Sermons

+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.” 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 theological 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 too 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 Romans, Galatians, and Hebrews. 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.

So last week I dodged the homiletical bullet and managed to not talk about money; we interpreted the parable of the unjust steward as pertaining to sin and forgiveness rather than financial wealth. I don’t get that chance this week, considering all of our readings deal with money and love of the same. I think I mentioned in this pulpit before a psychologist I once knew who claimed that all modern, western people suffered from five psychological complexes: mother, father, sex, death, and money. I don’t know whether this is true or not, but these are certainly topics we don’t like to think about too deeply or for too long, and we certainly don’t want to talk about them. Too bad we can’t avoid it this morning. Oh well.

Most of you have heard me say before, but it bears repeating, that the great spiritual danger of wealth is that it encourages the development of a false soteriology. That is to say that it gives us something we can convince ourselves will solve all our problems, including the problem of sin and death, other than the grace of God. In this way, I think the preferential option for the poor is less a moral judgment than it is an empirical fact. That it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven without God’s special, providential act is just the simple truth of the matter.

Here is the most disappointing news for those who have wealth, and it is something I hesitate to mention for what will become obvious reasons. Simply being beneficent isn’t going to cut it. We all may be ready to agree with the proposition “you cannot buy your way into heaven” in the abstract, but don’t some of us sort of believe it, anyhow? If only one gives enough to charity or to the church, if only one directs one’s philanthropy to effect the most good possible, cannot one be assured of pretty swanky digs in the hereafter? Well, no. Perhaps you can see why I don’t like to say this too loudly. If people think this way, they might be apt to be more generous, and that could solve a lot of real problems. But maintaining too much reserve in sharing this difficult news is even more dangerous, because we’re back to relying on ourselves, in this case our own outward generosity, rather than on God’s grace.

Note what Abraham did not say to Dives from across the great chasm fixed between heaven and hell. He did not say, “well you’d be here if only you gave ten percent or fifty percent or ninety percent of the good things you enjoyed in life to Lazarus.” Should he have done that? Of course. But not because he thought he would thereby merit salvation. That gets it the wrong way round. He should have done it, because he realized at the first that his wealth was never going to save him, that only God could do, that all his money was itself a gift of God (as are all things), that the purple and fine linen garments and sumptuous feasts were a veil which obscured his profound spiritual poverty.

You cannot buy salvation, but what about happiness. You also cannot buy happiness. This is a cliché, but I think it’s true without being a truism. At least it’s not a truism in English, in which we have too many definitions for “happiness”. You knew I was eventually going to go down a Greek rabbit-hole, right? Wealth either can procure or is itself the definition of ολβος or ευτυχια, and these words for happiness are close to the ideal sort of life in the non-philosophical Greco-Roman mythological worldview. Whether you can procure this yourself by a combination of hard work and bribing the pagan gods or if this is entirely dependent on however Fortuna’s wheel is spinning for you is a matter of debate.

This, however, is not what the New Testament means by happiness. Nor, by the way, is it what Aristotle talked about (in case you like ancient philosophy) or Aquinas (in case you’re a Thomist) or the Westminster Shorter Catechism (in case you are of a more Reformed bent). All these in one way or another claim that the goal of human life (in this world and the next) is happiness, and I would contend along with them—and contra Kant and the accepted orthodoxy of a large part of philosophical ethics over the last two centuries—that it is the aim of moral reasoning. But happiness in what sense?

There are two Greek terms to consider here: ευδαιμωνια and μακαριος. The former was the preferred term of the philosophers, but doesn’t appear in the New Testament (perhaps because it has the Greek word for demon right in the middle of it, though that is an oversimplification of the meaning in context). The latter is the term used throughout the New Testament, and it is a near synonym. In all events, this word for “happiness” is alternatively translated “blessedness” or “beatitude”, and it suggests something much deeper and permanent than cheerfulness or good fortune. It is, I’d say, the state of being at peace with God and the world, established in hope, and able to maintain trust in the almighty amidst all the changes and chances of life. This, I think, is the state of which St. Augustine famously said in which our restless souls find rest in God.

All that is sort of complicated, metaphysical stuff, which is where my theology-addled brain usually goes, so how do we make all this practical? Forgive me for one more Greek term: αυταρκεια. This is the word translated in our Epistle this morning as “contentment.” This was a favorite word of the stoic philosophers, but Paul uses it in a slightly different sense than they do. He gives us some very practical advice, here:

There is great gain in godliness with contentment; for we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of the world; but if we have food and clothing, with these we shall be content.

The way to achieve this lofty spiritual state of Happiness [with a capital “H”] is simply to rely on God’s Grace and be satisfied with what you’ve got if you’ve got enough to survive.

What happens naturally after this simple commitment to the proposition “that’s enough” is amazing. We stop ignoring Lazarus at the gate; we actually help him out. We stop insulating ourselves from the problems around us, like those at ease in Amos’ Zion. Maybe we can contribute in some practical way to the grievous ruin of Joseph, or maybe all we can do is pray for God’s blessing on those in distress, but stuffing ourselves with lamb and veal and wine and napping on ivory beds wasn’t going to make us any happier in any event, only more deluded.

And here we have the great irony of the life of Christian virtue. Doing all these good works to justify ourselves isn’t going to get us one whit closer to God and salvation or happiness. But once we take that step of admitting our utter dependence upon God and commit to living with that being enough, a virtuous cycle kicks off. As St. Paul promises– we do good, we are rich in good deeds, we are generous. And as we practice these virtues we become more-and-more content and hopeful and happy; and doing these things becomes like second-nature, because it literally is–we’ve shed the nature of Adam and taken on the nature of Christ Jesus. And finally we may take hold of the life which is life indeed.

+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.

Occasionally a preacher who is too clever by half will get up and give a one sentence sermon and sit down. Rarely does this go well. I heard a story of a priest who got into the pulpit on Christ the King Sunday and bellowed “the church is not a democracy” and then sat down. While he may have technically been right, this seems like a poor tactical move, and I suspect he didn’t last too much longer in that parish. The only sermon of this sort I ever heard was when I was in seminary. We had a celebration of the Eucharist with sermon and everything every day in the chapel in addition to Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer every day; so we were expected to be in chapel three times daily unless prevented by some good cause, so the daily sermons tended to be brief. But only once did I hear a “one sentence sermon.” The celebrant that day was Fr. Kadel, the seminary’s librarian, and this is a man whom I love and respect, but his choice to give this particular sermon did puzzle me. All he said was “parables are not allegories.” That was it. As baffling as this preaching power move was, it stuck with me–and I assume every one else what was in the chapel that day–and in light of this morning’s Gospel, I’m actually now grateful for having heard and remembered it.

This morning’s Gospel contains what may be the strangest 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 contemporary 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 being. 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, of wealth, 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.

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. Another truth about parables is that we can sometimes misidentify whom their characters are meant to be. Who is God in the story? Who am I? Is it even that simple, given the preceding fact, that they’re not allegories to begin with.

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.

This is an oversimplification of the Old Testament, but it’s more or less correct to say that 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 Law. 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 triumphed over fairness; love has overcome the law.

This doesn’t mean that we don’t have any expectations. It doesn’t mean we should try to be kind and just and courageous 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 when leading you through the sinner’s prayer. 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 a room?

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