ask from the Son of the Most High God.

But Jesus rebukes Mary. Woman what have I to do with thee? Woman, what does this have to do with Me and thee? (Ibid, 3) The rebuke is needed because her faith is, as George MacDonald writes, unripe and unfeatured. This faith, working with her ignorance and her fancy, led her to expect the great things of the world from him. (George MacDonald, The Miracles of our Lord.)  We tend to think that Jesus was being condescending towards his mother when he calls her woman. But Jesus is drawing Mary’s faith into deeper knowledge of Himself. Mine hour has not yet come. (Ibid, 4) Jesus is calling Mary to consider a faculty far greater than reason. (Idem) He wants her to believe and know that He has not come into the world to turn water into wine in order to save men from earthly shame. Rather, He will turn water into wine as a sign that He alone can make what is common into something divine, something earthly into something heavenly, and something human into something Godly. He will turn water into wine as He turns sin into righteousness and death into new life. 

Mary believes and knows that her Son’s rebuke is just and good. She commands the servants, Whatsoever He says, do it, (Ibid, 5) Mary believes and knows that her Son possesses all truth. She has been humbled. Jesus responds. Fill the waterpots with water, (Ibid, 7) and the servants obey. Mary’s premature and ill-placed faith, knowledge, and love will be redeemed and rewarded. Jesus continues:

Draw out now, and bear unto the governor of the feast. And they bare it. When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and knew not whence it was: (but the servants which drew the water knew;) the governor of the feast called the bridegroom, and saith unto him, Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse: but thou hast kept the good wine until now. (Ibid, 8-10) 
 
Jesus has not come down from Heaven to perform earthly miracles on earthly men for earthly joy and happiness. Here, He does not merely produce new earthly wine at an earthly wedding for earthly men who had already drunk too much in an earthly manner. Were this all that He had done, drunk men wouldn’t have known the difference. Mary wasn’t drunk. Neither was the governor of the feast.  The governor tasted the difference. Mary believed and came to know her son more truly. 

Of course, today’s miracle is a sign and symbol of what Christ always intends to do with us. If we are in search of miraculous earthly solutions to earthly deficiencies, we are far too drunk on earthly things to see how Christ the Light longs to bring new spiritual wine into our fallen lives in this holy season of Epiphany. Christ Jesus is the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Cor. i. 24) He comes to put new wine into new bottles. (St. Mark ii. 22) The Blessed Virgin Mary had to rebuked for her earthly love. With her, we must believe and know that they have no wine then, and we have no wine now. We must believe and know that we need new wine. We must believe and know that Christ alone can make this new wine from the blood that He sheds for you and me on the Tree of Calvary.

Jesus insists Mine hour is not yet come (Ibid) for He is on the way to His Cross. For now, He might provide earthly wine or not. Whatsoever He says, we must do it. We must believe in order to know. His Hour does not yet come until we go up to the Cross of His Love and beyond. Then, a new kind of wine will pour forth from His hands, His feet, and His side in the Blood that He has received from His mother and offers back to His Father. The Sacred Gift of Mystic Meaning will be found in the Blood that alone is the new wine that gives new life to a fallen world that can taste the difference. 
We believe that Jesus saves the best wine until last. We believe that His Blood is a Sacred Gift with Mystic Meaning, the new wine poured out for us in the death we could not die. Christ pours out His Blood as He dies to the world, the flesh, and the devil for us. His Blood is the new wine that brings us into His death. His Blood is the new wine that brings us into the New Life of His Resurrection. We believe and know that His Blood is the new wine of His love, that gives us all joy. As the poet reminds us, 

Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,/
Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.
                         (Agony: George Herbert)
 
Amen. 
©wjsmartin

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That day is called the birthday of the Lord on which the Wisdom of God manifested Himself as a speechless Child and the Word of God wordlessly uttered the sound of a human voice. His divinity, although hidden, was revealed by heavenly witness to the Magi and was announced to the shepherds by angelic voices. With yearly ceremony, therefore, we celebrate this day which saw the fulfillment of the prophecy…(St. Augustine sermon clxxxv)
      
Tonight, we come to the cradle, the manger, and the cave in Bethlehem to worship God’s own Word made flesh, beginning with a meditation upon the Incarnation by St. Augustine of Hippo. From the human side of this reality, we can hear only silence. The Word of God made flesh has no words; he is as speechless as every newborn babe. The Word of the Eternal Father, His only and everlastingly begotten Son, is made man for us and for our salvation. From conception in the Virgin’s womb, and now in His birth, he is intent upon redeeming man, all men, you, and me. Conception has been redeemed in the womb and now birth is redeemed. There is the silence of the child himself. From the child, the only sounds that emerge are the inarticulate cries of a new-born babe. The sound of this infant’s voice must be heard. But first, it is not to be understood. God never forces His Word and Will upon anyone. The gift of God in Jesus Christ must make its way into the unruly, antagonistic, unfriendly, and hostile world of good and evil. The gift of God’s redemption for us that will be found in this child will not be received truly and sincerely until it is heard by the ears of the human heart. What we must hear first are the cries of an infant babe.
Jesus Christ is God’s eternally begotten Wisdom and Truth. St. Augustine tells us that,

Truth is sprung out of the earth: and righteousness hath looked 
down from heaven. Truth, eternally existing in the bosom of the 
Father, has sprung from the earth so that He might exist also in 
the bosom of a mother. Truth, holding the world in place, has 
sprung from the earth so that He might be carried in the hands 
of a woman. Truth, incorruptibly nourishing the happiness of 
the angels, has sprung from the earth in order to be fed by human 
milk. Truth, whom the heavens cannot contain, has sprung from 
the earth so that He might be placed in a manger. (Idem)
 
Some two thousand and twenty-three years ago, Truth or the Word of the Father looked down from Heaven to Earth. Eternal Truth, the Everlasting Thinking and Speech of the Father will come alive in birth from an earthly mother. Truth and the Word that hold the world in place, gives it meaning, desires its perfection will be held in the hands of a woman. Truth and the Word that inform, define, and nourish the life of the sempiternal angels, will begin to live in the Babe of Bethlehem, nourishing the same Babe on mother’s milk. God has become Man. The Word has been made flesh. The Truth and Word that the heavens cannot contain, limit, constrain, and constrict now comes alive in the Babe lying in a manger, poor, hungry, constricted by the earthly elements and yet destined to live, breath, think, know, understand, and reveal the will of God the Father in human flesh. The Truth and Word shall be discovered and revealed in the Second Adam, Jesus Christ. And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. (St. John i. 14)
          
Jesus Christ is God’s Word, Wisdom, and Truth made flesh. God did not send His Son into the world with a blast of paranormal, miraculous otherworldliness. He is God. He needs nothing. He is alive in His Word made flesh, needing only a mother’s milk, care, and love. The eternally begotten Word made flesh is Truth. He needs only the simplest of things to begin His journey. We should cherish and treasure the gift of the Word made flesh in an Infant Babe. God wants to share His own great goodness from conception into birth. Silently and quietly, we must go to the Manger. With all humility and meekness, we must contemplate the way our God comes to us. Selflessly and generously, we must bring our hearts and souls to Him in order to see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us. (St. Luke ii. 15) St. Augustine stirs us up to God’s awakening of the world in those infant eyes that look out on the cosmos that He has made now with awesome wonder. Be still and see that the Word though whom all things were made and without Him was not anything made that was made. (John i. 3) now sees it all for the very first time as a baby. All the potential for new human life is taken on by the Infant Babe of Bethlehem. Jesus Christ enters human life to recapitulate and reconstitute human nature from the very beginning, first in the womb and not as a newborn infant. We must hear the message of the angels:

Arouse yourself, O man; for you God has become man. 
Awake thou that sleepest, and rise up from the dead, and Christ 
Shall give thee light! For you…God 
has become man. If He had not thus been born in time, 
you would have been dead for all eternity. Never would 
you have been freed from sinful flesh, if He had not taken 
upon Himself the likeness of sinful flesh. Everlasting misery 
would have engulfed you, if He had not taken this merciful 
form. You would not have been restored to life, had He not 
submitted to your death; you would have fallen, had He not 
succored you; you would have perished, had He not come. (Idem)
 
The world and all of us have lived in sin and its reward — death. For man to be saved and for our human nature to be redeemed, God must get under our skin and come into our condition. He would later remind us that Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. (John iii. 3) We cannot be born again unless the Spirit of God revivifies the flesh of man in Jesus Christ. And he was conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary. Heaven has come down to earth. God has come down to man. The Divine has become human. Not only does He submit to our conception and birth. He submits to our death. He is conceived as one of us, He is born as one of us, He lives, learns, grows, as one of us. And He dies as one of us. Had he not come, we would die a death that never ends.

Let us joyfully celebrate the coming of our salvation and 
redemption. Let us celebrate the festal day on which the great 
and timeless One came from the great and timeless day to this 
brief span of our day. He has become for us ... righteousness, and 
sanctification, and redemption… (Ps. lxxxv 11) (Idem)
 
Will this Word be made flesh for us and in us tonight? Or are we people of the Law of Sin and Death? Will the Word of God be conceived in us as He was by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary long ago? Will the timeless One, the Word of God enter the brief span of our day and be born in us as He was in Bethlehem? If He is to be born in us, He must be born in silence, in quiet, in awesome wonder at the creation He had made, depending only the simplest of things, as on a lowly mother, thankful for nothing but the milk of Mary’s kindness. You and I must become infant babes of Bethlehem.

Many Christians will depart this life having never revealed to the world that Christ was born in Bethlehem. But we must remember that

Truth is sprung out of the earth because Christ who said: ‘I am the truth’ was born of a virgin; and righteousness hath looked down from heaven because, by believing in Him who was so born, man has been justified not by his own efforts but by God. ‘Truth is sprung out of the earth' because 'the Word was made flesh’/ and 'righteousness hath looked down from heaven' because 'every good and perfect gift is from above.’ (Idem)
 
This memory must become the reality of our lives. Christ’s new birth which we celebrate this night is Truth sprung out of the earth, truth born of a virgin, and longing to be born in you and me. This is Heaven’s truth which will be born in us by Grace, by God, by the Gift of Christ. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. (James i. 17) The Babe of Bethlehem longs to be born in ustonight so that we go tell it on the Mountain that Jesus Christ is born and bringing us to salvation! Tonight, Heaven and Earth meet in the heart of Jesus Christ, the Babe of Bethlehem as one life, one energy, one wisdom, and one love.       

The author of the Hebrews reminds us:
God…hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son, whom He hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also He made the worlds; who being the brightness of His glory, and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the Word of His Power, when he had purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high; being made so much better than the angels, as he hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent glory than they. (Hebrews, 1-4)
 
The Eternal Son of God became a baby. So too must we. Babies have all the potential to become more excellent than angels. Angels are pure spirits. But we can become spirits in bodies, the Word made flesh, a culmination of all creation. Humility and faith must be our virtues. The wisdom of the poet exhorts us to the Imitation of Christ. 

WITH a measure of light and a measure of shade,
The world of old by the Word was made;
By the shade and light was the Word conceal’d,
And the Word in flesh to the world reveal’d
Is by outward sense and its forms obscured;
The spirit within is the long lost Word,
Besought by the world of the soul in pain
Through a world of words which are void and vain.
O never while shadow and light are blended
Shall the world’s Word-Quest or its woe be ended,
And never the world of its wounds made whole
Till the Word made flesh be the Word made soul! (Arthur Edward Waite)


Amen.
©wjsmartin
 
 

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​Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say, Rejoice.
 
On the Last Sunday in Advent, you and I are called to come to know the Word made flesh and to Rejoice. Our recognition of Jesus Christ, the Word made Flesh, and our rejoicing are gifts coming to us from the heart of John the Baptist. Today John the Baptist prepares us for Christ’s coming into his Body, the Church, and especially for His first coming, which we remember on Christmas Day. We are called to discover the character which both knows Jesus Christ as the Word and Wisdom of God made flesh and to rejoice in Him. 
           
But first, in today’s Gospel John the Baptist teaches us to know ourselves and our need for Jesus Christ. The Jews sent Priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who art thou? And he confessed, and denied not; but confessed, I am not the Christ. John the Baptist never pretended to be Christ, and neither should any Bishop, Priest, Deacon, or Layman. He confesses that he is not even Elijah the prophet. Malachi had foretold that Elijah would come before the Second Coming of the Lord. Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD. (Mal. iv. 5)  But the Angel Gabriel insists that it is John who shall go before [Jesus Christ] in the spirit and power of Elias (Lk. i. 17). Both are messengers and forerunners. Neither one of them is the Christ. John prepares for the first coming and Elijah for the second. John shares with Elijah the vocation of precursor and preparer. John Baptist says, I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord, as said the prophet Isaiah. (St. John i. 23) John has come to prepare the Jewish people for the coming of the Lord. His preparation begins with a confession of who he is truly. He calls us too to knowourselves as those who need always make straight the way of the Lord. (Idem)

John comes and teaches us to know who we are. Repent ye, for the kingdom of God is at Hand. (Matt. iii. 2) John teaches us to repent because we are always sinners in need of the Saviour. With John, we are called to confess our sins. John, like Elijah, is a messenger of repentance. Because we are neither righteous nor virtuous, we must make repentance an habitual part of our spiritual lives. But his confession also reveals to us that repentance is only a beginning. Repentance prepares us for the salvation that Jesus Christ alone can bring into our lives. John tells us: I baptize with water: but there standeth one among you, whom ye know not: he it is who coming after me is preferred before me, whose shoe's latchet I am not worthy to unloose. (St. John i. 26) From the depths of John’s heart we come to know that repentance empties us, unselfs us, and make us that spiritual place in which Christ can come alive. John has a baptism with water for repentance, but Christ shall baptize…with the Holy Ghost. (St. Mark i. 8) John’s baptism will cleanse us; Christ’s baptism will sanctify and save us. The one removes sin and the other infuses righteousness.
           
With John the Baptist, you and I must move out of the world and into the soul. We are too much at home in this world. John comes to teach us that this is not our home. Christians ought to know that this world is a place of passage and pilgrimage, from wilderness and exile to the true homeland and City of our God. Like John the Baptist, like the Apostles, you and I must become courageous searchers and seekers, “who would not cease from exploration…until at… the end of all exploring they would arrive where…they… started from and know the place for the first time. (Eliot, Little Gidding) With them, we must earnestly prepare for the Lord’s coming? 

We live in a time when the human heart seems so far removed from any need to seek out and find God. We live in a world whose idolatry conceals the knowledge of God. John the Baptist, bearing the spirit of Elijah, calls us away from our idolatry. Anything that claims our time, attention, and money more than God is an idol or false god. Anything that consumes, owns, and possesses us more than God is an idol. The idol could be a political platform, a romantic notion, or even an arrogant assertion of our own will to power. It could be a large house, an expensive car, an obsession with money and taxes, or an addiction to another person. None of these things must ever claim our hearts more than our love for God. If anyone of these things stands between us and God, we must know to get rid of them. Anything that does not reveal to the world our humble, unmerited, and undeserved receiving of God’s costly and precious mercy is an idol. Anything with which we cannot part is an idol. And that idol may stand in the way of another’s coming to Christ. Not only does our attachment to idols stand between us and God but it might very well turn others away from Him also! Ye cannot serve God and mammon. (Matthew vi 24)

John Baptist comes to join him in that spiritual journey that calls us to sever our ties to the false gods and idols of this world. He knows that repentance and self-denial might be dangerous. We might become proud of our good work of repentance and self-emptying while failing then to undertake the more difficult labor of embracing God’s goodness into our souls. Bear fruits that befit repentance, he cries, for even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. (St. Matthew iii. 8, 10) With John’s contemporaries, we might ask, What then shall we do? John the Baptist tells us not only to repent but to purge. He who has two coats, let him share with him who has none; and he who has food, let him do likewise. (St. Luke iii 11) He tells us not to desire more than is our fair share in the earthly city. Collect no more than is appointed you. (Ibid, 12) To the soldiers he says, Rob no one by violence or by false accusation, and be content with your wages. Why? Because while John baptizes…with water for repentance, He who is coming after me is mightier than me, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry; He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. (Ibid, 14-16) This is serious business. It might even get confusing. Charles Williams remarks, Let the man who has two coats give one to the man who has none. But what if the man who has none, or for that matter the man who has three, wants to take one from the man who has two- what then? Grace of Heaven! My Sainted Aunt! Why, give him both. If a man has stolen the pearl bracelet, why, point out to him that he has missed the diamond necklace in the corner! Be content…

The outside world and our dependence on it could land us in Hell. With John, let us know that we have been too attached to the things of this world. Let us repent. The old man must quit splicing hairs and counting the cost! The old man must see that the time has come to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. (St. Luke vi 31) John wants us to know that the character of the soul must be prepared to know and welcome the coming mercy of God. We must know also that it is more than we either desire or deserve. God’s Mercy is coming to us and will be made flesh. The coming Christ invites us to knowthe pattern and movement of perfect love. John tells us to share everything, and if we think that we have given too much, we must interrupt our self-congratulations and know that the most that we can give is nothing in comparison to what Christ comes to give us! The Virgin Mother of our Lord has a nice rebuke for us: The rich he hath sent empty away. (St. Luke i. 53) It is all consistent with John Baptist’s insistence that our souls should know Christ’s coming.
           
John also exhorts us to mourning. We acknowledge our sins, and we ought to mourn over their effects. We mourn our own lost opportunities to die to ourselves and prepare more seriously for Christ’s coming. We must pray for the gift of tears. Our physical tears begin to heal those who grieve. Our spiritual tears begin to cleanse us from sin, as St. J. Chrysostom says. Our repentance and mourning promise to play the greatest part in our coming to know God and rejoice in His coming. Our bodies will begin to heal, and our souls will be altered for the better. The water that John pours over the heads of penitents symbolizes the tears that purify the soul that awaits the coming of Christ.
          
The tears that unceasing prayer offers…are resurrectional. (Philokalia) Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. (St. Matthew v 4) Rejoicing and Joy constitute our end. Our preparation for the coming of Christ, heralded by St. John the Baptist intends to make us new and ripe for rejoicing in Christ’s Holy Incarnation. St. Paul says today Rejoice in the Lord always and again I say Rejoice. (Phil. iv. 4) We must rejoice in Jesus Christ’s coming to the soul. John’s cry for confession, contrition, and compunction prepares us to be filled with the salvation that Christ’s birth brings. Sorrow must yield to joy. If this power becomes operative in our lives, we shall instinctively perfect confidence and hope in God’s future glory. Today, Christ promises to infuse us with His presence to generate, deepen, and perfect our belief and hope that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. So let us close by praying with St. Ignatius of Loyola:

Fill us, we pray, with Your light and life, 
that we may show forth Your wondrous glory.  
Grant that Your love may so fill our lives 
that we may count nothing too small to do for You,  
nothing too much to gizxve,  
and nothing too hard to bear.
 
