A Homily for The Sunday Next Before Advent

November 24, 2019

All Saints Anglican Church, Prescott, AZ

 

Text: Jeremiah 3:14-18

 

Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in thy sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

 

            This morning we end our year of studying the Old Testament. I hope and pray that you’ve seen God acting consistently throughout all times, you have seen that it is not as though there is one God in the Old Testament and another in the New, as some have said, but rather that there are two covenants, the first foretelling the second and God’s actions in those are thoroughly consistent. You have seen prophecies about Christ, you have seen types or foreshadows of Christ in some of those who came before him. You have, I pray, seen how important the Old Testament is to the Christian faith.

            After this morning we will shift our focus to the gospel accounts. As we study these, It is my prayer that we will grow in our knowledge of Christ, grow in knowing our prophet, priest, and king, grow in knowing our Lord and savior and draw into a deeper relationship with him.

            This morning we end with the words of the prophet Jeremiah. Our short reading is packed with significance for us as Christians as we enter into the season of Advent, the season of preparing for our coming king, but it is also packed with significance for us as a small but growing church.

            Jeremiah sits at the cusp of the fall of Jerusalem. Someone once told me  if we were to summarize Jeremiah into one sentence it would be “you will be taken but, even in that, God will remain faithful to His people.” The promise to Israel through Jeremiah, isn’t so much that they will be okay – but that God’s judgment will finally fall upon them. However bleak the judgment may seem at that point in time, God is always faithful to His people, His judgement upon His people is always to draw them back, to encourage them to repent and cease trusting in false gods.

            For Israel – and for many people – the temptation seems to be towards idolatry, I have been reading a little bit about idolatry recently and it is interesting both Jewish theologians around Christ’s time and St. Paul saw the same downward spiral in people who committed idolatry – for the Jewish thinkers and teachers the cause was a failure to rationalize ones self to the one true God, for St. Paul it was not a failed intellectual ascent, but God’s judgment upon the idolater.

            Yet, both of them saw the same pattern, idolatry leads to greater and greater sin. So, for the historic nation of Israel in the Old Testament it started with idolatry but then lead into social injustice, lead to treating people poorly, it lead to rampant sexual immorality, and it lead to corruption and wickedness within individuals and within society. For this reason Jeremiah cries out – return, O faithless children! Return to the Lord who is good, who provides, who will care for you and all your needs, return to Him who is your master. 

            This call to repentance is never an allowance or acceptance of their sin, but a reminder of the cost of their depravity, a call to turn away from it. We live in a time and place where it is unseemly to talk about sin, unseemly to call darkness dark. We do no one any favors by pretending that which is wrong is right, though we also must remember that we are all sinners set free by the grace of God. We must call sin what it is – death – but we must do out of love, not out of a sense of self-righteousness, or unkindness. While we call what is wrong – wrong, and what is right – right, let us also be beacons of hope, and healing, for there is a tremendous amount of pain and hopelessness in the world.

            One of my favorite descriptions of repentance comes from the Anglican theologians J.I. Packer – perhaps simply because I enjoy listening to his grandfatherly British acce

A Homily for Trinity XXII

November 17, 2019

All Saints Anglican Church, Prescott, AZ

 

Text: Isaiah 66

 

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be always acceptable in thy sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

 

            For whatever reason, when I’m thinking about the season of Advent I tend to confuse it with Lent, not anything about the actual season but the words themselves. Perhaps it is because both seasons are purple, perhaps because they rhyme, or perhaps because they are similar in nature. But where in Lent we are repenting and drawing towards our need for our death to self to be reborn in Christ, in Advent we are preparing – preparing to remember Christ’s incarnation, preparing our hearts to be a continual dwelling place for Christ, and preparing with joy-filled expectation for the return of Christ.

            In two weeks we’ll enter into this season of Advent, which in our prayer book and lectionary it starts the new church year. I have often thought of the church year as being a lot like breathing, it provides life to the church but it just sort of happens, and if you don’t pay attention the year goes by without much thought. It is easy enough to sit in the pew and never really notice it. Realistically, there’s not much you need to do about it, just check the calendar and the next day comes. Yet, to cut the church year out, is to lose a beautiful opportunity walk through the life of Christ, to prepare for his birth, remembering his childhood, his ministry, his own preparation for his death, the last supper, his death itself, and his rising again, then we learn again to live as the spirit endowed church, and to look forward to Christ’s return.

