I was struck on Tuesday evening by the stunning theology of some of our favorite Christmas hymns. I won’t repeat them at length here, and I certainly won’t sing any of them. I’ll spare you that. But it got me thinking about Christmas and how profound the theology Christmas truly is, and we get an excellent sampling of the depths of that theology in our readings this morning. There’s no attempt made by the church to determine the actual day of Christ’s birth and celebrate Christmas on that day. Why the church chose December 25th is a complicated question, but it’s safe to say that, at least in part, is had to do with the Christianizing of an already established pagan holiday. But that suggests that Christmas isn’t so much about the day as it is about the theology, and if you want to get the theology of Christmas, there is perhaps no better set of readings than you what we have this morning. 

It’s worth noting that today’s readings are always the readings on the First Sunday of Christmas. There aren’t options for years A, B, and C. There is always one Sunday between Christmas and Epiphany, and today’s readings are always the readings, so there is something important here for us to understand about Christmas. And it’s not just the Johannine Prologue, although that in itself is worth probably a dozen sermons. It’s all the readings collectively that give to us not only a theology of Christmas but a theology of redemptive history. 

Israel’s belief about its God was different from the way the Greeks and the Romans thought about divinity. For the people of Israel, three primary beliefs about God made sense of everything else that the Old Testament said about God. The first of these beliefs was monotheism. The Old Testament Scriptures make clear again and again that there are not a pantheon of gods in the heavens, but one, true, and only God. That’s the first belief: monotheism, and it is given almost creedal formulation in the Shema, “Behold, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” 

Second, deriving from the first belief, Israel believed that its God, because he was the only God, was the God who made heaven and earth. God is the creator. There is nothing that exists, save God himself, in heaven, on earth other, or under the earth that God did not make. Israel’s God is the creator-God. That’s the second belief. 

And as the second belief flows from the first, and so too does the third belief flow from the second. The Old Testament says that not only is Israel’s God the only God, and not only did he alone make the heavens and the earth and all that is not God, but he is also the covenant God. God created the heavens and earth, but something went wrong, and so God picked one family out of all the families on earth to fix what had gone wrong in his creation. He chose Abram to be a blessing to all the families of the earth, and he made promises to Abraham and his offspring forever. Of course, the story of the covenant God involves more than just the story of Abraham. The story of Abraham and his offspring is a subset of the story of humanity, but the story of the Old Testament after Genesis 12 is almost exclusively the story of Abraham’s descendants, and the two questions that rest over the entire narrative are this: how is God going to use this family to fix the world and what is to come of the promises made to the children of Abraham?

From this perspective, we see that the Old Testament contains two great stories. There is on the one hand, the story of God, the only God, the creator of heaven and earth, who chose Abraham and his offspring to fix what had gone wrong in his creation, and on the other hand the story of Israel and her struggle if not failure to be the people whom God had called and commanded her to be. 

Of course, the biggest crisis in the story of Israel was the exile. Removed from her land with her Temple destroyed, it might seem that God has forsaken his people and given up on his plan. But God has

Who is this child in the manger? That really is the question that all of us must answer for ourselves. The story of the life of Jesus begins with the newborn child being laid in a wooden manager, and it will come to an end when that same child is nailed to a wooden cross. Of course, it’s part of the Gospel that the life of Jesus doesn’t end there at the cross, but the wood of the manger and the wood of the cross demand from us an answer to the same question: Who is this?

Luke draws our attention to the manger for several reasons. The manger adds a human touch to this story. We can picture the young mother, having just experienced the trauma/miracle of childbirth, laying her newborn son in this wooden feeding trough. The manger also adds a theological dimension to this. It shows the extent of the way to which God the Son humbled himself, leaving the throne of heaven for an animal’s feeding trough. 

But, while both those points are true, in Luke’s narrative, the manger does else. Three times Luke mentions the manger. First, Mary gives birth to her son and lays him in the manger. Second, the manger is the sign for the shepherds. The shepherds are told the most incredible news by the most incredible messengers: “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger” (Luke 2:10–13). 

So, first, Mary lays her newborn son in a manger. Second, the angels are told that the manger is a sign for them of the wonderful news about which they just head, and then lastly, the shepherds find Mary and Joseph, and more importantly, they find “the baby lying in a manger” (2:16). In case you’re wondering, this is not a common thing. Shepherds don’t usually just happen upon babies in a manger, and new mothers weren’t prone to leaving their child in an animal’s feeding trough. But this manger is the sign to the shepherds. It is the witness that the incredible things spoken by the angels were in fact true. So, if we ask the question “Who is this child in the manger?” it is the angels who give us the answer. 

