Sermons

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

A few years ago I was a guest preacher at a place of worship I’ll not mention to protect the innocent, and had an interesting experience afterward. A young woman approached me after the service was finished to express her gratitude for something I did in the sermon, namely acknowledge the reality of sin. She said it was refreshing and encouraging to hear a preacher do that in that church, suggesting that this was not a common occurrence. I wish I could say that this surprised me, but it didn’t. Reflection on this basic truth about our nature is deemed by some to be too negative, and is too often replaced with a sort of positive humanism that might sound comfortable but has little to say, I would argue, about the reality of our situation as fallen people in a fallen world and how we are to be saved, namely not through our own worthiness but through Christ.

What encouraged me about this interaction, and what I thought could be instructive for all of us, is that this young woman was not upset or depressed about reflecting on the reality of sin, but seemed instead to find comfort and encouragement in it. Coming to terms with sin and redemption can be a very joyful thing because we can finally internalize the truth of today’s Gospel: “God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” Even in this most penitent season then we may rejoice in our penitence.

This Sunday, the fourth in Lent, has been called Laetare Sunday, which comes from a Latin word meaning “to rejoice”. It comes from the first word of the old Latin Introit, or entry hymn, which would have been sung in the Roman Catholic Church, every year on this Sunday until Vatican II suppressed that bit of the Mass. The hymn goes like this:

Rejoice ye with Jerusalem: and be glad with her, all ye that love her: rejoice for joy with her, all ye that mourn for her: that ye may drink and be satisfied with the milk of her consolations. I was glad when they said unto me: We will go into the house of the Lord.

Thus, church would have begun on a very high note indeed, and in the midst of Lent at that! That’s why we have rose-coloured vestments today, by the way, a much more joyful colour than the purple of the rest of Lent, at least in the eyes of church tradition.

All of this is to say that that woman who found joy in penitence, who wanted to be part of a church in which she could acknowledge sin, was quite right. Redemption makes no sense without something to be redeemed from. Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross for us wouldn’t have been anything more than an historical fact had it not been that we needed and are in need of saving.

St. Paul knew this well, which is why in his letter to the Ephesians he may in one breath say that we “were dead through the trespasses and sins in which [we] once lived” and in the next breath proclaim the joyful news that God has “made us alive in Christ…and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places.” Paul knew that we could not be perfect by our own efforts, but “by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is a gift from God.”

This is very good news for all of us. In fact, it is the Good News. We can only fully appreciate it, though, we can only attain to the joy which God intends for us, when we recognize that we are too sinful to dig ourselves out. This realization releases us from perfectionism. Only when we get over ourselves, when we realize that we cannot attain perfection on our own terms, that we need an Other will we experience the joy of redemption. Of course, getting to the point of experiencing this joy may not be entirely pleasant, as I’ve said a couple times over the last few weeks, because it requires that we be honest with ourselves. The process of recognizing our own fallen-ness, our own sinfulness, is full of tears and travail. But we may take the psalmist’s affirmation to heart in the midst of this process of self-searching: “Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning,” reads Psalm 30. Or from today’s psalm:

Some were fools and took to rebellious ways; *
they were afflicted because of their sins.

They abhorred all manner of food *
and drew near to death’s door.

Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble, *
and he delivered them from their distress.

He sent forth his word and healed them *
and saved them from the grave.

It is only after the realization that we are sore afflicted, that we have the capability of recognizing that only God has the power to save us, that we are not expected to save ourselves, and that in this fact we may rejoice.

In all events, I wish you all not only a productive and edifying Lent, but a joyful Lent. May God give us such an awareness of His redeeming love that we no longer remain captive to our own sinful pride or to the perfectionism which leads us to deny sin, but come to the full realization that He “so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him,” not perfect, sinless people, but “everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

+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.

There is a depiction of Jesus, painted by a Canadian artist about forty years ago, which was originally called Jesus Christ, Liberator, but which most people these days refer to as “Laughing Jesus.” I suspect most of you will have seen this painting at one time or another, and it captures an image of a sort of Christ we’d like to think of: jovial and friendly. Now, I don’t think the bible ever tells us about Jesus laughing; the Gnostic Gospel of Judas does, but this should not inform our view of the Christ. Even so, while our Lord is shown in scripture to be a rather serious fellow, he was a human being, so I’m sure at some point he laughed. That’s not really the point I’m trying to make here. The point is, and the “Laughing Jesus” painting’s popularity serves as evidence of this, that we tend these days to think of and depict Jesus in ways which highlight his meekness and kindliness. We rarely get as off-base as “Buddy Christ” from the movie Dogma, but sometimes we get a bit close.

