In homiletic textbooks (these are books on how to preach), they often say that a good sermon has three main points: an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. Then they break this down even further and say that the body of the sermon likewise should have three and only three points, and if you’re really skilled, the beginning of each point will be alliterative. In contrast to this model for a good sermon, I only have one point to make this morning, and this is all the introduction you are going to get.

My point is right there on the screen: We are all sinners. Full stop.

Now, I have a pretty good suspicion about what just happened inside most of your heads. Some of you said to yourself, “Well, of course, I’m a sinner.” Ok, that’s a good start. The problem is that I don’t believe you actually think that. Meanwhile, some of you said, “Well, yeah, I still sin, but….” No buts. No what-about. We are all sinners.

But here’s the good news: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, to save people like you and me. Look at what Paul says:

The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.

Do you really think Paul was the foremost of sinners? Let’s just consider his pre-conversion life. Yes, he persecuted the Church, but does that make him the foremost of all sinners? Was he worse than Judas? The hyperbole here, and that’s exactly what this is, serves a point. It gives us a window into how Paul thought about himself. He thought of himself as a sinner, as a person who didn’t deserve anything that God had given but rather was entirely dependent upon the grace and mercy of God.

And notice that he doesn’t say “of whom I was the foremost.” He says, “of whom I am the foremost.” “I am the foremost of sinners,” he says, but I received mercy.

But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life.

Mercy. A few verses earlier, he speaks of the grace of our Lord overflowing to him. Mercy and grace. To sinners. That’s the Gospel. So let me be as clear as I can. The moment you make the shift from thinking of yourself as a sinner in desperate need of the grace and mercy of God to thinking of yourself as a good person who maybe stumbles sometimes but is generally doing ok, the moment your brain makes that shift, it’s game over. You no longer believe the Gospel. If you’re not a sinner, then you don’t need grace and mercy, and heaven help you if you stand before the judgment seat of Christ without grace and mercy and instead get exactly what you deserve. If Paul thinks of himself as the foremost of sinners, but you think you’re probably doing ok, then something has gone terribly wrong.

There are not sinners out there and saints in here. We are all sinners. And thank God for that. Thank God that you’re a sinner because Jesus Christ came into the world to save whom? Sinners.

Somehow the church today seems to have gotten this all wrong. We see people outside the church living lifestyles that we don’t approve of or behaving in ways that we don’t condone, and we call them sinners with a scowl on our faces as if that isn’t precisely the group of people for whom the Son of God came into the world and died on a Roman cross.

The church today seems to function as if the two most operative words in the economy of salvation are not grace and mercy. We seem to operate as if, for various reasons, we deserve this, as if our inheriting of salvation is us getting exactly what we deserve. But I promise you, despite the way that so many professing Christians talk and think these days, you don’t want to live in a world where people always get exactly what they deserve, especially when it comes to you and God. What you should want is to live in a world overflowing with mercy, overflowing with grace, overflowing with forgiveness because those things are your only hope for eternal life.

Let me ask a question. I won’t ask you to raise your hands. Just be honest about the answer in your own heart. Do you want to live in a world that’s fair? The answer is no. You don’t want to live in a world that’s unfair because injustice prevails, but you also don’t want to live in a world that’s totally fair. The world you want to live in is a world full of mercy, grace, and forgiveness, and those things aren’t fair because you don’t deserve any of them.

It shocks me how opposed to mercy many Christians are today, and the only conclusion I can reach is that it’s because we no longer think that we need mercy too. We think we’re generally doing ok, and so long as we get what we deserve, everything’s going to work out for us. But that is not the Gospel. In fact, that is anti-Gospel. The Gospel says that I am a sinner, you are a sinner, and the people outside our walls are all sinners too. We are all sinners, and we are all in desperate need of the grace and mercy of God.

So we can no longer permit our knee-jerk reaction to sin in other people’s lives to be one of disgust or disdain or disapproval or rejection. When we see a sinner, what we should see is the lost coin and the lost sheep; what we should see is exactly who we would be apart from the grace of God; what we should see is an opportunity for rejoicing when what was lost is now found.

Jesus says at the end of the Parable of the Lost Sheep:

Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.

But here’s the punchline, in case you don’t see it already. There are no ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. Not me. Not you. Not now. Not ever. There’s only ever been one righteous person who needed no repentance, and unless you are Jesus of Nazareth, you’re not him. There aren’t ninety-nine righteous and one unrighteous; there’s one hundred unrighteous and one who knows he’s a sinner, and that’s the one you want to be. So I’ll say it again. I’m a sinner. You’re a sinner. The people outside our walls are sinners. But here’s the Gospel.

The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.

So I’m a sinner, you’re a sinner, the world is full of sinners, and thanks be to God because Jesus came to save sinners.

Amen.

The post We Are All Sinners first appeared on St. Dunstan's Anglican Church.

A Sermon on Matthew 4:1-11.

I said on Ash Wednesday that the problem that ensnares the world today is the same problem that has plagued humanity since the beginning, namely, our rebellion against God. Part of going through Ash Wednesday and going through the season of Lent is to remind ourselves that even though we are the people of God, we are not excluded from this human predicament of sin. We have to come to God and repent, holding up our brokenness and weakness to him as an offering, so that we can be the people he created us to be and so that we can go out into the world to do the work of his kingdom as his broken-but-healed, weak-but-strong people. And I also said that our repentance takes place as part of a story that starts in the Garden, makes its way through Abram and his offspring, climaxes in the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus of Nazareth, and then continues in the Church. It is that same story that is on display in our readings this morning. 

God created Adam and Eve and placed them in the Garden to be his image-bearers, the vice-regents of his creation. Their task was to rule over creation, to govern it wisely, and to expand the Garden over the face of the earth. But Adam and Eve failed to listen to the Word of God. God commanded them not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the serpent twisted what God had commanded, deceived Eve, she and Adam ate, and ever since the world has been subjected to futility–ever since all created things have been under the curse. 

And then God called Abram and promised him that he would bless the entire world through Abram and his offspring, that he would take all that had gone wrong and make it right. The story weaves its way from Abram through the Patriarchs and Joseph until it comes to Moses, who stands before Pharoah and says that the God of heaven and earth has commanded, “Let my people go.” God’s solution to the problem of sin is Israel-shaped. Redemption is to come through Israel, and so he frees his people from slavery in Egypt, baptizes them in the Red Sea, and brings them to Sinai, like Adam and Eve in the Garden, to give them his commandments and to tell them how to live as his people. 

God’s solution to the problem that plagues creation is Israel-shaped, but even as God is on Sinai giving his Law to his people, Israel is following in the footsteps of Adam and Eve. They are rebelling against their creator and worshipping a golden calf at the foot of the mountain, and herein lies the fundamental problem that permeates the Old Testament. God’s solution to the problem that plagues creation is Israel-shaped, but Israel itself is part of the problem. They are just like Adam and Eve. They don’t listen to or obey the Word of God, and this rebellion, which manifests itself at Sinai, flows through the Old Testament from Exodus to Malachi. And so the question remains at the close of the Hebrew Bible: How can God use an Israel-shaped solution to the problem of sin when Israel itself has become part of the problem?

In answer to this question, God steps into the story of human history, unites himself to humanity in general but to Abraham’s offspring in particular, and will be faithful where Israel was faithless. So, when Jesus is led by the Spirit back out into the wilderness, this is not merely an exciting tale where Jesus is tempted by Satan. When Jesus encounters Satan, the whole Gospel is at stake, and the entire narrative of our redemption is at risk. Will Jesus be faithful where Israel was faithless? Will Jesus be faithful where Adam was faithless? And the answer to both questions is a resounding yes. Of course, those questions won’t be answered fulled until the cross where Jesus was obedient to the point of death. But here in the wilderness, as Satan comes and twists Scripture, Jesus succeeds where Israel and Adam failed.

Adam’s sin brought sin and death into the world. Israel’s sin put God’s plan of redemption in jeopardy. But because of the faithfulness of Jesus Christ, death no longer has the final word in the story of our lives. Death may have reigned, but God raised Jesus from the dead. Despite denying like a criminal, despite dying under a curse, God declared him to be righteous, to be in the right, by raising him from the dead, never to die again, and by seating him at his right hand as the world’s true Lord and King. 

What Paul has in mind is a courtroom. On one side stand all those who put Jesus to death, all those who claimed that he wasn’t who he said he was, all those who doubted him, despised him, and rejected him. On the other side stands Jesus, the one faithful descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the one faithful descendant of Adam and Eve. He was crucified. He died like all the rest of Adam’s descendants. Surely he was faithless too. Surely God would not have let the righteous suffer in this way. Surely anyone who dies on a tree is cursed. Surely the world was right in what they said about him. In this courtroom, God is the judge, and on Easter Sunday, the judge rendered his verdict. He raised Jesus from the dead and declared him to be the righteous one in this heavenly courtroom. And now God offers to all the descendants of Adam and Eve to stand in that declaration of righteousness as a gift. 

