Sermons

In fact, it is this supreme gift of our regeneration which shines brighter than any star. For we were not made for the stars; the stars were made for us. And the God who made them, the God who never changes, the God who always keeps His promises, has remade His reborn children of grace into vessels fit to explore and enjoy the heavens. God displays the utter goodness of His will in saving undeserving creatures who will fill the new Heaven and new Earth, the new Mars and the new Alpha Centauri. The closer the Word of truth is to our hearts, the closer we are to these bright, undiscovered countries. The Resurrected Son of God has already shown that death itself is not strong enough to stop the light, not strong enough to contain the good and perfect gift of everlasting life. We will need it, for you and I have so much to do, so much to accomplish on the bright shores of eternity. We will build and create and love and feast surrounded by the fruit born of surviving even the darkest moments of this fallen world’s rebellion. We are the fruit of His harvest and glory beckons. May we never fail to answer the call.

Blessedly, when Jesus sees these weak and scared men gathered around Him, He sees so much more than the worst sins of their life. He certainly sees what these men are in their worst moments, but He also sees what these men will become; He knows what great works the Holy Spirit will do through them; He knows the mountains they will climb and the riots they will start; He knows the empires they will tear down and the hearts they will break and remake for the love of the Lord whose name no torture will be able to tear from their lips. As Jesus prays to His heavenly Father in the next chapter, “[My disciples] are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth. I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word…” (St. John 17:16-20). When Jesus looks into the eyes of His apostles, He sees every generation of Christian who will rise from their witness even as the world tries to crush them in its malice and wickedness. 

What does this mean in practice?  It means no Christian is ever truly a victim. We live in a world in which people actively seek victimhood, or at least the status of a victim. From people who live in a state of luxury that would be the envy of Babylonian kings complaining about the most insignificant things in their lives to the various groups of people seeking cultural power by casting themselves as the victims of all those around them, we see our fellow Americans wear their victimized statuses on their sleeves like some kind of inverted military rank. Into this maelstrom of privilege and practiced victimhood, St. Peter proclaims a different, radical approach to human suffering. By patiently enduring the worst our fellow humans can throw at us—suffering we do not deserve—the Christian embraces an opportunity to show the uniqueness of what it means to have Christ as our master.

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.

Today’s Gospel reading drops us in the terror and blood and shame of our planet’s worst and greatest moment. If another 2,000 years pass before the eyes of the children of men, no series of days will scream with the birth pangs of the new heaven and new earth like what we hear and feel during the solemn recitation of our Lord’s passion and death. The Man who wronged no one, the Man who represented the best of us—the living, breathing symbol of what Mankind was created to be—was tortured and suffocated for the sake of money and power and lies. We often look for meaning in the violence and savagery of Man, but those of us who have spent any time walking with Christ from the dark trial of the Sanhedrin to the unjust halls of Pontius Pilate’s palace to the place of the skull to the indignity of being hanged on a tree and buried in another man’s tomb, we know evil endures not by logic or reason, beauty or truth, but rather, with fear and pain and sorrow.

In the end, our Lord never backs down from the challenges of the crowd even knowing that revealing who He truly is would drive them into a murderous rage. Jesus will not lie about who He is, and so He tells them what they are not ready to hear: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am” (St. John 8:58). Jesus explicitly places himself outside of time, as the Lord of time, as the very being of everlasting timelessness, and the only being who exists outside of time (because He created time) is God. And how does mankind respond to this great moment of contact between the divine and human, a moment in which Man and his Creator might finally engage in thoughtful dialogue and perhaps find peace? The crowd responds to this earth-shattering revelation by picking up the stones lying around the still unfinished temple and throwing them at the God for whom the temple was being built. The creation Christ has come to save responds to His glorious Advent by trying to murder him without trial like an animal. These soldiers in the war between God and Man did their part and almost killed the God they said they loved, but Jesus’ mission to save mankind, culminating in the cross and the empty tomb, is on the Trinity’s time table, and so Jesus departs from the crowd until all things are made ready for the great sacrifice of Good Friday and the great victory of Easter morning.

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 St. 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.

So, maybe before we look askance at St. Paul and think we modern people have all this figured out, we should recognize that we stand fairly well condemned as a nation, as a people, and as a society before the sexual ethic God reveals in His Word. The great tragedy of our settling for smut, one-night stands, and pretend marriages is what we are giving up. Against the common slander often leveled against Christians, St. Paul doesn’t tell us to be ashamed of the true love that glorifies God and man. Instead of shame and guilt, we are to replace our desire for darkened conversations and our hunger for sexually compromised stories with “thanksgiving.” Instead of using the destructive sins of others or ourselves to numb us to the real terrors of the fallen world, we are called to give thanks for the real love God has placed in our lives. And, I don’t even mean just that of a sexual nature. Our culture’s dreary focus on sex as the thing that most defines one as a person has robbed us of the joy of friendship: real, self-giving friendship between people who have no ulterior motives, real friendship that seeks nothing but to give and give and give some more because we recognize that whatever we give of ourselves in this world will pale in comparison to what we have and will receive from the Lord of the Ages. This far richer tapestry of love, most perfectly represented by God the Son loving humanity as we murdered him on a cross, will always be more complicated and alien to us than the simple slogans and suffocating half-truths of our enemies, but the people of God must not trade the beautiful colors of that lush tapestry for the monochromatic dreariness of a cheap motel towel. We are called to live our lives in color, in communion, and in thanksgiving.  St. Paul wants us to choose the tapestry, not the towel.

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.