Teach us, good Lord, to serve You as You deserve: 
To give and not to count the cost;  
to fight and not to heed the wounds; 
to toil and not to seek for rest;  
to labour and not to ask for any reward,  
save that of knowing that we do Your will; 
through Jesus Christ our Lord. 

Amen.
 
©wjsmartin

​Art thou He that should come, or do we look for another?
(St. Matthew xi. 2)

We have said that Advent season is all about our preparing for the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ at Christmas time. In history, Jesus Christ, the Desire of God, was made flesh some two-thousand years ago in ancient Palestine. At that time, the historical Jesus had come to summon His followers to God’s Kingdom through the one oblation of Himself once offered. (Consecration Prayer, BCP 1954) As the Holy Spirit began to touch and move people through Him, He initiated the return of man to God the Father. He desires to do the same today. History has been in the process of being swallowed up into eternity ever since God the Father called Abraham out from Ur of the Chaldees. Having overcome all potential obstacles to communion with our Heavenly Father in His Son, the Father continues to draw back to Himself those who are ready and willing. The Ascended Christ continues to make history as He does the Father’s bidding and comes to be made flesh in us through the indwelling of His Spirit. 
        
We have a future, and our destiny is to be with God the Father. In today’s Gospel we are charged to prepare for that future in a very specific way by John the Baptist. John’s mission is to make ready and prepare the way for the coming of Jesus Christ, and so his life is a paradigm and pattern for our Advent preparation. His life is summarized in these words: He must increase, and I must decrease. (St. John iii. 30) John the Precursor, John the Preparer, is on a mission to discover that spiritual character that makes room for the coming of Jesus Christ. Yet, he knows that Christ cannot come to us until we have been emptied of our sins. Our sin takes up too much space! Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. (St. Matthew iii. 2) He calls us to make room in our hearts for Jesus Christ. John lives in the wilderness where he discovers himself. He sees himself clearly in a place far removed from relations to other people and things. He sees himself, mostly, as far removed from God. Here he discovers his sins and his need to repent of them. The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly and rejoice even with joy and singing. (Isaiah 35, 1,2) John Baptist’s wilderness is unlike nature. Nothing grows in a lifeless desert. But in John Baptist’s wilderness God will give the increase. John Baptist commands the coming of Christ. As Romano Guardini writes, 

The herald proclaims his message with authority, and what he says is framed in terms of a command. There is always a sense of urgency in what he announces. Though it may conflict with what is in men’s thoughts and interrupts them in their business, he cares less to conciliate them than secure their attention. (The Lord...) 
 
The hard truth that John proclaims is that God alone can save us from the wilderness that He demands.   

John commands us to share his repentance over his self-willed alienation from God. Repentance is the hard dry truth that knows of no growth or harvest in self-will. Repentance generates an abyss, a void, a barren wilderness, into which alone the coming Lord can work His healing redemption. John knows that the wilderness that his repentance has created is an empty cistern that can hold no water. With John, we must experience this emptiness that comes in and through ourselves and our best efforts. We must be unselfed in a purely potential state so that Christ might begin to redeem the raw materials of our being.  

And yet how can we do this? It sounds so much easier than it is. Repentance is difficult. What we are speaking about is not being sorry to others for sins committed against others. What we are talking about is being convicted by the Holy Spirit of our sin against God. Oswald Chambers tells us that, when the Holy Spirit rouses a man’s conscience and brings him into the presence of God, it is not his relationship with other men that bothers him, but his relationship with God –‘against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned and done this evil in Thy sight.’(Ps. li, 4; My Utmost, p.342) We cannot become the space that is prepared to welcome the meaning and purpose of Christ’s coming until our carefully contrived worlds of respectable goodness come crashing down. (Idem) What we have made and what we protect jealously must be destroyed. Even our good works, our law-abiding and moral habits must perish. Being satisfied with ourselves in relation to all else must die. Natural goodness and pious habits cannot save us. Self-conscious satisfaction is a barrier to the coming of Christ in our souls and bodies. With John the Baptist, we must say, [There is one] who coming after me is preferred before me, the latchet of whose shoe’s latchet I am not worthy to unloose…Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world…(John i. 27, 29)  He must increase and I must decrease. It is not ‘I’. I am not He. I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord. (St. John i. 23) With John the Baptist we must embrace our own undoing before we can comprehend Christ’s coming to us. With John Baptist we remain in sin if we cease to understand the value of repentance. With him we must examine ourselves and see if we have forgotten how to be truly repentant. (Ibid)
        
This means that we must be found faithful to Christ in reflecting and repenting in good times and bad. We find the extreme of bad times in today’s Gospel. John Baptist is in prison awaiting execution, having been tortured severely. John is near death and his role as Herald and Forerunner is coming to an end. He awaits the blessing of the Messiah’s coming. He sends his disciples to ask Jesus, Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another? (St. Matthew 11. 3) He must decrease and Christ must increase. They are sent back with no promise of John’s liberation from prison or of Herod’s demise. John must be swallowed up in Christ alone. 
Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see:  the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them. (Ibid, 4,5) 
 
In other words, give to John what he longs to hear. Give him the promise of healing, sanctification, and salvation. Tell him that what he has prepared for is coming to pass. John may not be able to live to see how the great mystery of Godliness unfolds. But he can leave this world being blessed by Christ’s coming with hope. Jesus knows that John is sufficiently emptied of himself to receive the good tidings of great joy that shall be to all people (St. Luke ii. 10) that are already pouring forth from the His heavenly heart into the suffering of the Baptist.
        
Christ goes on to say: And, blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me. (Idem) Monsignor Knox has it as, whosoever shall not be scandalized by me. The idea is that, as He says, blessed is the man who shall not be suddenly out of his stride, just when everything seemed to be going all right, by running up against an unforeseen snag or obstacle…or by falling into a trap. In other words, blessed is the man who is faithful come what may, despite all manner of unforeseen drawbacks. (Knox: The Epistles and Gospels, p. 16) Blessed is John Baptist into whose self-denial and looming death Christ can come with the spiritual hope that will save all men through all times and conditions.
        
Christ goes on to show that His coming is most acutely welcomed by those, like John Baptist, who are suffering and dying to this world. 
What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind? But what went ye out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? Behold, they that wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses. But what went ye out for to see? A prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and more than a prophet. For this is he, of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee. (Ibid, 7-10) 
 
What should we expect to find in John the Baptist? Unwavering faith. Utter unworldliness. Suffering. Death. To repent and be forgiven as God passes by or winks at men’s sins is Old Testament Religion. The new religion will demand death like that of the Baptist. It means that every inch of my being must decrease and die that Christ may come alive in me. Can Jesus who is the one that should come really intend that I should suffer in this way? Can a loving God demand such agony of soul as a condition for His coming? Jesus’ answer is a gentle, merciful but firm. Yes. Blessed is he who is not offended in Me. (Idem) Christ says that those who follow Him must die. They may, like John Baptist, die at the hands of wicked men. In whatever condition we find ourselves, we must die spiritually to anything that opposes Christ’s coming redemption.

Christ tells us that John’s way is correct. John turns our hearts of disobedience to the wisdom of the just [One]. John invites us into the wilderness of repentance as death and bids us welcome Christ’s coming. As Romano Guardini writes:

Stillness is the tranquility of the inner life, the quiet at the depths of its hidden stream. It is a collected, total presence, a being all there, receptive, alert, ready. There is nothing inert or oppressive about it. Attentiveness –that is the clue to the stillness in question. The stillness before Christ. (The Stillness and Silence of the Mass)
         
We have a future if we embrace John Baptist’s stillness. Only in stillness can we welcome Christ’s coming.  He must increase, and I must decrease. (idem) As Fulton Sheen remarks, Herein lies the secret of mental and spiritual stability. It is only by creating an emptiness that Heaven has a place to fill.  The Baptist is a steward who has been found faithful (1 Cor. iv. 2) in stillness and emptiness. Stillness and emptiness enable Christ to unself us, bring us into death, and bless us. Only then, with John, will we know that God’s coming Word made flesh will suffer more than any for us so that we may be called the children of God, and hope for a future of eternal union with His Father and ours, through the Holy Ghost. 
Amen.                     
©wjsmartin
 

​
 
Heaven and Earth shall pass away,
but my words shall not pass away. -St. Luke 21:33

We have said that Advent means coming, and in it, Christ comes to prepare us for His coming at Christmas. Last week, Jesus Christ came to awaken us out of spiritual sleep in order to purge and cleanse our souls. The urgency of the call was illustrated in Christ’s purging of the Temple at Jerusalem. The temple as the image of the soul and its condition – a den of thieves, indicative of the character of our souls on the best of days. For this reason, then, we prayed that He might give us Grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life. (Advent Collect) We prayed that Christ, the Everlasting Light, might come to us and penetrate our hearts and souls, freeing up as much room as possible for His imminent coming with new birth in us at Christmas time. Advent’s coming light is the unchanging Word of God, heard and moving the hearts of faithful men, as recorded in the pages of Holy Scripture, and made flesh in the life of Jesus Christ. In both manifestations, Advent’s coming light intends to make our souls spiritual spaces that Christ can indwell by Grace.   

Now, on this Second Sunday of Advent, we are called to open our spiritual eyes and understand more fully the nature and work of Christ’s Coming Light. St. Paul makes it very clear in this morning’s Epistle that Jesus Christ is the Light that has come into the world to confirm the promises made to [our Jewish] fathers so that the Gentiles might glorify God for His mercy. (Romans xv. 8,9) Jesus Christ is the Coming Light or God’s Word of Promise made flesh. For the Jews, He will be the fulfillment of promised salvation and deliverance from the Law of Sin and Death. For the Gentiles, He will be the revelation of that mercy and forgiveness that they never imagined could emerge from the heart of a God whom they knew but with whom they could never find lasting communion. He was, in a sense, an idea rather than a Person, or something that seemed more conceptually conceived than actually received in the hearts of pagan men. 

Because the promises of deliverance and salvation were made only to the Jews, the spiritual preparation for Christ’s Coming can be found expressed on the pages of the Old Testament as the Word of a Personal God heard and hoped for by the Jewish patriarchs, priests, prophets, and kings. St. Paul tells us that ancient books of the Old Testament were written aforetime…for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope. (Ibid, 4) The Word of a Personal God was full of promise for His Chosen People, Israel. To them, God spoke His Word. His Word was Christ. Through Christ the Word, God promised to come to save His People from the sin and death that separated them from Himself. In the Old Testament, we read of hope for deliverance from Original Sin. Through many dangers, toils, and snares, the Jews persistently remembered God’s Word of Promise and believed that God would come to save them. To the hearts and souls of the ancient Jews, the coming light was God’s written Word as Promise.

The Coming Light to the early Christians was the fulfillment of that promise in the life of Jesus Christ. For both Jew and Gentile, the Coming Light was embraced in the heart by faith as the unchanging Word of God. The struggle for both the ancient Jews and the early Christians was the temptation that Christ’s Coming Light might be darkened and even extinguished by the changes and chances of this fleeting world. 

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. 25,26) 
 
Men in every age would come to see that the powers of heaven themselves will be shaken as the Word of God judges history.

We Christians must realize that Jesus’ depiction of His Second Coming reveals creation as always changing, coming to be, and passing away. When men are mostly moved by earthly things and what comes to them naturally, they are always in danger of failing to use the creation in the service of their salvation. Distress, anguish, and disappointment are the logical consequences of misplaced hopes and confused loves. Those who put their trust in the false gods of mammon, power, or prestige shall always be filled with fear over the future. They are hewing out for themselves broken cisterns, which can hold no water. Jesus uses the parable of the fig tree to describe how most men receive Christ’s coming.

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. (Ibid, 29-31) 
 
St. Remigius says this:
 
Or, when this fig shall again bud, that is, when the synagogue shall receive the word of holy preaching, as the preaching of Enoch and Elijah, then ought we to understand the day of consummation is at hand. (Catena Aurea)
 
Men with the eyes of faith will see that ancient Jewish Law and even Greek pagan Wisdom will be judged by Christ the Coming Light like the fig tree. St Gregory writes, the fruit of the world is [always in] ruin [and] the powers of heaven shall be shaken. (Idem) To both the Jews who seek for a sign and the Greeks who search for wisdom, the Second Coming will judge man’s earthly Law and secular Wisdom as limited and incomplete, at best. What both missed was that the first coming of Christ in the flesh was the Incarnation of God’s Word and Demonstration of His Loving Will for Man.

This Coming Light of Christ that we embrace in Advent is the brilliance of the Word who comes to judge the world here and now. We can see Him only with the eyes of faith. We need not wait for the Second Coming for Judgment. For the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God: and if it first begin at us, what shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God? (1 Peter iv. 17)
Jesus says that heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall never pass away. (St. Matthew xxiv. 35) So Christ the Coming Light and Word of God, must judge us now. Jesus says In patience possess ye your souls. (Ibid, 19) He means, Be vigilant, wait, and watch. He comes to us in this season of Advent, as one who judges the world and reveals that it is always passing away. Our Gospel teaches us that the fear of the Lord, holy terror in this present time should move us to endure patientlyChrist’s Judgment of us. So, we should pray: 

O Lord, let us fear thy Coming Light here and now with wholesome wonder that submits humbly and heeds faithfully thy judgment of our lives. Shed thy Coming Light upon our sins, that we may claim and confess them. Give us deeper sorrow for them. Help us to love the thing that is good and hate that which is evil. Give us patience to suffer for holiness and righteousness’ sake.
 
To this end, today’s Collect exhorts us to the devout perusal of Holy Scripture: 
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 ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life…(Advent ii, Collect) 
 
Our relationship with God comes through His promised Word, the manifestation of Christ the Coming Light and the Word made flesh. Christ the Coming Light is the Unchanging Word of God for us made flesh encountered on the pages of Holy Scripture. In patience, we must possess our souls and embrace His Holy Word in our flesh. We must allow Him to judge, punish, discipline, and correct us so that we might more fully become His own. Patience is the companion of Wisdom, St. Augustine writes. With patience, Christ’s Coming Light will enable us to receive with meekness the engrafted Word which is able to save our souls. (St. James i. 21)  

But as we await Christ the Coming Light with patience, we are not excused from cultivating desire. As real religion is filled with the fear of the Lord and holy terror, so too must our hearts be filled with desire for the coming Judgment. Ancient Christians were known for looking for Christ’s Second Coming so earnestly that they were full of impatience because it appeared to be delayed. (The Christian Year in the Times, p. 5) Much more than preparing themselves for Christ the Coming Light in the here and now, they longed for the Second and final Coming. In times of persecution, which might begin to feel again, Christians must cultivate love and desire for their End. To Early Christians the thought of the Judgment was a constant encouragement, an inspiration to continued fidelity in the face of opposition. (Idem)

Christ the Light of the World, who will pronounce judgment at the Second Coming, is the One whom we should know as Our Lord.  Christ the Light is the Loving Word made Flesh who wins our salvation. The desire and love of God in the flesh, the Forgiveness of Sins must be dearest to us. Christ came into the world to conquer sin, death, and Satan from the Tree of New Life on the Wood of the Cross. He knows us better than we know ourselves. He sees most clearly what is in the heart of another. He knows our struggle to embrace His Light, for He is pure Goodness. (Idem) Christ the Coming Light is the God’s Word of Divine Desire for us in His Death and beyond. This Advent, we must prepare for Christ’s coming to see that from the Crib to the Cross there is no phase of human life that is not redeemed as Man’s desire for God and God’s desire for Man. The key to its success in us will be found in our responsibility or irresponsibility, in our approval or condemnation forever. Here and now, there is still time for repentance. Judgment bids us take heart of Grace in the conviction that the opportunity is still ours to attain a life free from past failure and worthy of Divine Approval forever. (Idem)
Amen.
©wjsmartin
 
 
 

 And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought 
in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the money changers, and the seats of them 
that sold doves, and said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called 
the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.
(St. Matthew xxi. 12, 13) 
 
 
The traditional Anglican lectionary goes back to the Ancient Church. As Father Crouse reminds us, If you consider the selection of lessons for the Sundays in Advent in [our] Book of Common Prayer, you will find that they are those appointed in the Sarum Missal of the Medieval Church of England and are in fact the same as those prescribed in the “Comes of St. Jerome,” which goes back to the Fifth Century. Our own Anglican Reformers decided to opt for the readings selected by the Ancient Fathers since they knew that they were safer guides to our salvation journey than any others.

Today’s readings are no exception. We have read this morning about Jesus’ exultant entry into Jerusalem, and literally minded post-moderns wonder why we are using readings for Palm Sunday. Why did the Ancient Fathers choose this reading for Advent Sunday? Aren’t we supposed to be getting ready for Christmas? But the Church Fathers understood that Advent prepares Christians for the coming of Christ’s birth at Christmas time. His birth is, of course, a triumphant coming into our souls once again, on Christmas night. St. Paul tells us this morning that, 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. (Romans xiii. 12) Christmas is all about the coming Light, the Light which was the Life of men…the Light [which] shineth in the darkness, and the darkness [overcame] it not…the Light that ligtheth every man that cometh into the world. (St. John i. 4,5,9) Advent, with the Ancient Latin Fathers, means preparing spiritually for the birth of Christ the Life and Light, and this involves readying the soul so that we may joyfully receive Him for our Redeemer.
         
Our Advent season encourages us to prepare ourselves through repentance for Christ’s dramatic visitation at Christmas. Advent is a season of fasting, prayer, and abstinence. St. Paul insists that we should walk honestly, as in the day, not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But putting on the Lord Jesus Christ, and making no provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof. (Ibid, 13, 14) Preparing for Christmas in Advent means readying ourselves of Christ’s dramatic coming at Christmas. Preparing for Christmas in Advent demands spiritual and bodily mortification so that we might welcome the Christ Child in a deeper way. Casting away the works of darkness, through sorrow, penance, and contrition will give us a keener vision into the need for Christ’s birth historically and spiritually. Compunctious contrition over sin reveals our distance from God. Our alienation from God demands a response to our fallen condition that God alone in His Son, Jesus Christ, can remedy. Christ came into the world to exorcise and expel all darkness from human life. Christ comesto us continually to root and ground us in His Redemption and Salvation.