God doesn’t say, “Jesus showed you how to earn your salvation, so now go out and earn it.” He doesn’t say, “If you’re good enough, what I did for Jesus, I will do for you too.” He doesn’t say, “If you can earn enough points, you’ll get saved from death too.” He offers all the descendants of Adam and Eve the same declaration of righteousness that he pronounced over Jesus with all its benefits simply if we will place our faith in Jesus Christ.

You see, the logic isn’t: Adam failed, Israel failed, Jesus succeeded, and now we must succeed as well. No, the logic is: Adam failed, Israel failed, Jesus succeeded, and now the benefits of success are offered to the whole world as an act of God’s grace. God has saved the world through Abraham’s offspring.

Adam’s sin brought death, but Jesus’ righteous act, namely, his obedience to the point of death, brought a gift so unfathomable and so incredible that even death pales in comparison. Paul’s point in Romans 5 is that the grace we receive in Christ is greater than the curse we receive in Adam in as much as Christ is more excellent than Adam. If Adam’s sin brought death, then how much more will Christ’s obedience bring life and grace and righteousness. Adam’s sin made the whole world sinners, but through Christ’s obedience, the entire world may now be made righteous, and for those who believe, our end, union with God, fellowship with is Spirit, and enjoying the new creation with Christ forever, is better than our beginning. What we gain in Christ is greater than what we lost in Adam if we put our faith in him who died upon the tree for our transgressions. 

So, in one sense, we are walking with Christ in Lent through his forty days of fasting in the wilderness, and in doing so we are walking the same path that Adam, Israel, and Christ walked before us. But there is a crucial difference for us as we walk through these forty days of Lent. For us who have been set free from sin and have passed through the waters of baptism, the victory has already been won. The test has already been passed. God has already defeated sin, death, and the devil in Abraham’s offspring, Jesus of Nazareth. So when we fast, when we repent, when we get down on our knees and ask God for forgiveness because we still behave like children of Adam, we aren’t trying to earn anything because all we could ever receive is already ours in Christ. We are much more simply letting the Spirit of God work inside us to make us right, to make us the people we already are in Jesus Christ. Remember, it is the Holy Spirit who drove Jesus into the wilderness, and he drives us there as well. The Spirit drives us out into the wilderness so that we can be transformed from children of Adam into fellow heirs with Jesus Christ our Lord.

And that should be our goal in Lent. We aren’t trying to earn anything. We aren’t trying to prove anything. We aren’t trying to show how committed or strong or righteous or devout we are. We aren’t trying to pass a test that’s already been passed or trying to win a victory that’s already been won. We are instead walking the path that Jesus walked, not to earn our salvation, but because we are his disciples, because we follow wherever he leads, and because we believe that the wilderness has something to teach us about being the people of God. The victory is already won. The Promised Land is already secure. The great story of Adam, Abraham, and Christ has reached its climax on Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Jesus has defeated Satan, and God has declared him to be righteous. Ours is but to repent and believe, and to follow our Lord and his Spirit wherever they might lead. 

Amen. 

The post The Wilderness Test first appeared on St. Dunstan's Anglican Church.

However one wants to interpret the story of humanity’s fall in the opening chapters of Genesis, the major premise of that narrative is clear. The fundamental problem in the story of humanity is our rebellion again God, and our word for that rebellion is ‘sin.’ God created us to dwell with him forever. He created us to share life together forever. He created us with bodies that would never die because we had access to the tree of life. Ever since that moment, when the serpent deceived Adam and Eve in the Garden-Temple, humanity has been cut off from God, separated from its creator, and separated from the source of eternal life. We began to die that day, and all of this is because of sin, because we rebelled against God, because we thought we knew better than his instructions for our lives.

The season of Lent, which begins today, is all about sin. Or to be more specific: Lent is all about the appropriate human response to sin, which is repentance. And here, we see one of the most beautiful facets of the Christian Gospel. Repentance isn’t arbitrary. Repentance takes place or means what it means as part of a story, and it’s a crucial part of our role in that story. A long time after Adam and Eve sinned, God called a man named Abram and made a promise to him that God would fix the world through him and his offspring. And God’s faithfulness to this promise is what Paul calls “the righteousness of God.” The Scriptures aren’t concerned about the attributes of God as if they were concepts or ideas that could be understood and defined independently of how God had revealed himself in salvation history. The Scriptures are concerned with what God does, with his role in this story that we call human history, and with his faithfulness to the promise that he made to Abram. His faithfulness to that promise is his righteousness. 

And so, if God is going to be righteous, if God is going to fix the world through Abram’s offspring as he promised, then the sin which had always plagued humanity from the beginning must be dealt with. And not in a “coming to the Temple once a day, once a week, and on appointed festivals” kind of way, but in a once for all, final, never again to be repeated kind of way. And this God did, by taking a faithful descendant of Abraham and nailing him to the cross. Paul puts it this way. He says in short that God “made him who knew no sin to be sin.” 

Today isn’t Good Friday, but repentance and the cross go hand in hand because, on the cross, God dealt with sin once and for all. How he did that is part of the mystery. I can’t tell you with absolute certainty and clarity what it means that God made Jesus sin. I can only tell you that Paul is adamant that God nailed to the cross the problem that has plagued humanity since the beginning and that sin died as Jesus died. And so when we repent, we aren’t repenting in the hope that God will find some way to forgive our sins, nor are we trying to find some action or emotion or sacrifice that will bring the forgiveness for which we long. The forgiveness for which we hope is already secured in the past. Sin, my sin, your sin, the world’s sin, past, present, and future, has already been dealt with once and for all on the cross of Jesus Christ. And our part in this story is to repent. To come to God, to recognize our sinfulness, to recognize our brokenness, to recognize our failures, our faults, and the futile desires of the flesh, and to say, “God, I’m sorry. There is no good in me apart from you. There is no way for me to make myself right. But you’ve already dealt with my sin. You’ve already nailed it to the cross. But still, Father, this world is broken. I’m broken. Make it right. Make me right.”

And that moment right there, when we recognize our own brokenness as part of the world’s brokenness, is where the words that Paul says next in our reading come to their full force. Paul says that God made him who knew no sin to be sin “so that in him [in Christ, in the sinless one who became sin and put sin to death on the cross], we might become the righteousness of God.” But remember. God’s righteousness isn’t a quality or attribute. God’s righteousness is his faithfulness to the promise he made to Abram to set the world to rights. Paul isn’t saying that we get God’s righteousness as some kind of independent attribute. He is saying that just as Christ became sin, we become God’s agents for renewing and restoring creation. 

On the cross, sin has been dealt with, but the world has not yet been made right. So, the same God who made the sinless one to be sin on our behalf now makes us his righteousness, his covenantal faithfulness, on behalf of the world; he makes us the agents through which his plan to set the world to rights will continue and flourish until the day when our Lord comes again. This is why the fast that God chooses isn’t a fast that focuses on me. The fast that God chooses is a fast that focuses on the other, on our neighbor. He says through the prophet Isaiah, “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to under the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked to cover him, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?”

That’s the logic of this day and the logic of Lent. The reason we gather together for a day of confession, the reason that we spend an entire season focusing on our need for repentance, is because we too are part of the same old story. From the beginning, sin is what has derailed this world. It’s wrecked lives, communities, families, friendships, and the list goes on and on. And repentance is us coming to God and saying, “God, the world is broken, and so am I, but in Christ, you can fix me. You can fix me, and you can send me back to a broken and hurting world. You can give me a purpose. You can send me back out through those doors into a world that’s broken just like me, and through your work in my life, you can continue to renew and restore this world. You can do this, Father, and I repent of all the sin that keeps me from it.”

