Every Lent, my parish—Saint Paul’s, New Smyrna Beach—offers what we call “Lent Friday Worship.” The weekly festivity begins with Plainsong Evensong, and then is followed by Stations of the Cross, Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, then to the parish hall for a community meal, and Rector Forum given by yours truly.

This year I am focusing on the Epistle of Saint James. The aim is, by the end of Lent, to go through all of it, line by line, offering my reflective commentary along the way. And to aid the commentary I offer, I will also be consulting and sharing the commentary on this Epistle by the Venerable S. Bede, the great English Church Father.

This Session 1 covers the background of James and the Epistle, and then looks at the first eleven verses of chapter 11. Those verses are below.

CHAPTER 1

1 James, a bondservant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,

To the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad:

Greetings.

2 My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, 3 knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. 4 But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.

5 If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to him. 6 But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind. 7 For let not that man suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; 8 he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.

9 Let the lowly brother glory in his exaltation, 10 but the rich in his humiliation, because as a flower of the field he will pass away. 11 For no sooner has the sun risen with a burning heat than it withers the grass; its flower falls, and its beautiful appearance perishes. So the rich man also will fade away in his pursuits.

Almighty and everlasting God, Who hatest nothing that Thou hast made and dost forgive the sins of all those who are penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of Thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

O Lord God, Who hast taught us that all our doings without charity are nothing worth: Send Thy Holy Ghost, and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the very bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whosoever lives is counted dead before Thee: Grant this for Thine only Son Jesus Christ’s sake, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the same Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

Last Sunday’s sermon finished with these words: In addition to the liturgical life and the Sacraments, the Church has always taught of the necessity of examining our conscience, and doing so regularly. Preparing for Lent is a time to examine our conscience. It is a time to take inventory about ourselves. It is a time to take inventory about our habits, and whether we have unholy habits, unholy vices, that keep us from being good soil. To borrow from Saint John: If we say we have no vices, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our vices, God who is faithful and just will uproot from us our vices, and cleanse us from the unrighteousness of our vices.

Today, on the Sunday before Lent, the Church sets before us the subject of charity, the older translation of the more modern word “love.” The Church does this to remind us that all works of repentance, of turning to God, are not of Christ unless they begin and end in the love of God. This is why our Lord teaches us not to “pleasantly regard” God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, all our strength, but to love Him. And for holy doctrine on love, let us turn to our patron, Saint Paul, and 1 Cor. 13.

It has been said that the thirteenth chapter of Saint Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians is the most important chapter of the Bible. The reason such a high claim is made about this chapter, which is our Epistle reading today, is that it teaches us two fundamental things. The first is that it teaches profoundly about Jesus Christ and Him Crucified. And the second is that it teaches us how to respond to Christ’s blessed Passion and precious Death. In understanding Paul’s holy doctrine of love, we know more about Christ and we know more about ourselves—more about our Saviour and about being His disciples—more about our King and about what it means to be crowned—about the Perfect Love of Jesus to which we aspire to imitate in our lives every day.

We know that Paul’s doctrine of love teaches about Jesus Christ and Him crucified because, as Paul says of love, “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” This describes perfectly our Lord, Who bore all our sins on the Cross, believed all that His Father had given Him, hoped for the salvation of all, and endured spitting, mocking, torture, and disbelief in Him all while keeping in Himself the peace which passes all understanding. In support of this, we have Saint John, who said, “God is love.” The Father is love, the Son of God is love, the Holy Ghost is love. And we know that Jesus is Himself the perfect pattern of love again from Saint John, who records our Lord saying, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” We are His friends, because all that Jesus heard from His Father He has made known to us.

As Paul’s doctrine on love teaches us about Jesus, his doctrine teaches us about ourselves as disciples of Jesus. Again our Lord’s commandment: “Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and … that Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” We are to love the Father and we are to love our neighbor. In both cases we are to imitate our Lord’s love for the Father and our Lord’s love for every human being. No matter what words we say, without love we are nothing. No matter what wisdom and knowledge we might have, without love we are nothing. No matter what we do, even if we give our body to be burned, if we do not have love, we are nothing. This is simply to say with with love we have life in the Holy Spirit, but without love we are spiritually dead, as if we never knew of Jesus, nor He us. Jesus told the five foolish virgins “I do not know you” and shut the door to them because they did not have love and perform acts of mercy, acts of love, in their life.