To perceive the Light of Christ’s birth on Christmas Day, we must courageously face the darkness. The contrast and contradiction between darkness and light was emphasized last Sunday when we asked the Lord to stir up [our] wills to plenteously bring forth good works in Advent’s time of preparation for Christmas. Advent’s call is prepare to meet thy God. We are called to meet our God at Christmas, but more poignantly at the Great and Dreadful Day of Judgment. Christmas itself must be a trial run for Judgment Day. Casting away the works of darkness means facing our sins and ridding ourselves of them now in the time of this mortal life. Darkness is comprised of that hardheartedness that neglects and dismisses sin because we fear the coming of Christ the Light.
         
Another way of facing the darkness which has a firm grip on our souls is to remember that Advent is all about the Four Last Things. What are the Four Last Things? They are Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. How do we relate to darkness? We are afraid of Death. We shall be better used to it if we start dying now. Dying to what, you ask? To ourselves, the world, and to sin. Thus, we might begin to allow the Judge Eternal throned in Splendor, Jesus Christ, to judge us now before it is too late. If Jesus Judges us now, He shall teach us how our thoughts, words, and works measure up against His Will for us. He shall show us Heaven and Hell. Either one or the other awaits us all. It is up to us which we choose by acclimating our lives to Jesus Christ or not. 
         
Advent begins with Christ’s riding into Jerusalem. With the crowds of old in this Advent season, we should respond to Him with Hosanna to the Son of David: Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest. (Ibid, 9) We should rejoice that, once again in Advent, Christ is coming to us. We sing Hosanna because the God of all glory and holiness has stooped down from His heavenly throne to enter our souls to give us one more time to repent, one more time to cast away the works of darkness and put upon us the armor of light. When we proclaim Hosanna, we should mean it. We mean it if, indeed, we allow Him to be the Great Physician who comes to heal our souls. The Christ who comes in Advent intends to awaken us to the darkness that defines our lives. He doesn’t have time for cheap Grace or lukewarm religion. He knows [the] time, [and] that now it is high time to awake [us] out of sleep, for now is our salvation closer than when we first learned to believe. (Romans xiii 11: AV & Knox) Christ comes to cure our souls and to call us out of darkness.
Next, we read that 

Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, and said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves. (Ibid, 12, 13) 
 
Christ means business. If we want Jesus to cast away the works of darkness in our souls, we had better allow Jesus to purge our systems of the worship of all false gods, like money, mammon, and the false security they deceptively provide! Christ is like any good doctor. Do we resent sharing our riches with others? Christ means to knock it out of us. Do we help others a little and ourselves a lot as we jump onto the computer to buy another frock, another trinket, or another house? Jesus is grieved over this worship of mammon. Do we make a God out of our loneliness and fail to take the time alone with ourselves to get close to Jesus? Jesus is angry because we forget that we are never alone. He is forever with us, longing for us to get to know Him better.
         
On this Advent Sunday, we must open our souls to the penetrating, invasive, determined, and dynamic Light of Christ’s coming! St. Paul tells us this morning that our patient preparation for Christ’s spiritual surgery must involve love. If Christ is to enter our souls to purge, cleanse, and wash away our sins, we must not be resentful, angry, or bitter. If Christ is to enter our souls, we must die to putting ourselves first and try putting ourselves last. We are sinners in need of a Savior. Owe no man anything, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. (Romans xiii 8) This means that we must stop acting out of insecurity and selfishness and begin to love and give freely. The night is far spent and the night is at hand. (Idem) Christ the Light comes to us freely in love to offer us the priceless gift of salvation. Do we want it? Now it is high time to wake out of sleep. (Idem) For they that sleep, sleep in the night. And they that be drunken, are drunken in the night. (1 Thes. V. 7) Alas, for the Day. The day of the Lord is at hand. (Joel i. 15) All sinful things are made manifest by the light: for whatsoever doth make manifest is light.  Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light. (Ephesians v. 13,14)

My friends, today we are called to slow down and contemplate our darkness in relation to Christ the Light. Advent is all about waking up, being roused, and becoming conscious of our need for Jesus Christ. We need to admit that this world’s false gods have left us in unhappy darkness. We need to admit that they have left us further removed from Christ the Light. We need to repent. Advent is about waiting and watching for the coming of Christ’s birth at Christmas. Without repentance, there will be no room in the inn of our souls for Christ’s birth. The Advent fire of Christ’s Light can purify and heal the temple of our souls of all false commerce with darkness. 

In closing, we might remember that forewarned is forearmed. Now is high time to wake out of sleep. (Idem) A friend of mine is fond of saying that is not my problem. But what if God has sent those who struggle and have needs into our lives not as problems but as opportunities. Perhaps others come to us as a Divine Opportunity to help and assist them not by compulsion or force but to prove our free love. Freely ye have received, freely give. (Matt. X. 8) It might just be that Christ is testing us against the Great and Dreadful Day of Judgment to see if we can practice love like His, love freely given and with no expectations! God loves us in Jesus Christ, no matter what! Owe no man anything but to love. (Idem) We are redeemed and saved by the Blood of Jesus Christ to commence and continue paying the debt of love. We can never pay off Christ’s debt of love to us, but we can offer it always and freely. Perhaps if we learn to love others and give to others, no matter what, in this Advent Season, Christ will come to us and be born in us, and we shall be called Christians, maybe even for the first time, on Christmas Night and others will awaken out of sleep too!
Amen.
 ©wjsmartin
 

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​Thy faith hath made thee whole…(St. Matthew ix. 22)
 

The green season of Trinity Tide emphasizes spiritual growth and fertility by drawing our attention to the miracles of Jesus. Our English word miracle is a translation from the Greek word dunamis, meaning mighty work or power. Archbishop Trench says that a miracle is an outcoming of the mighty power of God, which is inherent in Christ himself, that great power of God. (Notes on the Miracles of Our Lord) A miracle is a manifestation of God’s power imparted by Jesus Christ, the Word made Flesh, into human hearts by the Holy Ghost. Most of God’s miracles found in Scripture can be traced to Christ in the days of His Incarnation. They are disclosures and revelations of God’s strength which are effected directly or indirectly through Christ himself. John Donne tells us that there is in every miracle a silent chiding of the world and a tacit reprehension of them that require, or who need, miracles.(Trench, p. 16)
         
Miracles are offered from God to man to remind us of that power, which we are habitually in danger of forgetting. This is the power that must, at times, startle and shake us out of an otherwise somnolent and sleepy spiritual sloth. Through miracles, God reveals Himself to the Jews on Mount Horeb. Through miracles, God reveals Himself, in Jesus Christ, to their descendants. Through miracles, we find that curative dynamism of Divine Power that visits men in Jesus Christ, heals them, and offers to carry them home to God. From what does man need healing? Sin. Every man needs to be healed of what stands between him and his Maker. The instance of healing is not what is important. God lends His power to man to elicit a deeper consciousness of his absolute dependence upon His Maker for his redemption and salvation. The miracle might cure a man of blindness. The greater miracle is his spiritual realization that God’s Wisdom, Power, and Love alone can ensure his transition to the Kingdom.
         
In today’s Gospel lesson, we read of two miracles that should encourage us to seek out the power of God in Jesus Christ for our own lives. We read of one miracle that is sought out vicariously through entreaty and another that is sought out directly through contact with Jesus. There is desire for healing a relative and passionate determination for healing of the self. In today’s Gospel the order is abruptly reversed.

This morning we learn that before a man can pray aright for the healing of others, he must be healed himself. Thus, the power of God is obtained individually so that the sanctified soul might know how and when to pray for others. This, of course, runs clean contrary to what most people do. Most people are consumed with praying for other people’s sin and sickness. It may be well-intentioned, but most men are more co-dependently consumed with other people’s sins than their own.   
         
So, to today’s lesson. We read that there is the ruler who comes to Jesus, honors him, and begs Him to come down to heal his daughter who has just died. My daughter is even now dead, but come and lay thy hand upon her, and she shall live. (St. Matthew ix.18) Jesus takes His disciples to follow the gentleman home. Something then interrupts their journey so that Jesus can reveal to the ruler what should have preceded his intercession for his daughter. Remember, the order of the healings is all important. Out of the blue and in the press, someone touches Him. Behold, a woman, which was diseased with an issue of blood twelve years, came behind him and touched the hem of his garment: for she said within herself, If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole. (St. Matthew ix. 20,21) Someone has interrupted Jesus’ response to a nobleman’s petition. 
          
The woman with an issue of blood twelve years impedes the journey into healing, for the benefit of our enlightenment and instruction. This woman is an example to us of that personal diligence and determination that must always precede our prayers and supplications for others. She reveals who and what the ruler should have been before he begged Jesus to heal his daughter. She represents that spiritual character and disposition that must characterize the life of the soul that must be healed before it can know how, when, and in what manner to pray for others. 
         
What does this mean? How can we possibly approach God with cares and concerns about others before we are made right with Him ourselves? No doubt, there is nothing wrong with wanting the healing of others and our loved ones. The example of the ruler provides us with a degree of natural good will; here we find a man honored and esteemed in the earthly city who is heartbroken over his daughter’s sickness and death. Yet we must see the interruption of the woman with the issue of blood as a call to our own need for getting right with God through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

The woman in this morning’s Gospel provides us with a witness to that faith that seeks out and finds, that perseveres and persists until it has secured the power of God for its own healing. She needs Christ’s healing. She has suffered physically for twelve years with uninterrupted menstruation. Yet, she is humbler than the earthly ruler.  Her ongoing and unhealed sickness has ostracized her from society, she is embarrassed, and she seeks a cure. St. John Chrysostom reminds us that 

she was ashamed on account of her affliction, accounting herself to be unclean. For if the menstruous woman was judged not to be clean, much more would she have the same thought, who was afflicted with such a disease; since in fact that complaint was under the law accounted a great uncleanness. (Hom. Xxxi)
 
She knew that she could not help herself, and St. Luke reminds us that she had suffered many things of many physicians, and spent all that she had, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse. (St. Luke viii. 43) Her faith convinces her that the mere touch of Jesus’ garment will heal her. With faith and courage, she will push through the crowd to touch Jesus. She cannot speak out of shame, but she can touch. Because of who Jesus is, the very garments that He wears must be conduits to the newness of life that will issue from Him to her. 

Then, Jesus, perceiving that virtue has gone out of Him (St. Luke viii. 46), says to her, daughter be of good comfort, thy faith hath made thee whole. (St. Matthew ix. 22) Jesus has been moved by the faith that has sought Him out and found Him in a unique way. Silently she prays, God be merciful to me a sinner and hopes to return healed to her hidden obscurity. 
 
The woman is a sign of our need to judge ourselves, feel our spiritual sickness, and seek a cure. She reveals a faith that Christ knows what is best for her without her asking. To reach out to God in Jesus Christ, to touch the hem of His heavenly garment, and to desire His power with a humble passion silently are of highest value to Christ, our all-merciful Lord! There can be no doubt that Jesus was thronged by a multitude of sick and diseased people. But one woman touches Him with humble faith. The commentators remind us that she might have touched His garment, been healed, and gone away with a healing and restoration that was as concealed and hidden as her original disease. For, she thought within herself, her own healing paled in significance to that of the ruler’s daughter. She was no aristocrat! But Jesus would have none of it. The unique, humble faith of this woman must be brought out into the clear light of day so that its earnest passion might inspire others to imitation. This is the faith that must travel out of fear and trembling into the clear light of Christ’s healing embrace. Archbishop Trench remarks:

She hoped to remain in concealment out of a shame, which, however natural, was untimely in this the crisis of her spiritual life; but this hope of hers is graciously defeated.  Her heavenly Healer draws her from the concealment she would have chosen; but even here, so far as possible, He spares her, for not before, but after she is healed, does He require the open confession from her lips.  She might have found it perhaps altogether too hard had He demanded this of her before; but, waiting till the cure is accomplished, He helps her through the narrow way. Altogether spare her this painful passage He could not, for it pertained to her birth into the new life. (Trench, Ibid, 150)
 
Daughter, be of good comfort, thy faith hath made thee whole. (Idem) Her faith has conquered Jesus’ heart, procured His virtue, and Jesus will hold her as an example to us all.
         
Again, John Donne tells us that in every miracle there is a silent chiding of the world. (Idem) The woman with the issue of blood chides or reproaches us all. Do we have her deep humility and faith to persistently pursue Christ’s power to heal? Christ brings out the faith of the woman with the issue of blood to make public what must shame us.  
Many throng Christ; His in name; near to Him; in actual contact with the sacraments and ordinances of His Church; yet not touching Him, because not drawing nigh in faith, not looking for, and therefore not obtaining, life and healing from Him, and through these. (Trench, Ibid, 149)
 
Will we pursue Christ persistently in the crowded ways of modern life with humble and faithful hearts that seek His cure for our sins? The woman with the issue of blood committed no sin but is ashamed and alienated. Christ intends for us to imitate her humility, faith, and persistence. We must be humbled. Our faith must feel deeply our need for His healing power. We must never think that Christ’s Redemption is for other people. We must never take Christ for granted. We must stop thinking that we can touch the hem of Christ’s garment in the Sacraments without believing in the power that they convey! The Son of God paid for our Salvation with His Blood. Do we receive His Body and Blood as what alone can cure our sin sick souls? Christ is God’s Word. If we touch the hem of His Garment, we must intend to receive His healing power.

Jesus displays the woman’s faith to all for our imitation. (St. J. Chryst.) We wonder why we don’t heal. Our faith is too weak. Our faith is a private affair. Jesus says, thy faith has made thee whole (Idem). In our lives, this miracle should reveal to the world an outcoming of the mighty power of God, which is inherent in Christ himself, that great power of God. (Idem)
Amen.
©wjsmartin
 

 
 





​Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Cæsar the things 
which are Cæsar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.
(St. Matthew xxii. 21)
 
         
One of the most difficult enterprises in Christian life involves holding things together. Christians try to hold together their bodies and souls in the service of God. They try to hold together their marriages and families. They attempt to hold together the church and even civil society as one nation under God. Christians are quite intent on holding together who are intended to be united by God. Yet the devil is in our midst to divide and rend asunder and break down. We tear babies out of mothers’ wombs and call the separation a healthy choice. We rend asunder marriages because narcissistic heathen cannot abide the sacrifice that is called to struggle to keep vows. We divide our bodies from our souls, thinking that their connection is arbitrary and without any spiritual meaning for the psychosomatic unity of a person. Of course, we’ve done nothing but divide ourselves from ourselves. What God intends to be one – one in oneself, one with others, one with Himself – we Christians are in danger of losing through division. But God always intends to hold us together through Jesus Christ our Lord and by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost.
         
Yet, our prayerful desire to hold it all together is not made easy. We pray in this morning’s Collect that the author of all Godliness…[might] hear the devout prayers of the Church, and grant that those things which we ask faithfully we may obtain effectually, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Of course, our prayers should be devout and sincerely aim to be one with God. Devout praying asks God to hold us together individually and collectively. Christians should want to go to God’s Kingdom first and foremost by not offending God who is all good and deserving of all of our love, and by conquering sin and death. But Christians who are awake will find that God’s desire for us has competition from the world, the flesh, the Devil, and even from the realm that the Caesars of this world rule and govern. 

The Devil’s attacks are more direct and discernible. The Rulers and Governors of this world are more subtle. Gone are the days when they fought valiantly against the enemies of the Christ and His Cross. In fact, these days, it seems that the Caesars of this world are offended at nothing but Christ, His Cross, and the beautiful history of the West that it engendered. Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s has become increasingly difficult in a world where the Caesars are positively godless and a serious threat to those journeying to Christ and His Kingdom. Caesars who disrespect freedom of conscience make it very hard for contemporary Christians to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. It is even more difficult for intelligent Christians who know that modern freedom, of course, comes only from Jesus Christ, the King of Glory. The Caesars of this world fill men with fear over the gain and loss of perishable treasures, determined to hold them captive to the false gods of a human nature that is at odds with itself and all others. Through faith and reason, Jesus Christ intends the happiness and communion of another world.

Of course, the forces of division present in the contemporary world have been around since the dawn of time. In the world of today’s Epistle and Gospel, they were alive and well in vice or even heresy. Vice is common to all men in all ages and leads most men to Hellfire and Damnation. Heresy is a bit more interesting since it, at least, attempts to give man religion, as misconstrued as that may be. As we read last week, in his Epistle to the Philippians, St. Paul is writing to the first Christian Church in Europe. Today, we learn that he is warning them of both heresy and moral corruption. Moral corruption divides man from the good of his body, soul, and spirit, the good of his neighbor, and from God through sin. Heresy divides man from the knowledge of how God redeems the body, soul, and spirit, how He enables man to love his neighbor, and how He draws all men back to Himself. Moral corruption and heresy threaten salvation and man’s return to God. 

St. Paul was dealing with heretics in the Early Church. He is worried about the Judaizers. Judaizers were early Jewish Christians who demanded that salvation be contingent upon strict adherence to the Jewish Law. Jewish Christians insisted that circumcision, dietary laws, and ritual observances were necessary to salvation since salvation is of the Jews. St. Paul, who knew the Jewish Law perfectly, believed that Judaizers were encouraging Christians to be held by the Law and not by the God of the Law. St. Paul knew that the Law could never save a man. He writes to the Galatians, I do not frustrate the grace of God: for if righteousness comes by the law, then Christ is dead in vain. (Gal. ii. 21) Again, he writes, For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh….(Rom. viii. 3) St. Paul believes that the Jewish Law revealed man’s habitual weakness and inability to be faithful. Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. (Gal. iii. 24) The Law brought the Jewish people into the consciousness of being held by sin and death. For those who insisted upon a rigorous submission to the Law, St. Paul has a solution. Strict adherence by ritual observances has been overcome by the Law made Flesh, Jesus Christ. Christ alone has fulfilled the Law, has obeyed it perfectly, has suffered its end in unjust death, redeeming it in Himself. Through His unearned, unmerited, and underserved death on the Cross of Calvary, Jesus Christ has brought the Law of Sin and Death to Death in His Death. Jesus Christ, the Forgiveness of Sins made flesh, has made Atonement for the sins of the whole world. The true meaning of the Old Law is found in Christ. The New Law brings life and Resurrection if we allow that Forgiveness of Sins, Jesus Christ, to overcome our sin in death to the world. The New Law means that we can be held together in body and soul, with one another, and with God once again in Jesus Christ. We can once again Render unto God the things that are God’s (Idem) because it was not possible that Jesus Christ should be holden of death. (Acts ii. 24)

Remember, Jewish Law and Roman Law, upheld by the Pharisees and Caesars, respectively, are two expressions of the same Law: the Law of Sin and Death. Neither the Jew nor the Gentile could overcome them. That neither Law could hold Christ in Death is the Miracle of Redemption. That Christ continues to hold us in His Liberating Hands is the Miracle of sanctification that leads to our salvation. God in Jesus Christ fills those who mind earthly things with holy terror. They fear what they cannot control or ever really possess. God renders Caesar’s good impermanent and unreliable. If the Gospel is true and men learn of it, the hold that godless rulers have over us becomes tenuous.