The calendar gives the opportunity to reflect Christ’s life, and to meditate upon in. As Advent approaches we look forward to his birth. Yet – we don’t simply look back, as we prepare our mind, souls, and bodies for our celebration of the birth of Christ we also celebrate and recommit ourselves to Christ coming into our lives. Finally, we look forward to the return of Christ.

Last week we asked ourselves the pertinent question – do we long for Christ’s return?

As we read the lessons and come closer to Advent and into the season itself, you will notice that the lessons start to look more and more eagerly forward to this coming of Christ, this completion of the kingdom of heaven, when all will be made right, when “all flesh shall come to worship before (the Lord).” So, this is why we’ve turned our eyes to the prophets in the last few weeks of our year in the Old Testament. This is why each lesson lately seems to be doubling down on the last and drawing us closer to this eager expectation of the return of Christ. This is why we are being reminded again, and again to pray “come Lord Jesus, come.” 

In our Christian sub-culture we don’t often talk about the return of Christ. I think this is another one of those side effects of modernism or perhaps of the abundance in which we live, though I am less sure than on other subjects, but if you think about it, it makes sense. The return of Christ first means a disruption of our modern comforts, and an entrance into something unknown. It is also a stumbling block for the knowledgeable. It is supernatural and as such it does not fit into Bultmann’s schema of demythization.

But the return of Christ has been the hope of the Church since its inception, the return of Christ is the hope and prayer of the martyrs who cry out, “how long oh Lord, how long!” The return of Christ is the hope of all those who suffer for the kingdom’s sake, the return of Christ is the fulfilment of his promise for all those who seek to live the beatitudes, the return of Christ is the hope of the poor in spirit, the persecuted, the humble and humbled, the return of Christ is our hope, and so we join the martyrs in that great pleading song and prayer and ask “how long O Lord, how long.”

And why is that?

This morning we get

Homily for 19 Trinity

October 27, 2019

All Saints Anglican Church, Prescott, AZ

 

Text: Jeremiah 30:12-22

 

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be always acceptable in thy sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

 

 

            This morning Jeremiah paints a picture of stark hopelessness in the first four verses of our reading. A picture that would lead anyone to despondency if it were addressed to them. In this, we remember when enter into the mystery of pain any number of things can lead us to that.

There are three reasons that come to mind – first the providence of God is one reason we may suffer – in the moment of suffering we may not know  why things are as hard as they are, but we know they are hard. The book of Job gives us an example of this. All we know is that Satan walked into the heavenly court and threw down the gauntlet and God accepted it. Job was innocent. Despite the protests of his wife and miserable friends there was no reason for him to feel such pain. Rather – we learn from the Book of Job that God is sovereign, and though we may travel through valleys of darkness God does not abandon us, and through our suffering God is glorified.

Or we may suffer because of the sin of others. We can think of both large cultural suffering or personal suffering that has been brought on not by our own wickedness but because someone has opted to do something wicked to us. Joseph, outside of Christ, is the best example of this in scripture. He did not deserve to be sold into slavery, he did not deserve to be cast into jail, and yet he did.

Christ, of course, is the ultimate example of suffering for someone else’s sin. Christ was the perfect person, and yet he died the most shameful death. And what do we do with this kind of suffering? We are called to a posture of humility and joyfulness – which is harder than it sounds – but if Christ suffered so darkly – how can we expect any better than our Lord?

And what of the pain that comes out of it? It is Christ who can heal our pain, our shame, our heart ache.  This is not some empty promise, but a real and active promise – St. Gregory of Nazaianzus summarized it best when he wrote “that which he has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His God head is also saved. If only half of Adam fell, then that which Christ assumes and saves may be half also; but the whole of his nature fell, it must be united to the whole nature of Him that was begotten, and so be saved as a whole.”

