St. Matthew's Sermons

Fr. Hayden A. Butler

Fr. Hayden

Bp. Scarlett

Fr. Hayden

A Sermon for The Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, Jan. 29, 2023

The Epistle, Romans 13:1-7 - The Gospel, St. Matthew 8:1-13

The Rev’d Stephen C. Scarlett

The authority of Jesus

The events of today’s gospel take place just after Jesus finished the famous discourse called The Sermon on the Mount. St. Matthew tells us that “the people were astonished at Jesus’ teaching, for He taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.” (Matt. 7:28-29).

The gospel healings develop this theme. The two people who ask Jesus for healing express their faith in Jesus’ authority. The leper said, “If you are willing, you can make me clean.” The centurion illustrated Jesus’ authority with a military analogy. He commanded soldiers and they had to obey. Similarly, Jesus had authority over disease. He could tell it to go away and it would go.

The epistle also talks about authority. St. Paul says, “Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities.” This is connected to the authority of Jesus as Lord. As St. Paul explains, “There is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves” (Rom. 13:1-2).

Exercising the faith our lesson prescribe is often more challenging in real life than it sounds in principle. The leper said, “If you are willing, you can make me clean”—and Jesus was immediately willing. Sometimes we come to Jesus believing he is able to heal us or help us, but Jesus is not immediately willing. Similarly, what do we do with the command to obey the government when the government is really bad, or when we, personally, are the victims of governmental injustice?

An eternal vs temporal frame

These are not new challenges. The Acts of the Apostles record many miracles and healings in the mission of the early church. However, the later New Testament writings, especially the letters to the churches, call believers to patience and faith when the answer doesn’t come immediately. Jesus himself exhorted us to persistent prayer using the example of a widow who wore out the judge with her complaints until he finally gave in (Luke 18:1-8). He ended that parable with a rhetorical question. “When the Son of Man comes, will He really find faith on the earth?" (Lk. 18:8).

St. Paul healed people and performed exorcisms. Yet, in 2 Corinthians 12, a later stage in his ministry, we are told that he prayed three times to be healed of an affliction he called, “a thorn in the flesh.” God told him, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness." (2 Cor. 12:9). Jesus was able to heal him but was not willing at that moment in that circumstance.

If we persevere in following Jesus in the life of prayer, we will experience both the miracle of answered prayer and the challenge of prayer not yet answered. This tension reflects the nature of the Christian life in this world. The primary goal of God’s work in our lives is to recreate us in the image of Christ. We are being prepared for our ultimate destiny in the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is with us now through the Holy Spirit. Sometimes it is revealed to us now in miracles of healing and visibly answered prayer. But the kingdom is not yet fully here. Consequently, every healing in this world is temporary, and not everything is healed. This tension is the root of the foundational Christian prayer, “Come, Lord Jesus.” When Jesus comes everything will be healed.

Justice

This same tension exists around the desire for justice. It is hard to overstate how important justice is to the biblical narrative. The Ten Commandments are about justice. Biblical justice is rooted in two simple principles. First, God created us and God redeemed us. Thus, justice means giving God the worship and honor he is due as Creator and Redeemer. Second, since God made us in his image, justice means honoring other people as God’s image bearers. As Jesus said, “Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren you did it to me” (Matt. 25:40).

Popular discussions about justice omit the primary biblical duty of justice to honor and worship God. This renders the second duty of justice impossible. We cannot honor the image of God if we do not honor God himself. This is the reason that from the beginning the church made one great exception to the command to obey the governing authority. The church met for the Eucharist on Sunday even when Caesar legally prohibited it. Caesar has a God-given vocation to punish wickedness and vice, but Caesar has no right to deny God the justice he is due.

Now, justice is a big and thorny topic in the church. It surfaced during the pandemic and the riots. It continues wherever people are treated unjustly. It raises questions. How much protest is justified? How much is required? How activist should the church be in protesting injustice?