In hearing and reflecting upon the profound account given us about love in the example of Jesus Christ, we may well feel overwhelmed at our great lack of it, as we come to fathom what true love is, and measure ourselves by Our Lord’s perfect pattern. Our great relief now, in Lent, and all our days is to understand that we live in Him: so we with confidence and humility look to Christ in prayer; in prayer with regard to every particular of our daily short-comings; and what we derive from examining our vices and sins, and thus our falling short of Christ’s expectation of us. In Christ we have the assurance that if we are faithful in Him and genuine in our desire to follow Him, to put off our old man and put on the new garments of Christ, if we are like the blind man who simply cried out to Jesus and said, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me,” He will hear us. Jesus Christ has taught us that all our doings without love, without charity, are worth nothing; with love we can move mountains. So Almighty Father and our God, send Your Holy Ghost upon us, and pour into our hearts the gift of Christ’s mercy, the gift of divine love, which is the true bond of peace and all virtues—strengthen Christ in our hearts, that we may continue to conceive in our hearts the Eternal Word of the Father, Jesus Christ, Who lives and reigns with the same Father and the same Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

We have heard the parable of the Sower and the Seeds many time. It bears asking, why does our Lord Jesus give us emphasis in His parable of the Seeds and the Sower to the material into which the seed is planted? He not only lists the different material in sequence – path, rock, thorns, and good soil – but He attaches specific symbolism to each one, which we see in His explanation to the disciples. Jesus is at pains to specify the differences in the material that receive the Word of God. Why is He at such pains? What is He after? Does He want the Word of God to be received on path, rock, or thorns? Clearly He does not. He wants the Seed to be received by good soil. So we need to think deeply on this.

Towards doing so, let us remember that the purpose of the three Gesima Sundays is to prepare us for Lent. To prepare us to take on what Lent is all about. And what Lent is all about is the inner world of the heart, where unseen warfare happens between the Devil and the Holy Angels, even the Devil and Christ Himself.

What the Gesima season invites us to recognize is that to fully attend to the unseen warfare, we must go on pilgrimage: indeed, that the spiritual life is a pilgrimage to the heart, and through the heart to Jesus Christ, and through Christ to the Father. The pilgrimage of Pre-Lent is a call to spiritual labor, through which we must love our Lord Jesus Christ, Who is our strength, our Saviour, our fortress. Hence we ask in our Collect, grant that by Thy power we may be defended against all adversity. It is Christ Who defends us. It is Christ Who shields us. It is Christ Who takes us under His wing and protects us.

We must take comfort in Christ’s protection, my dear brothers and sisters. Who else can protect us? Who else by Christ has the words of eternal life which shield us from our adversaries? And it is through taking comfort in Christ’s protection that we can allow ourselves to be vulnerable before Him. Being vulnerable before Christ means we recognize our weaknesses – it means we recognize our failings – our shortcomings – our reliance on vices, what the New Testament writers call “passions,” and are our unholy habits of thought and action. It is because of our vices that we are led to commit sin. Vices lead to sins that we commit, either in the action of our mind or in outward deeds. This is how we must understand our weakness: unholy habits are rooted deeply in us, and we cannot help ourselves.

We need Jesus Christ. Only a Saviour can rescue us. Only a Saviour can uproot our unholy habits by His grace and by His transforming Holy Spirit. To be a sinner is to be a person who is aware that he or she is in need of a Saviour. This is humility, this is being reality-based: we cannot save ourselves, we cannot uproot our unholy habits that lead to committing sin without Jesus Christ, Who is our only Saviour, and the Saviour of all who put their trust in Him and Him alone.

To have that attitude, to have that outlook, to be reality-based as a way of life, is the attitude and outlook of humility and all Christians aspire to attaining this attitude and outlook. We do not start there after our Baptism. We must grow spiritually to attain that attitude, as our everyday attitude; we must grow spiritually after Baptism to attain that outlook, as our everyday outlook. Baptism is necessary as the first step towards dying to self and taking on the resurrected life of Christ as our own life, but we must be trained, disciplined, and made fit for true humility.

This is what our Lord is after in His parable of the Seed and the Sower. We are all striving to be good soil. We are striving to be those who, after hearing the Word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patience. The Church teaches we can get there in this life, we can become good soil through the liturgical and sacramental life of worship in the Church. But often we are not the good soil, but may be the thorns, who hear the Word, but as soon as they go on their way the are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, so their fruit does not mature. We may even be on the rock, who are joyful when they hear the Word, but because they do not have root, when they are tested by life they lose the Word and fall away from Him. We even might be on the path, who hear the Word, but the Devil comes and takes away the Word from their hearts, because they have not learned how to reject the Devil’s invitations, and have rather suffer from all sorts of vices that they have yet to ask God to remove.

