Author: John Drymon

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

One of the uncomfortable things about our tradition of Christianity (particularly for the preacher, who must try not to lead others into error) is that our peculiar place between Roman Catholicism and Reformed Protestantism means that some rather important doctrinal matters have been very carefully nuanced. Maybe the most famous of these is found in our catechism–which I encourage you to read through from time to time; it starts on page 844 of our Book of Common Prayer. Anyway, some of you know that one distinction between Roman Catholicism and most Protestant churches pertains to the number of sacraments–Sacraments being those objective means of Grace, performed by the church’s ministers (though some more evangelical protestants would disagree with that definition). For Roman Catholics there are seven and for most Protestants there are two.

So how about us? Well in one place, the catechism states that there are “two great sacraments given by Christ to his Church”, those being Holy Baptism and the Holy Eucharist. Then a few pages later five other “sacramental rites which evolved in the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit”–confirmation, ordination, holy matrimony, reconciliation of a penitent, and unction–that they are, indeed, means of grace, but that “they are not necessary for all persons in the same way that Baptism and Eucharist are.” You’ll learn later on in my series on Anglican Church history that there has since the Sixteenth Century been a concerted effort to have a broad enough church for those of both more Catholic and more Reformed sensibilities to be able to conscientiously be a part of the church, and I think this threads the needle quite nicely.

All of that is just to set the stage for an issue of doctrine which is even thornier, and which one has to do a bit of digging to find something like a satisfying answer as to what the church teaches–namely, the nature and effects of faith. Probably the closest we can get to an official stance is found in the 39 Articles of Religion, finalized in the Church of England in 1571 and confirmed by the Episcopal Church at its General Convention of 1801. (Here is some more homework for you- because the Articles are also in your prayerbooks, beginning on page 867.) In the eleventh article, it says that the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone is “a most wholesome Doctrine, and very full of comfort.” Then the very next article says that good works “do spring out necessarily of a true and lively faith.” This suggests two things as I read it. First, that there is what a philosopher would call logical implication (a relationship of necessity) between faith and morals. Second, and more to the point of what I’m building up to, that faith is to be understood as something more than simply believing a claim for which we don’t have evidence.

I said at the outset that our church’s carefully staked-out middle-ground ecclesial territory sometimes makes it difficult for the preacher. I should have said, it makes it difficult for me, and as recently as last week’s sermon you might have noticed me trying to balance on that razor’s edge of saying both that, on the one hand, we cannot earn our own salvation by being good but, on the other hand, God expects us to grow in virtue and not doing so has consequences.

I think it comes down to understanding faith in the fullest sense of its meaning in scripture, as it was carefully summarized in articles eleven and twelve, and as we see it borne out in both the Old Testament lesson and Gospel appointed for today.

We don’t hear to often from the Book of the Prophet Habakkuk, but we should pay it more attention, because it is generally regarded as the basis off of which the Apostle Paul developed, thanks to Divine Inspiration, his own rather nuanced view of the nature of faith. It’s important to the arguments found in the epistles to the Romans, the Galatians, and the Hebrews; and Paul rather explicitly casts himself as a sort of “new Habakkuk” in his sermon in Antioch in the thirteenth chapter of Acts.

In any event, central to both Paul’s project and our own understanding is that last half verse of today’s Old Testament lesson: but the righteous shall live by faith. The Hebrew reads “vetzaddik yichyeh beemunatov”–the just shall live by firmness or steadfastness or fidelity. We might have already guessed that to live by something, suggests that that something must be more than mere, tepid cognitive assent. Understanding that the word itself, translated for us as faith, means something like firmness or steadfastness makes the point clearer.

Likewise, the disciples’ desire that the Lord should increase their faith in today’s Gospel suggests that it is something more than believing a proposition. It could, of course, mean something like “make our certainty about this proposition’s truth stronger.” When we look to the Greek, however, we get something closer to the Hebrew of Habbakuk: Πρόθες ἡμῖν πίστιν–add to our faithfulness or trust.

Now, two things: first, this more active way of understanding faith presupposes that one believes certain propositions. Perhaps that’s obvious, but a full-blown postmodernist philosopher might quibble with this assumption. So we take it as a given that saying something like “I steadfastly trust in the resurrection of the dead” logically requires one to believe the resurrection is a true fact. Second, it is important that we recognize that it is not our active faithfulness which justifies us. Nor for that matter would our mere, tepid cognitive assent do if that were all faith meant. It is the action of God which does it all; we’re talking here of acceptance of God’s saving plan rather than our personal agency in that plan.