The answer the angels give can be reduced down essentially to three words: σωτὴρ, χριστὸς, and κύριος, or, in English, Savior, Messiah, and Lord. However, before we look at these three names, we need to consider how Luke has introduced the story of the birth of Jesus. Sometimes we see names in the Bible, and we skip right past them. For example, Daniel 7 begins “In the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon,” and we assume that Daniel is mostly giving us a date, and so we don’t think too much about who Belshazzar was, how he had become king of Babylon, or anything like that. And sometimes that’s ok, but in the case of the opening verse of Luke 2, it’s particularly important that we don’t do that.

The first verse of this chapter begins, “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered.” Caesar Augustus is not a name that you should let your eyes over lightly, especially when you consider the fact that this type of introduction isn’t typical in the Gospel of Luke. In this case Luke wants us to understand the story he’s about to tell in the context of a world ruled by Caesar Augustus. 

August was the adopted son of Julius Caesar, and he became the first emperor of the Roman Empire after a bloody civil war that saw him bring an end to all his rivals and turn the great Roman republic into an empire. If you aren’t familiar with Caesar Augustus but this still sounds vaguely familiar, the rise to power of Emperor Palpatine in the Star Wars prequels is based on the story of Caesar Augustus. Unlike Palpatine, who is feared through the Star Wars universe, Caesar Augustus is praised and beloved, at least by those who survived his rise to power. August was said to have broug

Matthew 11:2-19

Has it ever seemed like God has failed to meet your expectations?

Have you ever felt like you’ve done your part, but Jesus hasn’t done his? Have

you ever felt like you’ve paid the price, done your part for the kingdom of

God, and yet the Kingdom hasn’t come? I’m not talking about soteriology, our

doctrine of salvation, because we are all inheritors of the reformed tradition,

and we all know that the work of our redemption was finished on the cross.

That’s not what I’m referring to. I’m talking about the nitty-gritty of

everyday life. I’m talking about those moments where you’ve poured your heart

into something, you’ve prayed, you’ve done the work, you’ve done what you

thought was right, you’ve gone above and beyond what would typically be

expected of someone in your position, and you’ve waited for God to act and

there was nothing but silence. I know that I’ve felt that moment before. You’re

left wondering what God is doing, or, more specifically, why God isn’t doing

the thing you think he should be doing.

It’s comforting to me to know that even someone like John the

Baptist had that feeling at least once in his life. I said last week that all

four Gospels make the same point, which is rare for the Gospels, that John the

Baptist is the voice crying in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord.”

He is the forerunner of God himself who is coming back at last to his people.

In our reading today, Jesus says that John was more than a prophet; he was the

messenger of Malachi 3 who would go before the Lord to prepare his way. He is

the greatest of all the prophets before the coming of the kingdom of God. He is

the Elijah who is to come, and yet even he begins to question what Jesus is

doing.

John is in prison. We won’t get the full story for a few more

chapters, but we know that he is imprisoned in part for proclaiming the kingdom

of God with Jesus at the center of that kingdom movement. King Herod didn’t

like John’s message, especially since it included a double renunciation of him.

He was not the true king, nor was his marriage to his brother’s wife

legitimate, and for that, he was arrested and imprisoned. John had paid a high

price to proclaim his cousin’s kingdom message, and now he languishes in jail.

What he hears of Jesus is surprising to say the least.

The rumors swirling around Jesus aren’t good. They say he’s a

glutton and a drunkard. They say he is a friend of tax collectors and sinners.

Where is his army? Where are his advisors telling him that he’s hanging out

with the wrong kind of people? Why isn’t he preaching against the King as John

had done? John might very well be asking himself why he’s in jail and Jesus

isn’t, or even more likely, why he’s in prison when someone with the power to

free him has not yet come to do so. And that’s often our question. When we have

a complaint about God, it’s often because we know God has the power to act, and

he doesn’t. We believe he can fix this specific situation for which we have

prayed and worked, but he doesn’t. Most of the complaints that human beings

have ever leveled against God come down to a question about theodicy, a

question about how God can be all-powerful and all-good and still allow evil to

exist.

