Sermons

To describe this whole process, Jesus uses the simple but powerful analogy of a woman giving birth: a woman experiencing the terrible danger and pain which serves as a living link back to the fall of man. Built into this example is the inescapable fact of the human condition: all life is sorrow. After all, even our happiest moments on earth come to us tinged in the darkness of our future destruction. Jesus saves this world by embracing suffering along with us and conquering it with the love that perseveres through pain and abandonment. Just as a mother perseveres in the midst of toil to bring a new life into the world, Christ suffers the worst the world can throw at Him, and rises from His empty tomb as the new humanity all this suffering was pointing us towards. His new manhood—a humanity no longer plagued by pain and death and sorrow—ushers in a new era of joy into the world because, through the Holy Spirit, we too can embrace the life of real goodness humanity was created to embody. We too can begin to live our lives of resurrection glory because sorrow has been given a new meaning—we can gaze upon our bloodied Savior, our suffering savior, and know that His story has become our own.

And it is what comes out of this faith that is so amazing. If we do trust Christ completely, which only makes sense given the reality of the resurrection, then we are free to love God and man without the terrible burden of hoping and praying that our relatively minor contributions must be enough to save ourselves or the world. We don’t have to conquer nature or bend men to our wills or win every political battle or be on the right side of history (whatever that actually means). Jesus has already overcome the world and its darkness; history is His story, so we are free to treasure a peace the world will never understand and prepare for a new life of creation and discovery. We can be happy warriors rather than half-defeated losers who reek of desperation.

If you are a baptized Christian, a member of the covenant, and empowered by God the Holy Ghost to remember His commandments and do them, then you are not lost but found; you are not a rebel or a stranger; you are a wounded son or daughter being carried to heaven in the arms of the shepherd who will always leave the ninety and nine to find you. You are complete, whole, even as this awful world rips pieces off you until there is nothing left to take. For in the end, our bodies will betray us as the great, final lesson revealing how much we aren’t God, how much we need God, but the people of God need not fear it, for the Holy Ghost has already reached down to us in the waters of baptism and united us to our resurrected brother and Lord. This spiritual resurrection has already occurred in us, and we are living in its magnificent, unfolding reality. Sin is no longer our master, but a pathetic, wounded tyrant and Christ has given us the blade to finish the job. Death is no longer to be feared, for we are tethered to heaven and the bodily resurrection to come by our unbreakable link to the victorious God/Man. Life is no longer a slow-motion tragedy numbed by drugs, legal and otherwise, but rather a daily march towards holiness, towards the wonder and glory humanity was always meant to embody.

If you hear my voice, and the voice of God reigns in your heart, then you are the people born of blood and iron nails, the people made from the sacrificial love which bore the weight of sin and death that humanity might rise from the ashes of despair into the dawning light of eternity. We will spend this holy week remembering that glorious day of days because we must remember we are not Judas; we must drown out the black voices in our world trying to convince us to die in despair and misery so they can feed off our time and treasure and broken hearts. Roar back at them, ‘My seed shall serve him, and they shall be counted unto the Lord for a generation; I shall serve Him, and death will be my defeated foe.

If salvation, if life beyond the few years we spend on this fallen planet is a matter of our common sense or collective wisdom, then our race is as doomed as these confused and angry men. St. John, however, has already told us how the children of God are born, ‘But to all who did receive [Jesus], who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God’ (St. John 1:12-13). Every plank upon which the self-righteous, Christ denying men of today’s reading stand—whether it be their ethnic lineage or assumed cultural superiority or adherence to the law or allegiance to their way of life—all of these tokens of false hope are ripped away from them by the God/Man’s revelation that He alone is the cure for death. Truly, all our false hopes become meaningless when the Word of God made flesh proclaims Himself as the perfect liberation from the great plague of human existence, from the death which robs all of us of our humanity.

