Good Asceticism: Training to Name What Should Be Renounced

TranscriptioN

Well, good morning again, friends. It is great to see you this morning. Happy August, if you can believe it. I am so delighted to be here with you and to see some new faces. I'm looking forward to meeting you after the service, so please stay and have coffee and snacks with us. But thank you for being here this morning.

I'm Father Morgan Reed. I'm the vicar here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church, and over the last several weeks, we've been in a series on the Epistle of St. Paul to the Colossians. Today ends that series, and next week, Steven Myles will be preaching, and we'll be getting into other things.

And so, last week we looked at chapter 2, and one of the things that was the main theme in chapter 2 that we got into was rooting ourselves in the tradition that was passed down from Jesus through the Apostles to avoid drifting back into spiritual captivity. And then this morning, we're skipping over a small section that is pretty important, so when you have some time, go read through the rest of chapter 2.

In this small section, St. Paul's outlining some of the problems that are happening in this church. There are matters of avoiding certain food or drink. Teachers are encouraging them to avoid certain food or drink, presumably as clean or unclean; observing certain feast days, new moons, Sabbaths—sort of a return to the Mosaic Law in some ways. And he mentions the worship of angels in that passage and dwelling on certain types of visions. So we're getting a window into the things that are arising in the Colossian church that he's addressing. And he also talks about not submitting themselves again to elemental principles, which we mentioned a few weeks back.

These teachers had set up rules that were creating a false sense of humility for the congregation—that if I could keep these rules of self-abasement, obedience to Torah, mystical experiences, then I can increase and have a higher knowledge of God himself. And I can rid myself of the things that make me unclean or that keep me from understanding God more deeply. He argues that all of those things pale in comparison to Christ.

And so, this is a very Christocentric letter—that Christ is in all, through all, he's over all. It's all about Jesus and who he is. And what he's saying is that those teachings from those teachers who are coming into your midst—they're of no value when it comes to keeping yourself, to keeping your self-indulgence in check, and to knowing God more deeply. They're of no value. Christ himself is the valuable one for keeping our self-indulgence in check and knowing God more deeply.

And there's an important word that he brings up in the letter, and it's helpful for us to know too. I'm sure it's something that doesn't get thrown around a lot, and this is the word ascesis, or asceticism. Kids, if you have your little papers here, and you say, "What did I hear today?" you can write down ascesis—A-S-C-E-S-I-S, ascesis or asceticism. It's an important word. And it refers to how you train for something. How are we training in a spiritual life? What are the results of our training?

And there is a dark and useless type of asceticism that exists, and that kind of asceticism keeps someone bound to the kingdom of darkness through pseudo-spiritual habits and other kinds of practices—and this is what he's arguing against. There is another type of asceticism that is good. It produces virtue. It produces the love of God. And he's arguing for an asceticism based on knowing Jesus Christ as Lord—training in the right things, not in the wrong things; training ourselves to put on virtue and to put off the old life of the old age. And doing that type of asceticism together in community makes the Word of Christ effective among us. It allows the peace of Christ to reign over us as a community, and it binds us together in the love of God.

So we begin our passage today, Colossians 3:5, where Saint Paul says to "put to death whatever in you is earthly." Different translations have different things here. The first one's fornication or sexual impurity, then just general impurity, passion, evil desire, covetousness or greed, which he calls idolatry. We don't often think of greed or covetousness as a form of false worship with a false god as its object, but he calls it that.

He starts with a specific kind of sin—a misuse of somebody's body in improper physical relations, fornication. He moves more broadly to impurity, and purity would include fornication, and it moves more broadly into moral evil. He mentions passions, which have to do with disordered loves and affections, and then he mentions the very desire or intention to do evil. And then he concludes with greed or covetousness, which he calls idolatry, because when the object of your affections becomes something other than the Lord—something you're desiring that is less than God—it shapes your desires, and that's why it becomes an idol.

So he's calling the church to become who they are. He's calling them to live out the thing that they've been made positionally in Christ. Our bodies had been an instrument of sin. They've been bound to the present evil age through distorted affections and loves, through perverted truths fueling unhelpful thinking and immoral behaviors. All these things put us in misalignment with the God who created us and loves us. And that old life was put to death in Christ when we were baptized with Christ. And each one of us then died, and we were raised to new life again as we shared in the death and the resurrection of Jesus.

And so, good asceticism trains us to live out the resurrection, and it involves putting off those ways of life that had been part of us when we were bound to the present evil age. St. John Chrysostom compares it to a statue that had been filthy, covered in rust, and somebody comes along and they scour the statue clean. And then after that, somebody has to regularly come through and clean the statue so that no rust or anything is allowed to grow on the statue over time.

St. Paul's commanding the church—and I love the way Janet did such a great reading—he tells them, "Do not lie to one another." The church is called to not lie to one another. And this is because I think self-deception and deceiving others is associated with the life of the old age that we died to, where we were in solidarity with Adam. But instead, we now live with Christ. We live in him. And this new self—if you go back to verse 10—he says this new self is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its Creator.

And that word image is worth dwelling on for a second. The image of the Creator—the word image comes from a Greek word where we get icons, iconos. And this phrase is an allusion back to Genesis, back to the creation account in Greek. And the Greek Old Testament says that male and female were created in the iconos—in the icon of God. We don't often read that in Greek—our translations are from Hebrew. Anybody remember—any of the kids remember—when it says God created man and woman, he created them in his… what do we say in English? "Image and likeness." That's right. Selem and demut, which are very important words to know as well. But in Greek, it's an icon. We are icons of the Creator, and this is what he is restoring us to.

