Sermons

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

I was a bit down in the dumps this last week for reasons many of you will know, so yesterday we went to see an inspirational movie, a genre which many of you will also know is not my “go-to”. I was a bit uncertain about the film adaptation of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, particularly having read the book on which its based some years ago at Annie’s insistence, but we did attend the “sneak preview” yesterday afternoon anyway. On the one hand, “faith based” movies are often poorly made, sometimes by those who couldn’t hack it in mainstream, secular media, and there message sometimes theologically dubious. On the other hand, too often mainstream films adapting explicitly Christian themes inappropriately soft-pedal those themes to appeal to a secular audience (see, for example, the Wrinkle in Time and Chronicles of Narnia movies from several years ago). So, it’s a tough needle to thread as far as I’m concerned. In my opinion, though, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever succeeded, and when it comes to wide release next week, I’d heartily commend it to you.

In case you haven’t read the book, it helps to know that the alternate title for The Best Christmas Pageant Ever in Commonwealth countries was The Worst Kids in the World. A woman appropriately named Grace is saddled with directing the seventy-fifth annual iteration of her church’s children’s Christmas pageant, and like a lot of things in churches, it had been presented in exactly the same way each year for three-quarters of a century. She had not intended to change things up, but through a series of events the most ill-behaved children in town, the Heardmans, who had never gone to church before showed, up for the audition and essentially bully the other children into letting them take all the major roles. The worst of them all, Imogene Heardman–who smokes cigars and drinks jug wine and constantly takes the Lord’s name in vain–ends up cast as the Blessed Virgin Mary. Despite constant pressure from the other Sunday School parents to kick the bad kids out, Grace comes to believe that letting the Heardmans participate, and particularly letting Imogene play Mary, is what she’s been called to do. If Jesus didn’t come to save the Heardman children, “the worst kids in the world”, after all, then who did he come for? I won’t give the whole story away, but it will suffice to say that it ends up being both the best and the strangest iteration of the church’s annual pageant, and both the Heardman children and the whole community learns precisely whom the Christ Child came for to begin with.

In my younger years I used to lament the conflation of All Saints and All Souls, the celebration of the famous men and women of church history and all the faithful departed. I’m still stuffy enough to feel the need to maintain that distinction to a certain extent, to say that, for example, we may pray to the Blessed Virgin Mary but we only pray for the late aunt Mary, and that our adoption of an ecumenical lectionary has muddied this important distinction further. Our readings this morning are really more about all the faithful departed rather than the “capital S” Saints whom we more properly celebrate on this feast. That said, I think it’s good to be reminded that the most basic reality is that all Christians are, to slightly modify a famous saying by Luther “simul sanctus et peccator”–at the same time saints and sinners. This applies to the famous, named saints on our church calendar as much as to each and every one of us, as much as to those whom we love and see no longer. Jesus loves the worst kids in town just as much as he does those who live lives of heroic faith and service.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to be a bit better, or rather that we shouldn’t try to let God work in us more what we cannot do ourselves. It does mean, though, that the righteousness of our Lord and Savior has been imputed to each of us to the same degree as to those who were famously faithful. When the Father sees us he no longer sees that which our concupiscence has made us do, but the righteousness of his Son which has been given us as a free gift. In this sense, while we can and should look to the “capital S” saints for their good examples, and while we may still request their intercessions on our behalf, we are all of us saints in a more fundamental and universal sense. Living into that, permitting the progress of sanctification in our lives and hearts, is a life’s work, the hardest part has already been done for us. And this is a work which God continues for those on that other shore and in that greater light whom we will one day join in a kingdom which has no end. Thanks be to God for that.

+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.

I read a commentary on Isaiah that had the following to say about today’s Old Testament lesson: These verses have been the inspiration for some of the greatest sermons ever written. These are not comforting words for a preacher, and needless to say, this will not be one of the greatest sermons ever written.

It is exceedingly hard to know how to approach the prophet Isaiah’s words, as they summarize more poignantly the whole mystery of our redemption than perhaps any other passage in the Old Testament. Maybe these words benefit from Handel setting them to magnificent music, but it is hard to see how they would benefit from me opining about them for five to seven minutes.

Perhaps a little history will help, though, or I should say a little historiography, which is the history of how history itself has been interpreted.