All of this is important, because it suggests that we are saying something more substantive than “I accede to the truth value of this proposition.” We’re saying, I put every bit of my trust in this truth and it changes how I live my life. In a few moments we will, as we do every Sunday, recite the Nicene Creed. I’ve heard it said, in jest, that the reason they moved the Creed from its traditional place immediately before to immediately after the Sermon in our current prayerbook was to correct the preacher if he had spouted any heresy from the pulpit. That is certainly a fringe benefit of the revision if nothing else.

In any event, it does give me the opportunity to suggest that this week, when we recite it, we might consider what it means if we are saying not just “I believe these propositions” but “I put my whole trust in them.” Indeed, I think this was the intention of the Fathers at Nicaea. It is obscured by the fact that our version is essentially a translation of a translation–We believe, translated and subsequently pluralized from the Latin Credo (I believe), itself translated from the Greek Πιστεύομεν (We have faith or trust or remain steadfast in).

Consider that, and consider how placing your trust wholly, steadfastly in our triune God, in the Incarnation, in the Resurrection, in the Communion of Saints, and in the hope of the life of the world to come might change your lives and the lives of those you love here and now.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

We have, for the past few weeks been reading from the First Epistle of St. Paul to his young apprentice, Timothy. Reading this rather discursive letter as a whole, we find that Timothy’s church in Ephesus was beset by a myriad of false teachings and false teachers. Impious superstitions; speculation which both wasted time and drew people away from the Faith once received; consent to scandalous and illegal behavior; condemnation of perfectly proper, Christian activities, like getting married and even eating.

False teaching was legion in this little church, and so were those who propagated the heresies. Worst of all, these false teachers were making a killing. We learn in today’s reading that the besetting sin in this community seemed to be love of money. They put their faith in mammon, hoping that wealth would save them. This is what in theological terms is called a “false soteriology”, which is a fancy way of saying that one can find life, and truth and purpose and salvation where these things are not to found. It is something that we fallen people fall back into, time and time again. So did Blessed Paul, who counted himself the foremost of sinners.

We are not in a world much different from Paul’s, I’m afraid. I know that I am barraged every day with false objects of hope, and sinner that I am, sometimes I put my trust in those things, hoping to find salvation there: whether it’s money, or the positive regard of my fellows, or self-sufficiency, or any of a number of countless idols the world constructs for me or I for myself. I suspect few of us are saintly enough to avoid placing our trust in these things from time to time; but it is not at the altars set up by this sin-sick world where we find salvation.

Anyway, that is what it is to live life on the terms that the world has set for us, and that is what the apostle is warning us against. The good life, he says, is forged by virtues like righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness. These are what St. Paul tells us to pursue, but the pursuit of these virtues isn’t what leads to salvation, either. Rather they are the proper response to the gift of salvation already wrought upon the cross and given freely to those who would accept it. Salvation is not primarily about how we live our lives, as important as that may be, but who it is that gives us life.

Indeed, after he lists the virtues of the Christian life, Paul goes on to explain why we ought to cultivate them: Fight the good fight, keep the faith; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called and for which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses. Our Lord made the good confession before Pontius Pilate, Paul tells us, and we find that confession in St. John’s Gospel: My kingdom is not of this world. We are meant to live as a people set apart, because we really are. By virtue of our Baptism we are made citizens of a kingdom that is not of this world. We are a priestly people, brought by Baptism into the Mystical Body of Christ and continually fed and reconstituted by the Very Body of Christ.

In the Fourth Century A.D., St. Ambrose of Milan, that Doctor of the Church and champion of the Faith in one of Christianity’s darkest hours, wrote a hymn which remains popular on the feast days of Apostles. The hymn extols the virtue of those whom the church recognizes as saints, but much of it applies equally to the ordinary saints of the church, the regular saints, like you and I, who are saints not by virtue of wondrous deeds, but by a simple confession of our belief in our Lord and our Baptism into His Body. From the third verse of that hymn:

Theirs is the steadfast faith of saints,
and hope that never yields nor faints;
and love of Christ in perfect glow
that lays the prince of this world low.

These aren’t miraculous acts, but the simple acts of faith we are called to live out as baptized people. To pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance. It is in living by these uncomplicated, but sometimes impossibly difficult virtues that we show forth to the world that though we are in the world, we are not of it. We show the world the power of the God in whom we find salvation. We show that in the waters of Baptism we are truly changed and will never be the same. We show to the prince of this world that the Kingdom of God will prevail, and for this there is much rejoicing in Heaven.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

This morning’s Gospel contains what may be the most baffling of Jesus’ parables. If you were paying attention it might have struck you as more than odd. It likely would have seemed like I misread something to horrible effect, because it seems to run counter to everything we know about Jesus: And I tell you, [Jesus says] make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous mammon. More recent translations make the point even more sharply: And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth.