Yet, still, we as Christians must pray about what rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s (Idem) really means. The heretics of the ancient world and the Caesars of our own seem Hell-bent on breaking Christ’s hold on our memories, minds, and hearts. St. Paul says, Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers, beware of the concision. (Phil. iii. 2) He continues, 

Brethren, be followers together of me, and mark them which walk so as ye have us for an ensample. (For many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of the Cross of Christ: whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.) (Idem, 17-19) 
 
Long ago, St. Paul criticized the Jewish heretics and immoral believers to shed light on the dangers of Christians who are held by false gods and mind earthly things too much to be of any heavenly good to themselves, others, and God. He showed us that Christians can be as earthly-minded as the Pharisees or any pagan Caesars. Christians too can be dividers and sewers of discord, held by Satan and lost to Heaven’s hold.

How can we render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s if we are trying to escape his hold on us? Why do we owe Caesar anything? It doesn’t seem to make much sense. Jesus referred to paying taxes to the Roman Emperor for the protection, law, and order that his Legion provided. That was a reasonable tax. But how does it apply to us? Jesus means it in a spiritual sense. We can show Caesar that our [true] citizenship is in Heaven. (Ibid, 20) We can honor Caesar and his heathen friends by showing them that Caesar and all men belong to God. For our conversation is in Heaven, from whence also we look for our Saviour, Jesus Christ, who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power which enables him even to subject all things to himself. (Idem) We can tell our unbelieving neighbors that we too were once held in Satan’s grip by sin. We can relate to the Caesars that we are being saved by God’s Grace, which has an eternal hold on our souls because our frail flesh hasn’t any hope without the love of a more Glorious Ruler. We should render to Caesar the witness of how King Jesus holds us in His loving embrace. We should render unto Caesar ourmourning. With St. Paul, we weep…for those who are the enemies of the Cross of Christ, whose end is destruction, whose god is their belly, who mind earthly things. (Idem) When we render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, may the Caesars realize that we mourn for them.
 
Caesars have a hold on citizens with which he intended to make a handsome return. As Matthew Henry remarks, If purses be Caesar’s, our consciences are God’s. Caesar has us superficially; God has us substantially. Caesar belongs to God. St. Augustine says, Christ’s coin is man. In him is Christ’s image, in him Christ’s name, Christ’s gifts, Christ’s rule of dignity. (Vol. vi. NPNF (1st) Let us return ourselves to Christ fully in will and in deed. In urging us to render to Caesar, the things that are Caesar’s, Jesus, our King, at least stumps the Pharisees. When they had heard these words, they marveled, and left Him, and went their way. (ibid, 22)

Amen.
©wjsmartin

 
                   
                   



​                   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. i. 6)
            

In the lections appointed for this morning’s service, we are presented with an excerpt from St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians. Philippi is in modern-day Macedonia, north of Greece and east of Italy. The church in Philippi was the first to be established on European soil, with which Paul maintained very good relations throughout his missionary career. The passage that we read is upbeat, which is curious for those who know when and under what circumstances it was written.
Tradition tells us that this letter was written at the end of Paul’s life, when he was imprisoned in Rome, awaiting trial during the reign of the notorious Emperor Nero. Paul was under house arrest and wrote a letter full of hope, thanksgiving, and love. Paul is consumed with Jesus Christ, whom he receives continually through the indwelling of the Holy Ghost. Paul is determined to pass on the presence of Christ Jesus to his followers, with the minor distraction of his imminent execution!

No matter: St. Paul is uplifted by his church plant at Philippi. He is filled with thanksgiving for Lydia, the maker of purple, and Christ’s first European convert. Lydia haled from Thyatira but had relocated to Philippi for business purposes. Thyatira was famous for having been a chief center in the Roman Empire for the indigo trade. Indigo is the plant that provides purple ink for coloring clothing and paint for all artisans. The color produced from indigo was costly and thus became the symbol of kingly power and prestige in the Ancient World. Archeologists have found remnants of inscriptions telling us of the Dyers’ Guilds of Thyatira. Lydia was, to our knowledge, wealthy from her trade in indigo. She first met St. Paul on his Second Missionary Journey to convert the Gentiles. St. Luke tells us in his Acts of the Apostles that when he, St. Paul, and their company of fellow Evangelists arrived in Philippi:

…On the sabbath we went out of the city by a riverside, where prayer was wont to be made; and we sat down, and spake unto the women which resorted thither. And a certain woman named Lydia, a seller of purple, of the city of Thyatira, which worshipped God, heard us: whose heart the Lord opened, that she attended unto the things which were spoken of Paul. And when she was baptized, and her household, she besought us, saying, If ye have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come into my house, and abide there. And she constrained us. (Acts xvi. 13-16)
 
Lydia constrained the Apostles, and we believe that the itinerant Evangelists were more than slightly embarrassed that a woman of such means and nobility would invite them to lodge in her lordly Roman manor. That Lydia was a worshipper of God means that she was probably a Righteous Gentile. Lydia is a Greek name meaning noble one. So, they took up her offer and began to establish the Church at Philippi in her opulent home. This was perhaps the first Church-House outside of Jerusalem. Lydiawas ready and willing to receive Jesus as the Messiah, was baptized with her whole house, and the rest is history. The Church of Lydia’s House went on not only to expand and grow, but it also opened its collective heart and coffers to Paul when he was preaching in Thessalonica and when he was imprisoned at Rome. St. Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians is a letter of hope, love, and thanksgiving for the Church at Philippi in Lydia’s home. 

Still, we are astounded at St. Paul’s spiritual centeredness with a ball and chain around his ankle, awaiting his impending execution at the hands of the Romans. His love of God with a grateful heart is truly a powerful treasure. His spiritual riches consist of zeal, courage, faith, hope, and love. Paul is under house arrest, and his trusted friend St. Timothy is by his side. Addressing the Philippians, he writes, I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine for you, making my prayer with all joy. (Idem, 3) St. Paul’s letter reflects a life of conversion, sanctification, and salvation and his treasure is given to others. He thanks God, because God had shared his faith, hope, and love with those who opened their hearts and souls to the reality of God with us, Jesus Christ. He thanks God because his new family is an extension of his own redeemed life. He is filled with all joy because his brethren at Philippi continue to tradition or hand over the faith once delivered to the Saints, (Jude i. 3) even as he suffers unjustly at the hands of Nero. He reminds them that God has begun the good work of his Holy Spirit in them. He encourages them to cultivate the good work begun in them, the new life as the riches of God’s salvation in Jesus Christ. The work that God has begun at Philippi, Paul insists, will be perfected, and brought to completion if his friends remain faithful to the Lord Jesus and hope in His promises. St. Paul is overcoming Lydia’s earthly wealth with God’s spiritual treasure.
            
St. Paul then introduces a concept that invites his friends to take on his burden. Paul, in his suffering, takes in with joy the presence of Jesus Christ in the church at Philippi. He says, I have you in my heart; inasmuch as both in my bonds, and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel, ye are all partakers of Grace. For God is my witness how I yearn for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus. (Phil. i. 7) Paul asks his friends to take on the burden of his love, which conquers all suffering.In other words, he asks those who are not facing imminent death to identify with his struggle, to hold him up in prayer, to put his weakness into their hearts, that their faith might give him grace to help in time of need. (Hebrews iv. 16) Paul insists that burden-bearing strengthens the faith of those who bear it and the one who suffers. Burden-bearing will become the norm for Christian in centuries to come, as those whose faith is perfected in the unjust suffering of others.

St. Paul imitates his Master and Lord. Jesus Christ hangs on the Cross at Calvary and holds his friends and even His enemies in the center of His heart. Jesus takes on the burdens of sin, suffering, and death, with no just cause in earthly terms. He takes on the joy and sadness, weaknesses, and strengths of those who trust in Him. He says Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you…my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Though painful and hard, Christ takes on the burden as His joy, His honor, and His privilege for us. Christ Jesus has taken on the burden of all mankind. The Lord takes on St. Paul’s weakness and fear. In turn, St. Paul takes on the burdens of others. Against his suffering, in Christ, he invites the Church at Philippi, rich in earthly things, to discover spiritual treasure. Hold me in your hearts; pray for me; ask the Lord to strengthen and help me. St. Paul asks his flocks to lift him up in prayer.
            
Burden-bearing is possible only because men realize that Christ has first born our burden of all sin. From the Cross He holds men in His heart, He forgives them their sins, and invites them onto the road that leads to salvation. Jesus Christ is the Forgiveness of Sins made flesh. He brings our sin to death. He rises from death and is ready to come alive in as many as will receive Him. Because St. Paul has been forgiven much, he can pass on Jesus Christ to others. Once, he persecuted the Church. Now he will give his life for it. St. Paul reckons himself to be dead indeed unto sin but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. (Rom. vi. 11) Now, he prays for the salvation of his sheep at Philippi because, though in bonds, he has them in his heart. (Idem)
            
In today’s Gospel, we read of the forgiveness of sins and our need to forgive always. If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1 St. John i. 8, 9) If we repent us of our sins and forgive all others, our Heavenly Father will forgive us. St. Paul embraces the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ, in a dramatic volte face or reversal of attitude that converted and saved him from his journey into Hell. The forgiveness of sins, Jesus Christ, is now resurrected in Paul; he extends it to his oppressors with mercy, compassion, and long-suffering. In today’s Gospel, Peter asks Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven. (St. Matthew xviii, 21) In Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Portia has this to say about mercy and forgiveness.
                              The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
                              It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
                              Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
                              It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
                                             (The Merchant of Venice, Act-IV, Scene-I, Lines 173-195)
 
God’s mercy and love are made flesh as the Forgiveness of Sins in Jesus Christ. It blesses those who give it and those who receive it. It is of God’s nature to give it for as long as anyone lives. It falls from God’s heart as naturally as the gentle rains fall from the skies. It falls into humble and lowly hearts which will receive it, emptied of pride and vanity, resentment, envy, and fear. It blessed St. Paul. His flock at Philippi returns it to his oppressors in joyful hope from grateful hearts for his ministry. Its quality overcomes all attempts by vengeful unbelievers to kill Christ’s Apostles. 
            
Today, we ask God to help us receive His forgiveness. We pray that the forgiveness of sins might be resurrected in us as it was in Lydia and the Philippian Church. We long to embrace the new life in Jesus Christ. As Charles Williams reminds us,

The new knowledge [in Jesus Christ] is to lose all recollection of past sin; it will be remembered neither in Heaven nor on earth; the Kingdom of the Lord is free from it. The new knowledge…is to be instinctive and natural, a lovely habit, a practice of joy…it is to be in the flesh of man and in his heart.
 
Amen.
 

But ye, beloved, building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in 
the Holy Ghost, keep yourselves in the love of God, 
looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life. (St. Jude 20)

Today we celebrate the Feast of Saint Simon and Saint Jude. Both are of the original Twelve Apostles of Jesus Christ. Of each, we know scarcely anything. Saint Simon is mentioned four times in the New Testament and then only in a list of the other Apostles. Saint Jude is mentioned six times – one of the twelve three times, as the half-brother of Jesus twice, and as the author of his own Epistle once. Unfortunately, we have very little history upon which to establish a foundation for a theme. Our 1928 Book of Common Prayer revisers make it even more difficult since they replace the Epistle Lesson from St. Jude with that of Ephesians ii.
        
Of course, the reason that the revisers changed the Epistle in 1928 was that St. Jude had to change his intended theme of our common salvation to address the more pressing matters of Christian Morality. So perhaps this might be today’s theme! As many of you know, St. Jude’s Epistle speaks of the wrath to come for those who are willfully living in notorious sin. St. Jude writes in earnest to a community of Christians who are surrounded by pervasive immorality that threatens to carry them away from the faith once delivered to the saints. (St. Jude 3) He exhorts them to contend earnestly for [this] faith to make place for the common salvation which they must embrace. (Idem) The common salvation is the work of Christ – the activity by which Christians embrace Christ’s work through the Holy Spirit in their daily lives. Again, perhaps we might join St. Jude today in studying the wrath to come for wicked sinners and the lukewarm saints who enable them!

What is worrisome to St. Jude is that his flock of Christians is very much in danger of being swept up into the surrounding sins of a culture that is bent on its own idolatry. He even suggests that his brood has been negligent, distracted, unfocused, and not centered on the all-sufficient work of the dying Saviour! Why else would he say that there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ? (Ibid, 4) His congregation has been asleep at the spiritual wheel. Its members have not thought sufficiently on the nature of Christ’s sacrifice and the victory that His death has won for all men in all time. His flock is not vigilant against the kinds of sins that lead to perdition and everlasting fire. They may not be committing the sins themselves, but they are enabling others who acquiesce in them by not calling their brothers and sisters to account at the Judgment seat of Christ. Who am I to judge? They might just as well have said. And in so doing, they miss the point of Gospel Truth. We are Christians is the answer. And we are to judge and detect and recognize sin for what it is.

Furthermore, we are to love our fellow brethren enough to pray for them and then find a way to communicate our spiritual concern over their spiritual negligence. It is not only Christian duty to call out sin for what it is but also to love and care for others enough that we earnestly attempt to help them out of it! If we do nothing for those about us who are living in notorious sin, we shall be called to account on the Great Day of Judgment for not having told the truth to our brethren.
Belief or faith for St. Jude calls Christians into the spiritual character of living that must never rest comfortably close to excessive and perverse sin. By way of contrast, St. Jude warns his flock about flirting with might very well be eternally contagious.

I will therefore put you in remembrance, though ye once knew this, how that the Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed them that believed not. And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day. Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire. Likewise also these filthy dreamers defile the flesh, despise dominion, and speak evil of dignities. Yet Michael the archangel, when contending with the devil he disputed about the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee. (Ibid, 5-9)
 
Those who do not believe in deliverance from slavery to sin and sinners will be destroyed. Those who take their eyes off God their Saviour, who are distracted and detained by sinners and their sin have in all truth left their own habitation (Idem) or their true spiritual home and the source of their nurture. They will be rewarded with the chains of slavery, that will find no final liberation from darkness. If they dally and flirt with fornicators and those who go after strange flesh (Idem) in adultery, homosexuality, lesbianism, in transsexuality, and transgenderism, and join those who mock, deride, ridicule, and despise moral virtue that conquers all vice in human life, their reward will be the vengeance of eternal fire. (Idem) And thus, to effectively disarm the enemy, St. Jude exhorts us to follow the example of St. Michael in rebuking Satan. The implication is that we must have the courage and determination to follow St. Paul’s advice in relation to all sin:

Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth…above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God: praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit….(Ephesians vi. 13-18)

St. Jude tells us that the sinners we should avoid speak evil of those things which they know not: but what they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves. (Ibid, 10) He says that they have no fear of God before their eyes, are full of hot air that can neither fertilize, grow, nor nourish virtue. Their sexual sin can bear no fruit and cannot fulfill the purposes of God’s intention for their bodies. Their sin is sterile, lifeless, and barren. Their bodies have forsaken the Natural Law as their souls retreat to the law of despair that forever derides God’s good loving power to heal. These are murmurers, complainers, walking after their own lusts; and their mouth speaketh great swelling words, having men’s persons in admiration because of advantage. (Ibid, 16) They are full of gossip, bellyaching, and bewailing their lot in life, flattering as they desperately attempt to secure a safe-space from what they conceive as spiritual oppression. We should be wholly disturbed by such sinners and their sins. My zeal hath even consumed me; because mine enemies have forgotten thy words. (Ps. cxix. 18, 139) 

St. Jude exhorts us, in these last days, to separate ourselves from these mockers of Jesus Christ who walk after their own ungodly lusts. (Ibid, 18) He insists that we must do so since they have not the Spirit of God. (Ibid, 19) They have rejected the hope for conversion and have and have sinned against the Holy Ghost. (1 John v. 6) We must pray that in some great way God might slay them in the Spirit and, in His time, to offer some tangible help. St. Jude continues:
But ye, beloved, building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost, keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life. And of some have compassion, making a difference: and others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire; hating even the garment spotted by the flesh. (Ibid, 20-23) 
        
St. Jude exhorts us to have courage and zeal. The zeal brings us back to St. Simon. Simon was called The Zealot. The Zealots stood wholly against Jews who worked for the Romans. Yet Simon was called to love them still and desire their conversion. St. Jude gives him the principles of courage and charity with which to proceed.

Today we praise God for the loving courage of St. Jude and the zeal of St. Simon. St. Thomas Aquinas tells us that zeal is a derivative of ‘delos’ –to boil or ‘to throb with heat’. With St. Thomas Aquinas, this is ‘a necessary effect of love’ and ‘the vehement movement of one who loves to secure the object of his love’. (S.T.A.: Summa Theoligica, i. ii, 28. Iv) Zeal arises from an intensity of love. (Idem) So, St. Jude doesn’t hate God’s enemies. He desires their salvation. We must tread carefully in association with them. Over-familiarity is of the Devil and threatens our commitment to Christ’s moral goodness. Still, we must pray for those who seem hell-bent on Satan’s possession. St. Thomas says also that it is evident that the more intensely a power tends to anything, the more vigorously it withstands opposition or resistance. Since therefore love is "a movement towards the object loved," as St. Augustine says (QQ. 83, qu. 35), an intense love seeks to remove everything that opposes it. (Idem) We must vigorously withstand the opposition of all sin. Our intense love for sinners’ salvation will be more likely to remove their opposition to God’s Desire in us if they see that we love them superficially. St. Jude and St. Simon spent their lives conquering the world courageously with the zeal of God’s love. In the end, both were martyred for the faith. Both were zealous for sinful man’s wholeness, the full activity of his moral and spiritual powers, gaining salvation here and now, looking to a future in a perfected supernatural life. (The Christian Year in the Times, p. 281) Let us join with them come what may. With John Henry Newman,

Let us seek this praise which cometh of God. Let us seek it, for it is to be obtained; it is given to those worthy of it. The poorest, the oldest, and the most infirm amoung us, but are despised and forgotten, who seem to answer no good purpose by living on, and whose death will not be felt even by their neighbors as a loss, these even may obtain our Saviour’s approving look, and receive the future greeting, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.’ 

