Sermons

As long as we are Christians in a fallen world (strangers in a strange land), we will not know the true peace of a world set right: the “peace that passeth all understanding” will always be something which must be placed in our hearts and minds by the benevolent God who made us through the suffering of childbirth and has saved us through the suffering of the Cross. That God commands us to be an unbreakable community who serve one another in humility and love—a set apart people learning the cruciform life by unlearning the selfish viciousness of our smiling dystopia. I don’t use that language lightly, our fallen world is a failed “heaven on earth project,” and the only options which rest before us are to try again and again to create our own utopia—to blindly trust that, despite all evidence, we can make a perfect world—or to disconnect ourselves from this nightmare and face the temporary suffering which inevitably follows.

None of this world-saving generosity, this new world building grace, happens because of our self-righteousness or who our parents are; we don’t get a seat at the great table because of our party affiliation or our money or our perfectly calibrated political opinions. It is those who know they need the feast who answer the master’s call: the men who run to the master’s table are the outcasts from a fallen world which rewards evil and idolatry. A broken world which rewards attitudes like, "I have to make more money than I will ever need, so I can't come to the feast,” or “I just bought a new car, and I need to try it out, so I can’t come to the feast,” or “I really need to focus on quality time with my family, so I can’t come to the feast.”  There is no shame in being a pilgrim and a stranger in a world which hates charity and peace, and it is precisely those kinds of people—to the shock and horror of Jesus’ original audience—who will be processed into the seats of honor to feast and worship and love for all time.

This true gospel took a sledgehammer to everything the Romans believed; it meant that the blessed people on the Esquiline hill were not those enjoying a bath; no, the blessed were the poor, crucified peasants whose grim deaths revealed they were enemies to a fallen world obsessed with loving itself and dehumanizing others for that end. It meant that God so identified Himself with the cries of the crucified and the cries of all the poor and mistreated in the world that He came as one of them to reveal the true powerlessness of the powerful, the rank impotence of the mighty. As we read in the Psalms, “O praise the Lord, ye that fear him: magnify him, all ye of the seed of Jacob; and fear him, all ye seed of Israel. For he hath not despised nor abhorred the low estate of the poor; he hath not hid his face from him; but when he called unto him he heard him…The poor shall eat, and be satisfied; they that seek after the Lord shall praise him: your heart shall live for ever.” From what psalm is that excerpt? It’s Psalm 22, the psalm our Lord invoked on the Cross, the psalm He made the mission statement of His passion and death. God hears the pleas of the poor crying out to heaven, and Christ comes to save them, not by giving them corruptible treasures, trinkets, or toys; no, He gives Himself. God the Son gives Himself to the wrath even they deserve so that every poor man or woman who invokes the name of Christ may be richer than any king or president, hedge fund manager or tech billionaire. 

We who are born of the water and the Holy Spirit are already in the ark of faith, and we have been given the living water which if men drink they shall never thirst again. We don’t need to measure ourselves by the fallen world’s standards—those standards nailed the Prince of Peace to the Cross; we don’t need to engage in the civic religion of outrage and tribalism because we have nothing to prove to anyone. God already knows we are defined by how much we need Him, and it is only His opinion which counts; it is only His love which saves. Liberated by this truth, we can bring peace to wherever we are; we can bring the peace which comes from knowing victory has already been won; we can bring the peace which knows our Savior’s greatest moment of victory was when He was exalted on a wooden device of torture and death, and so we too can grab our cross and do likewise.