Now, I don’t intend to solve this problem today, but I do

want to give you some insights to help you think about this problem. There are

several different ways of doing theology, but there are two I want to focus on

right now. The first is natural theology, and the second is systematic

theology. Systematic theology is theology from above. It’s often biblically-based,

but instead of a narrative, it creates a consistent system of thought that

governs what God is and does and what humanity is and does and how the two relate.

The real-world issues of people don’t necessarily matter in the context of

systematic theology. Let me give you a clue. When you hear someone give a

heartless, uncaring, but seemingly theologically correct response to so

Matthew 3:1-12

Our collect this morning is one

of my favorites. Collects are prayers that follow a specific form or pattern,

and the word ‘collect’ comes from the Latin collēcta, meaning to gather together, and the idea is

that a collect gathers together the prayers of the people in the congregation.

And when you have a collect assigned for each Sunday, you’re gathering together

not just our prayers but the prayers of every church that prays this collect

this morning.

This morning’s collect, which I

will read again in a moment, goes back to the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, and

Thomas Cranmer is its author. If you’re doing the math, that means that the

Anglican church has been praying this prayer for 470 years. For context, many

of the weekly collects in Cranmer’s original prayer book were translations of

the Latin prayers for each Sunday, but this one belongs to Cranmer, and he is

the one who placed it here near the beginning of the church year. And that’s

surprising, because at first glance this collect doesn’t particularly fit with

Advent, and yet it’s been the collect for this Sunday for nearly 500 years.

Let me reread the collect, and

you’ll hear what I mean. “Blessed Lord, who caused all Holy Scriptures to be

written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and

inwardly digest them, that by patience and the comfort of your holy Word we may

embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have

given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy

Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.”

Let me make two points about

this Collect, and then we will turn our attention to the Gospel. First, despite

appearances, this collect is an Advent collect because the church lives in the

liminal space between the first and second coming of Christ, and in that space

in between these two poles of the redemptive history, we have Scripture to help

us find our way. The Bible, set in the context of the worshipping, praying,

Spirit-filled community of the people of God, is the best source that we have

for how to live between the first and second coming of Christ. So, it is an

Advent collect, not just because Cranmer placed it in Advent, but because it tells

us part of what the people of God are to be doing as we wait for the return of

Christ, namely, engaging with Holy Scripture.

Secondly, I want to point out

the critical grammatical oddity of Cranmer’s collect. The list of how the

Christian is to engage with Scripture is not a single list. There are two parts

to it, but there isn’t an “and” connecting the two parts as one might expect. Cranmer

doesn’t ask that we would “hear, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them,” that

would be one list, nor does he ask that we would “hear them and read, mark,

learn, and inwardly digest them.” That would be two lists with a conjunction.

No, Cranmer asks instead that we would “hear them, read, mark, learn, and

inwardly digest them” with no conjunction. Cranmer wants us to see that there

are two parts to what he has in mind, but they are all part of the same process

which leads to inwardly digesting, or being transformed by, Scripture. That

process starts with hearing Scripture, and that’s what happens in the church.

We hear Scripture read, but the process doesn’t stop there. Cranmer expects you

to go home and “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” the same words you

heard in Church. And back in 1549 through 1662, this was easy because the

prayer books printed the text of the Sunday readings, not just the verses, but

the text, with the collect. So, as long as you had your prayer book, you could

easily hear the words hear Scripture read and then go home and “read, mark,

learn, and inwardly digest them.” It was all there in your prayer book.

Cranmer believed that it is the

Christian’s responsibility, as we wait for the return of Christ, to be actively

involved in the study of Holy Scripture. There are many ways y

Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 24:29-44

Advent is a season of waiting.

It is also a season of repentance, but that is not its primary focus. Advent is

not a mini-Lent, as some consider it, and one of the ways our Bishop asks us to

signal this is by having the celebrant wear blue vestments instead of the

traditional purple because purple is also the color of Lent. However, that’s

not to say that there is no tone of repentance in Advent, but it is repentance

oriented towards waiting, or, in other words, repentance is part of what we do

while we wait.