So asceticism is good when it trains us to name those things that we need to renounce. Unhelpful asceticism trains us to avoid dealing with sin, and as a result, it ends up incurring more filth, and it distorts the image of God in us—it distorts us as icons.

Doing the work of prayer, engaging with Scripture, with the community of faith, the Church's tradition, locating ourselves in the story and in the plan of God, and listening to the Holy Spirit prepares us to receive God’s grace. And when we're prepared—when we have this disposition of preparation to meet God’s grace—we can risk naming things honestly, to renounce the ways that we’ve been bound. Those things that potentially humiliate us—we can risk confessing them to the Lord, because we expect grace to be abundant. Christ wants to rightly order our loves. He wants to restore his image in us. He wants to bring us to a greater knowledge of his love and his peace. And he wants to reveal his new creation work in each one of you to the world, as a compelling argument of what he can do in a life that’s being transformed by the Gospel of God.

So why are we tempted to lie to one another? Why do we avoid telling the truth? It's a good question that I've been thinking about this week, and I think children provide a helpful example. This is not my child—in fact, this is probably me. This might be me, hypothetically. But let's say a child breaks something in the house. They break a lamp or something, and the child doesn't generally immediately go to a parent and say, "Mom, I broke the lamp. It was me. I take full blame, and I apologize." Genuinely. Sincerely.

It's not that forthcoming, generally. And why is this? You know, there's often an attempt to hide evidence. "My sister did it." You know, it's the sibling who did it. Or, "It just broke itself. Weirdest thing. I have no idea." You know, maybe Mom or Dad had told them not to play ball in the house, or to wrestle near the lamp, or to lean back in their chair near the lamp—or period. And the child's brain then, as they've broken this thing, is just flooded with this deep sense of guilt and humiliation. And their minds and bodies can't bear this feeling of humiliation.

Now, if the parent comes in and they're super dysregulated, and they respond to this child with verbal attacks and rage and shaming insults like, "How could you do that? How could you be so dumb?"—right, that would be a horrible thing to say to your child—but by shaming the child like that, they reinforce the child's need to lie and to protect themselves, to avoid having that kind of reaction again from their parent.

So, if however the parent comes in and they connect with the child, they say something like, "I see your tears. I see a broken lamp. I wonder what those tears are for." The child might cry more, but the child is now humanized. They are given respect and honor as an individual, and they're invited into a conversation about the events that have just transpired. The parent might say, "You know, it sounds like you did something that you knew you probably weren't supposed to do. And I think something that we both loved got broken, didn’t it? Thanks for being honest with me and telling me that. You know what, I also don’t like feeling guilty or sad. Sometimes I do things, and I immediately realize I shouldn’t have done that. And I hate that feeling too. That doesn’t feel good, does it? I wonder what you might do differently if you were able to do it over again."

Now the child feels connected to the parent. There’s a bond of love that’s happening, and they've named what they feel and why. It’s not weird to feel that. They've explained it. And that child begins to metabolize humiliation. It runs through their body and makes its course through in a way that teaches them, without shame, that they can join you as the parent in the solution.

And so, there might be some natural consequences, right? Like, you might say, "You know what, we need to clean that up. I'm going to ask that you do that." Or, "Yeah, it's going to cost some money to buy a new lamp, and so over the next few weeks, we'll be taking some money out of your allowance to help pay for that so we can get a new lamp, and we can all enjoy it."

But from a formation standpoint, this child has now learned the usefulness of that feeling they want to avoid. "Maybe I ought not do those things that make me feel this way." There’s a usefulness as a guide to moral virtue. And they've learned that you still are connected with them in this bond of love and familial relationship. They learn—because of the way that you reacted—that they don’t need to hide the things that they do wrong when they feel that thing. They can come to you honestly and name that, because the parent is safe.

Now, that is really hard as adults, because we often don’t have that capacity even with one another, right? And so sometimes the default is rage or shaming one another. But imagine if our asceticism—our training in the spiritual life—trained us to be honest and metabolize those feelings of guilt and humiliation because we trust that Jesus wants us to heal, and he wants to make us fully human again as image-bearers, right? Like, Jesus wouldn’t come to us when we’ve done something wrong and say, "How can you be so dumb?" Instead, we would expect Jesus to come and say, "Yeah, that doesn’t feel good, does it?"—and to invite us into a new way of life.

So the person who knows this kind of love, has experienced that love and forgiveness, that peace and grace, has the capacity to offer that kind of peace and love to one another. And so the Church, when it’s at its best, is a training ground for this formative kind of truth-telling and renunciation of the old self, with the hope and the expectation of receiving the grace of God in community, as we're in relationship with one another.

And what can often happen, though, is people—because of their own stories—learn to hate part of themselves or shut it off because that part of themselves was never welcomed. It wasn’t even allowed. And so they protect themselves by weaving together webs of self-deceit. And I think this is part of the root of lying to one another. I generally don’t come to somebody looking to lie—it just happens. And why is that? It’s more insidious than just my own will to be evil. It’s something that’s been built up over time.

