Sermons

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

It has become almost cliched to point out that social media has made our discourse as a society less likely to be civil or to take account of complexity. I was amused and rightly lampooned a couple months ago. A clergyperson, thank God from a different church (though that’s not to say it might not have just as easily been an Episcopal priest) posted, in meme form, a remarkably bad take on the nature of Christ’s sacrifice and our justification. I responded by writing the following:

Christian theology attempted through memes is generally a bad idea. Trying to dispute two millennia of careful meditation on the nature of the doctrine of the atonement with a political slogan is a supremely bad idea.

Of course, somebody then took my quote and turned it into a meme. I thought that was pretty funny, but more importantly it was a good reminder for me. Don’t feed the trolls.

We might lament meme-ification and the scoring of points through soundbites, though it is nothing new. It certainly predates social media. I have been fascinated by church signs which feature slogans and inspirational quotes for a long time. Sometimes they’re fine, or even funny. Other times they are a bit, as the youngsters would say, “cringe.” Most of the time, I feel like they just need a bit more context, which I understand is impossible through the medium of church signs.

One message that one sees frequently on these signs is something along the lines of “the church is not a museum for saints, but a hospital for sinners.” The point is well taken, but it doesn’t make it clear that we’re all both saints and sinners simultaneously. Nor does it advertise the fact that the “course of treatment” in this hospital for sinners is not primarily about making us morally better by its ministrations(as much as we might hope that this is sometimes possible), but about reminding us that we are wholly dependent on God’s Grace and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to us. I know… just try fitting all that onto a church sign.

The quote in question has been attributed to all sorts of people over the years, such that it’s probably impossible to determine who might have first said it. There is something, though, written by John Chrysostom, but its slightly different and I think more apposite:

The Church is a hospital, and not a courtroom, for souls. She does not condemn on behalf of sins, but grants remission of sins.

I like this better, particularly since few of us these days think of the church as a museum for saints (though this might be different if we were a medieval cathedral in Europe rather than a local parish church in the American Midwest). Plenty, however, have gotten the idea that the church is a court of law established to condemn the sinful, and this is likely due to the moralism that has been preached from many pulpits instead of the Good News of God’s Grace.

Chrysostom’s sentiments here are also closer to what I think Jesus is getting at in today’s Gospel. I’ve mentioned in a sermon before, in relation to Zacchaeus, that tax collectors were reckoned an unrighteous lot by the Jews of Jesus’ day. They weren’t just performing a basic, necessary function for the smooth-functioning of the Roman Empire. They were, rather, rewarded for defrauding the people, bullying them into paying more than was owed. So in this morning’s Gospel, the pharisees were quite right to note that in sitting at table with Matthew and the other “tax collectors and sinners”, he was fraternizing with a bad group. Their problem, then, was not in recognizing sin, but in how they believed it should be addressed. “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, `I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’”

The other mistake they make is in what I said a minute ago could be taken from the church sign version of the quote–namely that there is a neat distinction between people who are saints and people who are sinners. Jesus says, “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” One wishes he went on to make explicit here what I take to be implicit and obvious, at least from a Christian viewpoint, by saying “and you, Pharisees, are sinners, too. You, too, are sick and in need of the Great Physician. Come and join me along with the tax collectors.”

Recognizing one’s own need for mercy and grace is a tricky business. The apparent irony of the Gospel is that flagrant sinners are often more able to accept that grace because they’re not shielded by an air of conventional piety. This, I think, is why hypocritical pharisees, teachers of the law and seen by the world and by themselves as being a cut above the rest, are the most regular recipients of Jesus’ rebukes.

This is not, however, to say that those given over to outward and even hypocritical displays of piety are beyond the pale of Christ’s salvific will if they are brought low enough by life’s circumstances to see that they are in need of grace. Consider the ruler whose daughter has died from the second half of today’s Gospel. You might not have caught the strangest element of this story. “When Jesus came to the ruler’s house, [he] saw the flute players, and the crowd making a tumult.” What’s that about? These are professional mourners, no doubt hired by the ruler himself, to lend a veneer of propriety to the proceedings. This is the literal definition of hypocrisy–“play-acting”, expressing the “appropriate, ‘done’ thing”–regardless of the real feelings one has on the matter. They are clearly not even good professional mourners, as they break character and start laughing at Jesus rather than keeping up the wailing and gnashing of teeth.

