Sermons

And so, the Christian who is led by the Spirit is beyond the fear of the law, beyond the fear of death, beyond the need for works of the flesh, because he is now free for love. We are now free to bear the Holy Spirit’s fruit in the desert of human misery. Because we belong to Christ, every single part of us belongs to God. Not just our brains or our Sunday mornings; no, every part of us belongs to the God who made a wild and dying plant alive in order to bear the fruit of the Spirit. Our every second is no longer our own but a double-gift from the God who created us and is now redeeming us for present and future glory. This reality has immense ramifications for how we live our lives. We no longer get to say, “I will try to make time for prayer or to contribute to Christian love or share the Gospel”; no, our entire lives are about being led by the Spirit and belonging to Christ. We work and sleep and eat not for ourselves, not to get more things than we can ever use, not to build our own little slice of heaven, not to worship the idols of our small and unimaginative age; rather, we do all the necessary aspects of life so that we can have time and space to grow the fruit of the Spirit, to grow the fruit which shows Christ’s total and uncontested reign in our hearts as it is in heaven. Every Christian will lose battles in this fight (otherwise it wouldn’t be a real war), but we must face the future as those who know victory has already been won in what Christ has already done.

The answer is pretty obvious, especially if we understand St. Paul's warning in his letter to the Galatians against the perversion of the law into a way of avoiding the living covenant with God. The Law of Moses, which came 430 years after God gave the covenant to Abraham, has never been a way around the covenant or a replacement for the covenant. It was given solely as a reminder of our duty to God, as a way of evaluating our behavior by the standard of how one who truly loves God behaves. Apart from this one purpose, we abuse the law in three ways: by putting the law above the covenant; by playing one law against another in order to avoid the duties of the covenant; and by doing evil on the basis of an absence of a particular law against a particular evil. “Where does it say I can’t cheat my wife if I’m unhappy?” “Where does it say I can’t murder my children if I’m sad?” “Doesn’t God want me to be happy?” “Isn’t that the highest law?”

Without the forgiveness of sins, only possible through the sacrifice made on our behalf by Jesus Christ, we are doomed, but we can take great comfort from the God who looks at this deaf man, an enemy two times over (both as a Gentile and as a sinner), and has compassion on him, sighs, and says, “Be opened.” Not to impress a crowd or to increase his popularity or to receive a financial contribution, no, only to help His poor creature—maimed by sin and evil. That should fill us with great comfort, for we worship a God who has pity on us even in our lowest point, and we can be sure that he will heal us from even the greatest affliction, namely, death.

It is here, precisely, that the Christian parts company with the secular idea of "self-acceptance." A Christian accepts himself as God accepts him: under the sovereignty and judgment of God, and according to God's standards of right and wrong, of good and bad behavior. A Christian offers his whole life to God in unwavering honesty, and receives his life again from God as a "new life in Jesus Christ," to which is attached God's faithful promises of holiness and perfection in God's own good time. Thus, every faithful Christian can face the entire world; he can face anybody and anything, in whatever calling God chooses to give him, and can say with St. Paul: "By the grace of God, I am what I am."

And so, the peace which passeth all understanding is a peace which begins and ends with perfect justice administered by the God who is the great avenger of all those wronged by the powerful. When Jesus rips through the temple, whipping its officials and overturning the tables of the money changers, He is avenging all those wronged by the false teaching and disbelief of the priestly class; He is avenging all those robbed by dishonest business practices; He is declaring His authority as the ultimate judge of the temple, and so the ultimate judge of Israel, and so the ultimate judge of the earth. He has come to bring peace, but that peace is only possible through the cleansing of those evil men who claim to act in His Father’s name. The temple was meant to be the holy space in which Israel could dwell with God in their midst; it was meant to be the space in which heaven and earth came together so that Israel could save the world through their faith and obedience to the covenant God gave to their fathers in the plains of Moab. Jesus is showing us today that it still is all those things, even when the Romans tear the building down to the ground, because Christ Himself is the fulfillment of every promise the temple held out to humanity. He is the holy space in which God and man are forever united; He is the one who saves the world by keeping the covenant and obediently following the will of His Father, and He is the last and great world saving sacrifice for the sins of Man. The temple destroyed by the Romans was not a failure; it was a signpost pointing to the fulfilled temple. Jesus is that fulfilled temple, and He now calls us to be the same.