So troubling are these words that, even from very early on, Christians have tried to argue that this is a mistake in how Luke recorded our Lord’s words, and critics of Christianity have used it as proof of the faith’s inconsistency. Julian the Apostate—the Roman Emperor who turned back to paganism after two Christian Emperors—claimed this passage as proof that Jesus was no more God than any other fallible human. And if we look at the text, it appears that Luke himself didn’t know what to do with this saying. Surely, he included it because Jesus said it, but then he tacks a number of Jesus’ other, apparently contradictory sayings about the dangers of mammon on to the end. So, we go from “make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous mammon” to “you cannot serve [both] God and mammon” in the span of a few verses.

What in heaven’s name are we going to do with this? Well, I want to suggest an alternate reading as a possibility—a possibility, not the gospel truth, necessarily, though thinkers as wise as St. Augustine made the same argument, so I’m in good company.

You will remember from last week that we sometimes misunderstand parables because we reckon their protagonists to be us rather than God. Keep that in mind. There is another truth about parables which also affects how we read them, and that is that parables are not allegories. That is to say that they give us an insight into the nature of God or of the Christian life, but not every detail is meant to correspond neatly to something in reality. So, in last week’s Gospel we heard the parable of the lost coin, and determined that the woman was to be seen as God and the coin as the lost soul, but the woman’s penury is a plot device rather than a symbol suggesting that God is somehow poor. It is a powerful metaphor, not a perfect allegory.

So let us apply these two facts—that we often mistake whom the parable is about and that parables are not allegories—to this morning’s Gospel. Remember what happened? The steward is fired for defrauding his master, and he proceeds to collect less than what is owed from the master’s debtors in order to ingratiate himself to them. Ultimately, the master commends the steward for his shrewd rejection of justice. The just, or righteous, path would have been to collect all that was owed, but such justice often lacks mercy. The steward is less interested in what is fair than he is in what is effective in bringing about rapprochement.

So what if this parable is not about us and our business dealings? What if it’s actually about Jesus? Remember, parables aren’t allegories, so we don’t have to see the steward’s initial unfaithfulness as anything other than a plot device to get the story going. In other words, just by positing Jesus in the role of the steward, we don’t have to claim that Jesus has defrauded God the Father or something like that. The important part is what the steward does with the debtors. They owe something, and the steward cuts them a break so that he might be taken in by one them. This is called “unrighteous” in the parable, but we miss the point if we impose our own understanding of righteousness onto the text. In fact, a better word would be “unlawful”, because that’s what a first-century Jew would have understood the word “unrighteous” to mean. The law demanded full payment.

If the steward is supposed to be Jesus, the parable is not about money at all. Luke probably added the bits afterward about not serving God and mammon, because even he (or perhaps some later redactor) didn’t fully understand what the parable was about. It’s not about money, but rather about the human soul and sin. By all rights, we’ve got a debt we cannot pay. The fair thing, the lawful thing, the righteous thing, would be for each of us to suffer the consequences. But just like the steward, who desired to live with one of the debtors, Jesus desires to dwell with us and within us. And just like the steward, Christ knows that that can’t happen if he simply follows “the rules”.

That we can have a relationship with Jesus is not fair; justice would demand the opposite. If a friend were to constantly turn his back on any one of us, to break faith and defraud us, we would be just to end that friendship. So, too, would God have been within his rights to cut us off entirely, to call it quits with us.

The children of Israel had a conditional relationship with God. God promised to remain faithful if and only if they kept their end of the bargain, if they followed the Old Testament rules. They didn’t. Neither would we have done. We were supposed to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and mind and our neighbors as ourselves. We still don’t. But then what God did was shocking, an affront to justice. He said “no more conditions. I will love you unconditionally.” That wasn’t the deal. He didn’t have to do it, but He loved us so much that He desired to stay in relationship with us whatever the costs to Himself, knowing that the cost would ultimately be His Son’s life. Mercy has trumped fairness; love has overcome the law.

As I said last week, this doesn’t mean that we don’t have any expectations. It doesn’t mean we should try to be kind and just and curageous and loving, to practice the virtues we learn in following the Lord. What it does mean, though, is that there isn’t anything we can do to make God stop loving us. He’s broken the rules for us already; He’s bailed us out when we should have been left in chains. The only things we can actually offer in return are our penitence and our thanks, which is why we keep showing up here week after week. We can try to love God back, even if we haven’t enough love in us to go very far in that regard. Most of all, we can permit Him to live in our hearts. This is not a one-time deal, no matter what the televangelists tell you. This is a daily choice. We can let God in or evict Him. But before we do the latter, let’s remember that that’s why he bent the rules in the first place. That’s why he showed mercy when justice demanded wrath. He who on earth had no home, wants only to live in us. Will we prepare for him room?

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.