Sermons

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

Last week for our sequence hymn we sang a difficult text written by G.K. Chesterton–“O God of Earth and Altar”–and by difficult I don’t mean conceptually it was conceptually difficult but that it required us to consider the degree to which the Kingdoms of this world, our own included, are very far gone from the ideals Kingdom God will establish on the last day. My favorite line from that hymn puts it rather directly: “smite us and save us all.” I learned this week that the hymn was actually covered by the heavy metal band Iron Maiden back in the eighties; I think (and I’ll just posit this now, and we can talk about what I mean at some later date) this is one among many examples of how orthodox Christianity is the most metal of religions.

Anyway, we can always rely of Chesterton for some hard truths. He once said of today’s Gospel, “Jesus here tells us to love our neighbors. Elsewhere the bible tells us we should love our enemies. This is because, generally speaking, they are the same people.” This may be even truer today than it was when he wrote it a hundred years ago. I think our current politicians could learn something from Chesterton.

Indeed, we all can and must, because it is none other than a mandate from Jesus himself:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.

We may respond to this by asking “well, then, who is my neighbor?” In St. Luke’s version of the story, the lawyer who asks the initial question and receives Jesus’ famous response, proceeds to ask the second question—Who is my neighbor?—in order to trick Jesus, and Jesus responds with the parable of the Good Samaritan.

You may remember how that one goes. The priest and the Levite—righteous men by Jewish religious standards—pass by the wounded traveler without offering any kind of assistance. The Samaritan, a member of a race and religion very much at odds with the Jews, rescues the traveler and pays his expenses during his convalescence. Who was the traveler’s neighbor? None other than a man whom circumstance had made his enemy.

We have a rather narrow definition of love, which I don’t think is unique to our time and place, but which is nonetheless misguided. We hear the word “love” and what do we think? We probably think of warm feelings for somebody because of some kinship or friendship or personal attraction. Warm feelings for somebody are well and good, but Christian charity is a much broader concept, and it seems to me to have little to do with those of whom we are predisposed to be fond.

Love in the Christian sense includes a commitment to act on behalf of those with whom we have little in common and even those with whom we are at enmity. Look back at that reading from Leviticus. Unfortunately it skipped several verses which are germane to our discussion of love. In the verses we heard, the Israelites are commanded to avoid prejudice and partiality, to avoid slander, to shun hatred, and to divest themselves of resentment and grudges. In the twelve verses our lectionary skipped, the children of Israel are also commanded not to steal, not to put off paying an employee even one day, not to be cruel to those who cannot defend themselves, and even not to harvest all of one’s land so that the poor might take the produce around the borders of one’s farm. All of these commandments are summed up in that elegant but seemingly impossible commandment: love thy neighbor as thyself.

You’ve heard me say it before from this pulpit and here it is again, perhaps my most often repeated comment on the Christian life: love is about commitment and sacrifice. If one is committed to loving one’s spouse, he must sacrifice his own selfish concerns for the good of the relationship. If one is committed to loving one’s children, he must sacrifice getting what he wants and doing what he wants to a great extent in order to be present and to support the child. If one is committed to loving the poor, she’s got to do something about it at her own expense. If one is committed to loving the Christ’s Church and those who do not yet believe, she must give sacrificially of her time, talent, and treasure to support the Church’s mission of reconciling all people everywhere to God and each other.

And the really hard part is that we cannot show partiality. We cannot choose to love only those whom we like. We must commit to sacrificing ourselves for those whom we don’t particularly like:

Love your enemies [Jesus says] and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

This seems an impossible task, but in truth we already have the greatest example: Jesus Christ who laid down his life not only for the people with whom he had mutual fondness, but for those who hated him, those who spat at him, those who scourged him and nailed him to the Cross. We are commanded to take up our own cross, to sacrifice ourselves for the good of others as Christ had done.

+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.