When we compare this serene, kindly Jesus of our imagination with today’s Gospel reading, then, we might experience some cognitive dissonance. Perhaps some of us might compare our own vision and experience of our Lord with today’s Gospel and find ourselves either confused or troubled. This is not the nice Jesus who goes round doing good deeds and having a good laugh with his “bros.”. The Jesus we see in today’s Gospel reading, the Jesus who fashions a whip of cords, who overturns the tables of the money-changers, seems angry and scary. This is not the Jesus we’re comfortable with.

This story has made some people uncomfortable enough to try to explain it away. Stanley Hauerwas, a noted pacifist scholar and professor at Duke Divinity School, has suggested that Jesus did not have a violent, visceral reaction at all in the temple that day. Rather, Hauerwas claims, that He was merely performing a careful, well-planned show in which he actually caused no harm to any person or property. This show was to make a point but there were no real consequences as such. Like many modern scholars who engage in trying to get a clearer picture of the historical Jesus, Hauerwas’ Jesus ends up looking eerily like Hauerwas.

But this is not fair to the story as we know it from scripture and it presents a very flat view of Jesus indeed. We have a desire, it seems to me, to fashion a God who affirms everything about us. We want a Jesus who only calls to us “softly and tenderly” when we’ve gone astray, not a Jesus who overturns tables; not a Jesus who uses both his staff and his rod, as the psalmist puts it, to comfort and correct us. We want to construct a God who is eminently palatable and comfortable and who doesn’t really want to change anything about us. But to envision God in this way is to build an idol. It is to ignore the words from today’s Old Testament lesson: “You shall not make for yourself an idol,” it says, “whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” Yet we do fashion idols “in the form of [something] that is on the earth beneath.” We fashion idols out of ourselves, thus putting ourselves in the place of God.

The problem of the money changers, and of many of us, myself included, is not a lack of religion. Rather, the problem is the propagation of irreligion, bad religion. The money changers knew enough about their Jewish religion to pervert it. They knew that sacrifices were to be made in the temple, and they chose to capitalize on it. Just so, when we cast Jesus in our own image, we know enough about Christianity to pervert it, to turn it to our own ends. Whatever I do or say becomes God’s will and I can point to a distorted image of Jesus to justify it. We don’t even recognize that the Jesus we see looks strangely like ourselves.

So, this sermon has become a bit depressing, even for a Lenten sermon, for which I apologize. There is hope here, though. It is appropriate that we are hearing this hard Gospel reading during this Holy Season. Lent provides us a special opportunity to invite Jesus into the temples of our own hearts and lives so that he can turn over a few tables in each of us. Lent calls us to be open to a sort of spiritual renovation—a transformation in fact—which is not of our doing but is something Jesus works in us. That’s part of what all the prayer and fasting and penitence of these glorious forty days is about. They are not ends in themselves, much less are they schemes for self-improvement. Rather, they are meant as a preparation, so that Christ may fashion each of us into temples worthy of his abiding presence, and when He comes to dwell in us we may not perceive him as a little version of ourselves—with all the assumptions and bigotries and narcissistic tendencies that we have—but as the image of the true God.

Naturally, the process can be painful, as I said in last week’s sermon. There was upset and confusion and turmoil that morning in the temple, and so will there be upset and confusion and turmoil in our own hearts when Christ comes in to do his transforming work. Christ said, “take up your cross and follow me.” Being conformed to Our Lord instead of conforming our vision of the Lord to ourselves means sacrifice, which is hard. Even so, we know that the end of such suffering is a renewed relationship with the Father, and ultimately unending life in His presence.

All of this should give us hope that in the often painful exigencies of life God is at work making Himself known. This is Good News for all of us. Despite our confusion and pain, God is working His purpose out in ways which we cannot now imagine. Our response to this blessed truth should be openness and endurance. We must be open to God’s will even when we find it uncomfortable or perplexing. We must be open to Christ working in us, when He turns over the tables in our own lives, strong in the assurance that in conforming us (and the whole world) to Himself, He will put all things to rights for His faithful people.

And, in the midst of such pain and confusion, we must heed the Apostle Paul’s mandate to “run the race with endurance”. We must endure in prayer and fasting and devotion, for these practices give us sustenance in our times of pain and confusion. And just as the angels ministered to Our Lord in the wilderness, so will God’s Word give us strength in the desert seasons of our lives. Just as God gave His people manna in the desert, so will the Body and Blood of Our Lord give us sustenance when we are wandering. And at the last, when surrounded by the light of Resurrection, we may look back on our own lives, and indeed on the whole sweep of history, and see that God was not absent even once, but was hard at work transforming this old, fallen world into His Kingdom.