The first step to salvation, the first step to being among the true sons of promise is to know we are all barren, but blessedly, God gives life to the barren. God looked upon the barren, childless Sarah: guilty of unbelief, pride, jealousy, and attempted murder; He looked upon her, and He united her to the Trinity’s world saving mission by giving her the son of promise. He gave her a life she didn’t deserve because God keeps His promises. The salvation of the world took its first step forward through a tiny heartbeat inside the womb of an old woman given up for dead. That heartbeat would grow up to be the man Isaac and from him would come generations of men and women, each in their own way a living testimony to the throbbing, human need for salvation. Until another woman, clothed in her virginity, was blessed with the new life which would take away all barrenness—the Son of Promise who came to reverse the fall of man, to restore the garden of creation, to create new life in us where men see only death. It is Jesus Christ’s resurrected glory which changed Paul from persecutor to martyr, and it is Christ’s resurrected glory which should lead all of us barren, unfruitful, human deserts to join in with prophets and apostles, saying, “Rejoice, thou barren that bearest not; break forth and cry, thou that travailest not: for the desolate hath many more children than she which hath an husband” (Galatians 4:27). God’s grace is for the barren, and so the barren can now rejoice. We can rejoice instead of worrying, we can rejoice instead of complicating our lives with all the fruitless pursuits of our neighbors, we can rejoice and know that Christ has promised life to those who believe; He has promised everything to those who are free. By God’s grace, we are the sons and daughters of promise, and by God’s grace we are free.

In the end, it all comes down to what we love. If we love God more than sex or fear or money or our things, then we will act in a way which reveals our love. If I love God more than my money, giving alms for the poor will not be a burden but an act of love. If I love God more than my favorite distraction, a daily hour spent praying and fortifying my soul in His Word will not be a burden but an act of love. If I love God more than myself, I will trust in Him rather than even my most cherished personal beliefs. To follow St. Paul’s apostolic command to be the light of this dark world is to live a life that is not our own. It is to live in the light which illuminates all darkness, the righteousness which brings good even out of evil. It is to live in the love which pillages the spoils of Satan and carries us home in His arms.

Her reply to Jesus should be familiar to us all, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.’  In the ancient world, calling oneself a dog was not flattering or cute. This phrase is one of humility and abasement, and as she kneels before the God who has humbled and abased Himself by becoming one of us, whose future holds the humiliation of the cross, our Lord recognizes one of His own. He sees in her reply the faith which can only come from the Holy Ghost. A faith Jesus describes as a ‘mega’ faith. And so, our Lord gives her the scraps from His table; He heals her daughter. And mind you, these are scraps, for just as the glorious medicine of immortality we will experience at each Lord’s Supper is only a foretaste of the endless wedding feast to come, so too is this miraculous healing merely a paltry morsel compared to the endless restoration and reconciliation of the new life to come. The healing Jesus provides for this faithful woman points to a future in which Gentiles from every tribe will be welcomed into the people of God to receive a permanent healing.  Jesus recognizes, just as He did with the centurion, that this woman is a harbinger of that future glory.

We see in the seeming weakness of Christ a strength which confounds us, a strength which cares nothing about itself, a strength which can only be showed by God stripped of His rightful glory, standing before His first rebellious creature. This strength, of course, appears to be madness to the world, but that is because the world has placed its faith in the transitory dreams of dying men. Christ does not have this deficiency; Christ has nothing in the wilderness but His faith in the promises of His Heavenly Father, and when everything is stripped away from us that is all any of us really have too. I ask, what of our possessions will we carry with us when we go one last time to the hospital? What satiated desire or treasured lust will comfort us when the walls we have built around ourselves come down and the wilderness finally finds us?

But, of course, death is not the end. We do not love as Christ has loved for no reason; we do not sacrifice ourselves every day for no purpose. This sacrificial love is not masochistic or absurd; we love in the way Christ loves because we will one day live in the way Christ lives. Our resurrected king is Himself the beginning of the new creation for which we daily pray, and the language of that new land will be the very love we read about today. Just as Paul can tell us to live without fear of death because Christ’s resurrection proves death can be defeated, so too does Christ’s resurrection prove that we can freely live lives devoted to God’s love. We no longer have to be enslaved by the myths and superstitions floating around our lost and troubled land; we can be free from those lies and daily prepare ourselves for the new heaven and earth which awaits us. It is that new earth which will soon be our reality, and we will wonder how we ever lived without the love that unites and frees and gives forever. In humanity’s best moments, we can sense that this promised country lies just across the horizon; in our best moments, we can feel God’s love drawing us to its immaculate shores. Why would we settle for less?