So rage starts to take over in the name of holiness, right? "We do things the right way here," right? And there’s an anger associated with that. Immorality is swept under the rug in the name of saving face. And the result is a stunted kind of discipleship training that’s based on self-deception. And the image of God—the icon of God—is dimmed in us. The result of that kind of discipleship is that someone becomes less human. But good asceticism makes us more human, because it renews the image and the icon of God in us. This is verse 10.

And so, later on as he goes along, St. Paul tells us to clothe ourselves in virtue, and he names these: compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience—a discipleship that’s aimed at virtue formation. It’s an invitation to explore who Jesus is and what he’s done. Jesus is the perfect image—the icon—of the invisible God. And so, as we make habits of stillness, silence, prayer, service, giving intentions to the rhythm of our day, we can ask how God’s coming to us in those moments, how he’s showing himself to us, how he’s renewing us, and how he’s actually creating a seminal desire in us to hold on to those virtues that reflect his character.

Where do we see God cultivating virtue in our souls? This passage mentions forgiveness. Forgiving one another is a characteristic of the Christian life, because we've been forgiven by God, and it's so important.

And I also want to give a little bit of a caveat on forgiveness, because I've heard about it misused. So forgiveness is not bypassing sin. It's not overlooking things, ignoring harm—that’s not forgiveness. There are situations where I've heard of, let’s say, just powerful or emotional abusers coming to church authorities and saying, "Well, I said I’m sorry to this person," and then someone in ecclesial authority responding with, "Well, look, they’re repentant, so you’ve got to forgive them." Not so.

Unless harm is accurately named, that its implications are teased out with sincerity, then forgiveness can’t really be offered with integrity, because we haven’t named all the harm. So in the absence of somebody’s genuine repentance—because I think this happens a lot, where we've been harmed and someone just won’t admit it to us or name it—what does forgiveness look like?

I think forgiveness can look like naming the harm accurately to ourselves and to Jesus, and then releasing to God our own contempt or our desire for vengeance. "Oh, that person would fail in life," right? To be able to say to God, "Oh, I wish that they would change. I am really hurt by them. But I trust that I don’t have to hate them anymore—I release them to you." That’s what forgiveness can look like in the absence of someone’s genuine repentance.

Now, aside from that caveat, even in healthy relationships—whether it's the household or in the Church—we're going to experience various levels of rupture. It's true in the house; it's true in the Church. And when it happens, we need to practice naming the hurt accurately to one another, and then to do the hard work of repairing with one another in relationship, with integrity. And this is because we’re bound by the love of God.

So I want to hear when I have hurt you. That is valuable to me, because I love you. And vice versa, right? This is how love works. I want to create capacity to hear those things without judgment. This is because love is the grace of all graces. And so we need to be a community that’s bound together in the love of God.

Paul tells them to let the peace of Christ rule over their hearts. Then he tells them that this peace, as it reigns over one another—this is the kind of peace that allows one another to flourish without the fear that we’re going to be dehumanized or cast out by one another. He finally tells them to let the Word of Christ dwell in them richly. When you create this kind of love, Christ’s words are effective in community. I can say to somebody, “Christ invites us into this,” and this is valuable to them. They can say it to me, and I receive that—even if it’s admonishing—and I can receive it as a word from Christ, because we are bound together in a secure relationship and in love.

So Christ’s words are effective when the community is bound by the love of God.

As we finish up the book of Colossians together today, consider your asceticism. And how are you training to be renewed into the image of your Creator? How are you training to be God's image-bearer in the world? We need to renounce the evils and the self-deception of the life that we lived before we took hold of the grace of God in Christ. We need to put on virtue, and then do the hard work of knowing ourselves accurately and truly, and knowing God's love accurately and truly, so that the Spirit might begin to bear fruit in our hearts, and we might come to know more deeply the grace and love of God.

And as image-bearers of God, we have to become a community where Christ’s word is effective among us, where the peace of Christ reigns, and where the love of God binds us together.

And so, I want to end today’s sermon with a quote that I found really helpful in my reading this week. One writer sums up this passage, and he says it this way:

“The Christ who lives in each of his people is the Christ who binds them together in one. This restoration of the original image of creation will yet be universally displayed. But how good and pleasant it is when here and now that day of the revelation of the sons and daughters of God is anticipated, and our divided world is confronted with a witness more eloquent than all of our preaching, and feels constrained to say as they did in Tertullian’s time, ‘See how they love one another.’”

May that be so for us.

Let me pray.

Almighty and merciful God, it is only by your grace that your faithful people offer you true and laudable service. Grant that we may run without stumbling to obtain your heavenly promises, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited using ChatGPT.

Rooted in Christ and His Apostles

TranscriptioN

Well, good morning again, everybody.

It is good to be with you. Seeing some of you after coming back from several weeks of being gone is a delight and a joy to my heart as well, so I am glad to be here with you, my friends. And as I mentioned before, if you're new or visiting, I'm Father Morgan Reed.

I'm the vicar here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church, and if you're new to Anglicanism, that's an Anglican way of saying the senior pastor of a new church. So, we are in a series in the book of Colossians. We were just in chapter 1 for a few weeks.

Today we're getting into chapter 2, and this really gets into the meat of what St. Paul has to say to these churches in the Lycus Valley, in Colossae, and in Laodicea. These groups are tempted to move away from the faith that had been handed down to them from Christ through the Apostles. If you have bad soil, then whatever plant you want to grow in that soil is not going to grow.