+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 suggested that if the apostles were really listening to Jesus when he said “take up your cross, and follow me,” there would have been an extra twelve crucifixions on Calvary on that first Good Friday. No doubt this might at first strike us as hyperbolic. If all the apostles had died at the same time as Jesus, after all, they would not have then been able to be witnesses to the Resurrection and the early church’s efforts to spread the Good News would have been stymied. What’s more, all but two of the apostles–Judas the betrayer and John whom we believe to have died of old age in Ephesus sometime during the reign of Trajan–were, indeed, martyred for the faith. The point is well-taken, though. We are all awfully quick to claim that Jesus was speaking literally when we like what he has to say and metaphorically when we don’t, and we might assume the apostles were capable of the same rationalization.

To Peter’s credit, though he tried to deny Jesus’ hard words in this morning’s Gospel, at least he realized that he wasn’t speaking in mere metaphors about matters of life and death. That is why he rebuked Jesus; he did not want to see his Lord and master and friend die. Perhaps he was still convinced that Jesus was to be the kind of Messiah who fit the mold generally assumed among faithful first-century Jews–a warrior king who would push the Romans out, unseat the puppet regime of Herod and his family and reestablish the Davidic monarchy in Jerusalem. Or maybe Peter’s reaction had less to do with his assumptions about Messianic expectation and Ancient Near Eastern geo-politics and more to do with his unwillingness to lose a friend.

In any even, while wildly missing the mark, we can probably appreciate Peter’s reaction, and we might find Jesus’ rebuke of Peter a bit disproportionate. “Get thee behind me, Satan!” Remember, though, Jesus’ previous experience with Satan. During his forty day sojourn in the wilderness, Satan tempted Jesus with both power and escape from death. Here, Peter is doing the same thing: don’t let yourself get killed; become our earthly king instead. Whatever Peter’s intentions were, the sinless one was still a human; the second Adam could have theoretically given in to temptation, and here Jesus nips that possibility in the bud, as it were, just as he had done in the wilderness.

Now, lest we say “poor St. Peter got it wrong so much, and we know better” I think his reaction reflects our own unwillingness to take Jesus’ words and the reality of God’s plan for us more than we might like. One of the handful of dead horses I continue to beat from this pulpit is that we live in a death denying culture. I will spare you on this occasion from another recitation of all the ways in which we run away from death and pretend it’s not real. Peter seemed to suffer from this sort of death denial, even in an age in which death and decay were far more “in your face” than in our contemporary, rather sterile Western World. Peter rebuked Jesus for sharing the hard, but by this point rather obvious fact that he was going to die, as are we all, and if we’re following Jesus it may even be sooner than we’d like. Hear again Jesus’ words from today’s Gospel, and remember that at this point in the story Jesus was no longer speaking just to the twelve but had gathered everyone following him to hear these words:

Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever shall lose his life for my safe and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.

We sometimes refer to a pinched nerve or an unpleasant neighbor or some other minor inconvenience as “our cross to bear”. That’s not what Jesus is saying. Our cross is the sacrifice of our lives to Christ and His Gospel. It means, quite literally, the courage and conviction to die in the service of the Gospel.

Now, as I said last week, the reality is that in the United States of America in the year of Our Lord 2024, none of us is likely to be called upon to die for our convictions. For most of us, the Cross will be a less literal, but nonetheless difficult death: a death to self-interest; a rejection of the modern idols of safety and security and success. If we’re not willing to experience that little death, we’ll certainly not be willing to literally die for the Gospel.

It is far too easy to equivocate while in the pulpit, far too easy to focus on comfort rather than challenge, but this, I firmly believe, is central to the Gospel. We must be willing to die for Christ and the Gospel if we are to follow Jesus’ mandate. This is not as a sign of despair but as a sign of hope. That none of us is likely to have to make that ultimate sacrifice is beside the point. Do we have the courage to follow our Lord to Calvary? If things were different, if we still lived in an Empire hellbent on hunting Christians down and feeding them to lions, would we stand up for Jesus in that final hour?

We must at some point ask this question of ourselves, not because it is likely (it’s not anymore), but because it will help us understand where our priorities lie and how we might be called to reorder them. That is a scary and uncomfortable proposition, but, believe me, it will put our lives in the proper perspective; this, my friends, is the hard work of this Holy Season. Be assured, though, that that work leads to life eternal.

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