If this part of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, then unlike so much of the world around us but like the Apostle, we must celebrate our weakness and brokenness. That is not to say that we celebrate that we are sinful, but that we are sinners in whom God is at work to renew and restore our lives. Paul is consistently celebrating his weakness and his brokenness throughout his letters, but nowhere more so than 2 Corinthians. Because Paul knows that if we go to the world pretending that we are perfect and have figured out how they can be perfect too, we are selling them a lie like the serpent in the garden. None of us are perfect people. We’re all, every one of us, broken people, broken deep down, broken just like the world around us. And if you’re somehow deceived into thinking that those of us who wear a collar are excluded from this, I’m here to tell you that you’re wrong. I am as broken as every single person in this room and probably more so. Don’t be fooled by a collar. But I’m here for the same reason that all of you are here—because I need a savior. Because I know that the world is broken and that I’m broken too, and so I have to come to God and say, “I’m sorry. Here’s my brokenness. Please fix this because I can’t do it. But you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, you can. You can fix me and send me. You can heal me and heal others through me.” But you can’t heal others by pretending you’re perfect because perfect people don’t need healing and they sure don’t need a savior. But since that day in the Garden, we’re all broken, and we’re all dying because of Adam’s sin and because of ours. On our own, we are nothing but sin-ridden dust, but in Christ, we can be so much more. We can be forgiven. We can be healed. We can be the righteousness of God if we repent.

Amen.

The post The Righteousness of God first appeared on St. Dunstan's Anglican Church.

In a few days, we will gather back here to start the season of Lent with a celebration of the Ash Wednesday liturgy. The season of Lent is a season of repentance and self-denial, and frequently in Lent people give something up like chocolate or television or the internet as an act of self-denial. Others use this season as an opportunity to deal with and hopefully move beyond some sin that they still struggle within their lives, and that’s completely appropriate for Lent too. The basic conception of Lent is that we’re “giving up,” whether that’s giving up something good as an act of spiritual discipline rather or giving up something sinful. Through either means Lent is trying to teach us what it means to empty ourselves, to deny ourselves, and to take up our cross and follow Jesus. 

We can see this if we take a closer look at our reading from St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians. The reading starts mid-thought for Paul, which is a bit unfortunate. Back at the beginning of chapter three, Paul is explaining that if someone wanted to put confidence in the flesh, by which he means, have confidence that his Judaism would save him, then Paul would have more reason for confidence than anyone. He was “circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews (which means he had no Gentile lineage); as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.” What’s important to note here is that none of these are bad things. There’s nothing wrong with what Paul lists here. Even being a persecutor of the church is reasonably defensible given what he believed about the consequences this new Jewish sect centered around Jesus might have for the people of God as a whole. 

And yet after making this list of reasons why he could have confidence in the flesh, Paul says, and here is where our reading starts: “But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of the Messiah. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus, the Messiah, my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish (or dung), in order that I may gain the Messiah and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through the faithfulness of the Messiah, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead” (Phil 3:7–11).

Paul’s argument here is instructive for us. He says that there were good things in his life that he is willing to let go of for the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus, the Messiah, his Lord. Actually, he says even more than this. He says that he counts all things as loss for the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus. So what does Paul mean? Is he saying that nothing for him has any value any more except knowing Jesus Christ? I don’t think so. One of the mistakes people often make when reading Scripture is not being able to recognize that someone is speaking hyperbolically. What Paul is saying is that part of being a follower of Jesus Christ is being willing to give up the good things we have in our life for the sake of following Jesus. 

Here Paul has in mind specifically soteriology, the doctrine of salvation. But this is only a specific instance of what Paul had already told the Philippians earlier. He told them back in chapter 2 to imitate Jesus the Messiah, who “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil 2:6–8). The word for “emptied” here is the word κενόω, and theologians speak of Christ’s kenosis or his emptying. What exactly it means for the second person of the Trinity to “empty himself” is a discussion for another time, but Paul’s point is clear nonetheless. Jesus “gave up” something for the sake of the world. He gave up something good, something that was his by right. He was equal with God, and yet he emptied himself for the good of others. He was obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. So, when Paul says in our reading, “Whatever gain I had I count as loss,” he is imitating Christ. He is modeling for the Philippians the very that he wants to see in them. Which is to say that the kenosis isn’t merely something that Jesus does but something that we are called to imitate in our own lives. We often talk today about incarnational ministry, but perhaps we should also talk about kenotic ministry: a ministry of self-emptying for the good of others, a ministry of giving up what we think is ours by right or merit for the benefit of the others

But if we do are going to talk about kenotic ministry, we also need to talk about kenotic soteriology, which, I know, sounds weird, but hear me out. There are lots of good things in this world that we like to hang our had on. They’re not bad. Not necessarily. But they are the things we use to identify and often self-justify. I want you to take a quick moment and think about this question for just a second. What is it about you that you think makes you a good person? There are two correct answers to that question. The first correct answer is this: “Father, I’m not a good person.” That’s correct. The second correct answer is this: “The only thing good about me is Jesus Christ.” And frankly, as much as many of know that this is the correct answer, actually convincing ourselves of this is another story. There’s a part of all of us that wants to earn our salvation, that wants to justify ourselves before God and others. There’s a part of all of us that wants to wear the badges of all the things that we think make us good people and say, “Look, here they are. Here’s my …” and you can fill in the blank. What we need in those moments is kenosis, a self-emptying.

And one of the ways you can do that is by “failing” at Lent. Lent isn’t about what you can achieve; it’s about your weakness. If we can achieve our Lenten goals, then we have set the bar too low, and if at the end of Lent you come to me and say, “Father, I did it. I fasted for forty days. I did it.” That’s truly failing at Lent. That’s failing to understand what this season is all about. The only righteousness, the only goodness, the only faithfulness in heaven and earth that matters is the faithfulness of God manifested in Jesus the Messiah. And whatever you think it is that makes you good, that makes you worthy of God’s love, that makes you special, you’ve got to empty yourself of it so that you can live instead by faith, which means taking up your cross and following Jesus, believing that the way up is the way down and that the way you come to know the power of Jesus’ resurrection, as Paul says, is by sharing in his sufferings, by emptying yourself for the good of others. 

Lent is a wilderness journey. It’s forty days of fasting and forty days of self-denial. But notice what Paul says towards the end of our reading. He does all of this kenosis, all of this emptying, so that be any means necessary, he may (and the ESV says “attain” but the word really means) “arrive at or come to” the resurrection of the dead. Paul has in mind a journey, and the reason we undertake this wilderness journey for forty days, the reason we take up our cross and follow Jesus wherever he leads, the reason that we empty ourselves for the good of others is because the journey through the wilderness is the only path that leads to the Promised Land. Or, to put it another way, you don’t get to Easter without going through Lent.  

Amen. 

The post A Kenotic Lent first appeared on St. Dunstan's Anglican Church.

Acts 1:1-8

Saint Luke is the only one of the Evangelists, which is a word we use for the authors of the Gospels, who wrote a sequel. Matthew, Mark, and John (it almost sounds odd to say it without Luke in there) don’t tell us what happened after the ministry of Jesus. Only Luke does. We can piece together some events in the life of the early church by looking at the epistles and the situations that Paul and others were addressing, but for the most part, it is the book of Acts which is our only witness to the life of the church immediately after the ascension of Jesus Christ. This book is our only window into those earliest years of the church, which has now existed for nearly 2,000 years. 

And one of the things that Luke does in his introduction to this book, and it is subtle, but it is incredibly significant, is frame the story of the early church as a continuation of the story of Jesus. Now, I don’t mean that Luke says, “This is what happened before, and now this is the sequel.” It’s not simply that time has passed and now Luke is telling a new story that in some sense continues the themes of his last book. Luke actually says more than this. He says, “In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach.” Note, he doesn’t say, “In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus did and taught.” No, he says, “I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach.”

If we stop and ask ourselves why Luke frames the story this way, the answer is obvious, and most you probably already know this. Luke tells the story of the early church this way because Luke believes that Jesus continues to do and to teach through his Apostles and through his church. The Gospel of Luke is the story of what Jesus began to do and to teach and the Acts of the Apostle is the story of what Jesus continued to do and teach through his Apostles. 

And for St. Luke, this isn’t simply a metaphor or an interesting way to frame the two stories. For St. Luke this belief is grounded in his pneumatology, which is a fancy way of saying that for St. Luke this belief about the early church is grounded in what he believes about the Holy Spirit. You see, the Holy Spirit isn’t just a doctrine, or an idea, or a source of magic power. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of God but also the Spirit of Jesus Christ. I won’t get into the debates that led to the split between the Eastern and Western churches, but there is a reason that we say in our creed the Holy Spirit is the Lord, the given of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. The Holy Spirit then is our entry point into the divine fellowship. It is our means of access to this grace in which we stand. But perhaps most importantly, it is the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, and who was poured out on the church at Pentecost, that makes us members of the body of Christ. 

We have no participation in Jesus or in the Church apart from the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit who makes us all one in Christ Jesus, it is the Holy Spirit who leads us on our journey through this life, and it is the Holy Spirit who fills us with wisdom and insight and brings us more and more into conformity with Jesus Christ each and every day. At least we hope so. And because of this, with the Father and the Son, He is worshipped and glorified. So on the vertical dimension, we have our access to the heavenly realm and to the Trinity through the Holy Spirit who makes us one in Jesus Christ, and as important and stunning as that is, that is not Luke’s point in our passage this morning. 