You've got to test the soil. You've got to amend the soil if you have a type of plant that you want to put in it so that that plant can flourish, that you're hoping is going to grow. And our passage this morning in chapter 2 of Colossians reminds us to root ourselves deeply in good soil. Namely, the good soil here is Christ himself, as we understand him from the faith that's been handed down to us through the Apostles in the church.

And the reason why we need to root ourselves in that is to the end that we're delivered from the present evil age. If you want to experience the salvation of God in your life right now, from this present evil age, you have got to be rooted in the faith of the Apostles that points us to Jesus. So St. Paul, he's encouraging these believers, and he uses the language of rooting—to put roots deep down into the soil of the faith that's been handed down to them from the Apostles, of which he is one of them, obviously.

What he says to them is almost like a thesis to the letter in verses 6 and 7: "As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him." They hadn't been following Jesus for those three years of Jesus's ministry. They're totally dependent on the testimony of others to understand who Jesus is.

So he says, "Rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving." Paul is concerned that these believers are built up in the faith that's been handed down to them. And the issue arose with these particular Christians that there were some teachers who had come in and were offering a rival tradition of who Jesus was and how to follow him, and this was threatening to resubjugate them to the thing which they had been freed from. And I think it's likely a reference to something like proto-rabbinic Jewish teaching—because there was no rabbinic Judaism back then, but sort of the roots of it—where these Christians were starting to go back to the law of Moses, and in this Jewish-flavored error, they're moving back into places where they're starting to follow the law in order to grow in Christ.

This is a problem that he is addressing. So, the elemental principles here are what he's addressing and are referred to in other places in the New Testament as these Jewish ceremonies and rituals. I think it's in the book of Hebrews as well.

These serve the purpose—these elemental principles—in the providence of the life of the people of God to bring them to Jesus. But once Christ came, these elemental principles no longer held the power that they held. They were useful to bring people to Christ, but to continue to hold on to those things as the means of growth in Christ, after coming to a knowledge of who Jesus is, makes those things into an idol and begins to pervert the testimony of those who were following Jesus as Apostles. So what is the faith handed down? This is the question that sort of arises naturally in Colossians 2. What is the faith that's been handed down? The idea of passing down authority through time and people is not foreign to Judaism.

If you read the document called the Pirkei Avot—the Sayings of the Fathers in Judaism—there is this idea that the seat of Moses had an authority, and it was passed down to Joshua through the laying on of hands. And you can sort of take this line all the way down to the prophets, to certain people in the Second Temple period, all the way down to, in Jesus's day, the Pharisees. I know that we often talk about the Pharisees as the bad guys, but actually, these were the ones who rightly sat in Moses's seat and were given authority to interpret the law authoritatively for the people of God.

And so, this authority to sit in Moses's seat was a real one. When you read the Gospels, Jesus—he never questions their authority to interpret the law. He questions their abuses of the tradition that they've established.

He points out their hypocrisy in not living up to the laws that they've rightly written down, or the ways that they misprioritize one law over another to benefit themselves and not the community and following God. In some ways, where he says, "making them twice the son of hell as you are," the idea is they're locking people out of the kingdom by misprioritizing and being hypocrites—but not necessarily in their interpretation of the law and applying it to the people of God. So, Jesus, though, has a greater authority than Moses.

He is a new Moses, making a new people. And so, this proto-rabbinic tradition was a good tutor to bring people to Christ, but once Christ has come, the old tradition has to give way to the new tradition that is in Christ. And that tradition—if you think about it—Moses saw the face of God and passed on the tradition to Joshua, the seventy elders, etc. Now we have Apostles who behold the face of God, and they are ordained to then pass on this tradition through the laying on of hands moving forward.

And so, this is where in the New Testament we get the bishops—the overseers—who are carrying on the work of the Apostles in these different regions, like Timothy, who receives the laying on of hands. He oversees several churches with different presbyters. And this might be new to you, but this is actually part of my own journey into the Anglican Church—why I found this really important and helpful.

In my studies, I was reading a lot about a topic called canon criticism. Canon criticism. It's a really fun field.

And it is. And so, it's the study of how the Bible was put together and who kind of calls the Bible the Bible at any given time. It's a fascinating field.

And what impressed me in canon criticism, when you get to the New Testament—what we call the New Testament—is that St. Paul's letters are actually the earliest Christian writings we have, right? Bible or not. His writings are some of the earliest we have. And his writings are about 20 to 30 years after the resurrection of Jesus.

So that makes them older than the rest of the New Testament. Which means: How did the church govern itself for 30 years when there is no New Testament? Right? How does the church govern itself when Paul hasn't even written letters yet—for 30 years? And then, if you think about it, St. John the Apostle—he's writing in like the 90s AD—so 60 years later. He's the last of the Apostles. The book of Revelation is one of the latest.

You know, if he's writing in 90 AD, that's 60 years later. So, if you think about it, St. Paul's letters are earlier than any of the Gospels. And then St. John's writing over here.

So, for like 90 years—no, 60 years, sorry—for six decades, the church is trying to figure out how to govern itself without a completed New Testament—20 years of those with no Gospels or letters—just the testimony of the Apostles. How does the church do this? Because I guarantee you, there was no shortage of heresies that were cropping up in 60 years. You know, just look at the last 60 years.