There has been a TikTok trend which has not only taken social media by storm in recent weeks but which has received some coverage in traditional media, with articles in the New York Times and the the Washington Post. Women have been asking men in their lives (husbands, boyfriends, brothers, &c.) how frequently they think about the Roman Empire, and the answer is usually “every day.” Now I think this trend, funny as it may be, unnecessarily plays into gender stereotypes. Perhaps because I am married to a classics major, but I think there are plenty of women who think about the Roman Empire just as frequently as men. What’s more, if you asked me the question, I would give the following answer: I think about the Roman Empire pretty frequently. But I think about the Achaemenid Empire even more frequently.

As it happens, our lessons this morning have made us consider both of these Empires. It is the Caesar, the Roman Emperor (namely Tiberius), who would have been on the coin with which the pharisees are trying to trap Jesus and this event, while proving that Jesus was very clever, might leave us with more questions than answers about the nature of the state, the secular authority, in terms of our obligations and God’s provision of a different sort of Kingdom.

That said, perhaps because of what I said earlier, I find the question raised by this morning’s Old Testament lesson even more fascinating, as it makes us think about the Achaemenid Empire of ancient Persia and its founding emperor, Cyrus the Great. For one thing, and to oversimplify to some extent, biblical history while generally seeing the Romans as “the baddies” (St. Paul’s insistence that all authority is established by God and that the church should pray for the emperor, notwithstanding), the Persians are generally seen as the “good guys” in the biblical story. I think I might have said from this pupit before that the Achaemenid Empire should get more credit in both history classes and pop culture, particularly the latter, in response to the very stupid film about the Battle of Thermopylae–Three Hundred–which got the baddies and the goodies flipped.

Anywayn Isaiah’s prophecy in this morning’s lesson comes at the climax of a fascinating period of history which I think interesting to enough to rehearse briefly, because it makes this morning’s Old Testament lesson all the more surprising. So, on with a bit of a history lesson, and apologies if it seems dry to some. I for one find it to be a really enthralling story.

If you follow the daily office lectionary, you’ve been hearing a great deal of the background of this morning’s Old Testament over the past couple of weeks in morning prayer. To bring you up to speed, the last great king of Judah, Josiah, had done what none of his predecessors had managed- namely, large scale religious and political reform. Though Judah was a client state of Assyria, Josiah managed to tear down the altars of foreign gods and encourage the worship of Israel’s god alone. He used tax revenue not to underwrite the monarchy’s expenses but to undertake a significant renovation of the Temple. Sadly, when Josiah died in the year 609 B.C. a whole series of bad kings followed. Josiah’s son, Jehoahaz, ignored his father’s reforms and was captured only three months into his reign after an ill-advised war with Egypt. Jehoahaz’s brother Jehoiakim was installed in his place by the Egyptian conquerors, but his eleven year reign was defined by his apparently constantly shifting allegiance between Egypt and Babylon who were at war with each other, and, worst of all, after facing criticism by the prophet Jeremiah, he undertook a policy of burning the prophet’s writings. Finally, Jehoiakim’s son, Jeconiah, only managed to rule for three months and ten days before he allowed Jerusalem to fall to the Babylonians and the best and brightest of Judah to be sent into exile throughout the Babylonian Empire on 16 March in the year 597 B.C.

Now, skip forward almost sixty years. Jerusalem had fallen, leaving only a puppet monarchy and the poorest of the poor remaining in Judah. Educated and wealthy Jews had established communities throughout Babylon, leading to an increased nationalistic and religious fervor which the Empire had sought to quash by its program of forced exile. This was a period in which the Jews learned how to maintain their Judaism, their connection to the God of Israel, outside the land given to their forefathers and without the benefit of temple worship. For the common Jew, this meant an increased attention to kashrut, faithfulness in observing the laws of purity and morality found in the Torah. For scholars, it meant not only an increased attention to studying the Law (the beginnings of modern, Rabbinical Judaism) but also an explosion of creativity. It is not in Israel but in Babylon that much of what we call the Old Testament was finally written down.