Over the course of centuries, people have sometimes tended to hold what is called a “deuteronomic view of history”, so-called because the writer of Deuteronomy, who probably also wrote Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, seemed to hold something like this view. Such a view generally holds that there is a neat correlation between good and evil acts, and divine reward and punishment. Do nice things and God will be nice to you; do bad things and God will do bad things to you. This is a helpful way to interpret history if you’re doing well, but no so much if you yourself are suffering. Indeed, the assumption that this is how history unfolds has led far too many people to utter the popular lament “what have I done to deserve this?” and to really believe that they must have done something horrible, even if they didn’t.

By the time we get to the 6^th Century before Christ, when today’s Old Testament lesson was written, such a view of history was found to be lacking. The Jews had been taken by King Nebuchadnezzar into exile in Babylon, leaving only the poorest to live in the wreckage of Jerusalem. Deporting and scattering the leading citizens of defeated nations was a standard tactic in those days, and usually the deportees didn’t have that hard a time of it in their new location. The people were not enslaved, nor were they subject to forced military conscription; they were simply removed to a more neutral location so as not to incite rebellion in their homeland. Thus, the tactic had not caused so much pain and grief to deportees from other peoples defeated by the Babylonians and Assyrians and other major empires of the day that they resorted to rebellion. The majority simply integrated into their new homeland under the Empire.

But this was not so for the Jews, for the land had not merely been a useful means of security and livelihood for them. The Jews believed that the land was a gift from God. So to have that gift revoked, would have made a number of people believe that they must have done something awful indeed to deserve it.

The God-given, inspired insight of the prophet was that this is not how the judgment of God works. “All we like sheep have gone astray,” he says, “we have turned everyone to his own way.” But God is not in the business of meting out particular punishments for particular sins in easily accountable ways. Rather it is “the man of sorrows” God-incarnate Christ himself, who was “despised and rejected of men” who “hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows”. Christ, we are told “bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.”

This does not mean that everything is peachy under the sun. Suffering is indeed ubiquitous because of our condition, because we still sadly live in a sin-sick world. It is not my particular sin which causes me to suffer, nor your particular trespass that causes you to experience a world of pain, but we encounter the dreadful reality nonetheless.

There is indeed much suffering in the world, and many have suffered in ways that I cannot imagine. Many suffer, not because they did anything to deserve it, not because God is punishing them, but because of the reality of original sin. Even so, there is exceedingly good news in the sacrifice of the suffering servant; there is remarkable hope thanks to our Lord, the man of sorrow. For we can be assured that the pain we may come to experience in this life is not a punishment, and that even the most intense sorrow is fleeting when seen in the context of eternity.

We are given the promise not only of eternal life, but of new life. “The righteous one,” Isaiah says, “my servant, shall make many righteous.” We are not only assured salvation, but given a means of achieving saintliness. We too may come to experience suffering, but thanks be to God, that we, like Christ, can offer up both our pain and our pleasure, both our sorrow and our joy, to become ourselves servants of the Gospel. As the hymnwriter, John Bowring put it, “Bane and blessing, pain and pleasure, by the cross are sanctified; peace is there that knows no measure, joys that through all time abide.” May we then all come to appreciate our own lives, our own joys and sorrows, not as rewards and punishments, neither as meaningless phenomena, but as realities which can find purpose and meaning in the light of the cross.

+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.

Two critical points about this morning’s Gospel really struck me for the first time this week. These were not insights gained through my normal means of sermon preparation–I typically first consult patristic commentaries (that is, the reflections of the Church Fathers of the first few centuries of Christian history); perhaps the most well-used books in my office aside from the bible itself and the prayerbook would be my twenty-eight volume set of Patristic bible commentaries. There’s also a lectionary podcast from a couple of priests and a lectionary blog from a seminary dean I subscribe to that regularly help me look at the lessons in a different way. This week, though, it was in discussing the lesson with Annie, who pointed out a couple of things that had not really occurred to me, and which I was shocked to find had not occurred to the Church Fathers in my books either.

First, before his hard commandment to the rich young ruler to sell his possessions and give the money to the poor, we are told that “Jesus, looking upon him, loved him.” While wealth can certainly create moral and spiritual difficulties, Jesus is not playing into an “eat the rich” mentality. As a preacher I’m often frustrated with some of my colleagues who came up during a period in which the modus operandi was to preach more about social and political issues than about the heart of the Gospel (which is about universal grace and the mercy offered to all).

This frustration isn’t because I necessarily disagree with the positions these colleagues take (I frequently do!) but because this approach elides the central point of the Gospel for what I take to be its moral implications, and whenever it becomes all about how good I am at being good, I’m in trouble. The love Jesus has for the rich man and his subsequent statement that salvation is impossible if dependent on human effort but all things are possible with God, is a necessary antidote to the sort of moralism which will always make us see ourselves as inadequate.