We're really creative with ways that we invent false teaching. So they were no different than we are in the early church. And so, it must have been that there is some tradition with the Apostles that is given to them by Christ, that they can discern the work of the Spirit and name it, even in the time where there is no New Testament written down.

Even the process of accepting things as the work of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit is a work of the Holy Spirit. When we talk about accepting the Bible and the books of the Bible, these books are collected, circulated. How is it that the next generation is going to arbitrate these new scenarios they're running into as people keep creating new teachings?

This is one sort of aside:

Even Paul's letters—what they call the 13, which includes Hebrews, whatever—but Paul's letters that are collected, tradition says that—you guys remember Philemon? Who's the slave in Philemon that's being asked to be freed? Anybody know? Onesimus. Good, I heard a couple of Onesimuses out there. Tradition has it Onesimus becomes a bishop, and he's the one responsible for collecting Paul's letters that we have in the canon now.

That's a fascinating thing. Can you imagine Philemon finding out that his slave is now a bishop, right? This is the radical work of the Holy Spirit. So, thinking about the church, situations are going to arise.

Like, people are going to start to think, “Oh, Jesus only was an apparition when he died, because flesh can’t—or God can’t—suffer.” Or, “Jesus must have only been spiritually resurrected, not physically, because the body’s evil.” Or just the idea that the body itself—flesh—is evil. These things are all cropping up in those first 60 years. And how do you deal with those?

The answer is that the Apostles had written about them, laid hands on people to write about them, to carry on this testimony of Jesus in this apostolic work. And so, for me, like, I still believe that the Bible was a primary authority, but for me, there had to be other sources of authority in the church than just my own mind.

This—you know—modern, at-the-time American, Reformed Evangelical interpretation of the text. There had to be more authority than just that, right? And so, that train of thought landed me safely into the harbor of the Anglican Church. We need bishops who are in the apostolic tradition to help us navigate what the Scriptures say about various topics.

If you want to read more on that, I highly recommend a book. If you're going to be in the catechism, in the confirmation class in the fall, this is a good one to add to your reading list. It's called The Gospel and the Catholic Church by the late Archbishop Michael Ramsey, who was the Archbishop of England in the 20th century.

One of our values at Corpus Christi Anglican Church is to live out the church’s tradition, and that looks like reading Scripture with the church, which can be noticing how Scripture interprets itself—Old Testament to Old Testament, Old Testament to New Testament, New Testament to New Testament, right? Peter even says Paul's letters are hard to understand, right? It’s fascinating. How does Jesus read the Psalms? How does Paul use the Law and the Prophets? Go beyond that.

Start reading the second generation of bishops. I call those the friends of the Apostles. These are the Apostolic Fathers, like Saint Ignatius of Antioch or Clement of Rome or the next generation after that, like Polycarp of Smyrna.

These people's writings are freely available online. There are other important works in the early church, like the Didache, the Epistle of Diognetus, the Epistle of Barnabas. These are really important.

The church has kept them for us. Pray with the church—so read with the church, pray with the church. Keep the church’s calendar as part of your rhythm.

Keep rhythms of prayer as you’re able to—not in a legalistic way, but expecting the Holy Spirit to speak by creating opportunities in your life for him to do so. Structure your life with the intention of a monastic, and make habits of prayer that fit your life situation with what God has entrusted to you. But all of these habits of prayer that we enter into with the church are to draw us into the love of Christ.

It’s sort of like in St. Benedict’s rule—it’s to establish a school for the Lord’s service. So be little Benedictines, right? We're all, in a way, oblates who are trying to create a school for the Lord’s service as a church. Partake of the sacraments with the church, and receive God’s grace to live out his calling regularly.

So, to discover the apostolic witness of the faith that was once for all handed down to the saints is to learn the work of the Holy Spirit. Those two are not separated. I’m gonna read a little bit here from St. Ignatius of Antioch.

He’s one of my favorite Apostolic Fathers. He’s writing this at the latest 105 CE—so we’re talking within 15 years of the Apostle John going to be with the Lord. He says this in his letter to the Ephesians:

“Thus it’s proper for you to run together in harmony with the mind of the bishop, for your council of presbyters is attuned to the bishop as to strings of a lyre.
Therefore, in your unity and harmonious love, Jesus Christ is sung.”

So you have this connection of obeying and reading and living with the church for the sake of seeing Jesus more clearly—and in this case, singing him, which I love, that imagery. So we need to root ourselves in the good soil of Jesus Christ and be strengthened in the faith that was handed down to us.

St. Paul moves on in verse 11. He says that they have experienced a spiritual circumcision, which is a reference to their baptism, and he names two things that stand against humanity in this, that keep people from experiencing the life that’s found in God. The first is in verse 14.

He mentions a record that stood against us with all of its legal demands. And it’s as though God has taken this record of debts that’s written against humanity, and he’s put that contract above the head of Jesus, where Jesus has this “King of the Jews” title. It’s almost like the contract is there as well, and when Jesus dies, in a real way, as people die with him, the record of sin is dealt with so that people can now experience the new life that’s in Christ. It’s not an arbitrary exchange of roles—like our sin for his righteousness, necessarily, on an individual basis—but as the Christ, Jesus is made the true representative of his whole people.

Remember, we talked about the individual and the corporate being alternated in Jewish thinking. Jesus is made a representative of his people, and so he can rightly destroy the contract that’s held over his people. This is in the Church Fathers—they talk about him tearing up the contract into pieces—and that’s how God makes new life possible.