But for all that, the ruler’s pain in losing his daughter is keen enough to get him to throw aside the artifice for long enough to go to Jesus and ask for help. He’s been brought low enough, if only for as long as it took him to seek out the Lord, to realize that he was at the end of his string, and he was miraculously rewarded for it.

I was asked recently if I had any idea why some people in our own culture have turned not just to secular “self-help” ideology, but even to pagan ideas of old, or at least the contemporary invention of supposedly pre-Christian beliefs pitched directly (let’s not beat around the bush) at comfortable, mostly white, radically individualistic Westerners. My theory, which is not at all politique but for which I can’t come up with a convincing alternative explanation, is that most of these folks just haven’t experienced enough loss or pain or some other reminder of how profoundly fallen our sin-sick world is, to realize yet that one needs a savior. It is my suspicion that the likelihood is that when one does experience for oneself his or her own inadequacy in fixing it, that person will set aside the crystals and smudge sticks and tarot cards and will either become a Christian or a nihilist. We pray it’s the former, and we, as the church, have no greater responsibility than to make the former more attractive than the latter, because it objectively is.

In the end, that’s really pretty simple even if we worry and wring our hands about it from time to time. Why? Because we too have been in need of the Great Physician to heal our souls, to apply the balm of his love and to give us the medicine which is the Sacrament. Thank God for that, and let’s be a little more ready to recommend the course of treatment we find here to others.

+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.

At the heart of the mystery of the Trinity is mission. Mission is a technical term, which comes from the Latin mittere meaning “to send”. The Trinitarian mission, then, is God’s sending of Himself. We are reminded once again of this in today’s Gospel reading. The message of salvation was spread by an act of sending in today’s Gospel:

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.

This act of sending the apostles was preceded both chronologically and logically by the Father’s sending of the Son. “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” The word used in that familiar passage from John is the Greek apostello, send out, from which we get the word apostle.

And just as the Father sent, or “apostled” the Son, so did both the Father and the Son together send the Holy Ghost. As Jesus said, and as the Apostle John recorded, “the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.” And again, with regard to his Ascension, Jesus assured the disciples “it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.”

We know God by His actions, and one of God’s principle activities—as we see upon reflection on the doctrine of the Trinity—is sending, “apostling”. And just as God sent Himself, both as the Son and as the Holy Ghost, so does He send the Body of the Son, the Church, out to do His will. God continues to send each of us into the world to be apostles, heralds of the faith, and we must be sure to heed God’s call. God may be sending some of us into far-flung mission fields. He may be sending some of us into ventures closer to home. In all events, we are an “apostolic” people, a “sent” people. It may be that God’s mission field for some of us is in the home, to be a herald of the Good News to those in our families. Perhaps God is sending others into a mission in our workplaces, or in the places where we conduct our social and leisure activities, or out into the community of Findlay, or, as I said, maybe even to some far-flung mission field. Perhaps the task is simply being a good example of the Christian faith to our neighbours, or perhaps it is engaging in some sort of social ministry, or perhaps it is telling someone we know about how much Jesus means to us. That last one can sometimes be difficult for us polite Episcopalians, but that is God’s call to us. In any event, just as God sent Himself, so is he sending each of us to do something for the sake of the Kingdom. It is our responsibility to listen and discern, through prayer and studying scripture and conversation with our fellow Christians, precisely where God means to send us to do the work of the Kingdom.

Now, keep this truth, that God is a “sending” God, in the back of your minds. We shall return to it. First, though, there is another truth we may glean from the doctrine of the Trinity, namely that God is a “loving” God.

Before we delve into this truth and what it means, there is a common, totally understandable, misconception about the nature of the Trinity which needs to be dispelled. We often think of the persons of the Trinity in terms of a sort of division of labour. That is, we assign a job description, as it were, to each person of the Trinity. Specifically, people sometimes talk about the first person of the Trinity, God the Father, as the Creator; the second person of the Trinity, God the Son, as the Redeemer; and the third person of the Trinity, God the Holy Spirit, as the Sanctifier. This application of job descriptions as alternate names for the persons of the Trinity has become more common in recent decades as a means of avoiding masculine language for God, paricularly in blessings.

