Sermons

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

Some of you know that Annie and I enjoy the theater, but only a few hundred years ago this might have been a scandal. The theater was considered borderline unacceptable by many church people, and actors were considered the worst of the worst. There is a famous church in New York, the church of the Transfiguration, which made quite a splash by permitting theatre-folk into their church. Actors were reckoned a lowly bunch, and the bad rap didn’t start with John Wilkes Booth or even the bawdy seventeenth century plays that the puritans had banned before the Restoration. In fact, the idea that acting was a most disreputable profession can be traced back at least to the ancient Greeks, who coined an interesting word for play-actors: hupokrites. Hypocrites.

I don’t share this little lesson in etymology to deplore the theatre, which, like I said, I quite enjoy, but to help flesh out what we’re up against with the sin Jesus warns against in today’s Gospel. “Beware of the scribes,” he said, “who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”

You see, hypocrisy is like malicious play-acting, putting on a performance whose audience doesn’t know is a show, for an undetermined but usually high cost of admission. And when the subject matter of said performance is religious, the deception is dangerous indeed.

And, what’s worse, the actors in the charade that is religious hypocrisy can be very good, so good that their tactics are only seen once tremendous damage has already been done. Religious hypocrites have gone from devouring widows’ houses to committing horrible acts of violence, physical and spiritual, against the weakest among us. And it’s not only the so-called “crazies”, the cult leaders of the world, but even sometimes clergy from more putatively respectable religions. “Beware the scribes,” indeed!

But let’s change the focus from these, turn around the camera which captures their shows, because nothing is easier than pointing out hypocrisy in others. Such radical forms of hypocrisy can serve as an easy distraction, because we can always say, “well, I’m not as much a hypocrite as him.” The difficult task, the hard work which we all need to do, is to search our own hearts for what apparently minor hypocrisies any of us is prone to commit.

I’m in an especially dangerous position, because, though a sinful person like anyone, my profession means that I walk around in long robes, and I do have the best seat in the synagogue (except when the bishop comes and displaces me from it). It is a short step from doing my job and exercising my authority appropriately to clericalism, and it’s an even shorter step from clericalism to outright hypocrisy.

But I am not alone in these dangerous waters, you see, for every single Christian can fall into it because of pride or simpe negligence. A good model for all of us, however, is found in the second half of this morning’s Gospel.

“Jesus sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. Then he called his disciples and said to them, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”

Now, the point is neither that rich people and their contributions are bad nor that penury is a good. If all you have in the world is “two small copper coins”, I’m not advising that you put it in the offering plate this morning, because I don’t want to be accused of devouring widows’ houses. The point is quite different from this.

In both Mark and Luke, the story of the widow’s mite, as it’s come to be called, immediately follows the denunciation of the scribes, and biblical scholars will tell you that this is intentional. Both episodes are meant to be understood as meditations on the same theme, the dichotomy between authenticity and hypocrisy. This is why, though neither Mark nor Luke says it explicitly, it is believed that those putting great sums into the treasury were actually doing it with great pomp and ceremony, ostentatiously drawing attention to their generosity. In other words, they were play-acting, just like the scribes. They wanted to be seen as surpassing “holy”. Giving generously wasn’t the problem, it was giving simply to be seen giving that was. The widow did not make a great deal of her offering. She just gave it.

Money is an obvious example, because it’s so tangible. It can be both a great source of good and potentially harmful to the soul, and we can often see the effects either way, comparing those who give selflessly and those who either become miserly or who give for self-aggrandizement. But money is just the most tangible example of this dichotomy of hypocrisy and authenticity. In reality, all that we do and say has implications in this regard. When we follow the widow to the treasury, the treasury of merit as the medievals called it, we deposit all our good works. Whether what we do is authentic or hypocritical, God can no doubt use it to His own ends, but it is only a true offering and a sacrifice if it’s done for the love of God, and his people, and his Church rather than for the love of attention.

In some ways, I feel like I’m preaching to the choir, because, as I’ve said from this pulpit before, there is a great deal of selfless work done around this place and in our community by many of you. Even so, we all, myself especially, need an occasional reminder along these lines. Thank God that we have such good examples. If you look hard enough, you’ll see the little acts of loving-kindness you catch your friends furtively doing, not blowing a trumpet but toiling in the dark. You can find examples in the stories of saints long gone on to their reward who took their master’s call to heart by giving of their energy or of their wealth or of their very lives. If nothing else, you can find a very good example in the poor, nameless widow from Jerusalem who all those generations ago gave her two mites, and was, no doubt, richly rewarded by her Father in heaven.

+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 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.