The church has never been afraid to confront injustice in rulers. The great church father St. John Chrysostom, at the Sunday Eucharist, called out the emperor for unjust brutality in a war—while the emperor was sitting in the balcony. Not surprisingly, John Chrysostom spent some time in exile. The most profound prophetic confrontation I have witnessed was by Mother Theresa of Calcutta. During a trip to America she was invited to address a joint session of congress. She told that joint session that she wasn’t sure how long God would allow a nation to exist that killed its own children. A joint session of congress has never been that quiet since that moment.

The command to obey the government and the command to exercise a prophetic voice remain the church’s dual vocation. This tension is governed by the biblical truth that this world is not perfectible apart from the coming of Jesus and the completion of the New Creation. We are witnesses for God’s justice, but we must never mistake the world for the kingdom. We are called to remain blameless in the face of the world’s injustice while we wait for the world’s true Lord to render his righteous judgements.

Nonetheless, the desire for universal justice is the essence of the prayer, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” In the western world, the desire for the kingdom is often associated with personal fulfillment and comfort. However, in the Bible personal fulfillment and comfort is inextricably connected to communal justice. Only when Jesus judges the world in righteousness, only when every creature made in his image and redeemed by him is treated justly, will everyone be made whole. We must never allow our faith in Jesus to shrink into a desire for mere personal happiness. A desire for true justice in all the world is the main motive for the prayer, “Come Lord Jesus.”

Faith and justice

The irony of calls for justice in the world is that they are frequently made by those who deny God the justice he is due. This makes true justice impossible. The human problem of injustice is rooted in our rebellion against God. It is because Cain would not give God his due that he ended up killing his brother (See Gen. 4:3-8).

This is why the Book of Common Prayer teaches us that it is our bounden duty “to worship God every Sunday in his church” (BCP 291). Our worship of God is not a Sunday only thing, but the way we order our time reflects the priority of our commitments. Worship is a matter o...

Sermon transcript:

As Bp. Scarlett noted last week, there is a chronological progression in the Epiphanytide Gospel Lessons that reveals Christ to us from infancy through childhood into adulthood and now His ministry. Today’s Gospel speaks of the first ‘sign’ that Jesus performs by changing water into wine at the wedding of Cana in Galilee as recorded by St. John.

The first appearance of water in the Scriptures is at the beginning when the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the deep, the formless and void waters. God spoke and life was brought out of lifelessness. Much of the story of Creation, in fact, is the story of how water is then given shape, place, and purpose where none existed before: being divided among the waters beneath and above the firmament, in the heavens and on earth, and then among seas and streams. Through the creative activity of God and in its good place in His work, what was formless and void was made to be a source and habitat for life.

The second appearance of water, however, reveals its other Scriptural significance. After the earth had been corrupted through the rebellion of mankind, water became the means of destruction, the de-creation of life. A remnant of living creatures was brought through the waters on the Ark, though, after which God made a covenant with Noah that He would never again flood the world to destroy all flesh. And here we get the first mention of a Biblical sign: the bow set in the sky to signify that God was keeping that covenant with Noah whenever the waters fell on the earth again. We can see in this covenant a redemption of both humanity and water by the word of God in a covenant promise, ratified by His sign. Through chastisement and judgment, God delivers again to humanity and water their created place and purpose.

The first appearance of wine in the Scriptures follows immediately from this restoration, but was made to serve mankind in renewing its commitment to corruption. As we read in Genesis, immediately after the covenant was ratified, Noah planted a vineyard and made wine with which he became drunk to the point of unconsciousness. In that state, one of his sons dishonored and shamed his father’s body, for which he was cursed by his father and made to flee. This introduction of wine in the Scriptures comes by the hand of the man who was brought out of the waters of the Flood-judgment, and becomes a source of shame and the exiling of the son from the father.