And so, in addition to the liturgical life and the Sacraments, the Church has always emphasized the importance of examining our conscience, and doing so regularly. Preparing for Lent is a time to examine our conscience. It is a time to take inventory about ourselves. It is a time to take inventory about our habits, and whether we have unholy habits, unholy vices, that keep us from being good soil. to borrow from Saint John: If we say we have no vices, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our vices, God who is faithful and just will forgive us our vices, and cleanse us from the unrighteousness of our vices. All of this through Jesus Christ, Who lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

Almighty and everliving God, we humbly beseech Thy majesty: that, as Thy only-begotten Son was this day presented in the temple in substance of our flesh, so we may be presented unto Thee with pure and clean hearts; through the same Jesus Christ Thy Son our Lord. Amen.

As we are using the traditional Western lectionary for our worship on Sundays and Holy Days, we have come upon that portion of the liturgical year known as “Gestimatide.” The purpose is to both lift up the eyes of our soul to Easter in the distance, and prepare us for the Lent and the disciplines of reading Scripture, prayer, self-denial, and fasting. It is to move our liturgical contemplation and prayer for the season of Epiphany (which is focused on the manifestation in our midst of God the Son, Jesus Christ, fully God and fully Man) towards the focus of Lent, which emphasizes the inner world of the heart, where unseen warfare happens between the Devil and God’s Holy Angels, even the Devil and Christ Himself.

What the pre-Lent season of Gestimatide invites us to recognize is that to fully attend to the unseen warfare, we must go on pilgrimage: indeed, that the spiritual life is a pilgrimage to the heart, and through the heart to Jesus Christ. The three Gesima Sundays function as a call to pilgrimage, a call to spiritual labor, always a pilgrimage and labour of love, and of loving our Lord Jesus Christ, Who is our strength, our Saviour, our fortress.

This emphasis on pilgrimage comes out in the short passage from 1st Corinthians chapter 9. He speaks of spiritual pilgrimage as a race, and Paul wants us to run the race that we might obtain the prize. The prize is being crowned in the glory of heaven; the prize is that upward call to life eternal in heaven, receiving the same crown as the Saints have already received. That crown is the imperishable wreath Paul speaks of. And so we must run this race, says Saint Paul, and the way we run the race is through discipline of the body and self-control. Every athlete, he says, exercises self-control in all things. So should every disciple. Whereas disciplined self-control by athletes involves muscles and joints, disciplined self-control by Christians involves the heart, and seeks to open the eyes of the heart, open them and keep them open.

This is because we are frail creatures living in a fallen world; we live among the unholy angels which have fallen to our state of existence, and we are everywhere surrounded by evil and temptation. In this fallen world our hearts are often blind. Blindness of the heart is what the Church calls the inability to perceive the divine presence of God among us, and inability to understand the truth about God and our relationship with Him. From time to time, we all suffer from this condition. We all can suffer from blindness of heart in our lives. And this is because, living as fallen creatures in a fallen world, we make choices that separate ourselves from the grace of God, and this can lead to being plagued by vice and sin.

Part of preparing for Lent is being sober about the human condition, and especially sober about oneself. Vices, or what is called in the biblical literature “passions,” are unholy habits of thought and action. We all have them, and often our vices are so deeply rooted that we have a very difficult time uprooting them. We are plagued by vice, and we are plagued by sin. Sin is where we knowingly act, whether in deed or even in action of our mind, in a way contrary to God’s will. We all sin, and often our sin is a product of the vices we have, our unholy habits. To be sober about ourselves is to be reality-based, and being reality-based is one of the definitions of humility. As Saint John so piercingly wrote: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” And, he could have added, “If we say we have no vice, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” But Saint John immediately adds, “If we confess our sins, God Who is faithful and just, will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

This is why we are given the Parable of the Vineyard on this first Sunday of Gesimatide. There is much symbolism to it. The vineyard symbolizes the task of following God’s commandments. The labour symbolizes our present life. The labourers represent people that in different ways are called to the fulfillment of God’s commandments. And by different ways, it means they are called in different times of their life: some recognize their call early in their life; some in the middle of their life; and others closer to the end of their life. The grumbling that is described as coming from the mouths of those hired first represent the vices of indignance, of envy, of jealousy, and the like; all of which are related to pride and forms of it. These are very ordinary vices, and these are common to the experience of the Christian life. The vast majority of Christians do not suffer from spectacular vice and sin; rather, the vast majority of Christians are very unspectacular and boring in their pride.

