Sermons

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

I attended a meeting last week with several clergy and lay leaders, both Episcopalian and Lutheran, last week, and one Lutheran pastor present—at whose parish we were meeting—had to excuse himself for a bit to meet with a woman in her nineties whom he said was having “a baptismal crisis.” It turns out that she was uncertain whether or not she had actually been baptized and was worried about what this meant for her eternal destination. Fortunately for her peace of mind, the church secretary found the recording of her baptism from the nineteen thirties. Thank goodness for church records. I always find it amusing when I read again the opening chapter of Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, as we did at Morning Prayer on Monday, where the Apostle writes the following:

I thank God that I baptized none of you, but Chrispus and Gaius; lest any should think I had baptized in my own name. And I baptized also the household of Stephanas: besides I know not whether I baptized any other.

The church in Corinth could have clearly used better record keeping and a good church secretary.

Two quick asides. First, there is always the possibility (at least in our tradition) of something called a “conditional baptism” which is intended for things like this anxious nonagenarian’s situation. When the big moment comes, you just say “if you are not already baptized, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.” I have had occasion to do this. Secondly, and more importantly, I don’t personally believe that God deals in “moral luck”, so I personally reject the idea that somebody could be condemned because he or she believed himself or herself to have been baptized but hadn’t been. That said, the pastoral response in such circumstances would not be to argue that point but to try to find the baptismal record and to do a conditional baptism if called for.

Anyway, all of this raises the question of assurance. How can we be sure we are among the elect?

Nineteenth century hymn writer Fanny Crosby seemed to have worked it out. You might have heard her words before if you grew up in a different Christian tradition (it’s sadly never been in our hymnal tradition):

Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!
O what a foretaste of glory divine!
Heir of salvation, purchase of God,
Born of His Spirit, washed in His blood.

Perfect submission, perfect delight!
Visions of rapture now burst on my sight;
Angels descending bring from above
Echoes of mercy, whispers of love.

Ms. Crosby might have worked it out, but the man who started her own flavor of Christianity, John Wesley, could not. While he taught that humans could have some level of assurance, he—who though not having Crosby’s visions of rapture and of angels descending, had felt his heart strangely warmed in a moment of conversion—could not ultimately confirm that he was certain he had been saved. Perhaps he had backslid back into his high church Anglicanism.

Puritans had similar concerns. While you’re not likely to hear it preached down at First Presbyterian (as our reformed brothers and sisters have lately tended to deëmphasize the theology of Calvin), those of the reformed tradition—Puritans and more moderate Presbyterians alike—believed that one couldn’t have perfect assurance of salvation, but only clues (signs of election) based on things like domestic tranquility and personal wealth–blessings from God which suggested to them that they were favored and thus saved. The result was the development of the Protestant work ethic (you’d work hard to evince these signs of election for your own surety and the recognition of your coreligionists) which works out well if you’re trying to establish a peaceable and productive society, but you also might get a bunch of people worried that they are sinners in the hands of an angry God.

Likewise, a case can be made that the Protestant Reformation itself began less because of Roman Catholic abuses (selling indulgences and the like, as important as that was as a tipping point) and more because good old Martin Luther was so terrified at the church’s ambivalence on the matter of salvation that he needed to find a system which provided more certainty to the believer that he or she was heaven-bound rather than damned.

Folks, I’ve got some good news for you. You don’t have to worry yourself to death; or maybe put better, the fact that you may be worried might ironically be the best evidence that you needn’t worry that you’re going to Hell. You have been been saved by Christ’s one sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction on the Cross. you have been saved in the regenerative waters of Baptism. You are being saved as you continue to receive the Grace of Christ’s Body and Blood and as good fruit is borne through your faith by the work of the Holy Spirit, even if your own participation that is simply sincerely saying “God, work through me though I am too weak to do your will.”

Now this is dangerous information to give out. It’s dangerous information, because people who are afraid of Hell can sometimes behave a lot better than those who aren’t. Geneva, when Calvin was more-or-less in charge was one of the most peaceful, prosperous, democratic places in the world.

And as much as I hate to admit it (and as I implied just a moment ago) the Puritan history of our own country’s early years had much the same effect. While our Anglican forebears on this continent were growing fat and lazy and treating trading slaves in the Southern Colonies, the Puritans up in New England were creating communities of mutual responsibility and laying the foundations for a country that could get on without a king, because they were so darned law-abiding and committed to equality (at least relative to others in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. And, contrary to popular fiction, they even killed fewer purported witches than Anglicans at the time did. Unfortunately, they were so good at obeying law and setting up the foundations of modern civil society because they were afraid that if they didn’t they’d literally go to hell. One takes the bad with the good, I guess.