Waiting is one the defining

characteristics of the people of God at every point in redemptive history. The

descendants of Adam and Eve wait for the end of their exile from the tree of

life. The descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob wait for the fulfillment of

the promises made to Abraham. The exiles from the Promise Land wait for the

forgiveness of their sins, the promised deliverer, and the return of YHWH to

Zion. The disciples of Jesus wait to see what Jesus could possibly mean by his

sayings about dying and rising again. Jesus waits three days in the tomb. The

disciples wait for the outpouring of the Spirit. The church waits for the

return of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who will come again one day to be our

judge. Throughout redemptive history, the people of God have been who wait. The

promise is always out there waiting for us, seemingly just beyond our reach.

That gap between our reach and

the thing we’re reaching for creates a certain amount of anxiety and space for

speculation to try and reduce that anxiety. One need only think of the rampant

success of the Left Behind books to understand the anxiety that we have about

what comes next and how we’ll consume almost anything if it will help reduce

that anxiety. Forgive me if anyone is a fan of those books, but their appeal

came not from their literary quality but from the appearance of giving a

biblical answer to our questions about what comes next. And Left Behind aren’t

the only books in this category. Michelle and I both used to work in Christian

retail, and there were books and study Bibles and prophecy guides and all these

different things to tell us all about what comes next.

And I want to be clear, this is

not a critique of this genre of books and teaching so much as it is a word of caution

on two fronts. First, Jesus says that no one, not the angels, not even the Son,

but only the Father knows the day or the hour. His entire point at the end of

the discourse in Matthew 24 is that we can’t know. The people in the days of

Noah didn’t know when the judgment was coming. The two men working in the field

and the two women working at the mill don’t know when the judgment is coming.

The master of the house doesn’t know when the thief is coming. And instead of

speculating about it, Jesus instructs his disciples to maintain constant

vigilance. Since we don’t know when the end if coming, Jesus doesn’t instruct

his disciples to speculate, but instead he instructs us always to be ready.

Second, not only does Jesus say

no one knows, which should caution us about speculation, but the history of the

people of God has shown that we are quite bad at speculation. Or maybe God is

just very good at surprising us. But think about the Gospels and what God

accomplished in Jesus Christ through the cross. We look back on Jesus’

contemporaries and ask questions like, “How did they not get it?” or “How did

they not see it?”, but they didn’t. Second Temple literature is filled with

speculation about what will happen when God finally acts, and many of these

works are based on good, solid Biblical interpretation by their contemporary

standards. Yet we know that when God finally did act, many were caught off

guard because their speculation had been so wrong.

And as someone who has studied

the Bible for the past two decades of my life, I can tell you that one of the

most remarkable things about the history of the church and of the Am

Luke 23:35-43

The Revised Common Lectionary divides the readings for Sundays into three sets: Year A, Year B, and Year C. In Year A, most of the Gospel readings come from Matthew, in Year B, they come from Mark, and in Year C, they come from Luke. John’s Gospel is divided out among the three years and shows up particularly on major and lesser feast days. Thus, today, we have come to the end of the three-year cycle. Next week will be the first week of Advent, and we will start again at Year A, but today we find ourselves at the very end of the lectionary: the last Sunday of Year C. And we have a special name for the last Sunday of the year. We call it Christ the King Sunday.

The liturgical logic works like this: in Advent, we await God’s salvation, in Christmas, we celebrate that God has come to us and united himself to humanity forever, in Epiphany, we give thanks that manifestation of God was not for one people only, but for the whole world, in Lent, we walk with Jesus for forty days through the wilderness and prepare ourselves to take up our cross and follow him, in Holy Week, we walk with Jesus day by day through the most important week in human history and we marvel at the mystery of the God who dies and rises again. We celebrate his resurrection throughout the season of Easter because with the resurrection of Jesus, God’s new creation has begun. We celebrate the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and then we come to Ordinary Time, or as some call it, Trinity Season. This season is the church age, and it culminates today in Christ the King Sunday. Just as human history as we know it will come to an end with Jesus Christ putting all his enemies under his feet, including death, and handing the kingdom over to his Father, so our liturgical history comes to an end with a celebration of Christ the King of Heaven and Earth.

You

might, therefore, rightly be surprised when the Gospel was read just a moment

ago, and you found yourself at Golgotha. We are months away from Good Friday.

We are a week away from Advent. We are at the end of the church calendar on a

day that celebrates Christ as King, and what we find is Jesus dying on the

cross. This fact is even more jarring when you consider that our second lesson

came from St. Paul’s letter to the Colossians and that that reading sounds more

appropriate for Christ the King Sunday.