We are meant to see the many parallels between the love and patience of this father and the love and patience of our heavenly Father. In Exodus 34, the Living God graciously describes Himself to his creature Moses in this way, “The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin…” (Exodus 34:6-7). Our Creator gifts us with existence; He gives us a life we haven’t earned in a world we didn’t build. Our only reasonable response is to wake up every day imagining new ways to show our gratitude in love and service to our Creator and fellow creatures. Instead, we demand God prove Himself to us, as if our every breath wasn’t a witness to the glory of our Father’s love and mercy, and we spend the Father’s gift of our very being on “reckless living.” Surely, the prodigal son is meant to represent the whores and tax collectors Jesus was calling into his Kingdom as He walked among men, but we would be quite blind not to realize how much of our modern lives demands we compromise ourselves in ways not too far removed from those whom the Pharisees saw as the unclean scum of the earth. Modernity’s moral goal is to make us all harlots and traitors to our father’s beliefs, and humanity is so twisted that we look out onto a world of evil and see this as evidence of God’s absence or non-existence, when we should see it as the great evidence of His mercy and long-suffering goodness. He allows us to take our inheritance as children of men and to do with it as we please until we are broken by the weight of trying to be little gods in fallen world—broken by the consequences of our rebellion.

And it is in this perilous space of infinite consequences where we ultimately find ourselves, as Christ says directly before today’s reading, two gates lie before us: one narrow and confined leading to eternal life, the other wide and easy leading to destruction, “For the gate is narrow and the way hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.” (St. Matthew 7:14). Even within the intense comfort and joy which abounds throughout the Sermon on the Mount, our Lord wants us to equally understand the pain and hardship which will inevitably come from following Him to war against evil. He must continually remind us that the life-saving religion which has a crucified man as its ultimate sign of triumph is not a religion of comfort and ease in the face of evil; it is a way of life in which we are to see God’s blessing most clearly when we are persecuted and rejoice when evil strikes us—precisely because it is in this life of suffering that we are united with the crucified Christ, united with the prophets who came before Him, and united to all the men and women whose sign of faith in the promises of God was a death to this world and its lies (Matthew 5:10-12).   

There lies our true position, and that is where our loving God meets us. As St. Paul writes, “For the wages of sin is death; but the free gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Romans 6:23). Evil promises to pay us the fair wages our good and bad works deserve. Evil promises to meet us at the end of our lives—as we are stripped of all our possessions and loves and hobbies and accomplishments—evil will be there with a smile and check made out to death. If evil is the master we choose, we will be treated fairly—we will be left with nothing but the cruel master we served but could never save: we will be left with nothing but ourselves. If then we are, by our maimed and bloodied natures, constrained to serve some master this side of the grave, let it be the master who has revealed His righteousness not as some abstract theory, not through a list of rules, not even as a reward for a job well done. Let us serve the master who broke Himself against the same humanity that is breaking us; let us serve the master who looked at the warring, selfish, spiteful tribes of men and said, “I will save them, I will redeem them, I will show them how to love.”

In fact, this union, between Creator and creature is meant to quite literally take over our entire lives and enlist us into the army of light fighting for the great destruction of evil and the elevation of truth and goodness and beauty forever.  St. Paul can say, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). The faithful, baptized Christian has the hollow, sucking chasm of blackness and fear that lives inside him replaced by a real, human heart from the most human man to have ever lived. We are forever after molded around His example and teaching, death and life, and we are freed from our slavery to sin, the flesh, and the devil. We no longer have to search for an identity from our neighbors or our friends or our desires; no, our fear and shame have been nailed to the cross along with the Prince of Peace, and we need no longer be afraid or ashamed ever again. Through the resurrection, the real world has broken into this fallen world of lies, and Christ will hold us close to Him as we pass through every temporary horror on the way to our true home. This journey, from death to life, already undertaken by the first fruits of the resurrection—Jesus Christ—this journey begins in our baptism and ends in the new earth to come, and it is this journey which is so vastly more important than all the other temporary quests we may be asked to embark upon. Our entire existence takes its meaning from the God who shared existence with us in the first place, and we are on a journey to be made whole in Him forever.

No nation, however, has a blank check from God to do as it wills. The Israel to which Moses spoke ignored the inspired wisdom that he offered, it departed from the praise and fear of God, it sinned, and it ceased to be, except as scattered remnants haunting history. The nation to which George Washington spoke, echoing the words of Moses, is just as capable of self-destruction, and it appears at times that we may have strayed so far from God that there is no hope for us. But despair is a lie and a tool of the devil. Any nation, just as much as any person, can always turn to the Lord God for mercy and healing. Any nation can turn to God to be restored to its right mind and to its best and most honorable estate under the divine governance.