Luke’s point is that those who have been filled with the Holy Spirit are called to go out into the world and do the work of Jesus Christ. The narrative works like this. Jesus Christ ascends to heaven, takes his seat at the right hand of God, and pours out his Spirit upon his Church to make them one with him and to send them out to do that work that he began to do in his earthly ministry. This means that our vocation as a church is not something substantially different than the mission of Jesus Christ who we see, over and over again in the Gospels, reaching out to the poor, the broken, the sinful, the hurting, and the lost with the love of Jesus Christ. And as those who are engaged in those types of ministries will tell you, it’s hard. It’s hard to always be giving. It’s hard to always be emptying ourselves for the good of others. It’s hard to set aside the things that we want to do in our lives and accomplish in our day to go meet the need of someone else. But that is the Gospel, and that is how we will make disciples. 

I wrote the Great Commission on the whiteboard in the fellowship hall a few months back before a Vestry meeting. My point was, and still is, that we have one mission as a church. Sometimes it gets a little convoluted because of how it’s translated, but there is only one imperative in the Great Commission. There is only one command, and it’s not “go.” It’s “make disciples,” and because discipleship is a never-ending process until we attain perfection in the age to come, the command to make disciples will never not be the mission of the church. So, we don’t have to figure out our mission for St. Dunstan’s. We already have it. What we have to figure out is how we make disciples in this church and how we reach out to these communities around us and make new disciples of Jesus Christ. 

And we get a key to answering that question in our reading this morning. Luke doesn’t use the exact language of the Great Commission here, instead, Jesus says to the disciples that when they receive the Holy Spirit, they will be his witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the end of the earth, and I’ll close with this reflection on our role as witnesses. It’s one thing to share the love you have for God, and for Jesus, and for the Holy Spirit, and for Church, and for Scripture, with those who share that same love. But that’s not exactly being a witness. That’s inward-facing. That’s what’s happening in this room. But being a witness to the ends of the earth is what happens when you walk out those doors, leave this place, and head back into the world. That’s where it counts. That’s where it costs. And the more we show people the love of Jesus, the more we testify about the good things that God has done in our lives, the more we empty ourselves for the good of others, the more we witness to the truth of Jesus Christ and his cross and his resurrection. The more we do those things, the more we are his witnesses, and that’s why we have the Holy Spirit, to empower us, to connect us to God, to connect us to God’s love, to make unite us to Christ forever, and to send out those doors into the world as witnesses to his kingdom and his cross. That’s where world mission Sunday starts. Right outside those doors. 

Amen.

The post Spirit-Filled Witnesses first appeared on St. Dunstan's Anglican Church.

1 Corinthians 2:1-16; Matthew 5:13-20

Today we are three Sundays away from the start of Lent. This Sunday is known Septuagesima Sunday, which means that we are 70 days away from Easter. Next Sunday is Sexagesima Sunday, and the Sunday after that is the last Sunday before Lent, also known as Quinquagesima Sunday. I hope you are taking notes because there will be a quiz later, and I will need the proper spelling of those words. 

The point of these names is mostly to signify that Lent and Easter are coming. We are still in Epiphany, and we have not transitioned to Lent yet, but Lent is coming, and thanks be to God, so is Easter. In Lent, it is traditional for a community of believers like us to all read the same book as an act of Lenten devotion, and I would like to suggest that we all read a small book by Francis Chan entitled Letters to the Church. I’ll have more to say about the book as Lent approaches over the next few weeks, but for now, I wanted to put it on your radar as Ash Wednesday draws near. 

To the task at hand then, there are three things I would like us to focus on this morning. The first two come from the Gospel lesson, and the second comes from the Epistle, and we’re going to take them in reverse order: Epistle first, then Gospels. But what I want you to do is, as you hear me speaking and saying what I’m about to say, I want you to be thinking about who St. Dunstan’s is called to be as a church. 

Paul says at the beginning of our reading, “And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus the Messiah and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:1–2). There is a lot that we could say here, but to keep it simple and to keep me from going off on rabbit trails, this is the essential message of the Christian message that will never not be a part of our life together at St. Dunstan’s. There is only one message for the world, and there is only one message for the church, and they are the same message. “Jesus the Messiah and him crucified” is Paul’s shorthand way of saying more fully what he says elsewhere, like 1 Corinthians 15: “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.” (1 Corinthians 15:3–5). 

That’s it. That’s our message to the world. That’s my message to you. That’s what I’m going to preach to you for as many Sundays as you’ll let me because every genuinely Christian sermon is simply a riffing on that sentence. To put it bluntly, if you’re not preaching the cross of Jesus Christ, you’re not preaching. The cross is and will always be the center of our life together and our teaching here at St. Dunstan’s because Jesus command to those who are on the way is simple: take up your cross and follow me. 

But also notice that for Paul, the cross is not just a historical and theological event. For Paul, the cross is the place where God’s secret and hidden wisdom is made manifest, the wisdom which is now made manifest in his preaching. He says, “But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor 2:7–8). To put it simply, the cross reveals the wisdom of God, which this world does not understand, and therefore our decisions as a church, assuming we want them to demonstrate and reflect the wisdom of God, must be cruciform. They must be shaped by and defined by the cross of Jesus Christ. 

Second, Jesus uses two metaphors to describe the people of Israel in Matthew 5. If we don’t recognize that first and foremost Jesus is talking to Israel, we are missing a step in the hermeneutical process by which we come to understand this text, but once we come to understand to whom Jesus is speaking and why, then we can understand why and how it applies to us. Jesus is true Israel. He doesn’t abolish the Law, he fulfills it, bringing that covenant to a close and ushering in the new covenant in his blood. And since the church exists “in Him,” or to use a different metaphor, since he is the head and the church is the body of the new humanity, it is the church’s task to take up the responsibilities of Israel, namely, being salt and light in this world. 

Now, I love salt, but we don’t use salt today in the same way that it was used in the first century. In the first century, salt wasn’t used so much for taste as it was used as a preservative, and when Jesus speaks of salt losing its saltiness, he’s speaking functionally. The way you could tell that a piece of meat had been preserved and was safe to eat was because you could taste the saltiness, but if the salt had lost its saltiness, you wouldn’t know whether the food you were eating was safe or not. 

Now, if I were to ask you about the vocation of the church, or particularly about the ideal mission of St. Dunstan’s, I suspect, and maybe I’m wrong, that ‘preservation of this world’ would be way down on your list if it even appeared at all. But Israel was called to be, and by extension, the church is, the salt of the earth, the thing that is meant to keep the earth from going bad. I’m not talking only about creation care or only about politics or only about families or only about reaching out to the poor and lost. I’m talking about all of it. This world was subjected to futility, Paul says in Romans 8. It’s broken. It doesn’t work. It’s fundamentally flawed in the most basic ways, and we experience that every single day. And a day will come when God will raise the dead and renew creation, but until that day it is our vocation, through small acts of kindness, through significant decisions, through prayer, through evangelism, through trailer park ministries and foodbanks and missionaries to hold back the chaos, if even for a moment, to stop the decay, if even only for one family. That’s our job: to fight against the chaos, to fight against decay, to fight against the darkness, and that leads us to our third and final point. 

We are called to preach nothing other than the cross of Jesus Christ and to make decisions based on the wisdom of God revealed through the cross, and we are tasked not only with being the salt of the earth but the light of the world as well. Jesus appears to be drawing on language directly from Isaiah’s promise of the restoration, but the imagery would have been evident to anyone in the first century. The glory of God that came to rest in the temple in the Promised Land wasn’t for the Israelites only. The glory of God was to shine forth from Jerusalem through the people of God to the end of the world. The temple mount was always the first mountain that rose out of the primordial waters in ancient near eastern creations stories, and so the city on a hill is Jerusalem, home to the Temple of the living God, but the light of Israel had refused to shine, and God left his Temple. But now the God of heaven and earth has filled his world with mini-temples, and you and I, filled with the Holy Spirit, are called to reflect the glory of God into the world. That’s why some of the best forms of Christian ministry can be called incarnational because at the incarnation, light shined in the darkness, as John says, and so we are tasked with going to the dark places of this world and shining the bright light of the glory of God into that darkness and letting God’s light shine in every corner of creation. But we can only do so by 

That’s our task. That’s our vocation – three simple words: cross, salt, and light. If we can figure out what the means for our church, we will be well on our way to fulfilling our mission.  