Now, whatever one thinks of inclusive language, this particular construction is in fact un-Christian. It is actually a very old mistake, which the Church Fathers called “the heresy of modalism”. The idea that God is triune because God acts in three distinct ways, three “modes”, is not correct. Long-story short, its logical conclusion is that there are three gods acting independently of one another, rather than one God in three persons. You see how this quickly leads us away from the Christian understanding.

To the contrary, since very early times the Church has taught that each action which God performs is an action of the whole of God. That is, each person of the Trinity is involved in any work of God. Think back to the first chapter of Genesis, for example. Certainly, God the Father was involved in creating the world, but we also remember that God breathed over the deep in His act of creation. The breath of God, or ruach elohim, in the Hebrew is the Holy Spirit. Likewise, we learn in the first chapter of Genesis that God created by means of the “Word”, and in John’s Gospel, we learn that that “Word” or “Logos” was none other than the second person of the Trinity, God the Son, who became flesh in Jesus Christ our Lord. So, the whole of God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—was active in the creation of the heavens and the earth.

Likewise, the whole of God is active in salvation. It is in the name of the Trinity that Christ demands we be baptized. In the passage in John’s Gospel, which serves in other lectionary years as the Gospel for Trinity Sunday, Jesus tells Nicodemus that one must be “born of the Spirit” and that this is made possible because the Father sent the Son. We are not only saved through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, but through the love of God the Father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. In short, the whole Godhead, the Trinity, saves us.

To go even a bit further, not only can we not assign job descriptions to the persons of the Trinity, but the job descriptions themselves—“creator”, “redeemer”, and “sanctifier”—unnecessarily divides the work of God into discrete actions. But, in being redeemed, we become a new creation, the apostle tells us. In the redemption brought about by baptism, we are simultaneously sanctified. One could go on, but the upshot is that God actually, ultimately does one thing. He loves us. Creation, and redemption, and sanctification and everything else we attribute to the hand of the most glorious Trinity is an expression of God’s love. “For God so loved the world…”

And this is ultimately the meaning of the Trinity. The Trinity is not about some real or perceived division of labour. The Trinity is about the nature of love. For love to be love there needs to be an Other. Thus, for us to make any sense of the assertion that God is love, God cannot be singular. As St. Augustine put it, “the Father loves the Son, the Son loves the Father, and the Holy Ghost is the love they share.” Even more compelling than Augustine’s explanation to my mind is that of the Eastern Church Fathers, people like St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Basil. They said that the mystery of the Trinity is defined by a mutual love in which the distinctions between the persons ceases to be apparent. The three are one because of the love they share is perfect. Perhaps we have felt hints of the blurring of personal distinction. Mutual love between spouses or between parents and children can have this quality. Of course, sin means that our love cannot be made perfect in this life, so all we experience are hints. “Sin has broken us apart” and so we cannot fully love in perfect emulation of the Triune Godhead.

And yet we may come to love better when we abide in the mystery of the Holy Trinity. Listen carefully to these words of the apostle John from his first epistle:

No man has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his own Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Saviour of the world.

The Holy Trinity is defined by the mutual love its members—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—have for one another. But, the Trinity is not an exclusive, mutual-admiration society. The Father’s sending of the Son and their mutual spiration, or sending of the Holy Ghost to us means that we have been invited into the love of God, invited to abide in the love that the persons of the Trinity have for each other. We have been given the chance to abide in that love. That is ultimately why we are “sent out” by God. Because God sent himself into the world, and we have been brought in to the loving life of the Trinity, so we too—children of the Father, members of Christ’s body, full of the Spirit—may be Christ sent out into the world and may invite others into this great relationship of perfect love.