It should be noted that the Jews were unique in the ancient world in being able to maintain their culture and religion and stave off assimilation after deportation. Ancient empires did this frequently because it always worked, except for this one exception. The northern kingdom of Samaria had experienced the same thing a hundred and fifty years earlier than Judah (in Samaria’s case, at the hands of the Assyrian Empire) and despite what conspiracy theorists and Mormons might tell you, the ten lost tribes of Israel were actually lost, assimilating into the empire of their conquerors. The Babylonian Jews, then, remain the one notable exception, and I’m perfectly comfortable in attributing this to Divine Providence.

More and more, while in Babylon, the Jews realized that they could only follow the God of Israel in the manner they desired by returning to the land and rebuilding the temple. The only problem was, they had no army and a couple generations of life in exile had made repatriation seem little more than wishful thinking.

But then, something unexpected happened. The Word of the Lord came not just to the prophet but to one identified in this morning’s lesson as God’s “anointed”. Indeed, considering that Isaiah himself was holed up in Babylon, we might assume that this prophecy was not even mediated through the prophet to this “anointed one” but went directly from God to him, 500 miles away from Babylon in the Persian city of Susa.

And who was this “anointed one”? Cyrus, the Zoroastrian king of Persia. God says to Cyrus that He has “called [him] by name. I surname you,” God says, “though you do not know me… I gird you, though you do not know me.” God chose not one of His own chosen people, but a king following a foreign religion (though, arguably the only monotheistic religion at the time aside from Judaism) to bring deliverance to the Jews.

We Christians often miss this part of the story because we read Isaiah on one level when there are at least two levels on which the prophecies function. Isaiah most certainly points to Jesus Himself as his people’s redeemer, but on another level he also point’s to King Cyrus. It’s not a matter of figuring out when the prophet speaks about one or the other; he can be understood as speaking of both in the same breath, a difficult thing for us literal-thinking modern people to get our minds around.

Anyhow, there is more in this than a history lesson with a twist at the end, because I think the twist-ending itself gives us an important lesson about who God is. We talk so much about coming to know God more fully, but we miss what is arguably more important- namely, that God knows us fully. To Cyrus, the God of Israel, if he had even heard of him, would have been a minor tribal god. He probably wouldn’t have seen this strange religion of displaced Jews as being particularly interesting. But God knew Cyrus, just as he knows each of us: completely. Because God knew Cyrus before Cyrus knew Him, this foreign king was made an instrument of the one true God.

The fact is we can never fully know God. We project all sorts of cultural and personal biases onto Him, and getting an even slightly clearer image of Him is a life’s work. I believe that even those who reject God most vociferously are often rejecting not God Himself but some inaccurate image which they’ve conjured up in their minds or which has been created by poor catechesis—some white-bearded chap who lives in the clouds who has less to do with the God of Israel and of Jesus than it does with our own hang-ups.

That being the case, the Good News is that however skewed our image of God is, God’s image of us is perfect. God knows us fully and can employ the greater angels of our nature, made perfect in Christ Jesus, to do His Will even when we don’t realize He’s doing it. It is a great God who can take some pagan Persian king to be a channel of his peace and deliverance. It is a great God who can take us, confused and sinful as we are, to be instruments of the Gospel in our old world. May our ignorance of God be overshadowed by God’s perfect knowledge of us, and may His perfect love find a home in the hearts who as yet do not know Him at all.

+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.

There are some people who are perpetually underdressed and some who and some people who are perpetually overdressed. I fall into the latter category. I was shocked the first time we went to the Toledo opera and I realized that I was only person in the room wearing a tuxedo. I am rarely seen in shirtsleeves, even during the dog days of summer. My former bishop back in Arkansas once told me that his mother had always said, “be sure to wear a jacket, because you never know when you’ll be appearing before a judge.” Anyway, if one were to err one one side or the other, I think being overdressed seems the safer option, and the parable in this morning’s Gospel seems to agree.

