Sermons

There is so much to see and admire in the faithful, penitent woman who throws herself on the mercy of Jesus. Her suffering and the suffering of her daughter have broken the illusion that she can do this on her own or that her false gods will save her. The world, with its false faith in strength and power, looks at this woman—on her face before Christ—and calls her weak or pathetic. She is both; I have no interest in convincing you otherwise. Our Lord tests her by calling her a dog, the normal Jewish, derogatory term for a Gentile, and she humbly says, ‘Yes, I will gladly be your dog, if you will only be my master.’ Our pride cannot take this kind of abasement; we are taught to have self-esteem, to love ourselves first, to be no man’s dog. We all carry some form of the revolutionary and butcher Che Guevara’s stolen battle cry, ‘It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees!’ Which is all well and good until someone shoots you in the back, and your legacy becomes t-shirt sales to unserious undergrads. The faithful Canaanite woman is weak and pathetic, but so is every person the world teaches us is strong. The great difference between she and those who think they are mighty is not muscles or technology or money; no, it is simply the realization that none of those things matter when we stand before the Holy God who created us. We cannot bribe Him; we cannot dazzle Him with our toys, and our strength or our sad story will mean nothing to the God who created a good world from nothing and watched us try to destroy it for nothing.

Our Lord certainly felt these mighty temptations; He truly is hungry, in fact He is starving, and all He has to do is obey Satan, and He will eat and be comfortable (the highest good of our fallen world), but here again, Jesus is faced with the same questions which so many church shoppers and churchgoers are faced with today: are the promises and sacraments of God enough, or do we need God to prove His love through miracles on demand? If God leads us to testing and conflict, will we turn on Him and demand proof that he loves us—a proof greater than the adoption sealed in our baptism? Jesus answers, ‘No,’ and so He suffers because suffering for the truth is what it means to be God’s Son in this evil world; suffering for the truth is what we ask for when we claim the baptism which separates us from the world as sons and daughters of God—marking us forever as combatants in the war between good and evil. We may not want this fight, and if so, we know where the door is, but don’t think our great enemy will accept our surrender so easily; he knows where we live, and he glories in our pain and misery. Jesus, weak and vulnerable in the sinful wilderness of Adam’s making, leans on His Father’s holy promises; He leans on the truth, and in that moment, as in all moments, it is more than enough.

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?

Knowing that, who then could possibly care if they were first or last? Who could possibly imagine being cheated by the God we see before us today? The only hope for us all is the divine, otherworldly justice we find revealed in the crucified body of the Son of God, revealed in the last psalm on the lips of the martyr, revealed in the tears of the repentant sinner, revealed in the shocked look of the baptized baby and the last Communion feast of the dying saint. Let us then both work and rest in the liberating generosity of the vineyard’s master who beckons us even now to trust in His victory, to trust that the work we do in His kingdom has eternal value because through Christ we have been given a portion of His eternal glory.

Thus, it is not God who is to blame for the corruption of His good creation, and so screaming out, ‘Why doesn’t God do something,’ is nonsense because God is not the author of evil; we are. God is not responsible in any real way for cleaning up the terrible mess we have made through our mad participation in sin and death. In any event, when someone asks that question, he isn’t actually looking for justice in any meaningful sense; he is like a spoiled child cursing his parents after he breaks the new toy they have just gifted him. And if the question is instead deployed as some kind of iron-clad means of disproving God’s existence, it fails in the same way that someone standing in my neighbor’s unmowed yard, while screaming, ‘Why doesn’t Pastor Richard mow this lawn?’, doesn’t prove or disprove my existence. In short, when humanity joins with Satan and attempts to rebelliously rule the earth by our own code, we cannot then demand God save us in the way we would like to be saved; we cannot demand that God surrender to us while we demand His help?