Second, Annie reminded me that while the rich young ruler left Jesus in sorrow because of what his mandate would mean, we never find out what he actually ends up doing. Like I said, the Church Fathers I consulted assumed that his was a hopeless case–he was too tied to his own wealth to be obedient to Jesus’ command and was thus unjustified. But we just don’t know if that’s the case or not. It is entirely possible that he did end up selling all his possessions and giving the money to the poor. His initial reaction does not necessarily imply what he’s going to do next. I am not proud to admit this, but sometimes when I know I have to do something that I don’t want to do I get pretty irritable and even sulky, but then I “do the thing” and ninety-nine times out of a hundred I actually end up enjoying it and feeling gratified for having done it. Perhaps as a hopeful people we should also hope that this happened with the rich young ruler.

There is an important caveat to all this. No, we do not earn our way into heaven, no matter how charitable we are. That said, sometimes things like wealth can shield one from appreciating his or her need to rely on Jesus. Sometimes we can adopt what I’ve termed in sermons here before a “false soteriology”–that is, a belief (whether explicit or, more often, implicit and functional) that something else is going to save us. Maybe it’s wealth. Maybe it’s esteem. Maybe it’s even our own good works, which might fool us into thinking that we’ve reached perfection.

In any event all these things can become what pop-psychology might call “baggage”, and carrying that stuff around with us may cause us some sorrow, too, when we behold the narrow gate and recognize we are a heavily laden camel who must be unloaded to have any chance of getting through the needle’s eye. (Forgive the mixed metaphor!)

I am frequently reminded (because I need a lot of reminders!) that I carry around some baggage, just like the rich young ruler, and I need to be ready to hold onto all of it loosely enough that I can let it go if Jesus ever asked me to do so. We all do, though what we happen to be carrying around might be radically different from person to person. So, this is just my own uncomfortable, personal confession. (I seem to have been doing that a lot lately, perhaps because after eight years here you more 0r less know me and I more or less trust all of you.) Perhaps you can relate and perhaps you can’t but I’d encourage you to consider what the equivalent is in your life.

So, I am comfortable (for which I’m very grateful) but I’m not wealthy. God called me to a vocation in which that really doesn’t happen. I might sometimes be surprised by how much some of my colleagues in fancy, endowed, historic parishes are paid, but (thank God!) we don’t have the problem in our system that nondenominational mega-churches with celebrity pastors often face. My colleagues and I are all sort of varying degrees of middle class, the only exceptions being those who inherit generational wealth. I am reminded, though, of a point sociologists have been making for a long time, which is that class has a lot to do with things other than money: education, manners, literary and artistic taste, civic engagement, &c. &c. &c.

That being the case, I am sometimes reminded that I went to a fancy private East Coast liberal arts college, I read literary fiction and the New Yorker, I don’t have a distinctive regional accent, I buy organic food. I could go on. I went to Toledo twice last week. The first time was for a lecture by a New York Times columnist, David Brooks, whom I’ve been reading for decades. The second was to hear our favorite opera singer, Renee Fleming, at the Peristyle accompanied by the Toledo Symphony Orchestra. The last time we heard Ms. Fleming was on our honeymoon, it was at Carnegie Hall and she was accompanied by the New York Philharmonic. So, to use language which has become popular in certain circles, I recognize my privilege.

So what if life and circumstances meant I had to give some or all of that up in some tangible way? What if the Holy Spirit drove me into some wilderness where the benefits of the sort of life to which I’ve become accustomed were either unavailable or alienating? I’m sure at first my countenance would fall and I’d go off sorrowing just like the rich young ruler. But what would I do next? I hope I am holding onto all of those things loosely enough that I could let them go for the sake of the Gospel if I had to, but the proof of the pudding being in the eating, I won’t really know until I’m actually confronted with such a reality.

So, I think I have to rely on that first surprising insight about Jesus and the rich young ruler–that Jesus, looking on him, loved him. I need to place my hope entirely on the fact that the Lord God didn’t come in the flesh in order to trick or to test us, but to love us and ask only that we try to love him in return. Eventually we will lose all that baggage, because (spoiler alert) we’re all going to die, and then what will great wealth or the esteem of our fellows or the fact that one has refined enough tastes to have a “favorite opera singer” be worth? At that moment, the only thing we’ll have is Jesus, but how wonderful it would be if we were prepared to have nothing but Jesus to get by before that final moment.

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