“He is

the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all

things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether

thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through

him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold

together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the

firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him

all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to

himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of

his cross.”

Now

that sounds more like Christ the King Sunday. That sounds like the King whom

heaven and earth adore. That sounds like a powerful King that we can emulate

and follow and praise. A King whom even the world might be able to rally behind

and understand. The world understands power. The world understands glory. The

world understands authority. Nevertheless, there is Golgotha, and there is that

sign above Jesus’ head.

I

pointed out last week that the people of God in the book of Malachi are crying

out for justice. They are crying out for the God of Heaven and Earth, the God

of the covenant, finally to act. The book of the prophet Malachi ends with the

promise that God will act, that God is coming, and before he does, he will send

Elijah. The people in Jesus’ days expected a God like the one we hear about in

Colossians. They expected the creator. They expected the one who rules over

thrones, dominions, rulers, and authorities. They expected the head. T

Malachi 3:13-4:6

This Sunday is sometimes referred to as the Second Sunday before Advent, which would make next Sunday the Last Sunday before Advent, which is more commonly known as Christ the King Sunday. The Readings for these two Sundays are intentionally linked. Some questions and promises arise in our readings this morning, in particular in our reading from Malachi, which find their answer in the New Testament, in the coming of Christ the King of Heaven and Earth.

In

Malachi, the people voice a complaint. It is a complaint that the people of God

have voices almost from the beginning. In fact, in the text in Hebrew, there is

some subtle wordplay with the word Jacob, who wrestled with God, and this is

the prophet’s subtle way of reminding the people that this is who they have

always been. They are Jacob’s descendants. They have wearied God by the way

that they have behaved as his people and by the way they have constantly

questioned and even doubted him.

Their

complaint in this section of the book might sound familiar. Maybe you have said

it before. Maybe you have never spoken it out loud, but in the quieter moments

of your life you’ve heard it rumbling around inside your head. For anyone who

looks honestly at the world, the complaint is fair. So, if you have said this,

that is ok. God wants us to be honest with ourselves and honest with him. He

does not want us to be hypocrites who pretend how great we are or pretend how

great everything is when that is not the case.

The

people’s complaint is this: “It is vain to serve God. What is the profit of our

keeping his charge or of walking as in mourning before the LORD of hosts? And

now we call the arrogant blessed. Evildoers not only prosper but they put God

to the test and they escape.” “It is vain to serve God.” That is a remarkable

thing to hear God’s people, the offspring of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, saying

about the Lord their God, but when they looked out on the world, the reality

did not seem to match what God had promised them. The arrogant, the proud,

evildoers, they seem to flourish, and yet those who serve God, those who keep

his commandments and live simple, humble lives do not seem to prosper in the

same way. Thus, the people, looking on this reality out in the world, say, “It

is vain to serve God.”

Now,

this is not the first complaint by the people in the book of Malachi, but it is

the last, and here something fascinating occurs. The people do something

different this time than in their previous complaints. This time, instead of

just complaining about the apparent disorder of the world, “those who feared

the LORD spoke with one another. The LORD paid attention and heard them, and a

book of remembrance was written before him of those who feared the LORD and

esteemed his name” (Mal 3:16).

This

group of people, who continued to fear the Lord despite the injustice in the

world, do not just complain about the world, but they gather together and speak

with one another. They are both aware that the world is not how it should be

and because they feared God unwilling to give up on him. And so, rather than

despairing, they come together as a community. They don’t give in to cynicism

nor are they blind to the reality around them, but instead they trust in the

promises of God, and God says to them that they will once more “see the

distinction between the righteous and the wicked, between one who serves God

and one who does not serve him” (Mal 3:18). God’s answer to their honest faith

is eschatology. He does not promise them that they will see the righting of

wrongs and the inversion of injustice now, but that the day is coming.

“For

behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all

evildoers will be stubble. The day that is coming shall set them ablaze, says

the LORD of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for

you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its

wings. You

Luke 20:27-38

I want to talk about the subject of resurrection this morning because I want us to be clear about what it is, what it is not, and where it comes from theologically. Because the concept of bodily resurrection is so prevalent in the New Testament and particularly central to the story of Jesus, we sometimes take it for granted that belief in physical, bodily life after death was also the belief of the Old Testament saints. And then, when we go looking for belief in resurrection back in the Old Testament because we assume it must be there, we often find it in verses that are ambiguous at best.