Simeon and Anna, on the other hand, represent the holy remnant through which again and again the Holy Ghost showcases His power over and against the unfaithful men who too often try to lead His people astray. Just because the temple has been taken over by priests who don’t believe in the resurrection doesn’t mean that God isn’t working in history to bring salvation to His people. Those traitors were not strong enough to upend the purposes of God or destroy the faith of those who hunger and thirst for righteousness: those false pastors didn’t put that faith in Simeon, and so they have no power to take it from him. In fact, Simeon stands as the vessel of their condemnation, for the sovereign God has reached through time and space to make this faithful old man’s name be remembered by the saints of God long after the names of those unfaithful priests have been burned out of history by God’s holy fire.

To be a follower of Christ is to accept that our temporary embarrassment or humiliation or pain or death is completely worth it if through our sacrifice even one soul can see the reflection of Calvary in our lives. Remember, St. Paul is not asking for us to give God something that isn’t already His; if we are ransomed souls, if we are saved, then we already belong to God, and He is simply instructing us how to use the life Christ bought back from the abyss. Our dutiful and holy participation in the Christian life serves as a reflection to men and angels and demons—to all creatures—that evil can be stopped, and if evil can be stopped once, it can be stopped again and again and again. We can stop making deposits in the bank of human misery because the riches of Christ are already ours.

Until verse 9 of chapter 12, ἀγάπη—the word Paul uses to describe genuine, sacrificial love—had always been used to describe the divine love, publicly revealed in the Son’s sacrifice of Himself for the sins of the world, but here (in the already in-breaking new world Christ’s resurrection made a sure reality) Paul reveals that a Christian’s love for others will be infused with a divine character. Our love, through the power of the Holy Spirit, will be painful as we shed layer after layer of the unnecessary trappings of this fallen world—as we focus our lives on uttering the unconditional, ‘YES,’ to all that Christ asks of us. Yes, I will be my brother’s keeper. Yes, I will zealously seek out good works for the kingdom of God. Yes, I will rejoice in the face of the violent and seductive tribulations of the fallen world. Yes, I will pray like I’m before the throne room of the Almighty God. Yes, I will open the home Christ gave me to bring the lost into His kingdom. Yes, I will do all of that and more because I am ready to be so fervent in thy Spirit that I burn on His altar as a sign and symbol to all men that God is on the march and wrath and love are coming with Him. We will be scarred in this world if we are Christ’s, but we can take it if the measure of our strength is God and not man.

But, God has defeated death. God embraces dead children just as He embraces repentant murderers remade into the children of God. How? The young child those first Gentile wisemen came to worship grew up to rebuild the broken unity between Man and God by writing a peace treaty in His own blood upon the Cross and sending God the Holy Spirit to transform the whitewashed tombs of our hearts into living temples fit for God to dwell. The first Gentiles to worship in the heart of God’s living temple were the wiseman representing the nations of the world bowing down in worship before God incarnate: these men were the first fruits of a new world in which Jew and Gentile are united in life through the holy worship now available to a new human race capable of once again walking with God as Adam and Eve walked with Him in the garden.

Abraham was called by God to be a father despite being an old man with no children. He was a man with no future; a grim casualty of a world made cruel and twisted by humanity’s failure to rise above our shared slavery to sin and death. It would be hard to imagine someone less likely to be called out of our world to be the father of many nations than Abraham. In fact, it might seem like a cruel, cosmic joke for God to command Abraham to take his barren wife Sarah away from the only family they had to become strangers in a strange land: a land filled with warlords and child sacrifice, pain and betrayal. But of course, we are meant to see in Abraham’s unsuitability and peril the shimmering outline of our own calling into the family of God. For without Christ, what future do you and I have? We can try to rage and fight against the darkness or become its pathetic servant, but no amount of anger or groveling will hold back the darkness: it is as futile as screaming at a sunset. No, we too must, ‘…get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee. (Genesis 12:1). Abraham is our father because we are of the chosen, but he was also our father in sharing with us the desperate need to be delivered, and so he is our father when we leave the familiar lands of sin and death to journey to the promised land Jesus Christ has built with His true heart and loving obedience. God’s unmerited mercy on Abraham is our story; it is the beginning of how we and our children will make it home alive—how we will fill the mansions of the new heaven and earth with the holy family death can no longer rip away from us. We need not scream at the sunset if we know the Son will rise and never set.