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. St. Paul is urging his Greek audience to look around before walking. Of course, St. Paul uses the word walk in a spiritual manner. By walking, Paul means moving through wisdom and prudence so that Almighty God…through [His] bountiful goodness…may 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. Foolish men do not embrace the Divine Providence for their lives. They are swift to speak and slow to hear. (St. James i. 19) Consumed with the things of this world, they hang upon what is impermanent and uncertain. Fools do not see the world in and for God.  
         
We are not called to be fools, but wise men. Wise men know that the world around us is full of temptations to gluttony and greed. Wise men see that the world is not theirs but 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. Wisdom bids us to use our time in this creation chiefly for Heaven’s interest in us. Wise men can come to believe that the eternally begotten Son of God, who creates and informs all things, is the same Jesus Christ who longs to reconcile all men to God’s Providence. Wise men see that creation is God’s, man is God’s, and that both can be perfected through Christ’s redemption of the time.     

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 describes it this way:

It is the Holy Spirit –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, and also of his unworthiness and the inadequacy of everything around him. Through man the world inhales God, and through him God inhales the world….and continually renews his knowledge of it.
 
The wisdom of God is Jesus Christ made present to us through the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit enables us to remember ourselves in Jesus Christ. We come to understand our need for Christ and His Sacrificial Death, and for the ongoing work of His Resurrected Life. Yet the Holy Spirit desires to give us more than just wisdom or knowledge. Through the Holy Spirit, we can inhale God and begin to find ourselves in the habit and activity of God the Father’s Word, Jesus Christ, who possesses all meaning and definition for our human nature.
         
But how can we be inhaled by God and then inhale Him? It sounds strange to our ears. Claudel is using an image to illustrate how God’s Wisdom and Love can forever define our redemption of time.You see, the Holy Spirit desires that such wisdom should indwell our hearts and change our lives. God’s Providence reveals to us how He sees us and how He intends to redeem us.

We see another picture of the process in this morning’s Gospel Parable. In it, Jesus illustrates our end as a marriage feast that we should prepare to attend. 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) The king is God the Father who always prepares us, if we are willing, for the marriage feast of His Son, Jesus Christ, in the end times. The Son is the Holy Bridegroom, and He desires the Church to become His Bride. God, through the Holy Spirit invites all human beings to feast on His wisdom and His love. Through the Holy Spirit, God sends out invitations through His servants. Yet we read that they would not come. (Ibid) A second invitation is sent out. God never ceases in His determination to inhale us. 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 be inhaled by God’s Holy Spirit. It speaks also about those whose resentment leads them to violently reject it by slaying those who bring God’s gracious invitation. In response to their foolish obstinacy, we read that in the end times, God the Father will send forth his armies of angels to destroy [the] murderers and burn up their city. (Ibid, 7) The real fools are those who 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 His creation as their only true Redeemer, 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. At any rate, not wanting to be inhaled by God, their desire will be rewarded, and they shall be exhaled forever. 

But before we get too excited about what this means for us –since, presumably, we come to church to inhale God, we had better read the rest of the Parable. What do we find? God’s wisdom and love are still alive in the hearts of His friends through the Holy Spirit. So, 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) Down through the ages, the friends whom God has inhaled are always carrying His desire to the nations. To the marriage feast, they bring in men and women who are both bad and good. They are sinners submitting to God’s Grace, attempting to redeem the time, as they allow Him to work the bad out and work the good into their lives.  They are not yet perfect but are daily dying to sin and coming alive to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. (Romans vi. 11) These are honest men and women who come to Church so that Christ can wash away their sins and fill them with His righteousness. 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, there must be a judgment between the bad and the good, those who have redeemed the time and those who have not. God always inhales the bad and the good but the bad had not reciprocated God’s love. St. Gregory the Great tells us that this wedding garment is charity, or the love of Christ offered to the Bride. Many come to church with faith but have not exhaled by putting on Christ with faith in His charity. (Hom. xxxviii) They have not the adornment of the new and spiritual man, as Archbishop Trench insists. (R. C. Trench, The Parables, The Marriage of the King’s Son.) Again, with Trench, they are despisers, counting themselves good enough in themselves, in the flesh and not the Spirit, to appear before God. (Idem)Because they have not exhaled God’s loving Providence in Jesus Christ, they have despised His Spirit, who alone can redeem the time in them. The wedding garment is that charity of God which adorns the soul with God’s Grace. Those who have faith but have not reciprocated God’s love are not clothed with wise circumspection and have not redeemed the time. Perhaps they have grumbled with discontent and ingratitude. Perhaps they expected special favors from the Divine Providence, always to be to His liking, saved from everything that brings hardship. (The Church Year in the Times, p. 200)

We are called today to inhale and exhale God. Receiving the Holy Spirit means surrendering all rights to ourselves (Oswald Chambers) with that capacity, that receptivity which no longer offers any obstacles to the will of its Creator. (Claudel, 179). The “I” must die; we must lose all self-importancethat stands between us and God. Walk in love, the Apostle says, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour. (Ibid, 1) Christ, the Bridegroom, has loved us; we are inhaled by God. If we inhale Christ by the Spirit, God’s wisdom will overcome our foolishness. In psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, we exhale God’s love for us in Jesus Christ with gratitude. In Jesus Christ, we are invited to suffer, die, and rise. Walking circumspectly, we conquer all sin and redeem the time through Jesus Christ. If we put on the wedding garment, we shall be given moral strength, with all that makes life honorable in service and worthy of character, ready to bear adversity cheerfully, suffering for duty’s sake gladly, giving us moral vigour and the truest self-respect. (The Church Year, p. 200) God intends to clothe us with it. If we are not clothed, we shall be 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 we are invited to the marriage of the King’s Son. If we reciprocate the King’s love for us, in Christ, and by the Spirit, 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, redeeming the time with exhaled reciprocal love. We pray with the poet:

Love, lift me up upon thy golden wings
From this base world unto thy heavens hight,
Where I may see those admirable things
Which there thou workest by thy soveraine might,
Farre above feeble reach of earthly sight,
That I thereof an heavenly hymne may sing
Unto the God of Love, high heavens king. 

Amen.
©wjsmartin

 What is easier to say, ‘Thy sins be forgiven thee’ or ‘Arise, take up thy bed and walk’?
(St. Matthew ix. 4)

Simon Tugwell reminds us that the one and only comment on prayer that Christ gave to His Church is that if we do not forgive, we shall not be forgiven. (Matt. vi. 14, Prayer: Living with God, p. 80) We have not received the forgiveness of sins from Our Heavenly Father through Jesus Christ by the Holy Ghost if we fail to forgive others. When we do not forgive others, the forgiveness of sins does not govern us from the throne of our hearts. Then, we take it for granted that Our Heavenly Father will forgive us repeatedly and treat forgiveness of sins like some kind of entitlement benefit that we deserve for being card-carrying Christians. But this reveals that we do not treat sin, confession, forgiveness, or Christ’s command to Go and sin no more with much seriousness. Rather than seeing ourselves as those who need forgiveness and must work out our salvation with fear and trembling (Phil. ii. 12), we are filled with pride over whatever supposed goodness we possess and are threatened by genuine goodnessfound in others.  
          
So, let us ask ourselves if what stops us from receiving and extending the forgiveness of sins is our own pride? Do pride and hubris erect a barrier to the self-realization that the forgiveness of sins alone leads to new life? Is there an element of immature insecurity that quashes all hope for inner transformation? Does what others think about us fill us with despair over the truth of sin in our lives? Perhaps an impenetrable wall surrounds our past interior trauma to shield us from ourselves? Perhaps we spend our days trying to show the world that we are sane, sound, and successful. But inwardly and spiritually, we are broken, suffering, and enslaved to sin. Pride commands us to put on a good face; so, we move on appearing to be one thing while we are not. Pride tells us that we can hold it all together, fend for ourselves, and do perfectly well without anyone’s help. Yet, when we encounter goodness in others that we do not possess, our pride weakens, security teeters, and self-reliance collapses as we envy that goodness in others that we reckon is beyond our greatest effort to secure. Pride turns into envy. Dorothy Sayers, in her commentary on Dante’s Purgatorio, says this:

The sin of envy always contains an element of fear. The proud man is self-sufficient, rejecting with contempt the notion that anybody can be his equal or superior. The envious man is afraid of losing something by the admission of superiority in others, and therefore looks with grudging hatred upon other men’s gifts and good fortune, taking every opportunity to run them down or deprive them of their happiness. (D.C.: Purg. p. 170)
 
Envy fears the excellence in other men that threatens and devalues his own. Envy’s thoughts, words, and works aim to destroy his privileged neighbor, depriving him of any goodness. Envy thinks falsely that he can never secure the goodness he lacks, and he is determined that no other man should find it either.        

Pride turns into envy and then the anger or wrath that kills the forgiveness of our sins and our forgiveness of others. This is a temptation for us all. Receiving God’s forgiveness of our sins is not easy, especially since our world defines good and evil by the changing and unreliable relative standards of feeling and emotion. Most of us, when left to the devices and desires of our own hearts, measure out forgiveness in so far as it enhances our narcissistic pride. Sometimes, from the perch of moral superiority, we assert with pride that we have forgiven others when they have not wronged us in any way. Their goodness unnerves us, and so we ascribe imagined evil to them. At other times, we claim that forgiveness costs too much because the sin was so great, and so we withhold it, twisting with envy and now even anger that our enemy doesn’t repent! Envy that cannot bear others’ goodness is enraged. If our unforgiveness has hurt another, we bask in pride’s power to enslave. His suffering is therapeutic. But in all three cases, pride and envy combined with anger hurt others because we have never truly discovered the Divine Mercy expressed in the forgiveness of our sins through detachment. 
         
Those who are immersed in the world’s affairs must also learn how to withdraw from it if they would grasp the significance of what they are doing. (The Christian Year in The Times, p. 197) This is spiritual detachment. Detachment enables us to realize that pride, envy, and wrath must be destroyed by Christ’s virtues in this morning’s Gospel lesson. 

Behold, they brought to him a man sick of the palsy, lying on a bed: and Jesus seeing their faith said unto the sick of the palsy; Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee. 
(St. Matthew ix. 2) 
 
Jesus is determined to extend the forgiveness of sins to fallen man, rewarding humble faith with true healing. Forgiveness is always the primary end of Christ’s mission to men of humble heart. Humility and meekness are the virtues that stand against all pride, envy, and wrath. Christ comes into the world first to heal the sickness of the soul. As Archbishop Trench remarks 

‘Son, be of good cheer’, are words addressed to one evidently burdened with a more intolerable weight than that of his bodily infirmities. Some utterance on his part of a penitent and contrite heart called out these gracious words which follow, ‘Thy sins be forgiven thee.’ (Miracles, p. 157) 
 
The man sick of the palsy is more diseased in soul than body. Perhaps he is consumed with pride and enviously begrudges other men’s wholeness. Anger at God would not be surprising. He is so spiritually and physically paralyzed that he cannot ask. Thus, Jesus declares, Thy sins be forgiven thee. (Idem) 

The Scribes become unhinged. Behold, certain of the Scribes said within themselves, This man blasphemeth. (Ibid, 3) Sin offends only God; God alone can forgive sin. What they did not see was that God was in Christ, reconciling, the world unto Himself. (2 Cor. v. 19) The Scribes were right if Christ as a mere man imparted forgiveness to another. But they had another problem. Christ’s glory stirred pride, envy, and anger in them as something they thought He could not and did not have because they did not. Again, with Archbishop Trench

Their sins were in that self-chosen blindness of theirs which would not allow them to recognize any glory in Him higher than man’s…and closed their eyes to all in their Scriptures which set Him forth as other than they themselves had resolved He should be. (Miracles: Ch. 9) 
 
Jesus responds, Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts? For whether is easier to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and walk? (Ibid, 5) Jesus knows there can be no tangible proof for the forgiveness of sins since it is inward, invisible, and spiritual. To be sure, it is easier to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee, than to say, Take up thy bed and walk. But because the Scribes have never known the forgiveness of sins as the gift of God’s love, Jesus heals the man’s body to reveal that forgiveness is Heaven’s power as love. But that ye may know that the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (then saith He to the sick of the palsy,) Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house. And he arose and departed to his house. (Ibid, 4-7) 

Today we learn of the healing power of the love that Christ brings to the man sick of the palsy. Through detachment, we see how Jesus conquers the sin and sickness of the soul. Now we turn to ourselves. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins….(1 St. John i. 9) Repentance is needed since our sinful flesh is always too ready to side with the cruel enemy of our souls. The things of this world press hard upon us, either to terrify us out of our duty, or humor us into our ruin. (Jenks, 221) The Great Physician bids us to search our hearts for our sins and confess them. We must not walk in the vanity of [our] mind[s], having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through…ignorance…because of the blindness of [our] hearts. (Eph. iv. 17, 18) The understanding is darkened when pride, envy, and wrath enslave us. Our Collect for Purityreads Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit….(Collect for Purity) We ask the Holy Spirit to purify not only our words and works, but the thoughts of our hearts. Withdetachment, with humility and meekness, we must see how our pride, envy, and wrath have killed the spirit of God’s goodness and separated us from our neighbors’ hearts. God’s Spirit must cleanse our motivations and intentions. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (ibid, 9)
         
With detachment, we take a long, hard look at ourselves in relation to God. We must remember that detachment is not necessarily found in the monk or mystic’s cell, cultivating a fugitive and cloistered virtue, potentially absorbing vanity. Vanity is the danger of asceticism. Detachment must give us the mastery of ourselves. (Ibid, p. 198) Detachment is found in the time and space that lead us from God to Jesus Christ. Detachment studies Christ’s parables, miracles, and his unjust and unmerited suffering in death on the Cross. Detachment stops here to find the height, depth, length, and breadth which God’s own Son and Word made flesh endures to save us. Detachment sees that Forgiveness is Divine forth-givingness, the free gift of a life which in the perfection of its spiritual power cleanses a man’s soul from the taint of evil and requickens it with new spiritual energies by which he is freed from sin. This forgiveness is offered to mankind through the Cross. (Ibid, Good Friday, p. 91) With detachment we become forever thankful for the redemption of the world by Our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of Grace, and the hope of Glory. (G.T. BCP, p. 19) Detachment then leads to our being renewed in the spirit of [our]mind[s] as we put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness. (Eph. iv. 23, 24) Detachment will give us true liberty in Jesus Christ, the freedom of soul found in the body of the man sick of the palsy, who jumped up, carried his bed, and marched before the gathered Biblical Critics. Because Jesus Christ alone had power on earth to be forgive sins, you and I can be freed from sin and not only forgive but also love all others in Him. 

Amen.
©wjsmartin

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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 with the host at a dinner party guiding his guest to go up higher, to sit at high table, and to be more honored. An invited guest always 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 through the virtues of meekness and humility. Guidance then leads Meekness and humility to wisdom and justice. Wisdom and Justice are perfected only with gratitude for God’s Grace.  

Of course, guidance is not much talked about 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, as the author of the Christian Year in the Times writes, self-will run riot is inimical to that self-respect that is perfected when the true self acts with all its powers responsive to the will in the service of righteousness. (Christian Year, p. 187) Self-respect demands that meekness and humility search out guidance rationally to find the road that leads to Truth. Homer, the greatest of the Greek epic poets, called upon the heavenly muses for guidance. 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. For Ancient and Medieval Man, the journey into Truth could never be found without humility and meekness’ surrender to rational guidance.  

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.) For Saint Thomas, meekness mitigates the passions of anger and envy. Meekness combined with humility temper a man to pursue what he can as he can through reason and free will. 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 he used it to help Theseus, the King’s enemy, escape the Labyrinth. The King imprisoned Daedalus in the Labyrinth. Pasiphae, the Queen, released Daedalus who then made wings for himself and his son Icarus so that they could fly from Crete. Daedalus, 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, the sea would engulf him. 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 humble and meek mean between two extremes. If man pursues things beyond his nature, he will fall into the depths of misery and death. Humility is…a disposition to man’s untrammeled access to spiritual and divine goods. (Idem) Humility yields meekness. Meekness submits to God’s goodness as guidance.

Icarus was overcome by his own pride and daring. Pride attempts to exceed the limitations of human nature ignoring the wisdom of guidance. Pride defies the guidance of teachers, laws, and God. Pride ignores history. Pride flees justice and reaps the reward of self-destruction.

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 

pride of heart, the heavens were bowed down, the foundations of the earth were shaken…angels were cast down from glory and became demons because of their pride of heart…Because of this, the Almighty was angered, and caused fire to come forth from the abyss…made Hell, and its torments…. (On Humility and Deceit, Anthony Abbott) 
 
In Scripture’s account, pride is an intellectual vice that finds its origin in Lucifer’s first rebellion against God. Prior to God’s creation of any other thing, angels were made to exist alongside God and to bask in the glory of His guidance. There was nothing to tempt or distract them away from God! They had God’s guidance. Of course, God’s guidance is His Power, Wisdom, and Love. Angels were made to submit thankfully to God’s guidance. The proud angels envied God’s nature and were angrythat He alone had it. Thus, they rejected God’s Grace-filled guidance that ensures everlasting felicity. So, they fell.

The humble man knows that he is not the creator of his own being and meaning. The humble and meek knows that he is lost in the dark wood of this life. Without help or guidance, he is lost. With St. Anthony, he knows that the deceitful man deceives only his own soul; for [as the Psalmist says]: His sorrow shall be turned on his own head: and his iniquity shall come down upon his own pate. (Ps. vii. 17; Idem) The humble and meek reject self-deception and self-will run riot knowing that these vices lead only to Hell.

The humble and meek seek guidance. They feel within themselves no small sense of powerlessness, futility, and failure in the face of sin. They 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 translate his fleshly powerlessness into the spiritual inability to move out of sin and into righteousness. He needs merciful guidance every day. The humble and meek finds little solace in the Pharisees’ stricture that Jesus shouldn’t be guiding men out of sickness and into health on the Sabbath. If they saved their own asses and oxen on the Sabbath Day, why shouldn’t Jesus stoop down to heal the dropsical sufferer? The humble and meek have taken the lowest seat. Jesus alone is the guide that invites us to come up higher, (St. Luke xiv. 10) The humble and meek humbles himself under the mighty hand of God. (1 Peter v. 6)

Today we pray for humility. G.K. Chesterton tells us that the problem with contemporary man is that he has become humble about truth and not humble about himself. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert–himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt – the Divine Reason [or Wisdom]. (Orthodoxy) Full of false pride, envy, anger, and sloth contemporary man desires no guidance. He is full of himself and nothing more. The humble and meek is like St. Paul in this morning’s Epistle, a prisoner of the Lord embracing alllowliness and meekness, with long suffering, forbearing one another in love endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. (Eph. iv. 1) His humility and meekness situate his soul to receive the wisdom and justice of God found on Christ’s Cross. Restraining impetuosity, humility and meekness go down to the Cross to submit to the guidance of Christ’s Sacrificial love, which alone can conquer sin and death. He is prepared to accept God’s gracious invitation to come up higher.