Amen.

The post Cross, Salt, and Light first appeared on St. Dunstan's Anglican Church.

Luke 2:22-40

Typically, this Sunday is the fourth Sunday of or after Epiphany, but instead, because today is February 2nd, we are celebrating Candlemas, also known as the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus Christ, also known as the Feast of the Purification of Mary, also known as Groundhog’s Day. Candlemas is one of the oldest known feasts in the Christian church dating back to at least the 4th century, where we know it was celebrated in Jerusalem. We have Candlemas sermons from Fathers of the church like Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory the Theologian, Amphilochius of Iconium, Gregory of Nyssa, and John Chrysostom. An incomplete book known as The Pilgrimage of Egeria, the account of a woman who went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land towards the end of the 3rd century, says this, “But certainly the Feast of the Purification is celebrated here with the greatest honor. On this day, there is a procession to the Anastasis [now known as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre]; all go in procession, and all things are done in order with great joy, just as at Easter. All the priests preach, and also the bishop, always treating of that passage of the Gospel where, on the fortieth day, Joseph and Mary brought the Lord into the Temple, and Simeon and Anna the prophetess, the daughter of Famuhel, saw Him, and of the words which they said when they saw the Lord, and of the offerings which the parents presented. And when all things have been celebrated in order as is customary, the sacrament is administered, and so the people are dismissed.”

It should be no surprise to us that this day was a feast day the celebration of which was comparable to Easter, for in many ways this is one of the more remarkable incidents in the life of Jesus where, as we saw with Jesus in the Temple as a young boy, many of the major themes of the Gospel narrative blend together in this one account. Here we find a reference to Mary, Joseph, Jesus, the Law of Moses, the Temple, Jerusalem, the Holy Spirit, the Messiah, the consolation or comfort of Israel, servant, peace, salvation, light, revelation, Gentiles, glory, and Israel. The Holy Trinity is present. The Holy family is present. The Law of Moses is present. The Jerusalem Temple is present. And we haven’t even started to tell the story yet of a young mother bringing her only child to the Temple to present him to the Lord in a simple act of obedience. And on the surface, that’s what drives this whole account. It’s the small act of obedience by Mary and Joseph that set everything else in motion. 

There are two texts at play here from the outset of the narrative. First, Leviticus 12 says that a woman who bore a son was unclean for seven days, and one the eighth day the boy was to be circumcised. Then, after 33 days (counting inclusively), the woman was to bring the child to the Tent of Meeting (the Temple filled this role in Mary’s day) with a sacrifice. For those who could afford it, the sacrifice was to be a one-year-old lamb for a burnt offering and a pigeon or turtledove for a sin offering. For those who could not afford a lamb, the mother was to bring two pigeons or two turtle doves, which is what Mary does. Secondly, the other text at play here is Exodus 13, which says, “Consecrate to me all the firstborn. Whatever is the first to open the womb among the people of Israel, both of man and of beast, is mine” (Exod 13:2). And so, because it is the fortieth day, and because Jesus is Mary’s firstborn, she and Joseph, as tired as they were, come to the Temple in obedience to their God. 

But there’s more that should be said there. If you’re sitting there thinking, “Exodus 13… Exodus 13… doesn’t something interesting happen in Exodus 13?” the answer is YES! Exodus 12 is the account of the first Passover, in which every household of the children of Abraham, so long as they could afford it, were to sacrifice a Lamb and were to put the blood of the lamb on the doorposts and lintel of the house so that when the Lord passed through the land of Egypt to kill the firstborn of man and beast, he would see the blood on the doorposts and spare the firstborn of the children of Abraham. This is why all the firstborns were to be consecrated to the Lord. He has spared them at the Passover in chapter 12, and so, in chapter 13, as the people of God are leaving Egypt on their Exodus, they are told to keep this commandment about the firstborn. The text says, “And when in time to come your son asks you, ‘What does this mean?’ [this redemption of the firstborn] you shall say to him, ‘By a strong hand the LORD brought us out of Egypt, from the house of slavery. For when Pharaoh stubbornly refused to let us go, the LORD killed all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both the firstborn of man and the firstborn of animals. Therefore I sacrifice to the LORD all the males that first open the womb, but all the firstborn of my sons I redeem.’ It shall be as a mark on your hand or frontlets between your eyes, for by a strong hand the LORD brought us out of Egypt” (Exod 13:14–16). 

So, from the outset, Luke is drawing our attention to Exodus 13 and Leviticus 12, but there’s still more OT lurking under the surface here. Luke says of Simeon that he was waiting for the consolation of Israel, and as I’ve said before, that is a terrible translation. Simeon isn’t waiting for the consolation of Israel, at least that’s now how it’s translated in Isaiah 40. He’s waiting for the “Comfort of Israel.” He’s waiting for the end of the exile. “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned, that she has received from the LORD’s hand double for all her sins. A voice cries: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken” (Isa 40:1–5). “The glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.” That sure sounds a lot like the Nunc Dimittis, the words that Simeon speaks as he holds in the infant Jesus in his hands, calling him “a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of your people Israel.”

Luke is telling a vibrant, multi-layered, and complicated story. On the surface, it is the story of a woman, in obedience to the Mosaic Law and in remembrance of God’s great act of deliverance, bringing her child to the Temple to offer him back to God and to offer sacrifices for her impurity. In that sense Mary models for us, as she often does, what it looks like to be an obedient follower of the Lord our God even when we don’t understand everything that’s happening around us. But if you look just underneath the surface, you’re going to see a different story – not wholly different, but a story that builds upon and illuminates that more obvious story. 

Luke points out from the beginning that Mary and Joseph come to the Temple “to offer a sacrifice according to what is said in the Law of the Lord, ‘a pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons.’ Luke isn’t telling us this information because he wants us to know that Mary and Joseph couldn’t afford the more costly sacrifice. Luke wants us to notice something, and it’s very subtle. He wants us to see that Mary and Joseph do not bring a lamb. Notice how central a lamb is in both texts with which Luke begins this account. In Leviticus 12, a lamb was to be offered to do away with the uncleanness of the mother. In Exodus 12 & 13, a lamb was to be slaughtered and its blood spread across the doorposts and lintel so that the Lord would pass over that home and spare the firstborn inside, and so all the firstborns males of Israel belonged to the Lord. Luke references both texts in which lambs play a central role, and yet there isn’t a single lamb in this story. Or is there?

Ask yourself one simple question: Does Mary bring a lamb with her to the temple or not? Does Mary bring with her to the Temple to offer back to God the Passover Lamb of the New Exodus, the Comfort of Israel of which Simeon speaks, who would be sacrificed not only for Mary’s impurities but for the sin of the whole world or does she not? Mary, in her generosity and obedience, is giving back to God what is already his. She is giving back to God the Passover Lamb, whose death will bring true freedom from slavery and true redemption and true deliverance. Mary gives her firstborn son over God, and some three decades from that moment she will stand at the foot of his cross and listen as he screams in pain while the Lamb of God is sacrificed. She couldn’t have known what Simeon meant when he said that a sword would pierce her soul, but as he died, she knew. 

And so, on the surface, what was a story about a small act of obedience and giving back to God what is already his becomes a story of something so much more significant. It is Mary who presents THE offering for THE sacrifice for the sins of the whole world. Jesus is barely 40 days old, and yet Simeon sees in the Spirit more than anyone could ever see just from looking at a child. He sees the future. He sees redemption. He sees deliverance. He sees the salvation of Israel’s God being revealed to the Gentile and the crowning glory of Israel’s great story coming to its climax. He sees the cross, maybe not in detail, but he can see Mary’s pain. 

Anna sees the infant Jesus and begins to sing praise to God and to tell anyone who would listen that the redemption of Israel had come. The Lord is once again by a strong hand delivering his people, and once again, it will involve the death of the firstborn son along with the death of the Passover Lamb, except those two stories become one in this child. 

And what you see here, I think, is that God can and does use simple acts of obedience to do great things. Mary and Joseph come to the Temple not because they knew that today was the day that God was going to speak powerfully through Simeon and Anna. They have no idea what is going to be said about this child when they arrive. They have no idea what’s going to happen. They have no idea that Anna is going to go out and tell everyone that the redemption of Jerusalem had come. They come in simple obedience, and God does something spectacular.