Take our reading from Job this morning. “And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God” (Job 19:26). On the surface, that sounds rather unambiguous, but if you look in your pew Bible, you’ll notice that after the word “in” there is a number three. That is a translator’s note, and if you’ll look down at the bottom, you’ll notice the translator’s footnote that says, “or without.” This means that the translation committee was basically split on whether the translation should be “in my flesh I shall see God” or “without my flesh I shall see God,” and those two phrases have drastically different meanings. The translation “in my flesh” comes into English from the King James Version and was made famous by Part Three of Handel’s Messiah, which begins with these verses from Job. But the preposition מִן means “away from, out of,” so “without (or away from) my flesh” is a better translation.

If you want further proof, consider the fact that no New Testament author ever quotes or alludes to this verse from Job in reference to the idea of resurrection at all. Take, for example, our Gospel reading this morning. Jesus is talking to the Sadducees, who don’t believe in resurrection, and the reason they don’t believe in resurrection is because they don’t believe it’s in their Bible. And to answer their objection that there is no Old Testament basis for the belief in resurrection, Jesus doesn’t go back to this passage in Job, nor does he go back to any of the other passages that well-meaning preachers and teachers have used in the past to try to demonstrate this doctrine’s Old Testament origin. Instead, he goes to Moses and the burning bush and says, “But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Now he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him” (Luke 20:37–38).

Jesus’ argument is that God does

not say he was the God of Abraham,

Isaac, and Jacob, but that he is their

God, present tense, and this implies that they are alive in some form, and

presumably, that they will rise again. And if you’re saying to yourself, “that

doesn’t sound like a very strong argument,” then you’re tracking with me. Based

on the Old Testament, the Sadducees kind of have a point.

So then, where does the doctrine of resurrection come from? In the Old Testament, the idea of resurrection is ambiguous at best, with maybe the ending of Daniel as an exception, but when you come to the New Testament, the doctrine is commonplace. In fact, it’s so commonplace in first-century Palestine that it’s notable that the Sadducees didn’t believe in resurrection. So, how do you get from the Old Testament to the New? In this case, you get there by way of the Apocrypha, particularly the book of 2 Maccabees. 

About the Apocrypha, the 39 Articles say, quoting Jerome, that “the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine.” So, the 39 Articles does make a clear distinction between the Apocrypha and Scripture, yet it does include them among the books that “the Church doth read,” so it also distinguishes them from all other books. If you don’t have a copy of the Apocrypha, I would strongly encourage you to get one because not only are

Revelation 7:9-17; Ephesians 1:11-23; Luke 6:20-26

Today we celebrate the Feast of All Saints’ Day. All Saints’ Day is traditionally celebrated on November 1st, but the Book of Common Prayer does allow for also celebrating it on the first Sunday after November 1st. What we celebrate today is the bond between the church triumphant and the church militant, by which we mean those saints who have already passed from this life and those whose work is still ongoing. But the connection that we share with all the Saints isn’t only vertical. It’s horizontal as well. There is a bond that exists today between all members of the body of Christ, and that bond crosses time, space, artificial lines on maps, and even death itself. To celebrate All Saints’ Day requires us simultaneously to recognize the horizontal and vertical bond that we share with all believers, not just the ones in heaven but also the ones on earth who might not look like us, talk like us, live like us, or think like us but nonetheless just like us participate in the body of Christ by faith.

That horizontal bond is one that we

forget more easily than the vertical bond. At least I do. It’s an amazing thing

that we live on a sphere and that the sun only shines on half of the planet at

a time. When you and I go to bed (well, when you go to bed… I’m probably up for

another 4-5 hours, but when you go to bed), someone on the other side of the

planet, who looks differently than you, speaks a different language than you,

worships Jesus differently than you, and thinks differently than you do about a

whole host of topics is waking up, and the first thing she’s going to do is

pray to and worship Jesus. And that means that as your “shift” ends, hers

begins, and therefore every hour of every day there is someone on this planet

worshipping our Lord Jesus Christ. At least I hope that’s the case.

What All Saint’s Day reminds us is that in a real sense you have more in common with that person on the other side of the planet than with someone who roots for the same sports teams, drives the same type of car, lives in the same type of home, or works the same type of job, if that person is not a believer in Jesus Christ. Of all the things that we use in this life to define ourselves and to give our lives shape and meaning, the only ones that are permanent, the only ones that transcend space and time, the only ones that transcend and even conquers death are faith, hope, and love in Jesus Christ. And in faith, hope, and love with Jesus Christ, we share a bond with all believers in heaven and all believers on earth, and we have a name for that bond. We call it the Holy Spirit.