Taking the lowest seat is essential for those who hope to find God in Jesus Christ and the salvation He brings. We must identify with all lowly sinners who wait to be asked to come up higher onto the Cross of Jesus into His liberating death. 

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) God’s humility and meekness in Jesus Christ will strengthen our minds against despair, and urge us on to the pursuit of great things…. (St. Thomas, Idem) 

God’s humility and meekness in His Son Jesus Christ should overwhelm us. Therefore, is my spirit vexed within me, and my heart within me is desolate. (Ps. cxliii. 4). That Christ took the lowest seat of unjust suffering and shame should destroy our pride.…I remember the time past; I muse upon all thy works; yea, I exercise myself in the works of thy hands. (Psalm cxliii, 5) God’s work is the humility and meekness of Jesus Christ who stretches out His arms on the Cross to invites us to come up higher. God’s omnipotent power found in the weakness of His Son’s death will make us strong. St. Augustine asks, He who throws a stone at heaven, does it fall on heaven or on himself? (Meditation on the Humility of Christ) The proud throw stones up at God’s Son, hanging on the Tree, though in humility and meekness He comes down from Heaven to save us. The stones fall back upon us! Because Jesus guides us to the lowest seat of the Cross, the first step of ascent to God, we can become His friends and be asked [to] come up higher. (Idem)

Let us follow the guidance of Christ’s humility and meekness today as we confess our true nature and need. In patience, let us possess our souls. (Luke xxi. 19) Through it, we can accept God’s wisdom and justice with deepest gratitude. God’s wisdom is His justice – that one man should die for the people. (John xi. 50) Through it, we leave behind the exaggerated ego’s soaring pride to embrace what we need most. With the poet, we can be touched by Grace. Then,   

That fair lamp, which useth to inflame
The hearts of men with self-consuming fire
Thenceforth seems foul, and full of sinful blame;
And all that pomp to which proud minds aspire
By name of honour, and so much desire,
Seems to them baseness, and all riches dross,
And all mirth sadness, and all lucre loss.
 
So full their eyes are of that glorious sight,
And senses fraught with such satiety,
That in naught else on earth they can delight,
But in th' aspect of that felicity,
Which they have written in their inward eye;
On which they feed, and in their fastened mind
All happy joy and full contentment find. 
(Hymn to Heavenly Beauty, E. Spenser)
 
Amen.
 
©wjsmartin
 

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O foolish people, and without understanding; which have eyes, and see               
not; which have ears, and hear not; fear ye not me? Will ye not
Tremble at my presence? 
                              (Jeremiah v. 20-22)
 
       
There is a truth about life nowadays that seems to escape most people. This is a truth about themselves. They lack all self-respect. Of course, this is because we have abandoned Christian morality. Proud and arrogant man rejects the call of the highest moral ideal as the law of his life. Proud and arrogant man no longer measures the worth of his life by it. This is because we do not fear God. Self-respect comes to men and women who know themselves, their limitations, and the contours and boundaries of human existence. Self-respect is a gift bestowed on those whose meekness knows that they must lose their lives to find them. Contemporary man fears earthly death. Today, Christ will perform a miracle that brings a young man back from earthly death so that we might awaken from spiritual death. We cannot be roused from the slumber of spiritual death for Christ to enliven and ennoble the finer elements of our self-respecting characters until we face our mortality.
       
Of course, the problem of mortality is as old as creation. Both the ancient Jews and Greeks were consumed with the good of the soul and its frustration from sin and death. By the time Christ came down from Heaven, the world was in a strangle knot of tension, confusion, and exasperation. Both the Jew and the Greek had enough self-respect to know human nature’s limitations in order to discover God and then struggle to overcome sin and death with His Wisdom. Mortality gnawed at man’s soul as he longed for union with his Maker. For the self-respecting Jews, there was hope in the prophesied promise of deliverance through Messiah. For the self-respecting Greeks, there was divine Wisdom and hope of imagined union with it after death. 
       
Socrates taught that the unexamined life is not worth living. (Apol. 38a) Socrates understood his own mortality and had enough self-respect to search for the truth of it throughout his life. He understood that his soul indwelled a body and often acted against it without knowledge. Our souls in bodies are mostly ignorant of the truth that should move them to find happiness through knowledge. Only then can the soul move above the body to discover the reason for, the cause of, and the Good of human existence. Socrates knew that man’s perfection does not consist in the pursuit of the body’s changing, fickle, uncertain, and unreliable passions. Rather, Socrates believed that man’s perfection consists in the soul’s use of the body for communion with the Good or God. Socrates had enough self-respect to pursue the Good beyond himself, knowing that he knew nothing and, thus, intent upon finding what he did not have. Long before he began his teaching career, knowing the limitations of his own mortality, with self-respect, he began to sacrifice himself for moral ideals above and beyond his selfish and sinful nature. His bravery in the Peloponnesian War from 431-434 B.C., when he fought to defend Athens’ integrity, was a testimony to how the common good moved him.  That Socrates believed in deeper transcendent truth can also be seen in his pursuit of the domestic good of his marriage. Xanthippi, Socrates’ wife, was famous in Athens for her disagreeable and nagging ways. In Xenephon’s Symposium, Antisthenes asks Socrates how he can endure his wife. Socrates says having a wife is like choosing a horse. Choose one who is high-mettled, fiery, hard to tame. Once you have tamed her, you have conquered nature. (Xen. Symp. ii. 10) Whatever struggles mortality brings, be they political or domestic, for Socrates, self-respecting man was made to tame his mortality and conquer his lesser passions for the sake of discovering the Moral Ideal, which promises to ennoble and purify his soul. The Good that man is made to know is the cause of all life, the source of all goods – the reasons for which things were made and the source of his true happiness and joy. 
       
Socrates’ philosophical method, like Jeremiah’s prophetic call, was on the way back to God. What both exhort us to pursue is the kind of thinking that tames mortality and sacrifices the lesser goods and gods of this earthly life for the discovery of God’s Goodness. With self-respect, this thinking begins in inquisitive wonder rather than in making. Socrates began his quest by saying I know that I know nothing. (Apol. 21d) Jeremiah realized his impotence before the all-living God. Do you not fear me? Do you not tremble before me? I placed the sand as the bound for the sea, a perpetual barrier which it cannot pass; though the waves toss, they cannot prevail, though they roar, they cannot pass over it. (Jer. v. 22) Both men had enough self-respect for the fear of the Lord and awesome wonder before God’s Thinking Goodness which they did not yet possess but desired. The self-respecting man does not yet know God’s Goodness, the Moral Ideal, for which he was made. Creation is made, moved, and defined not by us but by God’s Thinking Goodness, on which every creature depends for being and wellbeing. The whole of the universe is God’s thinking of it, and we are made to discover it! We neither create nor perpetuate our own thinking. We use our souls without any thought of where our thinking comes from or to whom it is made to be returned. God patiently awaits our discovery of His Goodness. 
       
Socrates and Jeremiah believed that God is calling us forth to find Him. He intends that we come to our senses and gain enough self-respect to acknowledge humbly that we know nothing. That we have souls should be evident in the very fact that we are thinking. That our souls persist beyond death can be seen in this morning’s Gospel. The young son of a widowed mother was dead in body. His decomposing corpse was carried from the walls of Nain to its burial outside the city’s gates. His soul lives on. Christ addresses the living soul that no longer inhabits the body. Christ intends that his body should be brought back to life in order to house his soul for its extended spiritual journey. Jesus wants us to see that mortality has no meaning or definition without God or the soul. If man were merely a soul or a body, Christ would not have bothered to reconcile the two. But Christ shows us today that He intends to give life to the whole person, the embodied soul, forever.
              
I know that I know nothing. Christ addresses the dead man’s soul, the Widow of Nain’s soul, and our souls. This is a portent of what every soul will do on Judgment Day when, with self-respect, it gives an account of the life it has lived, soul in body, or spirited mortality. The real evidence for God’s power and promise is found in the dead boy’s soul, who knows Christ and obeys His call.
       
This is the kind of soul that Jesus finds in the Widow of Nain. That the widow woman bereft of her only son is more than merely a body or a soul is clear. The loss of her son’s mortality pierces through her body to her soul. Her soul is so present to her that her body translates the cessation of her son’s life into anguish and sadness. The pain and heartache of her only son’s death consume her soul. She is not running away from mortality, but she has enough self-respect to honor the dead and mourn her loss. She is precisely where Jesus wants to find all of us. What Socrates felt as his brothers in combat fell by his side in the Peloponnesian War and what Jeremiah felt as Jewish Brethren died at the hands of the Babylonians, the Widow of Nain expressed. Because of her self-respect and spiritual sensitivity for human mortality, she is ripe for Christ’s visitation. She has no words or pleas for Jesus. She weeps silently because words cannot conquer the cruelty of mortality when she can do nothing. She is Rachel, weeping for her children who are no more…. (Jer. xxxi. 15) She is Jesus’ own Mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary, who will mourn at His Cross. She is Mother Church, who weeps for her wayward children until they are found by Christ. Her mourning is sincere because she respectfullyknows herself. She will fulfill the beatitude. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. (St. Matthew v. 4) 
       
The Widow of Nain’s soul is open to the Lord’s command Weep not. (Ibid, 13) She obeys, for she knows her mortality with self-respect and knows her Lord. Her soul is wholly open to the Lord’s Word. Jesus came and touched the bier: and they that bare the dead man stood still. (Ibid, 14) Her soul is alive with much people who accompanied her and her son. She was self-respecting enough to face mortality without shame. God’s compassion in Christ will bring life out of death and hope out of despair. And he that was dead sat up and began to speak. (Ibid, 15) We do not know what he said. That he spake is sufficient evidence that his soul inhabits a body quickened by Christ once again. All are filled with awesome wonder. New life in the dead man now brings his mother and the crowd out of mortality’s end into self-respecting new spiritual life.
Self-respect calls us to know ourselves, and the limitations of human mortality.
 
Self-respect implies the free exercise of our spiritual faculties in the sphere of the supernatural and a living communion with Him, Who is supremely the Holy Spirit. We may have to acknowledge that our powers in all these elements of the self are small, but we shall be saved from self-contempt if we recognize that, however weak they may be, we have the capacity of infinite development so long as we are loyal to the highest we perceive. (The Church Year in the Sunday Times, p. 188)
 
With the Apostle Paul, we must come 
to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge. (Eph. iii. 16-19)
 
With self-respect for our mortality, we must pray that our embodied souls will find new life in Jesus Christ. With the Widow of Nain, we must mourn until we find it. Only Socrates’ learned ignorance, I know that I know nothing, and Jeremiah’s fear of the Lord can make us ripe for the visitation of God’s love in Jesus Christ with encouragement for that self-respect which, founded on reverence towards God, knows that our highest dignity is to serve Him with all our powers. (idem, p. 189)
Amen.
 
©wjsmartin

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The Good which we have forsaken must come to us from without
before we can rediscover it within. Thus, the Good comes to us through
the humanity of Jesus Christ, that then leads us to the Eternal Word,
through which, in turn, we are reconciled to the Father. The Good that
we discover is the original Word of God, by which alone we were once obedient to God 
and can be made obedient again.
William Law: The Spirit of Love, Address XVIII
 
         
The Gospel of Jesus Christ is all about how the Good must come to us from without before we can discover it within. Trinity Tide is all about virtue in the soul as it recovers its lost Good. If we are to grow in virtue, we must rediscover the Good in the Sacred Humanity of Jesus Christ. In Him, we must rediscover that state that Adam once had but had lost by reason of his pride. Today Jesus says Ye cannot serve God and Mammon (St. Matthew vi. 25) But we are fallen and, thus, constantly torn between the two. Jesus will teach us to know the difference. Then, He will teach us that to love or will the Good requires inward and spiritual suffering. The real battle comes as the soul struggles to love the one and hate the other (idem, 24) as Jesus Christ welcomes us into His death.

Of course, postmodern man has been conditioned to fear and shrink from love and hate. Such passions might elicit courage and zeal to fight and even die for an ideal or principle. But Christians are called to love and hate. To eschew evil and do good (1 Peter iii. 11) require knowledge of the good and the power to will it. Jesus exhorts us to hate the sin and love the sinner. This means loving both ourselves and others in God. It means that we must hate sin which separates us from God. Jesus means business, and in the end times if we haven’t taken our one shot at salvation seriously enough, we shall be rewarded with the Hell that we have chosen. Irrational cowardice will be no excuse at the Great and Dreadful Day of Judgment.
      
Coming to love the sinner, again, means ourselves and others in the Good. This will be, of course, be a consequence of knowledge. Goodness must be found first on the outside of ourselvesbefore it can be willed inwardly and spiritually. That we are torn between good and evil in Adam, is clear to any man who knows himself. Anyone who denies this is mad or insane. But even fallen man has always been left with a remnant of God’s Goodness. Fallen man has forever discovered God’s Goodness in his study of nature with the ancient Greeks. Fallen man has forever discovered God’s Goodness through revelation to the ancient Jews. When Christ comes into the world, externally and visibly, as Man, with body, soul, and spirit, He invites all men to partake of the reconciliation between Man and God’s Goodness realized and perfected in Himself. 

St. Thomas Aquinas says that God rules Man by three rights. First, by the right of creation. For He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture. (Ps. xcv. 7) Second, by the right of purchase. Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers; but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot. (1 Peter i. 18.19) Third, by right of the support of life. Who giveth food to all flesh, for His mercy endureth forever. (T.A. Trinity XV Gospel Commentary) By the right of creation, we know that we owe our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life to God. By the right of purchase, we know that God in Jesus Christ has purchased us and paid the ransom for our sin. By the right of support of life, we know that God gives us that well-being that will ensure our salvation by way of the indwelling of Our Lord the Holy Ghost. Knowing that we come from God the Father, are made right through God the Son, and are sanctified by God the Holy Ghost are three essential forms of knowledge presented to faith, hope, and love. Reason teaches us to know our origin and destiny. We come from God and are made to return to God. Nothing – neither sin nor death, needs stand in the way of God’s rational purpose and loving desire to save and reconcile us with Himself. 
         
But our failure to hate sin distracts us from willing what we believe and know to be God’s Good.Sin is found in the flesh and our anxiety over it. Today St. Paul writes to the Galatian Church, which is being tempted to indulge the flesh. Jewish Christians are tempting Gentile converts to believe that the precepts of the Jewish Law pertaining to the flesh, like circumcision, are needed for salvation. St. Paul rejects this.

Though I might also have confidence in the flesh. If any other man thinketh that he hath whereof he might trust in the flesh, I more: circumcised the eighth day of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee; concerning zeal, persecuting the church; touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless. But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. (Phil. iii. 4-7)
 
Once he believed that the Law was as close as Man could come to God. Soon he learned that neither the Law of Nature nor the Law of the Jews could enable man to will God’s Goodness. Then he encountered Jesus Christ, and came to know that the Law of the flesh is sin and death. St. Paul began to connect the dots. His faith was rational. The Law condemned man to death and alienation from God the Father. For St. Paul, man’s division from God has been overcome in Jesus Christ. Jewish Christians are demanding circumcision in the Gentiles to glory in their flesh. (Gal. vi. 13) St. Thomas says that ‘they may glory’ for making so many proselytes. (Comm. Gal. vi.) For Jewish Christians, circumcision was fleshly proof of winning converts. St. Paul counters with, But God forbid that I should glory save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world. (ibid, 14) St. Thomas continues:

Notice that where the worldly philosopher felt shame, the Apostle found his treasure: what the former regarded as foolish became for the Apostle wisdom and glory, as Augustine says. For each person glories in that through which he is considered great…For one who regards himself to be great in nothing but Christ glories in Christ alone. Hence the Apostle says: ‘[I have been crucified with Christ;] I live; but not I. Christ liveth in me.’ (Gal. ii. 20, idem)
 
Faith, hope, and love are rational. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. (1 Cor. i. 25) God comes to Man, saves him, and reconciles him to Himself. Faith in who Jesus Christ is and what he does make sense. But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. (Gal. iv. 4,5) God intends that Man know and love Him. His plan has unfolded without interruption. God sent His Son into the world, taking on our nature, to conquer the Law of sin and death. For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. (2 Cor. v. 21) Christ consumed all sin in Himself and defeated it. God’s Word submits to His own Law of sin and death rationally for us to win our salvation.
         
Still, knowing the Good and loving or willing are different. St. Thomas writes For in the Cross is the perfection of all law and the whole art of living well. (ibid, Gal, vi.) Loving God in Jesus Christ by the Spirit, we enter His victory over sin and death as we love the sinner – in ourselves and hate the sin. To love is to will the good, ‘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.’ (Rom. vi. 6) Christ predicts our anxiety. 

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith. Therefore, take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?... For your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. (Matt. vi. 28-34)
 
Hating the sin and loving the sinner is embracing God’s Goodness. We must seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. St. Augustine writes 
 
But the Lord admonishes us that we should remember that when God made us…body and soul, He gave us much more than food and clothing, through care for which he would not have our heart double [over the necessities of life.](Aug. Book II, ‘Sermon on the Mount’)
 
With St. Paul and St. Thomas, we return to the Cross. ‘For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything nor uncircumcision, but a new creature.’ Indeed, he glories mainly in that which helps in joining him to Christ; for this the Apostle desires…to be with Christ. (idem) Undo care and anxiety over the flesh is sin. Hating our sin to embrace God’s Goodness in Jesus Christ from the Spirit to the flesh is virtue. Loving Christ’s death opens us to His promise to make us new creatures in His Resurrection. Heaven’s secret is that, with love, He will feed and clothe us inwardly and spiritually. He invites us to eat His Body and drink His Blood. As secretly as God feeds the birds of the field and clothes the lilies of the field, His love will feed and clothe us if we have faith. Ye cannot serve God and Mammon, (idem) foolishness to worldly men, but to them that love Him, the authority to become the Sons of God. (John 1:12) 
Amen.
©wjsmartin

We open our mouths wide till God opens his hand, but after, as if
the filling of our mouth were the stopping of our throats, so
we are speechless and heartless.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux
 
        
Have you ever found yourself in a form of suffering that bound you together with other people because of a common predicament? Our world is full of communities that meet because of a shared grief that seeks a common cure. You’ve heard about or have even been a part of those grieving groups – cancer survivors’ networks, Veterans organizations, Al-Anon, and Alcoholics Anonymous, and so on. If you haven’t participated in any of them, you know that these communities meet to solve common problems that emerge from some kind of disease, addiction, or trauma. In each group, there is hope for mutual and reciprocal help. In each group, too, there is always the danger of potential breakdown because of collective spiritual ingratitude. Then there might be the danger that one might find spiritual ostracization because he doesn’t fit in and seems rather alien to the copacetic coziness of the group dynamic. Yet, if the group is seriously committed to its desired end and is patient, the outsider might very well reveal some spiritual truth to the community. 
        