The theological truth is socially dangerous, because people realize that they’re not going to burn just because they’re bad. We’re all pretty bad by nature thanks to the fall and only good by the grace of God. I’m not sure how I feel about that. Actually I do, but thank God I’m not God. I’m certainly not as loving and gracious and forgiving as God. In today’s Epistle, we get a pretty broad, generous view of salvation. We are all children of Abraham, and God has reckoned us all worthy of Salvation because of the Blood of Christ. In his conversation with Nicodemus, the only litmus test Jesus gives is that we be “born again” or “born from above” as some modern translations put it. He says we must be born of water and of the Spirit, which is to say (at least as I read it, though there are alternative interpretations) that we must both be born physically and then receive the New Birth of Baptism. Most of us (myself included) received that new birth when we’re too young to understand its nature, and we are merely passive recipients of God’s Grace. But that I think is ideal; infant baptism being normative just means that we’re being honest about the nature of the Sacrament and of Salvation, because even baptism of those of riper years, as older prayerbooks put it, is essentially a passive reception of God’s Grace, which we can only will partially and imperfectly to be recipients of.

So the good news is that we don’t have to worry. We’ve been saved. God’s promise is irrevocable. The difficult news, though, is that we’re not off the hook.

Okay, you’re not going to hell. So what? For about the last half millennium we’ve been obsessed with the question of justification and its mechanics. Who’s saved? Who’s not? How does it happen? What if I’m not saved?

I don’t mean to be flippant, but this is not really the question we who are not systematic theologians need to spend all our time and energy sorting out. God has saved us through the blood of His only Son. We didn’t deserve it. We’ll never earn it. We got it anyway. The precise mechanics of how it works are interesting, and I love being a part of those discussions as an academic exercise. I’m in a group reading through the Decades of Heinrich Bullinger, a seminal Swiss reformer, and just had a long conversation via video conference yesterday about what he had to say about justification by faith. But the God’s honest truth is that you don’t have to read Sixteenth Century theologians or even listen to Fr. John’s occasional expositions on Greek verbs to get saved.

So, as one theologian said (I think it was Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey, but I can’t track down the citation), “I was saved, I am being saved, I will be saved.” We have that assurance. The really interesting stuff is what comes after that realization. God loves you. You are baptized into Christ’s Body. You have been born anew, born from above, born again whether you knew it or not. You have a mission. Faith without works is dead, says St. James. That doesn’t mean your or my inadequacy in doing as many good works as we might will send us to Hell. So what?

The reality of being saved and not doing anything about it seems worse to me, somehow. It means you’ve been given something and haven’t done anything with it. And it’s so simple to take that gift and use it. You’ve just got to love your neighbor. As I’ve said before, that means a lot more than having warm feelings for them. You don’t even need John Wesley’s strangely warmed heart. There are people I deal with in life who don’t get the cockles of my heart very warm. But I love them. Or at least I try to do. And that’s what we’ve all got to do. To be loving. To return the gift of Grace which we’ve been given. As absolutely wretched as we may be, as much as we may spurn or resent God or take Him for granted, He still loves us, so we ought to do the same for our sisters and brothers.

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

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

I’ve heard it said that the three most dangerous words in the English language are “I got this.” It is certainly physically dangerous in certain situations. I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but it’s reported that Harry Houdini expressed his disbelief in the miracles of the bible right before saying that he could easily take the punches to the abdomen that either killed him or hastened his death.

Those words, “I got this” are even more spiritually perilous. “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall” warns the Proverbs. While that book is sometimes criticized for its tedious nature and purportedly limited applicability, those few words of universal wisdom strike me as sufficient warrant for the book’s inclusion in the biblical canon. (Not that I or anybody necessarily has a right to question the canon, but it is something that happens.)

“I got this” may be translated as “I will wrest control from the providential hand of God, because I think I can manage things better.” This is the primordial sin we see in Genesis, and it is the climax of of Satan’s failed attempt to cause our Lord, the Second Adam, to fall in the wilderness.

I think the ordering of the temptations is significant. First, an apparently minor trespass (you’re hungry, give in), than the mot-and-bailey approach—Not comfortable making yourself a God by commanding the angels? Surely a little idol worship (I’ll be your idol) isn’t quite as flagrant, and the reward will be tremendous. Perhaps the tempter had succeeded in this gambit so many times he was sure he’d succeed again. The primordial history of the first half of Genesis is full of failed attempts human beings made to be like Gods (to succeed where Adam failed), and then the whole rest of the Old Testament shifts its condemnations to idolatry. Casting a metal God is a lot easier than trying to build a tower to heaven or procreate with fallen angels, after all, and one can convince oneself it’s not really such a big deal, relatively speaking.