It’s not brought about through the law of Moses—that law which was keeping Gentiles from experiencing the life fully in God’s family. It’s not found in that anymore. Jesus and Jesus alone tears up the contract, and he brings new creation, and he creates a new people.

And the second thing that stands against us are the rulers and the authorities—not earthly ones necessarily. These authorities and rulers in this world are ones that we cannot see.

Right, in the Nicene Creed we talk about things visible and invisible. These are rulers and authorities we can’t see. Their authority is derived, in one sense, from God—it’s not self-generated.

It’s also very distorted and perverted, and in their perversion, they work against humanity becoming all that God has made it to be, and they work against humanity enjoying the divine life that they were created to experience and participate in. And so, by participating in the victory of Christ, we also participate in the victory over the powers that stand against us. There’s one writer, and I really like the way that he connects these two ideas of powers and the contract.

He says it this way:

“It might even be said that he took the document, ordinances and all, and nailed it to his cross as an act of triumphant defiance in the face of those blackmailing powers that were holding it over men and women in order to command their allegiance.”

So what has bound us to sin no longer has authority to do so anymore in the cross of Christ. The powers and the authorities do exist in some obvious places—like when Christians give credence or allegiance to things like karma, horoscopes, astrology, fatalism, fortune-telling.

There are all kinds of perversions that we can name and create. We create new ones on a weekly basis. There are all kinds of things that are perversions of divine power.

And that was more obvious—and it can even be influence over politicians. This was really obvious in Rome to whom the groups that Paul’s writing, because in those days you actually had to sacrifice to the local deities for the welfare of the people. This is why Jews and Christians become the scapegoats—because they refuse to offer sacrifices to the local gods.

So, when famine hits, who’s responsible? Those people who won’t sacrifice to the local gods. So you can sort of see it more obviously in Rome, but it’s still true today. And so, the powers are often subtle.

If you go back to the Garden of Eden and you think about the serpent's words to Eve, they're almost true, and they're slightly wrong. And it's that slightly wrong part that makes things that are forbidden look good. And so, the powers and the authorities work slowly, methodically, deceptively to draw image-bearers of God away from the love and presence of God.

That's what they do. Here's a hypothetical example. Someone's grown up fairly poor, and they've become determined not to live like that as an adult.

And so, this person worked hard, they made a lot of money, they lived lavishly, and they let their family do the same. The children of this person didn't work as hard, but instead they became quite entitled. And the result of that scenario is that now the kids, as they grow up, they're gonna have to either rely on Dad, find a job that pays very highly without having the skills to find one of those jobs, or they're gonna have to marry somebody of wealth or something else.

But those are kind of your options, right? This man was so determined not to be like his own father, and that drove his whole life narrative. And instead, what he should have done is started to look backwards and name things honestly. He could have worked on asking what harm was there, what good was there.

Was it that maybe he lived in a scenario where his father actually did make a lot of money, but spent it on things that didn't benefit the family? That would be a place of harm to start naming. Was it something else? Was there a time in his childhood where he became aware that he was living in poverty? What friend told him that? What teacher told him that? How did he feel about that? Where was there goodness in the ways that he grew up? Where was there harm? That's a much harder thing to do than to adopt a narrative of, I am just not going to be like this person. Instead, he was determined not to be like his father without actually knowing what that meant.

And so, it caused a whole mountain of other problems. There are subtle lies that undergird this man's life, that are drawing him away from the love of God and the right use of creation, that are a result of wanting to respond to something that caused him harm. We all have places like that man, where we've given in to these subtle voices of defeated powers.

Things that are drawing us into the kingdom of darkness—things that draw us away from the love of God. So we have to do the hard work of naming things honestly, to get rid of them, to in a sense practically tell those authorities they have no more authority—to bring these truths before the cross of Christ. So as we conclude, let me tie together for us this sort of spiritual warfare aspect and the apostolic tradition.

The Colossians didn't have to appease elemental powers or elemental laws or give in to falsehoods that draw them from the love of God—and neither do we. God had made a mockery through the cross of those very authorities and powers that had lifted Jesus up onto the cross. Falsehoods and the powers of darkness—they're fought against by this vision of Christ. Knowing Christ, and Christ centrally, Christ over all—this Christ that has been handed down to us through the apostolic faith.

And so, we have to be rooted in what points us to and clarifies who Jesus is. That's what establishes us, that's what strengthens us, and that's what brings us into the abundance of thanksgiving that God has for his people. Jesus is central. And so, my encouragement this morning is to get to know Jesus in the Scripture and through the church's interpretations of the Scriptures.

Get to know him in the prayers of the church. Get to know him in the sacraments, where the Holy Spirit meets you in communal worship. And get to know him in the lives and in the writings of the saints that have gone before you—those that the church has deemed worthy of being part of this great tradition of which we're all a part. So grow in Christ with the church, in a faith that can't be shaken. As I conclude, let me pray for us, and I'll pray for us one of the ancient prayers of the church.

O God, who art the unsearchable abyss of peace,
the ineffable sea of love,
the fountain of blessings,
and the bestower of affection,
who sends peace to those that receive it:
Open to us this day the sea of your love,
and water us with the plenteous streams from the riches of your grace.
Make us children of quietness and heirs of peace.
Enkindle in us the fire of your love,
sow in us your fear.
Strengthen our weakness by your power,
and bind us closely to you and to each other
in one firm bond of unity,
for the sake of Jesus Christ. Amen.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited using ChatGPT.