In this morning’s Gospel, we find the case of one such alien or Samaritan, who otherwise might not have been welcomed by the group but for the overwhelmingly desperate nature of their common disease. That the man was tolerated reveals how fatal illness and disease break down all division. For the men who clung so acutely together in this morning’s Gospel Lesson shared the disease of leprosy. Leprosy in the ancient world was viewed as a spiritual malady, earning its carriers exile from the City of Man. The physical manifestations were deemed so hideous by healthy men that it they were judged to be a punishment for sins, both by the God of the Jews and the deities of the ancient Gentiles. In any case, the leprous were unwelcome in both communities and so lived on the borders of both as aliens to all. And it is one such group that we encounter this morning. We meet them because Jesus chose not to take the common and safer route for Jews making pilgrimage up to Jerusalem but to go through the dangerous border that the Jewish people shared with their Samaritan neighbors.  
         
And as he entered into a certain village, there met him ten men that were lepers, which stood afar off: and they lifted up their voices, and said, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us. (St. Luke xvii 12, 13) The lepers stand on the outskirts of the village, and they cry out for help from one whom they trust will hear their plea. Their bodies are wasting away and decomposing, and yet their souls are alive to the need for love. They have not despaired. The prayer of their hearts is that Jesus will be friend and neighbor to them all. The who is my neighbor? of last week’s Gospel takes on a compelling and urgent nature. These men are in a ditch of a predicament and do not merely need help but want it. Their companionship in misery and suffering moves them to seek out the one neighbor whose mercy can heal their pain. The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth. (Ps. cxlv. 18) Archbishop Trench reminds us, they do have hope that a healer is at hand, and so in earnest they seek to extort the benefit. (Parables, 262) So they cry, Jesus, Master, have mercy upon us. (St. Luke xvii 13)

And when He saw them, He said unto them, Go show yourselves unto the priests. And it came to pass, that, as they went, they were cleansed. (St. Luke xvii 14) In last week’s Gospel we remember that Jesus likened Himself unto the Good Samaritan and not the Good Jew. Today, this same Samaritan continues His work, but this time without need for bandages, oil, or wine. Physical deterioration has yielded to spiritual desire; to the inner hearts of wounded outcasts, the spoken Word of the Good Samaritan is all that is needed for the healing that will soon follow. Those who are spiritually conscious of their sorry and sinful state always cut to the quick and cry Jesus, Master, have mercy upon us. (Idem) When He says, Go…, they obey and trust in the power of His love. Matthew Henry writes that Those that expect Christ's favours must take them in his way and method. (Comm: St. Luke, xviii) Obedience and trust must become the instinctive response of the supplicant to the all-merciful God. What sinful men must seek is His power to heal and whatever means He deems fit for it. 

Here we see that an external and visible disease reveals far more painful inward and spiritual suffering. Because the lepers’ disease is so hideous, they dare not touch him with their infectious bodies. Their inner agony longs to touch His heart with the cry of anguish. He hears their words and responds with the Word. Go shew yourselves unto the priests. (Idem) His all-commanding Word moves into their hearts so that they trust it inwardly as it heals them outwardly. We read that as they went, they were cleansed. (Ibid, 14) Notice that nothing more was needed for this kind of healing. The men were physically healed of their leprosy instantly as they moved on to the priests.
But this is not the end of the matter. This miracle is not only about healing the physical disease of leprosy. What is clear from today’s miracle is that Jesus heals always to inaugurate an inner and spiritual transformation. The Jews alienate the Samaritans because of their ethnicity and race. That the Samaritan would dare to show himself to the [Jewish] priests is uncertain. Though no longer leprous, still his soul felt alienation and separation from all other men, filled with fear and confusion. His motives might have been mixed. Coleridge says no man, either hero or saint, ever acted from an unmixed motive, for let him do what he will rightly; Conscience whispers "it is your duty.” The Samaritan does what he thinks is right and best by his conscience. The Samaritan, alone, is spiritually awakened by his healing and so returns to offer God thanks. Feeling the newly emerging healing of his body, he senses the birth of a spiritual awakening in his heart to the Power of God in Jesus Christ. In the depths of his spirit, he had longed for a friend, and so in this place that he feels the presence of the newfound love in God’s Good Samaritan. Here he finds that love that will touch and transform his life. And one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks: and he was a Samaritan. (St. Luke xvii 15,16)

This outsider, this alien to Israel’s promises, turns back. Unlike the Nine Jews, this man serves the Power of God’s love in the heart of Jesus and not the Law and the Commandments. No doubt the priests in the temple would have judged him alien and undeserving of their blessing in any case. But more importantly, he turns back first to the source and cause of all healing and health. He not only turns back, but he glorifies God; he not only praises God but with all the strength of his body’s newfound health, he runs, and he falls down at the feet of God’s powerful presence in Jesus Christ in Spirit. His body was healed, but now his soul has been set free, and he serves his liberated soul, giving thanks to God in Jesus Christ. 

And Jesus answering said, Were there not ten cleansed? but where are the nine? There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger. (St. Luke xvii 17,18) This Samaritan is a stranger to God and his promises. But it is this stranger who perceives and knows Jesus’ love most truly. This Samaritan alone gives God the Glory. His faith is startling and profound. The others were healed by faith as well. But as George Macdonald reminds us, this man had enough faith left over to bring him back, for his cure had been swallowed up in gratitude. (Miracles of Healing…) Jesus says to him, Arise, go thy way; thy faith hath made thee whole. (St. Luke xvii 19)

This morning we each must ask: Where do I find myself in this morning’s miracle? Are we one with grateful Samaritan? Are we here for worship in community alone to seek healing through Common Prayer and the Sacraments? Or will these outward and visible signs bring inward and spiritual healing to our souls? For that to happen, once we leave this place, we have two options. You have come to God’s priest to receive His blessing. Will we turn back, giving God thanks throughout the week for what we have received through Jesus Christ? Again, with George Macdonald, All communities are for the sake of individual life, for the sake of the love and the truth that is in each heart, and is not cumulative. But all that is precious in the individual heart depends for existence on the relation the individual bears to other individuals. – how can he love? (idem) Jesus gives Himself to the community of ten lepers but one turns back because his faith has moved him to gratitude in love. Jesus gives Himself to us today in His Body and Blood. Will we turn back and offer him thanks for incorporating us into His death on the Cross and His Resurrection? Are we being healed in deed and in truth so that nothing presses us with more urgency than the ongoing need to be grateful for the good work already begun in our souls? St. Paul tells us to walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lusts of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary the one to the other. (Gal. v. 16, 17) The Venerable Bede asks, with the Samaritan, acutely aware of my own unworthiness, humbling myself before God, shall I hear the Divine Word to rise, put my hand to strong things, and go on my way to more perfect things? (P.L. 92, Expos. In Lucam) Today’s Samaritan perfects his flesh with the Spirit of gratitude. Soon he shall bear the fruit of the Spirit…which is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against which there is no law.Let us not be speechless and heartless like the nine other healed lepers. Jesus Christ the Good Samaritan’s has cured us. Let Jesus us allow Jesus to respond to our thanksgiving with:  
Arise, go thy way: thy faith hath made thee whole. (St. Luke xvii 19) 
©wjsmartin
 
 
 
 

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Blessed are the eyes which see the things that ye see: For I tell you,
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.
(St. Luke 10. 23, 24)
                
Before Jesus proclaims the blessing in Gospel lesson, He offered thanksgiving to His Father for beginning to generate a new kind of seeing and hearing in the eyes and ears of His Apostles, which were opened, like new-born babes, into the new world of His mission and meaning. Yet no sooner had Jesus praised His Father for bringing new vision and meaning to His friends than one man, a lawyer, stood up to test his religious view against what he saw as an exhortation to the impossible. For those with eyes to see and ears to hear, Jesus will correct the lawyer’s senses with His own. The lawyer may turn out to be both blind and deaf, but Jesus will open the eyes and ears of others to the limitless love that He brings into the world.  
         
Behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted [Jesus], saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? (St. Luke 10. 25) Archbishop Trench reminds us from the get-go that the lawyer is not tempting Jesus with pride or envy; he merely meant to test and try Jesus’ teaching. He knows that God ‘tempts’ man, putting him to wholesome proof, revealing to him the secrets of his heart, to which he might have remained a stranger. (Trench, Parables) So, Jesus responds, What is written in the Law? How readest thou? (St. Luke 10. 26) The lawyer replies, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy strength, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbour as thyself. (Ibid, 27) Jesus answers, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live. (Ibid, 28) Jesus implies, You know the Law. If you can obey it, you shall find eternal life. That the lawyer cannot fulfill the Law becomes clear because he wants to put a limit on his love. (Trench, idem) The lawyer, willing to justify himself (–or prove himself blameless) said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour? (St. Luke 10. 29) The lawyer, wanting a healthy boundary to his love, means whom shall I love and whom should I refrain from loving? Archbishop Trench writes that the essence of Love has no limit except its own ability to proceed further. (idem) This man wants to know who my neighbour is to guard against nolimit and a virtue that might extend into infinity. His mistake is that he is looking at the recipient of his love and not at himself. His Love for others is limited! St. Cyril suggests that in asking, ‘Who is my neighbor’, he reveals to us that he is empty of love for his neighbor since he does not consider anyoneas his neighbor; and consequently, he is also empty of the Love of God. (C.A. Pent. xii) 

Jesus answers him with a parable. 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. (St. Luke 10. 30) Here, Jesus tells the story of Man’s Fall, and how God, in Jesus, will respond to it. Because of sin, fallen man has freely willed to travel down from the Love of God’s Jerusalem into the sinful love of earthly Jericho. As a result, he has fallen in with the devil and his angels, who have stripped him of his original righteousness and wounded him with the sting of death, or sin. (1 Cor. xv. 56) Fallen man is wounded and abandoned, left half dead in relation to God. Throughout the course of man’s fallen history, great men, educated in the Law –like today’s lawyer, have forever gone up to Jerusalem to receive the discipline and correction of the Law and the Prophets but have also always come down and fallen into the ditch.

The parable continues. By chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. And likewise, a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side. (St. Luke 10. 31, 32) Origen reminds us that the Priest and the Levite represent the law and the prophets in all ages, (Origen, “What shall I do for Eternal Life?”)who might very well have had the wisdom to describe man’s indenture to the Law of Sin, even with hope in the prophesied promises but cannot offer Grace to help in time of need. (Hebrews iv. 16) This is because they cannot identify with Sinful Man, in themselves, fallen from God and wounded by sin. They do not see that in the ditch is the condition of another self in desperate need of God’s Grace. They have forgotten the weightier matters of the Law, judgment, mercy, and faith, (Trench, idem) and, thus, have placed a limit on their Love, justifying [themselves].
                  
Jesus 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. (St. Luke 10. 33, 34) Man who knows that he has fallen from Divine Grace in earthly life lies helpless in the ditch. Along comes a Samaritan- literally an alien and exile to the Law and Prophets of Israel. Yet, Samaritan means one who observes the Law, and this Good Samaritan will turn out to be the only one who can fulfill the Law. For this Samaritan is one who is so full of compassion and mercy that he alone can impart the Love that he receives from God to others. He is the love of God and the love of neighbor in the flesh. He alone can heal Fallen Man and remedy his spiritual alienation from God. As Origen reminds us, Providence was keeping the half-dead man for One who was stronger than the Law and the Prophets. (Idem) Thou art a Samaritan and hast a devil, the Priest and Levite exclaim to Jesus. Nevertheless, the Samaritan, which also means guardian, comes down with a medicine bag full of spiritual remedies. He carries with him bandages, oil, and wine, for He expects to find all self-consciously half dead fallen men, who know that this limitless love alone can break the sway of sin over their lives. This Samaritan sets fallen man upon his own beast ­­–his back, and because loving his neighbor becomes the labor of his lifetime, he carries him into spiritual health that knows no limit. 
         
The Good Samaritan is, of course, Jesus Christ, who alone bears and carries the weight of all self-consciously half-dead sinners on to their healing redemption. He carries man to an inn and cares for him. The inn symbolizes that hospital for sinners, the Church, who are passing through this vale of tears to God’s Kingdom. The Church’s innkeepers will be the Apostles and then their successors.  Jesus, the Good Samaritan, spends a night in the inn, on His Cross, and then throughout His Resurrection, as He cares for fallen man and then teaches the innkeepers how to continue the work that His love has limitlessly begun. 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. (St. Luke 10. 35) The Good Samaritan gives two pence to the innkeepers, the price He pays for the salvation of their souls with His Body and Blood. The Church receives these gifts as the means of ongoing spiritual convalescence in the Holy Sacrament. He has paid the price of their salvation with His Body and Blood, and because of what Jesus Christ, the Good Samaritan, has done, the salvation journey has limitless Love to draw upon. When the Good Samaritan returns, He will repay to the spiritual caregiver, the Church, what He owes them –the salvation He has gifted to them as the Love that keeps on giving. 
At the conclusion of the parable, Jesus asks the lawyer and us, Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighour unto him that fell among the thieves? (ibid, 36) The lawyer answers, He that showed mercy on him. (Ibid, 37) Jesus said, Go and do thou likewise. (Ibid, 38)
         
Thus, we must ponder the significance of the parable for our own lives. Who is my neighbor, we ask with the lawyer? We learn that our neighbor is not, first and foremost, the man left half-dead in the ditch, but the Good Samaritan, or Jesus Christ Himself. Our neighbor, then, is not, first, the man upon whom we are called to show mercy. Rather, our neighbor is the One whose Love for us knows no limit. For, truly, we are the man in the ditch in need of redemption and salvation. Until we realize that Christ Jesus is the Good Samaritan who comes to bind up our wounds, heal our bodies and souls, take us into the inn of the Church, to convalesce by the Grace of God through the power of His Holy Spirit, we shall never sufficiently receive with thanksgiving that Saving Love which is born to be shared. The Priests and Levites are not alone in passing by the real problem. The Scripture hath concluded all under sin, that the promise by faith of Jesus Christ might be given to them that believe. (Gal. iii. 22)Whenever we forget that this inn is a hospital, and that we are here because we are sick and need of the Good Samaritan’s limitless loving cure, we perish. Receiving the limitless Love that Jesus Christ, God’s Good Samaritan, brings to our fallen condition, we shall be sore amazed as His eternal desire and omnipotent might save us through the Holy Spirit. We shall not only see, hear, and obey God’s Love for ourselves, but we shall also love our neighbors as ourselves because God’s Love in our hearts touches all others, like the Sun, which does not inquire on which it shall shine. (Trench, idem) We shall receive from God, of whose only gift it cometh that [His] faithful people do unto [Him] true and laudable service. (Collect Trinity XIII) Such service loves God wholly and our neighbors as ourselves. With Archbishop Trench, let us see that Love is a debt we are forever paying and are contented to owe (idem) to God and all men, through Jesus Christ, by the Holy Ghost. Let us see how Christ loves us with no limit as we hear His command to minister to Him in all others. (idem)

Amen.
©wjsmartin
  
 

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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 rehearsed habitually 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 often otherwise occupied and, thus, slothful in relation to our spiritual well-being. God hears in order 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 of His mercy and the intensity of its Power.  

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 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 that she knew could cure her demonized child. She was not a Jewish petitioner but a Gentile seeker, and so was provoked by Jesus, who 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) The response that Jesus anticipated and desired to elicit from her was brilliant. She said, Yes, Lord: yet the dogs under the table eat of the children’s crumbs. (Ibid, 28) Jesus told the woman that because of her faith and desire for fragments of the holiness that He has brought into the world, the devil would be expelled from her tormented daughter. The faith of this Gentile realizes that she is rewarded with a gift that she desired but did not deserve. Her desire was born from a deep sense of God’s presence in Jesus, which His own fellow Jews missed. Desire follows love. This woman loved her daughter and so was led to the light and power of God in Jesus Christ.

Now, this morning, we encounter a Jewish man who cannot so much as express his desire and has no idea about what he might or might not deserve. His friends, however, express his desire for him and seek the power that Jesus brings. We read: And they bring unto him one that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech; and they beseech him to put his hand upon him. (Ibid, 32) Jesus is back in the land of the faithless Pharisees, the land of His own Jewish people, amongst men with pretensions to religion. Yet here we find a man who images the Jews’ deaf and dumb relation to God. What ensues is not a conversation at all. Jesus had spoken to the Syrophoenician woman because she spoke to him. But here He finds silence in a man who is deaf and mute, and so a silent prayer is offered from Jesus to His Father. We read: And 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. Noise and commerce drown out the silence that Jesus draws from to impart God’s Grace to us. The silence of the wilderness should have been remembered by the Jews, who heard God’s Word and experienced His Power only when they had been put to silence. Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth. (Psalm lxvi. 10) Jesus took him aside so that in solitude and silence, he might be more receptive of deep and lasting impressions, even as the same Lord does now oftentimes lead a soul apart, or takes away from its earthly companions and friends, when He would speak with it, and heal it, as Archbishop Trench reminds us. (Trench, The Miracles) This man needed to find God in Jesus Christ for the very first time. His healing can come about only from a deep and lasting impression of the Word heard for the first time and, thus, alone capable of unloosing his tongue.

