Sermons

And that is what makes the calling of Trinity Anglican Church so important to so many of us, not only to those within our mission, but also to those without a church or even their salvation. Just as St. Timothy’s little mission in Ephesus was called to great things, to leading a life of Christian evangelism and Christian discipline, our church is called to that same great life. As we remain faithful to Christ and to his teaching; as we remain steadfast in the Biblical worship of Christ’s church; as we refuse to accept dark nonsense, our own or anyone else’s, in place of the truth; we prove our Gospel ministry and the truth of the Gospel itself. Therefore, brethren, Christianity lived as a whole life chosen for us by God is the evangelism God has given us to do: Watch thou in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry. That is our duty, that is our calling, that is our share of the victory of Christ.

The church, on the other hand, is meant to be a lifeboat picking up men dying of exposure and thirst, dying of selfishness and greed, dying of loneliness and despair, but what happens when the modern church simply joins the choruses of the damned? What happens when the church forgets that her job is to drag the unwashed, sun-crazed victims of this world into her nurturing community? Well, people die.  When the church becomes a club or a social-welfare group or anything other than the other-worldly, sacrificial community described by St. Paul today, people die. That’s why it’s worth it to go to prison if that’s what it takes to preach the gospel, that’s why it’s worth it to be go without so that others may survive, that’s why it’s worth it to assassinate our pride in public acts of loving obedience to our Savior. We have been saved for a purpose, or we haven’t been saved at all; we are either in the boat groping for an oar through tears of gratitude, or we are still in the dark water barely keeping ourselves afloat.

And so, we pray for the incomprehensible power of God to save us from our brokenness, to fill us with the incomprehensible love of God revealed for 33 years in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and revealed every day by the church of Christ on her knees and on her feet trying to contain within ourselves the impossible fullness of God. This weight of glory can seem impossible to bear, but there is no one else to bear it. We have been called; we have been chosen to bear it, and we must. For, when we bear it, even if only for the moment of this brief life, we can finally understand that the power and love of God converge on the cross. There, the perfect plan of God and the best part of humanity came together to shout the great mystery of God’s love into the darkness. The mystery which proves that we are not God; the mystery which proclaims that God is bigger than all our dreams and knowledge, and His divine fullness is infinitely greater than anything we can contain. And yet, St. Paul prays that we be filled by this infinity, filled by the infinite and mysterious mercy of the God who would allow Himself to be murdered to save the world—a supernatural love seen in the Christian man or woman who embraces the mystery, chasing after it with everything they have, until the mystery of God’s love fully disarms us, until its majesty and glory force us to stand naked and without defense before the loving, consuming fire which will cleanse all, bring peace to all, and renew all. As we hear from the slaughtered lamb on His eternal throne in Revelation, ‘Behold I make all things new’ (Rev. 21:5). Just like our Lord on the cross, when we approach this mystery, it will kill us, but only in His death do we understand life, only in His death can we face the daily decay of our humanity and the destruction of all we love. We can take that death with joy, because the fallen world cannot strip us of the fullness of God’s righteousness and love placed in our souls by the blooded but unbroken victor of Calvary.

It is then the little ones, the children of Christ’s church, both physical and spiritual who in their seeming weakness are the perfect vessels for the manifestation of God’s glory. Hence Jesus’ words, ‘Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you, That in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven’ (St. Matthew 18:10). The children of God may not have tanks or missiles, and we may not run a hedge fund or pull upon the levers of state power, but we do have the angelic army of the Living God standing at the ready to avenge all who wrong us. For just as Christ chose the sacrifice and heroic weakness of the Cross to confound the world and its demonic prince, we can be just as assured that He will return with incorruptible strength and perfect power to set right what humanity has set wrong. Even now, thundering in the walls of His heavenly realm, Our Father, hears the cries of His oppressed children—wracked and mauled by the suffering of this fallen world; He hears, His angels hear, and there will come a glorious day when the whole world will hear the final battle chorus of the angelic host.