The cunning nature of sin is that what appears to be categorically different can in fact be different in degree rather than nature. For what is idolatry, but the natural recourse of the one who has failed at self-deification? My trying to be God didn’t work, so let’s try to make this stone or tree stump a God instead. It seems absurd, but these are the lengths we can go to retain the illusion of control.

I already talked a lot about Lenten disciplines and their spiritual nature on Ash Wednesday, but I want to briefly expand on that theme in light if this reality. I said that the end is to strengthen our reliance on God, not to give us an accomplishment to be proud of; and that disciplines should best be undertaken with this, their proper end in mind. This means that sometimes the most instructive aspect is failing at them, failure typically being more spiritually beneficial than success.

I’ll go a step further. Lent is not about adopting a self-improvement regimen. If we are improved in some respect in the long-term because of a discipline—becoming healthier, becoming more generous, learning more about the bible—this is a good thing. But the primary purpose, I think, of fasting and prayer and almsgiving, is to strengthen our bond with our Lord so that we might rely on him all the more. When the inevitable fall comes—I’ve yet to meet the person who doesn’t have at least an occasional slip in morality or in devotion—we can then be assured that the fall won’t be so great as it might have been, and God is near at hand to pick us back up.

There is a counterpart to the very last verse of this morning’s Old Testament, that I really love. We left Adam and Eve, ashamed and covering their nakedness with fig leaves, a rather shabby and impractical ensemble. After God comes and passes judgment, though, he does not leave it there. Before expelling them from the Garden, he himself fashions for Adam and Eve clothes made from the skins of animals. This shows, I think, that as much as we may disappoint God and experience consequences, the punishment is never as severe as the crime. God’s wrath quickly abates and he provides loving care the moment we need it most.

Christ, of course, does not fall. He has proved by the end of our Gospel lesson, that the Second Adam succeeds in temptation’s hour and foreshadows the fact that he will persevere to the last. But if he had fallen prey to temptation(what a horrible prospect, and whether or not it would have been possible is a difficult Christological question, but consider it for a moment) I suspect the angels would still have come to minister to him in the desert. That’s just how gracious God is.

So, like Luther said “be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly.” Now, I’m not Lutheran enough to take that literally. Don’t set out with the intention of sinning. But you’re going to do it, I guarantee you. And when you do, Christ’s Grace remains available if only you repent and return, no matter how often. I, for one, am a frequent-flier when it comes to receiving God’s grace in this way. And every time, God has clothed me again and sent his holy angels to minister to me. He will do the same for you.

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

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

Genres go in and out of fashion across all media. When, after all, was the last really popular Western film, or glam metal album, or didactic novel? My guess is the answer to each of those is Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven in 1992, The Darkness’ Permission to Land in 2003, and Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World in 1991. Give me a moment to sit with my nostalgia for the popular culture of the 1990s and early 2000s, which is sadly increasingly the measure by which we “geriatric millennials” judge the world as it is.

Perhaps the genre which has fallen on the hardest of times, though, is what is called the “Gospel harmony.” More-and-less successful attempts at taking the four Gospels and blending them together to present a single, cohesive narrative have been undertaken since very early in the church’s life. The first was probably Tatian’s Diatesseron in the middle of the Second Century A.D., and the genre flourished in the Reformation Era. Modern approaches have been more experimental, and my favorite (which you may have noticed if you’ve paid especially close attention to the bulletin cover art I choose) is James Tissot’s harmony by way not of text but illustration.

In all events, this approach fell very much out of favor with the rise of the historical-critical method. Instead of harmonies we now see synopses, in which the text of each Gospel is placed side-by-side for the the sake of comparing and contrasting them. The question, really, seems to be whether the four Gospels speak with one voice or with four or more. I think that’s a misleading question, though.

Personally (and take this as Fr. John’s perspective, not necessarily as “Gospel truth”), I think the best answer to that question is this—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John speak with one voice from four perspectives. They’re all equally inspired in the proper sense, all equally imbued with ultimate truth from the same spirit who is the Holy Ghost. Yet each retains a perspective on the events given how each writer received the message, whether by being present in the moment, recording eye-witness reports from others, or by given supernatural insight (I believe all three of those modes are active at various points). I am not, and probably will never be, convinced that there are outright contradictions to be found across the Gospel accounts, meaning that I think they could at least theoretically be “harmonized”, but those points at which the narratives depart from each other can teach us something, too, so long as we’re reading faithfully, appreciating the Canon of Scripture as a whole to be authoritative, and ask with some intellectual humility why, for example, Mark and Luke include something which Matthew does not.