As the Venerable S. Bede teaches, among the words of faith humility reigns in a special way. What counters pride and prideful vice is faith in God and trust in His goodness, trust that His goodness will deliver us, will save us, from our vice and sin. With our faith in God strong and our trust in Him full, our life in Christ becomes humble, recognizing that we depend on God for everything: our very life, all good things that we do, even every breath we take – all depends upon God and on Him alone. To know this is humility. What counters pride and prideful vice is trust Christ and loving Christ, and seeing Him as our strength: seeing Him as our rock: seeing Him as our defense: seeing Him always as our Saviour, Jesus Christ, Who always hears our voice, for He is God, He is our Rock, He Who dwells in us and we in Him, and Who lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

O God, Who, by the preaching of Thine apostle Paul, hast caused the light of the Gospel to shine throughout the world: Grant, we beseech Thee, that we, having his wonderful conversion in remembrance, may show forth our thankfulness unto Thee for the same by following the holy doctrine which he taught; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Brothers and sisters, today we hear of transformation. Saint John tells us of a miracle, indeed his first one. Our Lord Jesus Christ performed a miracle in which water is transformed into wine: delicious wine, not the stuff that gets you drunk and gives you a headache the next day (or worse), but what is immediately recognized as good wine. What our Lord Jesus Christ did, He did at Cana in Galilee, and in doing so, He manifested His glory. And it made His disciple believe more in Him, for we are told by Saint John the beloved disciple, “His disciples believed in Him.” Even here, we see Saint John teaching us that in receiving the Eucharist, our belief in Christ should increase, for we know His power is in us.

Saint John relates this Miracle at Cana in the second chapter of his Gospel account. The disciples are following Jesus because of the amazing word of endorsement proclaimed by Saint John the Baptist, which takes up much of the first chapter. The disciples had heard John Baptist’s testimony: “Behold the Lamb of God, Who takes away the sin of the world” – the very same testimony which calls us to receive Christ in the Sacrament of His Humanity called the Eucharist. John Baptist gave more testimony about Jesus: “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and He remained upon Him.” The Holy Spirit had told John Baptist this would happen, and it indeed did happen. And John said, “I have seen and testified that this is the Son of God.” At the time of the Miracle of Cana, the disciples embraced Jesus because John the Baptist called Him the Lamb of God, Who takes away the sin of the world – which means Jesus is the Lamb of God, Who removes all separation between us at the God the Father, maker of heaven and earth.

Jesus said to His disciples that He would make them fishers of men. John the Baptist’s testimony had caught fish. By the mere teaching of the Lamb of God, John had reeled in Saint Andrew, Saint John the Evangelist, Saint Peter, Saint Philip, and Saint Bartholomew (who is also named Nathanael). Ancient church tradition also indicates that Saint Simon (often called the Zealot) was present as well at the Wedding of Cana – indeed that Simon was from Cana, and was the bridegroom at the wedding where the Saviour performed this miracle of transformation; that after witnessing the miracle of the water turned into wine, he became a zealous follower of Christ, and for this reason is known as Saint Simon the Zealot. That Saint Simon in his discipleship of Jesus was zealous, or full of zeal, for Christ made him full of the Holy Spirit. In changing water into wine, He changed the water of Simon’s ordinary life into the wine of divine love.

The 19th century Anglican divine Father John Keble preached these words about the wedding at Cana: “The turning water into wine at a marriage feast, came first among our Lord’s mighty works: why was it, as S. John calls it, the beginning of miracles? It was so, because it was in a special way a sample, a taste, a glimpse, of that power which is at the bottom of all miracles: the power which keeps up the ordinary course of the world, and works such astonishing changes in it.” Then he added: “When we think of this marriage feast in Cana, let it put us in mind that Jesus Christ is in our feasts, is with us wherever we are, and in all that we do, turning our water into wine, our earth into heaven, if we prevent Him not by our sins.”

Let us be the water that Christ turns into wine. Let us be changed from odorless, ordinary water to sweet-smelling wine of heavenly vintage. Let us be transformed by Christ from our old selves of sin into our new life in unity with Christ. Let us allow the Holy Spirit to show the transformative power of Christ to the world through the examples of our own lives. As Paul said in 2nd Corinthians 2: Let us be “the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing.” Let us be known for the love we show to our fellow Christians, and to the world: let us be transformed, let us allow Christ’s miracle happen in our hearts, so that, just as all gathered in Cana for the wedding knew of Christ’s power and glory, that through us, and through our zeal for knowing and loving Jesus Christ, the world knows Christ and sees the glory of Christ, Who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

O God, Who didst bestow upon Thy blessed Apostle Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven, and didst appoint unto him the high priesthood for binding and loosing: vouchsafe, that by the help of his intercession we may be delivered from the bonds of our iniquities; Who livest and reignest with Thee, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.