St. Gregory is arguing for the reality of the incarnation of Christ – that Christ is fully man and fully God – but the incarnation is practical for our salvation, redemption, and healing. It is not as though Christ came and set us free, and was like the deist’s clockmaker God, and said “welp, that’s enough,” and walked away. No, Christ actively heals those pains. For Christ experienced loss of friends, experienced betrayal, experienced slander, experienced deep and dreadful shame. If we give these pains to Christ – Christ is capable of healing even the darkest struggles of our hearts. For he assumed a fully human experience in order to bear the darkness and pain that humanity all too often experiences.

The author of Hebrews further affirms this when he wrote “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.” In other words, Christ fully knows what it is to be human, yet lived perfectly, and can therefore bring every heartache, joy, pain, love, tear, laughter, sorrow, and delight before the heavenly throne, and in that he can heal us and bring us to the deepest of joy.

My friends, if you are struggling from bitterness, anxiety, or pain from past hurts – I know it may seem impossible – but give those pains to Christ – he can and will heal them. It may take time, it may take hard conversations with brothers and sisters in Christ – it may take yea

A Homily for 18 Trinity, 2019

October 20, 2019

All Saints Prescott, AZ

 

Text: Amos 8:4-12

 

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be always acceptable in thy sight, O Lord my strength and my redeemer. Amen.

 

            One of my favorite poets from the last century is Robert Frost. His poetic observations of the world have long inspired me to be more thoughtful about how I live. One of his lesser known poems is called “Departmental” and reads as follows:

An ant on the tableclothRan into a dormant mothOf many times his size.He showed not the least surprise.His business wasn't with such.He gave it scarcely a touch,And was off on his duty run.Yet if he encountered oneOf the hive's enquiry squadWhose work is to find out GodAnd the nature of time and space,He would put him onto the case.Ants are a curious race;One crossing with hurried treadThe body of one of their deadIsn't given a moment's arrest-Seems not even impressed.But he no doubt reports to anyWith whom he crosses antennae,And they no doubt reportTo the higher-up at court.Then word goes forth in Formic:"Death's come to Jerry McCormic,Our selfless forager Jerry.Will the special JanizaryWhose office it is to buryThe dead of the commissaryGo bring him home to his people.Lay him in state on a sepal.Wrap him for shroud in a petal.Embalm him with ichor of nettle.This is the word of your Queen."And presently on the sceneAppears a solemn mortician;And taking formal position,With feelers calmly atwiddle,Seizes the dead by the middle,And heaving him high in air,Carries him out of there.No one stands round to stare.It is nobody else's affairIt couldn't be called ungentleBut how thoroughly departmental

 

            Frost is not lamenting ants but the way in which we tend to departmentalize what we do. He is lamenting our cultural struggle to be whole people. This morning we heard a stark reminder from the prophet Amos that we cannot departmentalize our lives.

 

It is always interesting and a little challenging to preach these portions of the prophets, because it would be very easy to slip into works righteousness. That is to say, it would be very easy from this text to say “you must care for the poorest and most vulnerable around you in order to be saved.” Yet, we are saved by grace, through faith in Christ. So, how do we understand this passage?

            First – we must recognize that our behavior is bad – while it is possible that we can perform virtuous acts without Christ, if we created a balance sheet, we would see our thoughts and actions do not line up with the perfection of God. We fall far short of his glory.             

            Secondly – it reminds us of the importance of the law – it is the law that condemns us. We read the Decalogue once a month so that we can see our lives spelled out in front of it. We can see our need to repent, the need to cry out to God “Lord have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law.” Incline our hearts to keep them because so often we are inclined to buck against them fiercely – in thought, word, and deed.

Likewise, when we read something like this, it should convict us – to repentance, and to a renewed trust in Christ. So, in that repentance we are set free from our sin, but called to something deeper, called to love better. Ultimately, we should be made uncomfortable when we read the prophets, but we should also recognize that we are freed by grace, and as our lives are transformed by that grace we are called to a sanctified life.

            That is the baseline from which we will jump off of, the prophets should convict us, call us to repentance, call us to a deeper trust in Jesus, and call us to love as Christ loved.

            Now, who is Amos? On the surface he was blessed to live in a time of prosperity – Syria had become besieged by the Assyrians, and as such their assault on Israel had stopped. This allowed Israel to flourish.

            But in this flourishing they became w