The second appearance of wine, though, comes in the hands of Melchizedek the King and Priest of Salem, who brings bread and wine to Abraham after his successful victory against the five kings of Sodom. In the hands of this ancient priest, wine came to signify peace and the blessing of God on Abraham’s life. Wine signified the promise of God who had called him from Ur of the Chaldees to be with him and to prosper him. The arrival of Melchizedek with bread and wine is followed immediately by God forming the second covenant of the Scriptures, this time with Abraham, promising that through the sign of a beloved son all the peoples of the world would be likewise blessed. 

All that we see of water and wine in Genesis is stamped on the subsequent Scriptural history of mankind. Water serves as a source of life but also as a means of judgment. As we observe in Exodus, the waters of the Red Sea became for the Egyptians the site of their destruction but for the Israelites the place of new birth as a people on the way to the promised land. In the Tabernacle and Temple it is a means of ritual purification, receiving from the penitent their exterior impurities as a symbolic act to purify them within. In a similar way, wine goes on to bear a dual significance. In the hands of Lot’s daughters or the dissolute sons of Eli at Shiloh, wine became their undoing and a prophetic image of God’s wrath, His judgment on mankind’s turn to self-destruction. Yet in the wisdom literature, wine is the gift of God of a brief reprieve from the curse of toil, of gladness to the heart of man in his travail, and a reminder that this was not the end of his existence. In the Tabernacle and Temple, of course, it became a participant in the offerings to reconcile the people to God. 

All that we see in Genesis of water and wine remains–that is, until they encounter Jesus Christ. Last week, we saw in the Gospel how Jesus, for the only time in the Gospels, goes into the water (as opposed to over it), and in coming up from the water the Holy Trinity is made manifest over the waters in such a way as had not been known since that first day of Creation. Jesus fills the waters with Himself, makes them alive again and conscripts them to His service as the means of bringing His life to those who would do likewise.. In doing so, he brings the covenant with Noah to perfection, which means the healing of Creation. Today, that new creature of water comes to appear before its Lord in the vessels of purification at a wedding. There that element, which had served the end of removing the ritual impurities of the wedding guests as a constant reminder of the flood, became suddenly a living reminder of life beyond judgment, a fountain of festivity and joy. There, wine could no longer hurt because it was given with thanks by Jesus to the end of revealing again how God had come to bring consolation and healing at last.

On this third Sunday after Epiphany, we start to see more clearly what the coming of Christ will mean for Him: that he will suffer and die and rise again to redeem the Church His bride. As the eternal and faithful Bridegroom, His first sign at a wedding points to the end of all things, the whole character and purpose of His mission from the Father–to seek out and return those who are not where they belong, to find the lost children of the Father and the bring them back to Him. 

But on this third Sunday, we also start to see more clearly what the coming of Christ will mean for us and for the whole Creation. In the hands of Jesus Christ, these elements that in times past served as the instruments of judgment and wrath have been transfigured as the sacraments that unite us to the life of Christ and to give us a place and purpose in the Covenant of Christ’s blood. In the hands of Jesus, that place where we left what was unclean and unworthy about us is precisely the place where the joy of the Kingdom springs up for us. There in Cana of Galilee, our Lord beautified the union of a husband and wife with the first sign of the Kingdom, with the sign that God had come among them to redeem the whole Creation. His first sign reveals the last things, it signifies the promise of God to bring new life and an immortal joy out of scarcity and fear and death. 

For out of the formless and void at the beginning God called forth life. Out of the solitude of Adam, God called forth his marriage to Eve. Out of the floods of judgment he called Noah. Out of Ur of the Chaldees he called Abraham. Out of Egypt He called Israel. Out of the Captivity He called a Remnant. And out of the world He calls His Church. 

It is out of our storied and weary pasts that He called us here as His family this morning. Out of differences and enmity and alienation, He called us to regard one another as brothers and sisters. Out of condemnation, He called us to redemption and communion. And out of His throne-room in heaven, He calls us forward now as His Bride to come and taste the wedding feast that is to come.