Like the Holy Family, we don’t always know what God is going to do. Our agenda this year is to create a vision statement for this church and begin to plot our course for the next few years and beyond. Some of that will lead us to big decisions, and those decisions will have a significant impact on our church. But for the most part, what’s going to make or break us as a church are not the big decisions but the small ones. It’s our simple acts of obedience, our simple acts of love, that will ultimately define us as a church. It will be our decision to be here and worship God together despite our differences and despite the change. It will be following God’s commands together and living as faithfully as we can the kingdom vision that God has for this church. It will be greeting people with the love of Christ and making them feel welcome every time they step foot in our church. It will be all these small acts of obedience and love that will make or break us as a church

This church will be whatever we make it. It won’t be defined by me or any one person. It will be defined by all of us, committing ourselves to small acts of obedience every day and trusting that God can do with those small acts far greater things than we ever imagined.  

Amen.

The post Small Acts first appeared on St. Dunstan's Anglican Church.

So, here’s my logic. I’m assuming that no one is coming to the annual meeting who won’t be in church today, but there may be some people who aren’t staying for the annual meeting who are here right now. On that assumption, I’m going to both preach and give the “State of St. Dunstan’s address now,” and then if you don’t stick around for the annual meeting, you’ll mostly be missing out on the business part of the meeting. I’m not advising that you leave, but I am warning you that this might be a bit longer sermon than usual. Maybe not as last week, though. 

One of the things that surprise me when I hear some people talk about the early church is often how idyllic their descriptions are. They speak about the first several decades, even centuries, as if Jesus ascended, the Spirit was poured out, the Apostles learned everything that we would come to know as confessional Christian theology, and everything was perfect. But the careful reader of the New Testament will know that things in the first century of the early church were far from ideal. Even in Corinth, a city that Paul had visited personally and a church that he had founded, there were lots of problems, including divisions and descensions among the people. 

Now, I’m well aware that when a person in any position of authority stands up in front of a group of people and says, “I want you all to agree” or “I don’t want there to be any divisions among us,” what it often sounds like is, “I want you all to agree with me” and “I don’t want there to be any divisions among us, so you all need to start doing what I say.” As we’ll see, however, what Paul has in mind is something entirely different, but more on that in a moment. 

For now, I want to talk about us as a church. It was at the very end of December in 2017 that Bishop Morales made me priest-in-charge of St. Dunstan’s. That means that I’ve been “in charge” here (a term I’m not comfortable with, as some of you well know) for about two years, and in those two years, we’ve made some significant changes, especially more recently. Change is always difficult for people. Some people, especially at the very beginning, although not many, chose to leave this community and attend another church, and that’s ok. All that truly matters is that they are still attending somewhere and still actively participate in the worship of Jesus Christ. Others passed away, or their spouse did, and that meant a move or change for them that took them away from St. Dunstan’s. We’ve lost some very precious people over the past two years, either because they’ve decided to move on or because the Lord has called them into his presence, but that’s not the whole story of the past two years. 

I remember a few months back, a senior member of this church came to me and said, “Father, can we start asking people to wear name tags again because there are so many new people and I can’t remember all their names.” Now that’s the kind of thing a priest wants to hear. Look around. Not necessarily right now, especially later today at the picnic, and look at all the new faces that Lord has brought to this church over the past two years. Every service has new people who have joined over the past few years, and several of those new people are plugged in, teaching Sunday school, serving in different capacities, and even being or becoming members of the vestry. 

Not only have we been blessed with great people, both like time members and new saints to our community, but we’ve also been moving in the right direction. We’ve been, slowly but surely for two years, fixing problems that needed to be fixed, in some cases, urgently needed to be fixed. And now, as the Bishop likes to say, in my humble and correct opinion, we are ready to move forward into the future that God wills for us, and that’s primarily what ReVive! was all about. It was about asking what the marks of a healthy church are, what we are doing well, and what we could be doing better. For those of you who were able to come out, especially on Saturday, I’m very grateful. Canon Mark asked me to relay what a great time he had with all of you and how confident he was about this church’s future success. He was clear that we have steps to take to get there, and I think that’s obvious to anyone who looks honestly at our church, but we are a healthy, growing, Jesus-loving, Bible-teaching community of people worshipping in the Anglican tradition and our present context, and quite frankly I can’t think of another church that I’d rather be apart of right now. Everything about this place excites me and fills me with hope about where God is leading us. 

And that brings me back to our reading from St. Paul this morning. Paul founded the church at Corinth, and later Apollos came to each there. There’s no record that Peter ever came to Corinth, but it’s probably likely that there were people from Jerusalem claiming to be teaching the true Gospel from St. Peter himself, much like we see in Galatians. And the people in Corinth, in this new church, started to pick their favorite. “I’m a disciple of Paul. I’m a disciple of Apollos. I’m a disciple of Peter. And there were even those who were saying, “No, forget those guys, I’m only a disciple of Christ.” To which Paul asks a straightforward question: “Is Christ divided?”

I wonder if I’m alone in having heard such language here at St. Dunstan’s. It’s not usually tied to a person, as if people were saying, “I follow Fr. Michael,” “I follow Fr. Chuck,” “I follow Fr. Luis,” or “Forget those guys, I follow Christ.” No, it’s not tied to a name, but a service. “I go to the 7:30 service.” “I go to the nine o’clock.” “I go to the eleven.” Of course, the times are code for different styles of worship, and there is undoubtedly a place for various forms of worship in the community of the people of God. But, “Is St. Dunstan’s divided?”

This body of believers in Christ, regardless of what service you all will be at next week, this is your community. This is your church. This is your family. When you need help, these are the people who will be there for you. And so, when Paul asks, “Is Christ divided?” or I ask, “Is St. Dunstan’s divided?”, what Paul is alluding to, which he will develop elsewhere, is his theology of the church as the body of Christ. Within the human body, every part of the body has roles to play, and there are distinctions between parts of the body. There’s a real difference between your eyes and your feet, but you need both if you’re going to walk somewhere unassisted. That’s why Paul isn’t saying, “I want you all to agree with me,” he’s saying, “We’re all the body of Christ. We’re all playing our role in him, and in him, we are all one.”  

Christ is the head of the body, and so he always holds the preeminent position. In some sense, those who say, “I follow Christ,” are closest to the truth, but in the body, each part has a role to play. Christ is seated at the right hand of God, and he sent Paul, Apollos, and Peter to teach and preach his Gospel. Each has his role, and that’s how it is in this church too. Each of us has a role to play in this body, from working with the altar guild, to working the sound booth, to visiting people in the hospital, to praying for people, to preparing food, to sending out birthday and anniversary cards, to a whole myriad of other things. And that transcends what service you attend normally on Sundays. One of our goals as we move forward as a church this year is to figure out how to place a greater emphasis on the whole body of this church rather than its parts so that when any of you think of St. Dunstan’s, you won’t just think of the service you attend, but the whole church. Even if you only go to your one service and that’s the only service you attend, those other services are still your church, and those people praying and worshipping Jesus Christ are still your family, and we need to place greater emphasis on this year and for years to come. 

And that idea alone might be enough for one sermon, but Paul says one more thing at the end of our reading that I cannot let go by without comment, especially on the Sunday of our annual meeting. Paul says, “For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power” (1 Cor 1:17). Again, like when he asked, “Is Christ divided?”, there’s a whole theology at play here that he will unpack later. In fact, St. Paul begins that explanation with the next verse, and that is part of our readings for next week, but still, we should say something here.

Why does Paul think that words of eloquent wisdom could empty the cross of Christ of its power? We tend to think of the cross of Christ as the tremendous salvific event of human history, and the once for all sacrifice of God incarnate that took away the sin of the world and opened a new path for humanity to dwell with God forever. On that understanding, the cross of Christ will never lose its power. But, of course, that isn’t what Paul means. I’ve said it dozens of times before and I will say it dozens of times still for as long as you let me because there is very little that we need to learn and understand more than this: the way up is the way down, and the way of the Lord is the way of the cross. 

What Paul is saying is that the cross is not for us just an event in the past to be remembered and brought forward into the present sacramentally. For Paul, the cross is a way of life. It’s a way of doing things, a way of preaching the Gospel and planting a church. It’s a reality that affects his decision making not just theoretically but practically. The way he does things, the words he speaks with, how he speaks – all these are informed by his theology of the cross. The cross, Paul believes, has a power to it, and when you make cruciform decisions (that is, decisions the basis of which and results of which can only be explained by the cross of Jesus Christ), you embrace that power, or maybe better, you put the power of the cross of Jesus Christ on full display. For Paul, that meant that when he preached, he chose not to use the rhetorical strategies of his day. He decided not to use the eloquent words of the philosophers of his time. Instead, he preached Jesus Christ crucified and risen, and he pointed to Jesus repeatedly in the Scriptures. And he did this, so that, when people were converted and hearts and minds changed, people couldn’t say, “Well, of course, they were. Look at how eloquent Paul is. Look how wise he is. Look how forceful he is when he speaks.” Instead, when people were converted and lives changed, the only explanation was the power of the cross of Jesus Christ.