Good Discipleship Produces Emotional Maturity

TranscriptioN

Well, good morning again, my friends. It is good to see you. I'm Father Morgan Reed. I'm the vicar here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church.

 We are in the middle of a series in St. Paul's Epistle to the Colossians. I started that last week. We're gonna finish chapter 1 this week and we'll be in it for the next, I think, two more weeks before we get into August.

And in the Letter to the Colossians, we hear about the good news about what Jesus is doing in these Colossian Christians from Epaphras, who is the church planter that Paul sent to bring the gospel to these Christians. And as Epaphras is giving his church planting report, St. Paul finds out that a problem has arisen amongst the Colossians. There is a threat that comes from teachers who have come in, who are introducing external badges of Judaism as tools that can help people grow in their relationship with God, in their knowledge of God, in their holiness.

Things like circumcision, Sabbath keeping, food laws, etc. These badges of Judaism are now introduced as the things that might help one grow deeper in their knowledge of God. So what St. Paul is doing, as he's re-centering the church's vision on who Jesus is and his preeminence in the plan of God.

And today's passage is about how God has done everything that is necessary for you and I to grow in Christ. And so we are then called to grow and then to bring others into that growth as well. The idea of growing reminds me of something.

How many of you kids here play a sport or do some hobby or activity that you work really hard at? What are they? [Kids answer…]

Yes. So in our household right now, baseball is the big thing. And I have been coaching this and learning lots of life lessons as a t-ball and coach pitch coach.

 And there was a kid on one of our teams who would always, it's hard to do this in a chossable, but I'm gonna try, he would always stand like this and sort of chop at the ball like this, kind of up to down, right? Like chopping wood almost. And I had the hardest time figuring out how do I help him stop chopping. And then at one point it just came to me, it was one of those like late-night thoughts where you're like, oh I haven't been thinking about that, but here it is.

He's not bending his knees. And so once I realized all he's got to do is bend his knees, get a little balance, it all of a sudden improved instantly. Once I had him bend his knees, by the end of the season he had actually gotten a hit.

I was so proud of him. That little mechanical thing that needed to be changed and taken down was the thing that needed to be fixed before he could become a better player. And so one of the things that I want to draw us to in Colossians is, St. Paul is calling us back to the basics in this letter.

Back to the fundamentals of the faith. Who is Jesus? We need to come back to the sovereignty of Jesus, the work of Jesus, the centrality of Jesus, in order to grow in Christ as we invite others into this journey of the goodness of the life of Christ with us. So as we look at our passage this morning in Colossians 1, let me pray for us.

“In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and Redeemer. Amen.”

What God has done

Well, first what I want to look at in Colossians chapter 1 is, and why it's foundational, is what God has done in Christ. Paul is still in the introduction to his letter.

It's a long introduction. It goes all the way from verse 1 to verse 23. He's just given this beautiful hymn that we didn't read today.

 It's a Christ hymn that people probably sung. And essentially what it says is that Jesus became man and he gave himself as a loving sacrifice on behalf of sinful humanity in order to create for himself a people, to the praise of God's glory. And the creation of a people is part of this broader cosmic plan to bring the entire universe into new order and harmony in God's plan.

What was being accomplished in Jesus, who's the Son of God, is then continuing to be accomplished through his body, which is the church. And the argument then is against those who would add things like circumcision or dietary laws as necessary elements to bringing about that plan of cosmic renewal and transformation. It's Jesus, Jesus only.

Jesus is central here and understanding who Jesus is is critical and what his work was for us. We started in verse 21 today where he says, and you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he is now reconciled in his physical body through death. Estrangement is something that isn't just something that we end up in a state of being, it's this progressive movement into the realm of evil.

And it happens as thoughts and actions work heuristically on one another. I think bad things, I do bad things, I think worse things, I do worse things. There's this progressive movement into the realm of evil where bondage takes place to the kingdom of darkness.

And the miracle here, as Paul envisions it, is that God can break through the hardness of this calcified sin, the unjust structures that we've created, the falsehoods that we've made the foundations of our life, and he can break through that in Christ and create us who we were made to be. One church father, I think it was Irenaeus, says the glory of God is a human fully alive. That's what it is.

And so I love the way that this idea is, God breaks through the calcified sin to create us who we were made to be. So we serve the God of justice though, and it says in the Bible that this God will by no means clear the guilty. So how is it that any of us who have years of reinforced sinful patterns and behaviors ever can be cleared of the injustice that we've brought about? How can God restore cracked icons who are meant to display his image to the world? No one wakes up one day and says, I really hope I get to cause harm to somebody someday, right? Or I really hope that I get to lie today.

I hope that I get to spread falsehoods today and lie to people. No one wakes up wanting to do that. Bondage to sin is far more insidious than obvious evil or things like breaking some of the Ten Commandments, right? The insidiousness of the bondage can come from things like defense mechanisms that we've developed to protect ourselves, and because of the dysfunctional ways we might have been parented.

These can be blame-shifting tendencies that we might have developed because we want to avoid any feelings of sadness or disappointment or humiliation. It can be ways that we've cursed others because we have a warped perception of how the world is. But here's the thing.

In the cross, in the work of Jesus, we see this collision of human sin and a holy God in Christ's crucified body. And in his body, sin is condemned. No longer has any power.