Now that Christ had ascended into heaven to offer Himself, once and for always, as the one sacrifice for the sins of the whole world, there was no more need for an earthly temple of sacrifice for sin. But there was a need for Christians to share in that one sacrifice of Christ, and for them to participate in Christ’s one offering of Himself by the sacrifice of their own lives to Him in praise and thanksgiving. In one sense, a Christian must and should do this everywhere and always, but Christianity because it is a Biblical religion, is not solitary, private, or a disembodied abstraction. Christianity is a religion of revelation, of the making visible of God’s good will and mercy, so that the Apostles constantly thought back to the Last Supper, where our Lord gathered them together, not only to teach them, but to institute the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, the Holy Communion with God, which continues as the making visible of our Lord’s death and our redemption from sin by His offering of Himself. In the Holy Communion, we participate in Christ’s one offering by receiving His Body and Blood, and by being His Body and Blood; and what the Holy Communion gives us, among other things, is a living, earthly picture and exhibit of the Temple not made with hands, of the holy place of God where Jesus Christ offers Himself to His Father for us. We see that in our church architecture: a picture of the holy of holies, and in our very theology of Holy Communion wherein the bread and wine act as holy instruments through which the Holy Spirit allows us to feast in Heaven with Christ in the Heavenly Holy of Holies described by Paul in Hebrews.

But, as we see today, joy is not everything. Give me joyful over jaded every day of the week, but joy is not the only part of the Christian life. How often do the apostles instruct us to be careful and wary of the dark forces which swirl all around us? Whether it's Paul telling us to put on the armor of light or St. Peter advising us to be on the lookout for the Devil as if we were on watch for a man-eating lion, our many enemies—both natural and supernatural—seek to glory in our ripped flesh, hot tears, and pain. The worst of these foes believe they are doing what’s best for us; they believe they are on the side of the angels but instead find themselves in the service of those fallen messengers of God who repeat again and again, ‘I will not serve.’ We saw a graphic depiction of this reality in the assassination of Mr. Charles Kirk. A number of the clergy at my conference this week were talking about the event and an argument broke out over whether Mr. Kirk was a martyr. That word, “martyr,” is our word after all; it is a Christian word, and it signifies someone who is a witness to the true faith unto death. There has always been a complicated relationship between martyrdom and politics. Jesus, by declaring Himself the Messiah, the new Davidic King of Israel, was making a theological statement which carried with it gigantic political ramifications for Judah and the Roman Empire. We see this reality in the words Pontius Pilate wrote over the crucified Jesus: “The King of the Jews”. Every Christian evangelist who followed Him brought Christianity to barbarous peoples who sacrificed humans to their demon gods, and with the Gospel, they brought a peace which cannot help but change a commonwealth, nation, a people. I believe we must look at the totality of Mr. Kirk’s work and see a man who helped bring thousands of young people to trust in Christ and was killed for that effort, and so it is appropriate to mourn Kirk as a martyr. Our response to a Christian martyrdom is to react as Christians. To know that Mr. Kirk in his death has gained life; to respond with the righteous anger which never forgets that our Lord is the Great Avenger of Evil (I encourage you to read Romans 12 this week); To pray we never become the thing we hate in our pursuit of justice and righteousness; and to build, to build the very thing our great enemy wants to destroy: to fill the earth with the faithful gathered in His church—worshipping and preparing. We must be on guard against evil, but do not let the assassin’s veto stop us from publicly sharing the truth which sets men free. All men die; we must live as men and women who die well and rise in glory.