That’s a theology that we must embrace because this church is Christ’s alone. It doesn’t belong to anyone other than him. Not to the bishop, me, the Vestry, or any of you. We are all, in our unique ways, responsible for it: the bishop at the top and all of us somewhere under him, but this church is Christ’s alone. 

In the months to come, we’re going to be talking about vision statements and mission statements. We’re going to be talking about outreach and evangelism and being more involved with the work already going on to help the poor in our community. Improving our worship here on Sundays, improving our sanctuary, improving our fellowship, improving our classroom space, and growing this church both in terms of the number of people and the actual space – all of these things are immediately on the agenda for the vestry that we will form at the annual meeting. But whatever we’re going to do this year, next year, and for years beyond, whatever we’re going to be in two years, five years, ten years, we’re going to look back at it, and what we’re not going to say is, “Oh, look at what Fr. Michael accomplished.” Or, “Look at what ReVive! accomplished.” “Look at what the Vestry accomplished.” “Look at what our capital campaign accomplished.” “Look at what WE accomplished.” No. We’re going to say is this: “Look at what God accomplished through the power of the cross of Jesus Christ.”

In 2020 we’re going to be doing a whole bunch of new things and charting a course for our future, but in some crucial ways, 2020 will be the same as 2019. We’re still going to be “A Church on the Way,” and that will never change. To be “A Church on the Way” is to be first and foremost a church founded on Jesus Christ, who is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6). To be “A Church on the Way” is to be a church grounded in the teachings and life of the apostolic church, whose earliest known name was “The Way” (Acts 9:2). To be “A Church on the Way” is to say that we will always place the highest value for our teaching and life together upon the New Testament and its witness to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. To be “A Church on the Way” is to recognize that we are all people on a journey. We have been set free from sin and death, but we have not yet arrived at the promised land of resurrection. That’s not going to change. In 2020 we will still be a church founded on Jesus Christ, a church founded on the teachings of Scripture, a church founded on the historic roots of the Church, and a church that recognizes that all people are on a journey and are at different points in that journey. 

Nor will we ever abandon the power of the cross. The way up is the way down. The way of the Lord is the way of the cross. There is no other way for us. That’s our only path forward because this church is Christ’s alone. He is its head. He is its beginning. He is its way. He is its goal. And whatever we will be, we will be for his glory, and his alone. 

Amen.

The post Christ Alone first appeared on St. Dunstan's Anglican Church.

Later this evening I will be headed to the airport to board a plane to Wisconsin where I’ll spend the next week studying at Nashotah House. Because of the reading that I’ve had to do for the class that I’m taking, I’ve been thinking a lot about epistemology over the past few weeks. Epistemology is the study of the theory of knowledge or the study of how we know what we think we know. In the sciences, to know something to be true means to be able to demonstrate it through critical methodology, or at least that was the great claim of the Enlightenment and modernism. Postmodernism, however, reminded us that the subject (the person doing the thinking and studying) is always involved in any truth claim, so there is always a subjective element built into even the most seemingly objective studies. Nevertheless, in the sciences, claims to truth rest primarily on repeatable use of critical methodology to produce the same result. So, if you and I do the same experiment the exact same way and we get the same result, we have discovered the truth. 

In the humanities, however, what we mean by truth is not so simple and straightforward. What does it mean that a poem is true? Or a painting? What about Lord of the Rings or the Chronicles of Narnia? Certainly, the Chronicles of Narnia are not true in the same way that a history book should be true, but what Christian could deny the truth of what the risen Aslan says to Lucy? “’It means,’ said Aslan, ‘that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know: Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.” Is that true? There is no Aslan, there is no Lucy, there is no table, and there is no Narnia, but who in this room would say that that tale isn’t true?

On the one hand, we have the sciences with their claim to truth through repeated, critical experimentation, and on the other, we have the humanities in which what counts as truth or knowledge is far more difficult to define. So, where on this spectrum do we place theology? When we say that something is true in theology or in the Church, is that claim more like a truth claim in the sciences or in the humanities? Or, to be more specific, when we hear John the Baptist say this morning, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” what do we mean when we say that it’s true?

This saying by John is one of the most iconic sayings in the history of Christianity. Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world is a prominent symbol in the history of Christian art, and it affected Christian imagination from the first century onward, even within the Bible itself, for example, in Revelation 5 where Jesus is the lamb standing as though he had been slain. The Agnus Dei, Latin for “Lamb of God,” plays a central role in the liturgy, and at the fraction, we repeat the words of St. Paul that Christ our Passover, really, our Passover lamb, is sacrificed for us. Some of us this Christmas, as a gift from Jimmy and Ally Thomas, went to the “Behold the Lamb of God” concert. This imagery is used in many ways throughout the history of Christianity, so it’s important that we ask ourselves, when John the Baptist sees Jesus coming towards him, when he sees a man, with probably long hair and a beard and dusty garments and dirty sandals, and he points to that man and says, “Behold the Lamb of God,” how do we know that to be true?

Are there scientific, repeatable tests that we can do to prove that claim like Qui-Gon testing Anakin’s blood to check his midichlorian count? Is there a test that we could run to check Jesus’ blood to see how much Agnus Dei was in there, or how much divinity? Obviously, the answer is no. That Jesus is the Lamb of God and that Jesus is the Son of God are different types of truth claims than what you find in the sciences. Does that mean that the claims are untrue because we can’t prove them scientifically? Again, obviously, the answer is no, and once we recognize this fact, we find ourselves at a fork in the road. 

There likely isn’t a person in this room who would deny that Jesus is the Lamb of God, but what do we mean by that claim? One on path that leads from this fork in the road, we mean, “I know that the Bible teaches that Jesus is the Lamb of God.” This is, again, a scientific claim. I can look at the text, you can look at the text, and anyone else can look at the text, and we should all be able to agree John’s Gospel has a scene where John the Baptist says that Jesus is the Lamb of God. So, on one path leading from this fork in the road, to know that Jesus is the Lamb of God means to know that the Bible says that Jesus is the Lamb of God, and on the other path is something quite than scientific knowledge. 

Knowing that the Bible says something to be true is not the same as knowing it to be true for ourselves. In the 18thcentury, a critical scholar by the name of G. E. Lessing, in an essay entitled “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power,” referred to this as the broad, ugly ditch. Lessing takes up Origen’s claim that the truth of Christianity is confirmed by the proof of the spirit working powerfully through miracles, to which Lessing says, “The problem is that this proof of the spirit and of power no longer has any spirit or power, but has sunk to the level of human testimonies about spirit and power.”

He goes on to say, “It is said, ‘The Christ, of whom on historical grounds you must allow that he raised the dead, that he himself rose from the dead, said himself that God has a Son of the same essence as himself and that he is this son.’ This would be quite excellent! if only it were not the case that it is not more than historically certain that Christ said this. If you press me still further and say, ‘Oh yes! this is more than historically certain. For it is asserted by inspired historians who cannot make a mistake.” But, unfortunately, that also is only historically certain, that these historians were inspired and could not err. That, then, is the ugly, broad ditch which I cannot get across, however often and however earnestly I have tried to make that leap. If anyone can help me over it, let him do it. I beg him, I adjure him. He will deserve a divine reward from me.”

There’s something tragic in Lessing’s words. He’s convinced, like most thinkers in the 18th century, that the only knowledge that counts as valid is knowledge that can be tested and verified in the present. Historical knowledge, that is history’s claims about what happened and what was said, what Lessing calls, “the accidental truths of history,” because they are in the past, “can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.” To put this another way, even if you believe that John the Baptist claimed that Jesus is the Lamb of God, that is not the same thing as knowing for yourself that Jesus is the Lamb of God, and between those two notions of truth is Lessing’s ugly, broad ditch. 

And here is where I get very worried. Six years ago, I was ordained as a priest because I knew a lot about the Bible and theology. Hopefully, there was a bit more than just that, but anyone who was involved in my process will tell you that the committee looked at my degrees and went, “Let’s get him through quickly.” But knowing about God is not the same thing as knowing God. Knowing what the Gospels say about Jesus is not the same thing as knowing Jesus. Knowing that John the Baptist proclaimed Jesus as the Lamb of God is not the same thing as believing in the core of your being that Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. That requires, to borrow a phrase from Kierkegaard, a leap of faith across Lessing’s ugly, broad ditch. The problem is that I am trained to give you knowledge on one side of that ditch, but to help you make that leap, to help you live in that other kind of knowledge, that knowledge that we know by faith, that’s the real task of a priest, that’s the real task of a church. 