The Church has for a long time considered the Holy Spirit to be the bond of love between the Father and the Son that is so strong that it is its own Person, and when we come to the waters to be baptized, we believe that God pours that Spirit on every one of us. The Holy Spirit is what we share with all believers across time, space, and death, and it is the Holy Spirit who not only unites us to Christ forever but also unites us to each other forever, and that should be the focus of our identity. Too often we identify ourselves by other things. I’m a Dolphins fan. I’m an Apple guy. I’m an American. I’m a Chicagoan or a Floridian. I’m a … and you can fill in the blank. Our first allegiance is always to a king and a kingdom, to a cross and an empty tomb, and everything else is a distant second. Nothing should define us more than who we are in Jesus Christ.

Because not only is everything else

in this world transient, but there is also a great reversal coming upon the

world. That’s what our Gospel is about. And the thing about the Saints is that

many of them, by the definition of the world’s standards, weren’t successful.

And by Saints here I don’t just mean the saints that we know and remember, but

all the saints: the Sunday school teachers who led us to Christ, the faithful

pastors and priests who serve in sm

Luke 18:9-14

The opening words of this morning’s

reading from St. Luke are worrisome. I don’t think it takes very much

imagination or creative thinking to recognize that the first words of our text might

have something to say to Christians today and especially to many Christians in

this country. In last week’s reading, Luke told us from the beginning what the

parable meant. He said, “And [Jesus] told them a parable to the effect that

they ought always to pray and not lose heart” (Luke 18:1). In this morning’s

reading, Luke doesn’t tell us what the parable means, but rather to whom Jesus

speaks the parable. He says, “He also told this parable to some who trusted in

themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt” (Luke

18:9).  

The parable that Jesus tells is

straight forward. In last week’s parable, there was a judge and a widow, and

the parable involved the widow repeatedly bringing her case before the judge

and demanding justice. In the parable this morning, there is also a courtroom,

but it’s not the local court that is in mind. The court in this morning’s

parable is the cosmic courtroom or the divine courtroom where God himself sits

as judge and Lord. Two people appear before the judge, but they don’t quite

know what’s happening. They’ve only gone to the Temple to pray, just as we have

come to the church today to pray, sing, worship, and take communion together.

The first man is a Pharisee; the

second is a tax collector. The Pharisee stands in the Temple and prays, “God, I

thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or

even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I

get.” The tax collector, on the other hand, stands far off, won’t even lift his

eyes to heaven but instead beats his breast and says, “God, be merciful to me,

a sinner!” For us as contemporary readers of this story who have all heard it

before, we know how the story goes from here. In our readings, because we are

almost two thousand years removed from the original context, the Pharisees are

part of the villains of the Gospels, so it’s not surprising to us that it’s the

tax collector who goes home justified and not the Pharisee.

But we need to pause a moment and

recognize how shocking this would have been to anyone in the first century.

It’s the word justified that tells us that the context for this story is a

divine courtroom. The Jewish people were waiting for their justification, for

the day in which the God of heaven and earth would intervene in human affairs

and say to the world, “This, my people, were in the right.” The Jews claimed

that their God was the true God, that their understanding of the world was the

truth, and that their way of life was the proper way to live. No matter what

was happening in the world, no matter which nation ruled, and no matter which

emperor sat on the throne, the Jews made their claim and believed that the day

would come when God would justify them and prove that they were in the right

all along so long as they lived the way God had commanded them to live.

And if anyone in the first century

lived the way God had commanded them to live, at least in the eyes of the

people, it was the Pharisees. And if anyone in the first century lived contrary

to the way that God had commanded people to live, at least in the eyes of the populace,

it was the tax collectors. So, when Jesus says that it was the tax collector

who went home justified and not the Pharisee, he is dropping a grenade in the

middle of their worldview. Imagine if I told you this same story, but instead

of the Pharisee and the tax collector, I said it was the prostitute and not the

priest who went home justified. Imagine if I said it was the drug addict and

not the bishop who went home justified.

And it’s common in the mind of most

Christians to rip on the Pharisees, because, as I said, they’re the bag guys in

the Gospels, but they’re the ones who are trying to be obedie