Blessedly, the fate of the world does not lie in the hands of paper pushers and bureaucrats or kings and congressmen for that matter. St. Paul tells us that ‘our sufficiency is of God,’ and we see just that in today’s Gospel reading, where Jesus Christ, God the Son and Lord of Creation, heals human infirmity with the same creative power He used to spread forth the firmament of heaven. This public display is real power reshaping a world marred by our sinful rebellion. It wasn’t some law or rule which removed the silence imprisoning today’s deaf man; no, this fallen creature was healed by the recreative work of the God whose air we breathe, whose image we bear, and whose world He will not let us destroy. Jesus Christ embodies this greatest of news when He joins His image bearers in our suffering through the death of the cross. He shows His everlasting solidarity with all those mistreated by a fallen, evil world by fighting it with the weaponry of sacrificial love. God the Son doesn’t say, ‘I feel your pain,’ and move on to the next reward for the rich and powerful; no, He lived in our pain and sorrow until we killed Him, and then He rose from the grave to show us death’s pathetic weakness. He revealed a resurrected glory to live for rather than a condemnation to fear. It is His sacrifice which today gives meaning and hope to all those suffering under the boot of evil; it is His sacrifice which will soon bring everlasting peace and justice to all who seem crushed and forsaken—especially to those who seemed crushed or forsaken.

But how? How can we possibly keep fighting in our weakness and our fear, keep fighting as more and more pieces fall off of us and the losses pile all around us; we can keep going because of what St. Paul says next, “..I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own” (Phil. 3:12). It is, once again, the One who tells today’s parable who makes all things new and possible; it is Christ who transforms the cries of the truly penitent man into the first words of one truly free: a new creation finally able to raise his eyes to heaven as he carries his own cross to the next battle, the next sacrifice, the next chance to show thanksgiving for the One ‘whose property is always to have mercy.’ It is only in the service of Christ that our works can rise above insane boastings or manipulative power grabs—transformed through Him into the meaningful sacrifice of ourselves: the sweet smell which fills the heavens and pleases the divine.  It is only in Christ that we can live in a fallen world which would make us all tax collectors and harlots.

We too share in this inheritance as men and women adopted into the family of God and destined to rule in the world to come. Importantly, we must remember that this assured, future destiny is real and true in the here and now. Just as our Lord’s Supper is a real and true feasting at the table described today by our Lord, a real and true spiritual feast of Christ’s Body and Blood really and truly received by all those who embody the faithfulness of those scared and imperfect and glorious apostles preparing to change the world one heart at a time. It is in this way that we are filled with the righteousness and authority of the Earth’s true king. That King sends us forth to die well in His name, to die on a cross or skinned alive or broken by cancer or ripped apart in a car accident or asleep in the bed we assembled when we were once young. Christ sends us out into the world, and He knows we will not return to Him unscathed, but it is in the scars of service we collect, those wounds of divine, sacrificial love which mark the men and women who will inherit the future. A future not molded by impotent heathen rulers and their pathetic, boot-licking followers, but rather, a future redeemed from the best parts of what it means to be human: a future where the pain and suffering of the human experience will be drowned out forever by the angelic songs of love and joy we humans have spent so much of our existence ignoring.

Grasping this broader understanding of idolatry helps us to understand why St. Paul, the champion of freedom in Christ, insists that the people of God live their everyday lives in worship to the true God. As he tells the first Roman Christians, ‘I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God’ (Romans 12:1-2). St. Paul is showing us that the worship we conduct in this building is designed to strengthen us for the worship we offer to the Lord in our everyday lives of loving obedience and faithfulness. To be a follower of Christ, we must purge our minds of the toxic brainwashing of our culture and embrace the sacrificial love most perfectly shown on the cross and in the 33 years God the Son lived through the daily humiliations of being human in a fallen world. The way we most perfectly follow Christ is to live our lives as a worshipful sacrifice to the Father. That means we do not just worship for an hour on Sunday; no, it means we are always worshipfully sacrificing. When we awake in the morning, until we lay down to sleep, every activity—at our work or in our leisure—needs to be considered a part of our necessary worship of the God who hasn’t just saved us for an hour on Sunday but has saved us for every minute of every day.