But how do you do that? Can I stand here very authoritatively in my vestments and clericals and with the full authority of a priest and say, “Have more faith! Go! Do it! Have more faith!”? If only it were that simple, right? Can I push you across the ditch? Can I, in my own strength, will you across the divide between knowing what the Bible says and believing what the Bible says? Nope. The leap of faith is one that you must take for yourself. We all know examples, sometimes within our own families, where someone was forced across that divide rather than allowed to make the leap themselves, and that’s why they end up at the bottom of the ditch and not on the other side like we wanted. Everyone must be allowed to make the leap for themselves. Only you can look at Jesus Christ and say with John, “Behold the Lamb of God.” Only you can look at the man Jesus of Nazareth and say with the Church that he is “the only-begotten Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father” and that all things were created through. Only you can look at the man dying on the cross and rising three days later and say, “There! That’s the Passover. That’s where God took away the sins of the world. That’s where God took away my sins.” Only you can do that. Only you can take the leap of faith across the ugly, broad ditch. 

But here’s what I can do for you, and here’s what you can do for others. First, I can tell you what I believe to be true in the very depths of my being. I can play for you the role of John the Baptist, which is for Karl Barth the role of every theologian and preacher. I can point you to Jesus Christ over and over and over and over and say, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Behold the Lord of Heaven and Earth. Behold the eternal Son of the Father to whom you owe every breath and who claims your total allegiance.” And you can do that for others too. You can point them back to Jesus.

Secondly, I can do what Jesus does at the end of this passage. Two disciples hear John say that Jesus is the Lamb of God, and so they followed Jesus. When Jesus sees them following him, he asks them what they are seeking. What a great question, right? What are you seeking? What are you here for? Why are you here today? The disciples seem to ignore Jesus’ question, and instead of answering him they ask him a different question: “Rabbi, where are you staying?” Jesus could have given them knowledge. He could have said, “Oh, I’m staying at the house two houses down from so and so’s place.” That’s a fact, that’s information, but that’s not what he gives them. Instead, he gives them an invitation: “Come and you will see.” He invites them to dwell with him. And that’s really the best that I can do for you. I can share with you all the information that I’ve learned about the Bible, about Jesus, and about theology, and I can tell you what I believe to be true in the depths of my being, but the most important thing that I can do for you, and the most important thing that you can do for others, is I can invite you to dwell. Arguably, that’s the primary goal of the liturgy: to help you dwell with Jesus—to help you dwell with him in his Word, to help you dwell with him in the creedal confessions of the church, to help you dwell with him in prayer, to help you dwell with him in repentance, to help you dwell with him in the fellowship and peace of other believers, and to help you dwell with him in the breaking of the bread. 

That’s what I can do for you and what you can do for others. I can point you to Jesus and say, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” and then I can invite you to dwell. I can’t prove to you that any of this is true, but I can tell you, “Come, and you will see.” 

Amen. 

The post Behold the Lamb first appeared on St. Dunstan's Anglican Church.

In 2008, Time magazine published an article entitled “10 Ideas that are Changing the World.” On this list were such ideas as “The End of Customer Service,” “The Post-Movie-Star Era,” and “Geoengineering.” For some, one of the more surprising ideas to make this list was number ten: “Re-Judaizing Jesus.” The article cites New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine of Vanderbilt University as saying, “if you get the [Jewish] context wrong, you will certainly get Jesus wrong.” For some, the article was surprising because, it was claimed, the church and biblical scholars have always known that Jesus was Jewish, and this wasn’t really a new idea. But, of course, that’s missing the point. The idea that was changing the world wasn’t merely reminding ourselves that Jesus was Jewish but rather that to understand Jesus, we must understand him in his first-century Jewish context, and this, unfortunately, is something the church failed to do for nearly two millennia. The history of the church’s reading of Scripture makes New Testament theology sound more like Greek philosophy than Jewish theology, and the project that is currently underway in New Testament studies, and for which we should all give thanks to God, is an attempt to reread and rediscover the New Testament in this distinctly Jewish light. 

 And I begin the sermon this way this evening because part of the process of coming to this understanding as readers of Scripture is coming to the realization that for most of us, in some important ways, this is not our story. Certainly, the prophets said that when God finally acted on behalf of the offspring of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that action would be a blessing to the whole world. Indeed, in the promise made to Abram, he is told, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen 12:1–3).

But there is a tension here. On the one hand, God has chosen to bless this one family, one people, amongst all the other families and peoples of the world, and yet when God acts to bless this one family, this one people, that action will be a blessing for all the other families and peoples of the world. This means that the story of the Bible, from cover to cover, is a distinctly Jewish story that, at its climax, resounds with blessings for the entire world. And that’s what we’re here to celebrate tonight. We’re gathered here to celebrate that God in his grace decided not to bless only one family on the earth but every family. 

Listen again to how Isaiah describes the way the blessing of Israel will become a blessing to all the world: “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you. For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will be seen upon you. And nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising.” You see, the imagery here is light and darkness, like it is so often throughout the Bible. When God acts, the Gentiles will be in darkness, but over the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, a great light will shine, and the Gentiles will be drawn to that light. 

We often read this type of imagery and language differently than it was intended. The imagery here isn’t that God will bless Jews and Gentiles alike, but that God will bless the Jewish people and that Gentiles are welcome to come and join themselves to that blessing. Therefore, in the first century of the church, some Jewish-Christian believers insisted that Gentiles be circumcised because that’s what the imagery of the prophets suggested, or at least that’s how it was most commonly read. The Gentiles were free to enjoy the blessings of the people of God, but only by becoming Jewish themselves. But that isn’t what we celebrate at Epiphany. We don’t celebrate that God acted on behalf of one family amongst all the families of the earth and that if we want to be part of that blessing, we can join ourselves to that family through circumcision.

On the contrary, we celebrate something even more incredible. We celebrate, as St. Paul calls it, “the mystery of the Messiah, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit. This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (Eph 3:6). 

The English can’t exactly capture what St. Paul is saying here. He lines up a series of Greek words that all begin with the same preposition as part of their morphology. He says that the mystery of the Messiah, which was not made known previously, not even to the prophets, is that Gentiles are συγκληρονόμα, σύσσωμα, and συμμέτοχα τῆς ἐπαγγελίας, Gentiles are fellow heirs, fellow members of the same body, and fellow partakers of the promise. Think about what Paul is saying just for a moment. This was supposed to be Israel’s story. There was a promise made to the offspring of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the rest of the world was cut off from that promise. The prophets said that the rest of the world was free to join themselves to that family, to come streaming to the great city’s new light. But Paul says God did something even more incredible than what he said through the prophets that he would do. Paul says that God has made Gentiles fellow heirs, fellow members of the same body, and fellow partakers of the promise, the promise, along with the Jewish people. 

And how has he done this? There is a reason that Paul calls this “the mystery of the Messiah.” God has made Jews and Gentiles together members fellow heirs, fellow members of the same body, and fellow partakers of the promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob by uniting them “in the Messiah Jesus through the gospel” (Eph 3:6). That’s what we celebrate today. The gospel. The good news. The mystery of the Messiah. The plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God.  

This wasn’t our story, but in his infinite grace, God has made it our story, calling us not to unite ourselves to the law, circumcision, Jerusalem, or its temple, calling us not to unite ourselves to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob but to the descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Jesus the Messiah. To be in him is to be a fellow heir, fellow members of the same body, and a fellow partaker of the promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob because “all the promises of God find their yes in him” (2 Cor 1:20). Or, as St. Paul says in Galatians, “Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, ‘And to offsprings,’ referring to many, but referring to one, ‘And to your offspring,’ who is the Messiah” (Gal 3:16).

And so, today, we give thanks for a mystery, a mystery hidden from even the prophets, a mystery hidden in God and made known to the Apostles. When that star rose in the sky and led the wise men to Jerusalem and then to Bethlehem, the glory of the Lord was rising upon the offspring of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the nations were coming to that light just as Isaiah had promised. But notice something. The star doesn’t rest over the city. The star doesn’t rest over the entire country and people. The star comes to rest “over the place where the child was.” (Matt 2:9). He is the light that shines in the darkness. He is the glory of God. He is the one who calls the whole world, Jew and Gentile alike, to come streaming to himself and to his light. For in him, all the promises of God find their yes. In him, we are fellow heirs, fellow members of the same body, and fellow partakers of the promise. He is the Epiphany, and not for Jews alone nor for Gentiles alone, but for every family on earth, and for that we give thanks today and forever. 

Amen.

The post The Mystery of the Messiah first appeared on St. Dunstan's Anglican Church.