Do we really want a formless, shapeless love whose only rule is, “Do what feels right?” What if our feelings and emotions and desires themselves are infected by the same poisonous air which prepares and nurtures people to commit whatever acts of evil we don’t like? Isn’t that a much more reasonable assessment of human performance through the ages than the adult fairy tale which begins with the heedless following of our desires and ends with a page reading, “And they lived happily ever after?” The Son of God knows us, and He knows only too well our epic, centuries long failure to truly love God and one another, and so He sets down a simple definition of love which should drive us to our knees in repentance and supplication and hope. We learn here that love is not defined by the unreliable whirlpool of our emotions or the semi-regular sexual revolutions of the bored and privileged; no, any real understanding of love must center on real action directed toward the God who is Love. That is tremendously good news; love is not some unfeeling force as indifferent to us as a hurricane or a tornado; rather, true love is personal because love is an attribute of the personal God. God’s love, the love we are called to share in through our sacrifice and obedience to His will, becomes about so much more that desire or pleasure or security—real love is always about salvation, always about re-directing the confused and lost human soul back toward the true, the good, and the beautiful.

St. Peter can tell us to abandon the superstitions and lies of the non-believers who surround us because we aren’t desperately searching for the meaning of life anymore; we aren’t walking in the dark woods scared of what might jump out of the shadows. No, “The end of all things is at hand,” or put another way, “the purpose of everything has been revealed in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” The eternal life of the Trinity has now been placed on the scales of life. What then could we possibly add to the other side of the scale which could outweigh the new reality revealed to us by God on a cross and Man walking out of a defeated tomb? The very meaning of words like fulfillment and joy and happiness take on entirely new meanings when we see the possibilities of eternity laid out before us in real-time by the God who is love.

"The Christian in prayer is a living symbol of our holy resistance against this cult of death. The Christian in prayer is a living reminder that the power and ambition of sinful men does not rule history. The Christian in prayer is Man truly alive because, humbly, on our knees, we are overcoming the world by asking God to overcome us: to destroy us and make us new."

By dwelling among us and within us, God the Holy Spirit unites us with the risen Christ in a more intimate way than if the Ascension had never happened. And so, we have not been abandoned by Christ, far from it, through the Holy Spirit, we are being carried by Christ to every dark corner of this fallen world to show the world what “good” truly means.

"...Which explains why Christ must not be just the good shepherd but something else as well, as He says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture.” (St. John 10:7-9). We need this part of Christ’s sermon to make sure we don’t confuse Jesus with all other men who have stepped forward to claim our souls for their world saving projects: the thieves and robbers who are wholly different from the God who became Man so we could be led through the valley of the shadow of death and into the green pastures—-feasting forever beside the waters of comfort. Jesus is revealing to His creatures that He is more than a Man: He is the sacred space in which heaven and earth come together, the place where, as Jesus says, “...heaven will open, and the angels of God will be ascending and descending...” (St. John 1:51). This kind of a leader is wholly different from all others we will experience in this broken world; here is a Master who will use every part of Himself to drag our fallen creation into the new world only He can recreate. The thieves and robbers of all ages—in their own way—hold out to us the hope for some new world just around the corner, all we must do is die for them in countless ways small and great. In contrast, Christ is that actual, new world in the flesh, and He will die for us to ensure it will come to pass. There lies the difference between our God/King and all the other rulers of men: thieves and robbers will gladly feed us to the wolves if it serves their schemes and plans, Christ lays His life down so that no wolf can ever truly hurt us. Only a shepherd who has died for His sheep is a shepherd worth dying for; this is what it means to be the Good Shepherd; this is what it costs."

St. John watched his Creator have the life strangled out of Him by His own creatures; St. John walked God’s mother home after seeing evil murder love on the Cross; St. John sat in the upper room while St. Peter cried in the corner, defeated and broken after betraying the Messiah, but St. John also saw death and chaos and uncreation vanquished forever in the resurrected eyes of His beloved Lord and God and friend.  He has seen the only One who has overcome the world, the only One who has overcome the great unraveling of God’s good creation we daily see in our own decay and eventual death.  Christ came and died to reverse this unraveling, and He did so by using our own evil against evil, by using our own darkness to make the true light shine brighter than a thousand stars.  How can we possibly continue our resistance against such alien and overwhelming power?  What victory can we possible hope to gain against a Father willing to send His Son to die in our place, a Son who volunteers for this terrible honor, and the Holy Spirit who unites our murderous, backward race to the very Godhead saving us? " For the full sermon text, click the link above