With St. Paul, the deaf mute man would come to realize that we are not sufficient of ourselves to think anything as of ourselves; [for] our sufficiency [comes] from God. (2 Cor. iii. 4)  We, with the deaf and mute man have a long journey ahead of us. But if we desire and seek God, knowing that we have been deaf to His Word and are thus dumb, we can learn to hear Christ the Word and speak His truth to the world. We read that Jesus put his fingers into his ears, and he spit, and touched his tongue…. (St. Mark vii. 33,34) Almost all other avenues of communication, save those of sight and feeling, were of necessity closed (Idem, Trench) to this man. Jesus must use the man’s seeing and feeling to stir his faith. The fingers are put into the ears as to bore them, to pierce through the obstacles which hindered sounds from reaching the seat of hearing. (Idem) First, we hear. Second, we speak. The tongue must be touched and pried from the roof of the mouth into motion to repeat what it has heard. Like a newborn babe, this handicap sees and feels before he can hear and speak. Thus, with wonder and awe, this man sees and feels as the approaching God opens his ears and unlooses his tongue. Pseudo-Chrysostom tells us that, 

Because of the sin of Adam, human nature had suffered much and had been wounded in its senses and in its members. But Christ coming into the world revealed to us, in Himself, the perfection of human nature; and for this reason he opened the ears with His fingers, and gave speech by the moisture of his tongue. (Sunday Sermons of the Great Fathers, iv. 2)
 
The man is new to hearing and speaking. The Lord must link his physical actions to the power that He instills from on High for the man to understand.
Through His human nature, Jesus will identify Himself with the fallen condition of man. As He cures the deaf mute man, looking up to heaven, he sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened. (ibid, 34) The power to heal comes from Christ’s unity with the Father in Heaven. Christ sighs in response to the wreck that sin had brought about, of the malice of the devil in deforming the fair features of God’s…creation, wringing a groan from his heart. (idem, Trench) 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) So, as the Venerable Bede teaches us, [Jesus] looks up to Heaven to teach us that it 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 groaning desire to ask the Lord to give us spiritual hearing and speaking because we obstinately refuse to hear and speak of the truth that He brings. Jesus sighs or groans because He desires us more than we Him, and longs to give us more than we desire or deserve. (Collect) 

The words of other men have started this 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) Our souls fear past sins; 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. We approach our primordial and primitivenothingness. 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 spiritual ears. We are ashamed to speak, and yet His Word slowly but surely gives us those words that can praise His Visitation.

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 simply of the wonderful works of God. The deep impression of God’s heartfelt desire for his salvation now opens his heart to thank 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 to plead the merits of His visitation. Perhaps, we are deaf to God’s Word and cannot speak His truth. As Pope Benedict writes, There is an inner closure that affects the person’s inmost self, which the Bible calls the “heart”. It is this that Jesus came to “open”, to liberate…to enable us to live to the full our relationship with God and with others. (Benedict XVI: September 9, 2012) Ephphatha, Be Opened, Jesus says. Jesus longs to open the ears of our hearts so that we might have what we neither desire nor deserve through His merits and mediation. (Idem) Christ calls us to follow Him quietly to His Cross. There, we shall see and hear how He offers Himself completely to us. There, we must plead the merits of His all-sufficient Sacrifice and Death. There, we must plead His mediation that begins from the Cross and extends into Resurrection and Ascension’s Eternity. From Heaven, He is our only Mediator and Advocate. Then, 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

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​I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. (Luke 5.32)  
           
Trinity Tide invites us on to the road that leads to salvation, through the name and blood of Jesus Christ, who alone reconciles us to God. No human being is denied this offer of redemption and reconciliation with Almighty God, the Father of lights, the Maker of all things. Every human being is invited to arrive at the end that God has always intended. Every human being can become a pilgrim on the way to the fulfillment and enjoyment of everlasting life with God.  Every human being can find the way that will leads to this end. Know thyself, the ancient oracle at Delphi commands. Know thyself, O Christian man and woman, and if thou can see who thou art, and what God is, then thou shalt find the way and the means that lead all to eternal life.
           
Every human being can come to know the way that leads to death and destruction on the one hand, and the way that leads to life and redemption on the other. The road that a man walks is, of course, his spiritual path. In this morning’s Gospel parable, our Lord illustrates the two ways. Two men went up into the temple to pray: the one a Pharisee, and the other a Publican. (St. Luke, xviii. 10) 
The first man is our Pharisee, a privileged and honored member of the established church of his day. This man was religious, he gave a tenth of his tithes to the Temple; he followed Jewish ritual and dietary law to the tee; he gave alms to the poor. He was the Eminent Victorian Christian of his own age. In addition, he was a religious expert on the dos and don’ts of the moral code. He was, more than likely, a good man, admired and talked of…toasted at public dinners and spoken of with conventional absurdity as a perfect divine. (A. Trollope, Conclusion, Barchester Towers) From him, we should expect to find the way to real religion and true piety.

The other man who went up to pray was a Publican – a Jew who was despised and hated by his own people for being a traitor because he collected taxes for the Roman Empire. From him, we might expect to find only the wrong way to pray since his conscience was seared with treachery. Day by day he was forced to live with a soul torn between the religion of the one true God and his greed.
            
So, we read that the Pharisee stood by himself and prayed thus. (Ibid. 11)) Long before we hear anything from the Pharisee, we see him. He is standing off by himself, segregated and divided from all others, perhaps intending that others should notice his piety (Notes on the Parables, Ch. 29),as Archbishop Trench suggests. This sight should disturb us. It appears that he is talking with himself.He is removed safely from all others, and next we hear why. God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. (Idem) The Pharisee has a very high opinion of himself. His prayer is relative and comparative. He considers himself uniquely virtuous, unlike all other men and, thus, superior to them. From the difference between all other men and himself, he takes a greater occasion for pride, as St. Augustine says. (Aug. Serm. LXV.) Looking over at the Publican he says I am alone, he is of the rest…. not… as he is, through my righteous deeds, whereby I have no unrighteousness. (Idem) As righteous, he divides himself from the unrighteous. He judges and dismisses them all as what he is not. With them, he shares no common ground. Because he is not an extortioner, adulterer, or even as this publican (Idem), he rejoices in his own goodness. He justifies himself, or thinks that he is better, by convincing himself that he is not a sinner, outwardly and visibly, in this world, and in relation to other men. He insists, in other words, that he is good by the standards and appearances of this world. The outside of the cup, his exterior and visible self, is pristine! For our admiration, he sets forth a list of his virtues. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess. (Ibid, 12) He went up to pray to praise himself. His list is short, for he has done all that he needs to do in the eyes of God. To be religious, as John Henry Newman points out, was for him, 

to keep peace towards others, to take his share in the burdens of the poor, to abstain from gross vice, and to set a good example. His alms and fastings were done not in penance, but because the world asked for them; penance would have implied consciousness of sin; whereas it was only the Publican’s, and such as they, who had anything to be forgiven. 
(J.H. Newman, 10th Sunday after Pentecost, 1856) 
 
He knows that he is neither a traitor nor a sinner and, thus, thanks God for his well-behaved, decorous, consistent, and respectable life. (R.C. Trench: Parables) Again, he thanks God for himself. Our Pharisee thanks God that he was not as that Publican. Never does he ask God for what He wants him to be. What we see and hear is a man who does all the talking in his prayer. He cannot hear God. Furthermore, he cannot see or hear one man who had found the way that alone leads back to the Almighty. 

But see and hear what the Pharisee missed. The Publican, standing, afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner. (Ibid, 13) This man, despised by his own people for his compromised and divided loyalties, is standing afar off. He does not think that he is worthy to come close to the wall of prayer or the holy Pharisee.He stands afar off, no doubt knowing most cuttingly that he is the last and least of those whom God should save. His conscience is seared. He knows that he is an unworthy sinner. He is poor in spirit and fearful of approaching God Almighty. He smites his breast, and what we see and hear is a man whose soul is wrenched with desperation over impotence against his division from God and his fellow men. God alone can save his soul. In all humility, without any doubt, he pleads, God be merciful to me a sinner. (Idem) This man knows himself. He knows, too, that avoiding God would be far worse than approaching Him to beg for mercy and healing. O Lord, correct me, but with judgment; not in thine anger, lest thou bring me to nothing. (Jer. x. 24.) He sees the Pharisee but thinks himself unworthy of his company. He knows only one truth. God stands before Him as the One who knows him, can help him, and can save him from himself and his sins. Before God, he sees himself as nothing. With the prophet Isaiah, he exclaims, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips. (Isaiah vi. 5)
            
This man stands by, but not near, the Pharisee. He stands afar off. (Ibid, 13) Little does he know that he stands far closer to the heart-searching God than most. He does not see by his own light but stands out against the all-seeing God. He sees God’s light and what it reveals to him of himself. He prays that God will hear his humble prayer. Unlike the Pharisee, he is not his own teacher, pacing round and round in the small circle of his own thoughts and judgments, careless to know what God says to him, fearless of being condemned by Him, standing approved in his own sight. (Idem, Trench) Rather, he hears the words of the Lord, Be still and know that I am God. (Psalm 46.10) He sees and fears God and is ripe and ready to hear the words of Jesus Christ: I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. (Luke 5.32) He has seen himself in the light of God’s truth and mercy. He knows that he needs God, and that God alone can save him from his spiritual wretchedness, misery, and poverty. He sees God and longs to hear the Word of His Forgiveness. He seeks pardon for wrong done, and the power to do better. Thus, he says, God be merciful to me a sinner. (Idem)
            
The Publican and his prayer, which the Pharisee can neither see nor hear, are a model for our own piety. The Publican does not justify himself with God whom he sees and hears. Eventually, he sees himself, with all other men, as one in sin and separation from God. With St. Paul, he insists I am the least of the Apostles, that am not meet to be called an Apostle…but by the Grace of God, I am what I am: and His Grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain. (1 Cor. xv. 10) He knows that he is helpless before God’s Majesty and Might. Unbeknownst to himself, he is one with all fallen men. John Henry Newman reminds us, 

this is because created natures, high and low, are all on a level and one in the sight and comparison of the Creator, and so all of them have one speech, and one only, whether it be the thief on the cross, Magdalen at the feast, of St. Paul before martyrdom. One and all have nothing but what comes from Him, and are as nothing before Him, who is all in all. (Newman, Idem) 

The Publican’s prayer is the true prayer of all men. In his heart, we find that unselfconscious holiness about to be born because of the weight of his own sin. From him we learn to humble [ourselves]… under the mighty hand of God…casting all [our] anxieties upon Him (1 Peter v. 6,7)
Let us this day, my brethren, see ourselves in the Light of Almighty God radiating from Jesus Christ. Let us see too that, if left to our own devices, we judge in relation to all others, convincing ourselves that we are good enough and better than notorious sinners. Let us see that God, our Heavenly Father, calls us to hear Him in Jesus. Let us pray that He might mercifully grant unto us such a measure of [His] grace, that we, running the way of [His] commandments, may obtain [His] gracious promises, and be made partakers of [His] heavenly treasure. (Collect Trinity XI) Let us seethat He alone, unlike any other, can and will save us from the Cross of Christ’s Love. He will hear us if we pray with the Publican, God be merciful to me a sinner…for everyone that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted. (Ibid, 14) 

Amen.
©wjsmartin

​Concerning spiritual gifts, brethren, I would not have you ignorant.
(1 Corinthians xii. 1)
 
In the Collect, Epistle, and Gospel for the Tenth Sunday after Trinity, the subject matter is struggle. As always, in the Trinity season, we are exhorted to so turn to God through Jesus Christ, that we might struggle to receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit, becoming visible and audible agents – revealers – of God’s presence in the world. And today we are reminded of a few key elements that rightly position our souls before God who longs to struggle with us and bring His gifts alive in our hearts and souls.
       
First, we learn what is not meant by struggling in relation to God. I would not have you ignorant…carried away by dumb idols, (1 Cor. xii. 1,2) St. Paul tells the young Corinthian Church. Jesus witnesses the worship of dumb idols when He visits the Temple at Jerusalem and finds His own people wholly ignorant of the gifts that God’s own people should have struggled to obtain as they prepared for His coming. Our Gospel lesson tells us this morning that Christ Jesus entered the Holy City, whose Temple symbolized the Church that Christ would grow from the foundation of Solomon’s beginning. The Temple was meant to be a place of encounter between God and man in this world, but Jesus finds it rather the site of sinful commerce between man and man. And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it, saying, If thou hadst known, even thou…the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes. (St. Luke xix. 41, 42) Instead of finding faith, hope, and love, there Jesus finds man’s obsession with mammon and money. In the Temple, Jesus finds that God’s Word which proclaimed His coming is unheard by the Jews, who have been blinded and deafened by their worship of dumb idols. Jesus finds men who were too busy for faith in the gifts of God’s Word and Spirit, now to be summed up and perfected in His mission to fallen men. They know not, neither will they understand; they walk on in darkness: all the foundations of the earth are out of course. (Ps. lxxxii. 5) They worship mammon and money and don’t reveal even an inkling of the struggle involved in putting God first and worshiping Him alone. 
       
Second, in Jesus’ weeping over the sins of His own people, we have a picture of that struggle and pain that must characterize our own mourning over our sins and the need to repent. The Church is the new Temple of God, and in it we too must grieve and lament over our ignorant worship of dumb idols. Origen of Alexandria, commenting upon these first few verses, says that 
Jesus weeps over Jerusalem first to confirm and establish those virtues which He desired should come alive in us. He writes, All of the Beatitudes of which Jesus spoke in the Gospel He confirms by his own example. Just as He had said “blessed are the meek”, He confirms this where He says “learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart. And just as He said “blessed are ye that weep”, He also wept over the city. (Origen: Sunday Sermons of the Great Fathers: iii, p. 341) 
 
We must struggle to embrace meekness, which is that virtue of knowing our place and the limitations of our human nature. We must then struggle to mourn and weep over our frailty and failure to be faithful to God. We also struggle to remember that Christ’s weeping is a sign of His compassion for us. St. Cyril of Jerusalem writes that Christ, who wishes that all men should be saved, had compassion on these. And this would not have been evident to us unless made so by some very human gesture. Tears, however, are a sign of sorrow. (Ibid)  St. Gregory the Great writes that the compassionate Saviour weeps over the ruin of the faithless city, which the city itself did not know was to come. (Ibid) And so three of the great Church Fathers remind us that Christ uses His human nature to reveal to us the great urgency to struggle to practice meekness and mourning so that our souls might unite with Him and thus be rightly related to a sinful world and our part in it.
       
So, through the gifts of the Holy Spirit, we struggle to confess that we have too often and for too long worshiped dumb idols in ignorance and have failed to confess our sins and mourn over them. But why is this such a struggle? The answer is that we are habituated to this world and our fleshly comforts. Our little worlds, one might say, are far too worldly. We are so immersed in creature comforts that have morphed into needs that we treat God and His Heavenly Treasure as a kind of afterthought of merely occasional compartmentalized interest. The fallen Jerusalem over which Jesus weeps this morning is the fallen Jerusalem of our souls. The soul that is fallen has lost the habit of ongoing submission to God’s Word of Promise for redemption, found only in the saving life of Jesus. The soul that is fallen has forgotten its sin because it is no longer confesses its powerlessness in relation to the God who alone can heal, redeem, and save.

We might recover the soul’s spiritual consciousness by looking at today’s Old Testament lesson. Here we read that Jacob rose up that night, and took his two wives, and his two women servants, and his eleven sons, and passed over the ford Jabbok. (Genesis xxxii. 22) Jacob, the son of Isaac, crosses the river Jabbok, which means to struggle, to empty, or to pour out. Unbeknownst to him at the time, Jacob was struggling to leave his old self, the natural man and the soul immersed in earthly and profane commerce, behind. Jacob can be our model for the man who empties himself of the worship of dumb idols, leaves behind corrupted desires for impermanent riches, and struggles to cross the spiritual waters. And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. (Genesis xxxii. 24) Possessions, money, even spouses must be left behind for a season so that true spiritual struggle can begin. Jacob struggles and wrestles. Pope Benedict XVI reminds us that, The Church’s spiritual tradition has seen in this story a symbol of prayer as a faith-filled struggle which takes place at times in darkness, calls for perseverance, and is crowned by interior renewal and God’s blessing. This struggle demands our unremitting effort yet ends by surrender to God’s mercy and gift. (Weekly Catechesis, May 25, 2011) Wrestling is spiritual struggle. Each of us must engage it. God struggles with us against the deceitful promises of the world, the flesh, and the devil. In the Person of His Son, Jesus Christ, we find God’s struggle to purge the temples of our bodies and souls of any evil that pursues false commerce in the world. Of course, God never forces His saving power upon us. He does not wish to prevail against Jacob or us. He touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was put out of joint, as he wrestled with him. (Genesis xxxii. 25)

Wrestling or struggling with God leaves behind a sign of our own imperfection and finitude. The thigh, which means his heart, struggles until it rests in God. God’s touch is the loving reminder that He will be the source of our healing and redemption. Jacob is touched by the love of God that saves him. He struggles or wrestles to obtain a blessing from God. God asks, What is thy name? (Genesis xxxii. 27) Jacob answers. God says, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed. (Genesis xxxii. 28) Israel means he has striven, hunted, aspired with God. And so too must we if we would be saved.

You and I must be prepared for spiritual warfare. Jesus weeps because He knows what we lose if we refuse to struggle and wrestle with God. Blessed are they that mourn. (St. Matthew v. 4) Mourning is grief over how we have neglected God’s will. We mourn over our failure to struggle more earnestly to discover His promises for us. Our spiritual thighs must be felt to be out of joint. We must struggle to grasp that God’s Grace intends that we hobble around this world careful not to be desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope…mourning the vanished power of the usual reign, as T. S. Eliot reminds us. (Ash Wednesday) If we fail to wrestle and struggle with God, to hobble, we shall never feel our condition as sinners in need of a Saviour. If we fail to struggle with God, we shall never be able to go with Jesus to His Cross. If we fail to struggle with God, we shall never see how Son of God has won our salvation in His ultimate struggle to hobble to the Cross to conquer sin, death, and Satan.   

Jesus…wept, and then we read that He went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold therein, and them that bought; saying unto them, It is written, My house is the house of prayer: but ye have made it a den of thieves. (St. Luke xix. 45, 46) In Jesus’ tears, we must struggle to learn that through Him, God expresses His Love as wrath against our sin. For whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth. (Hebr. Xii. 6) Let us receive this wrath as Divine Loving correction. Christ brings us to our own powerlessness. We were made to struggle and hobble. Jacob wrestled with God and found himself. Now God, in Jesus Christ, wrestles and struggles against Satan for us. Satan underestimated the omnipotence of his adversary. Satan tortured and crucified Christ as Man. Christ assumed our weakness. But Satan forgot that as Christ the Man was dying, His death was already becoming the instrument of Son of God’s victory over sin, death, and Satan. In the Crucified Dying Lord, Death took on new meaning as the source and seedbed of the hobbling struggle of new life that never dies.

Jesus wept over the destruction of Jerusalem as He saw the human soul’s failure to struggle to put God first. Jerusalem is fallen, and so are we. But now Christ takes us into His loving death as we struggle and hobble to be born again and walk upright. Walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour. (Eph. V. 2) Our Collect directs, let us ask God for such things as shall please [Him] that the Spirit may enable us to struggle and hobble to thank God for this and rejoice! 
Amen.
©wjsmartin