+In the name of the one eternal and indivisible God : Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

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

There are very few things I lament about our liturgical tradition as Western Christians in general and Anglicans in particular, which is probably why I am generally grumpy when some colleagues perceive the need for liturgical experimentation. That said, there is one thing which I wish were more a part of our inheritance and which Eastern Christians may do a bit better, namely prayers addressed to the Holy Spirit. Most of our prayers are addressed to the Father and prayed in the name of the Son and in the power of the Spirit, but there’s no reason why we can’t pray directly to the other persons of the Trinity. In any event, the work of the Spirit is nonetheless featured in many of our prayers. One of them, which I use at the beginning of each vestry meeting gives us what many take to be two of that same Spirit’s most important activities in our lives – “strengthen the faithful [and] arouse the careless.”

On this feast of Pentecost, when we celebrate the coming of that Spirit and his abiding presence with us, we must be careful to keep both of these divine missions in mind. Our lessons appointed for this morning all focus on the latter: the apostles are given the miraculous ability to preach the Gospel to the nations in various tongues, Paul outlines the variety of gifts given to the faithful to do the work of the Gospel, and Jesus breathes the Spirit onto the Apostles, empowering them to absolve sinners.

I guess I understand why this is our lectionary’s focus; it speaks to a cultural reality of comfortable, nominal Christianity in which we so often need the Spirit to lift us out of complacency and give us power and passion to do God’s work in the world: whether that is the work of evangelization or service to the needy or exercising leadership within the church, or any one of a host of other active vocations within the Body of Christ to which that same Spirit calls us.

But, I’m not so sure that this is really our prevailing reality anymore. Maybe comfortable, nominal Christianity was the primary concern fifty or sixty years ago, and it’s not to say that we don’t ever need the Spirit to roust us out of our complacency today. But I personally grow tired of sermons that tell me that we need to do more–sermons that are, as I said several weeks ago, strong on the Law and weak on Grace. You see, the problem in the Year of our Lord 2023 (at least as I see it, from the perspective of a priest of a parish whose people cannot be accused of not doing enough as far as I can see) is not that the faithful are complacent. I don’t think nominal, cultural Christianity should be our biggest concern. The culture no longer seems to reward that. We might lament the statistics which suggest continued secularization in our society and throughout the West (and I do). But we should also take that with a pinch of salt, remembering that those who do identify as Christian these days are probably a lot more likely on average to actually believe and do what Christians are called to believe and do, the expectation of church attendance for the sake of respactibility no lonmger being terrribly common.

Perhaps this Pentecost the more important focus is that which is absent from our appointed lessons, then, but fully present throughout Scripture-namely, to comfort the afflicted and strengthen the faithful. In the midst of our fallen world there is no doubt that we should pray for and permit the Holy Spirit to stir up in us the will and means to take faithful action. Even so, I think we must first ask that same Spirit to comfort and console us, lest our action be motivated by something other than literal inspiration (the Spirit dwelling in us to guide us).

So today, perhaps, our prayer should simply be that the charismatic activity which our lectionary omitted be forthcoming. Jesus promised this during his farewell discourse, recorded in John’s Gospel, particularly in the fourteenth chapter of the same:

And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of Truth … I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you … [T]he Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you. Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, I give unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.

The word Jesus uses here is παράκλητος (Paraclete), which we might render more literally in English as “the one called alongside.” You see, the Spirit of God, the Church teaches, is not some phantasm or mere force (hence more modern bible translations and liturgical texts preferring “Spirit” to “Ghost” for the third person of the Trinity, though I don’t know whether or not that choice actually succeeds in clarifying the point).

The Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost is, rather, a person, just as much as the Father and the Son, and he comes along side us just as he dwells in us, to help us when no other helper can be found. And St. Paul tells us, in his Epistle to the Romans, that even when we cannot pray–when we are so sad or angry or frightened or exhausted that we cannot even put our feelings into language–the same Spirit prays in and for us “with sighs to deep for words.”

Come, then, Holy Ghost to us now. Pray for us when we cannot pray. Comfort us when no other comforter is near. Give us strength and courage to meet the days ahead. Help us to trust in the Father’s will, in the Son’s intercession on our behalf, and in your own abiding presence with us now. Give us those gifts that have been promised to aid us in our work for the Kingdom and hope for the Kingdom that has yet to be revealed. At the last, bring us to that pace where with the Father and the Son, you too live and reign to the ages of ages. Amen.