And now I’ll finally get to the point for which all of that is meant to serve as a sort of hermeneutical foundation. There is a clause present in the accounts which Mark and Luke give of the Transfiguration which is absent from the version we just heard from Matthew. After Jesus is transformed into a luminous figure before his eyes and joined by those who stand for the Law and the Prophets, but before the voice of the Father comes to affirm Christ’s status as Son of God and Messiah, Peter exclaims “Lord, it is well that we are here; if you wish, I will make three booths here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Eli’jah.” In Mark and Luke there is then an aside. Luke adds “not knowing what he said.” Mark goes further, imputing a motive; Peter didn’t know what to say because he was afraid.

Some would claim that Luke and then Matthew are here cleaning things up to make Peter seem less like a craven dope. I don’t buy that, largely because they don’t seem interested in retroactively rehabilitating Peter elsewhere, but also because I don’t buy the claim that Mark is the earliest Gospel and Matthew and Luke are using it as a source and editing it; that was the standard assumption among historical biblical critics until fairly recently, but it’s been increasingly questioned in recent decades. (Pro-tip: you can tell when a biblical scholar stopped keeping current by how strongly he or she insists that Mark must have come first.) I tend to think that Mark gives the fullest account, including the embarrassing slip and the motive behind it, because Mark was told the story by Peter himself. This is the ancient, traditional view, and it’s more-and-more acceptable among scholars who are open to questioning nineteenth century assumptions. So perhaps Luke couldn’t be certain of Peter’s having been motivated by fear (who can peer into anyone else’s soul, after all) and Matthew was uncomfortable even saying for certain whether or not Peter said it in ignorance. Maybe Matthew assumed something that we, too, should consider. Maybe Peter said the right thing, it was just the wrong time and the wrong place.

To show that even my own stubbornly held interpretive assumptions can be changed, I know I’ve preached sermons in the past on this text that amounted to the following: it’s nice to abide in the glory of God for times of spiritual refreshment, but you’ve eventually got to go down the mountain and start walking the way of the cross. Now, there’s some truth to this, unless you’re a cloistered monk or nun, whose whole job is to stay in the booth with Jesus and Moses and Elijah; that is a gift and a valid vocation, which is not mine and probably not yours. That said, the polar opposite approach can easily lapse into works-righteousness, into the deadly idea that each of us needs to go get crucified as if the one sacrifice weren’t enough, and into the historically disastrous belief that we can build the Kingdom of God ourselves so long as we’re good enough. Maybe the occasion for building booths and simply abiding with Jesus are more frequent than I’ve suggested in the past. Maybe, instead of descending the Mount of Transfiguration today to enter into “the hard work of Lent” ™, what some or most of us will commence on Wednesday is more like dwelling in booths on the mountaintop with our Lord for forty days. Jesus and the disciples didn’t have that luxury that time, but maybe poor Peter would be right if he said it today.

When I was in college I took a course from a man named Harvey Sindima. He was a pretty severe, almost puritanical minister and theologian from Malawi, where, I gather, Presbyterians had not started feigning ignorance of the man when you brought up John Calvin. He literally failed every student’s first assignment every class every year, probably to motivate us to work harder and to remind us that we were totally depraved. I hated the man at first, and then I came to love him.

Professor Sindima knew that I was considering seminary and ordination and we had a long talk once about this. He asked me all sorts of questions about why I wanted to do this, why I though I should be allowed to, who did I think I was, that sort of thing. And I gave all those answers that callow youths discerning a vocation typically give, which mostly amounted to “I want to be nice and help people.” “No. no. no.” seemed his continual refrain. Finally, he said those words which I believe God gave him, just as he had the Psalmist:

One thing have I desired of the Lord,

which I will require:

even that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,

to behold the fair beauty of the Lord,

and to visit his temple.

In that moment I realized the nature of my vocation. And now I am convinced that this is not only the priestly vocation, it is the Christian vocation.

This doesn’t mean that we’re quietists. It doesn’t mean that we’re not called to do external work which God enables by doing the internal work in our souls. We strive for justice. We preach the Gospel to the nations. Sometimes we take up our cross in order to follow. But also dwell on a mountaintop with the Lord. We also behold the beauty of his courts. We also retreat into that quiet place in our souls where Jesus has taken up residence, that we might relate to him as the very joy of our hearts. If you’re still looking for a Lenten discipline, maybe this year you can build a booth, not three maybe, but one, where with Moses and Elijah you can adore the one who is the Law and the Prophets in the flesh, who is our priest and our king.

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