The parable we just heard might be one of the most bizarre of Jesus’ parables. It starts out predictably enough. It seems a rather simple allegory at first. If we were to read it as a simple allegory, there were those invited to the banquet (representing the children of Israel), and the king’s slaves (representing the prophets of the Old Testament and the Apostles of the New) go out to remind them that they had better come, but they refuse. So, the slaves go out and recruit all sorts and conditions of people—both bad and good—to take the place of the missing guests. This motley group of people is us- the saints and sinners who have been given Grace to attend the feast here at our altar and in the Kingdom on the last day, despite being gentile sinnners. It all seems simple enough.

But then Jesus throws us a curve ball. Who in the world is this poorly dressed guest and why does the king deal so harshly with him?

On our honeymoon, Annie and I stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria (not the sort of place we’d normally stay, I note, but it was our honeymoon). Said hotel banned things like jeans and tennis shoes in the lobby, and if you broke the rules you might get a nasty look. But the concierge wouldn’t bind you and cast you out into outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth (though, I suppose for some who frequent fancy Manhattan establishments, getting one’s lunch at the hotdog stand outside might be one’s idea of hell). We might think that the caliber of guests who finally showed up at the banquet would mean that many were uncouth enough to forgo a wedding robe or simply too poor to own one! At first blush, the king seems rather capricious and uncharitable.

Biblical scholars have engaged in a great deal of work to try to explain this. Some have suggested that the wedding robe would have been a garment which a host would provide for those who came without one, like loaner jackets at upscale restaurants (still a phenomenon when I lived in New York a decade-and-a-half ago, though I suspect this practice might have gone by the wayside). If that were the case, the guest in question must have refused to follow a dress code when compliance would have been easy enough. The truth, though, is that we just don’t know enough about the customs of First Century Palestine to say for certain if this would have been the case.

Fortunately, I don’t think a knowledge of ancient wedding practices really matters so much in this instance. What we have here is not a simple allegory, but a parable in which the symbols don’t necessarily have a perfect relationship to the realities they symbolize. What matters is not how precisely wedding robes were distributed but the fact that the guest doesn’t have one on. Our work, then, is to figure out what the robe symbolizes.

There are two prevailing theories from the most ancient of Christian writers. In the interest of full disclosure, I tend toward the second of these options, which will be no surprise.

The first is found in St. John Chrysostom in his homily on this text says that while the invitation is “grace” the garment is “life and practice”. Others, St. Augustine among them, would agree. The implication of this view is that one’s response to Grace, namely Faith as it is manifest in good works, is necessary if we are to attend the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, the heavenly banquet. To comply with the dress code of heaven, we must weave a robe with the threads of righteousness. This meshes nicely with the Epistle General of St. James. “Faith without works is dead.”

Ireneaus and Tertullian hold the opposite view, which I find more compelling. The wedding garment itself is Sanctifying Grace freely given. We may, of course, take off the garment, like the wedding guest, but it’s given to us in Baptism whether we want it or not. It is notable that in the Baptisms of the Early Church, the baptizand—whether infant or adult—would be baptized naked. For adults being baptized, this would mean only Christians of their own gender would be present for the Baptism, and it’s likely the reason for the ordination of female deacons from very early in the church’s history, a practice sadly stamped out relatively early on, only renewed in our Communion in the last Century, and sadly still not embraced in others. Perhaps the Roman Catholics’ forthcoming, so-called “synod on synadolity” will be a hopeful baby step in the right direction, but I ought not get into the internal politics of a church not my own, so I won’t opine or speculate further along those lines in a sermon.

Anyway, after emerging from the water, the new Christian would be clothed in a white robe to symbolize his or her regeneration- that person’s status as a new creation. While we cannot know for certain, the wedding garment in this parable might be not-too-subtly related to the baptismal garment of early church practice.

Whatever that wedding robe is meant to symbolize, though, we can pray that we’ll see plenty of people following the heavenly dress code on that day when we reach the other shore. Thank heavens scripture tells us we will see a multitude dressed in white before the throne, all sorts and conditions being summoned from the highways of this old world to attend the greatest wedding feast of all.

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