And then in the resurrection, we find this miracle where we find victory over sin and death. So not only is sin condemned, it's actually defeated. And so therein, in the work of Jesus, lies the possibility of rescue from bondage, from sin, from cursing, so that we can be reconciled to God.

This is what God has done. And the aim of the cross is to create a holy people where God's image is restored, where he's made known. And what's done in principle is then going to be done in practice.

God's made all things possible in Christ, and now we have to do the hard work of naming brokenness accurately. And that's really hard work. Jesus wants us to heal.

He's not sitting there going, man, I wish they just, you know, like, I don't even know what perceptions we might have of Jesus. But Jesus wants us to be free. He wants us to be healed.

And I read this somewhere. Someone helpfully said, what is not named cannot be healed. What is not named cannot be healed.

And on a simple level, if I had that kid on the baseball team, you go back to thinking about him, if I had seen the problem with this kid's swing, and I had figured it out, but in my heart, I was like, oh, no, if I tell him, he might be embarrassed. Or if I tell him, he's going to think that I'm mean, that I might not tell him the simple thing that he needs to improve his swing. He'd never grow.

And so in fact, to withhold the truth from this kid, because of my own anxieties, might at the very least be lying to him. And also, it's kind of slightly cruel, because it's intentional. It's subtle, right? It's not so obvious.

 It's a very subtle kind of cruelty. But imagine this is true now with situations that are more weighty than just how to do a swing in baseball, right? Because it shows up in lots of ways. And the different situations we run into in life bring these things up.

If we're afraid to name addictions as addictions, overreactions as overreactions, what scenarios or words spoken to us or people make our bodies become dysregulated somehow? If we don't notice those things, then we can't name it, and we can't walk with Jesus in the healing process. To name those things is to start a process of healing with Jesus. The very thing that he longs for.

So what was done in principle on the cross is now being worked out in practice in the body of Christ, the church.

Suffering and the Mystery of Salvation Revealed

So we move from the introduction now into verse 24. St. Paul moves into this section on pastoral concerns, and he says this really interesting thing about the suffering that he's been going through.

He says, I am completing what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church. Now in Paul's day, as it was true in the scriptures of Paul's day, the Old Testament, there was this interplay of corporate and individual. So we have something beginning in the person of Jesus that continues through his corporate body, the church.

Paul's not saying that Christ's death is somehow insufficient, that he needs to somehow make up for those sufferings, that Jesus didn't suffer enough. That's not what he's saying. What I think he's doing is connecting the fact that when Jesus suffered, it was to the end that God's plan, the mystery hidden before all ages, was being made known.

And so, and it's the mystery of God creating a people to serve under Jesus as Lord, to bring about new creation. The suffering had its end as the revealing of the mystery. And so the suffering in the body of Christ that occurs because the pursuit of holiness within the church is part of that work of Jesus to reveal the mystery that was hidden that needs to be made known, this mystery of salvation.

So he's undergoing suffering to bring the church to maturity. That's essentially what he's saying. We could also say it this way, he is living out the vocation of the church.

As an example, to bring about new creation where people are in bondage to the present evil age. And to understand that, we have to understand something else about early Judaism. They saw the world as occurring in two ages, the present evil age and the age to come.

And we tend to think, in our mindset, well here's one and then comes the other. But they didn't think about it that way. It's not chronological.

What the early Christians thought of here with the two ages is that they overlapped and intersected somehow. And that what Christ brought about in his death on the cross and resurrection was the coming of the new age in the midst of this present evil age. And so suffering then becomes the birth pangs of seeing the mystery revealed, the mystery of the new age, where Christ is ultimately going to be over all and in all and through all.

So we should not seek to suffer as a martyr. Don't hear me say that. Seeking to suffer as a martyr or to be a martyr is the root of all kinds of evil.

But the reality is, as you follow Jesus, you will encounter suffering. All of us will. For some people it is going to get to the level of religious persecution, like our friends in the Democratic Republic of Congo, friends in India.

We should be standing with our brothers and sisters, praying for them as they're persecuted for their faith. It may not be religious persecution. All of us will undergo a level of suffering.

Various physical, mental health crises, sicknesses, loss of friends, job losses, battles with temptation, avoiding escapist behaviors, doing what's right in the face of feeling really anxious about it, risking relationships when you're naming harm honestly, to show genuine kindness when it's costly, and it would feel much easier to hold on to contempt for the other person or even for ourselves, to listen to somebody share the harm that we've caused them without judgment, with curiosity and kindness rather than being defensive. These are all ways of truth-telling that will potentially cause suffering, or at least angst, or at least fear. They're risky.

We're going to undergo various aspects of suffering and being restored as icons of Christ, but the faithfulness in the process is what needs to happen. And these sufferings, according to St. Paul, those are the birth pangs of the mystery that is being revealed.

Tireless labor for maturity

So God has removed all the obstacles for us knowing him, and he's given the task to the church of continuing Christ's work in the world to make that mystery of God's love known even in our trials. And finally, the third thing here, Paul models for us how we're supposed to labor tirelessly for our own maturity and for the maturity of other people in Christ. And so he does do this in his own strength, but he recognizes that this is what the Spirit is doing in him, and so he has to work with the Spirit to accomplish this. It's hard work.

He says, for this I toil and I struggle with all the energy that he powerfully inspires within me. This is Paul's passion, to help people grow, mature in Christ. And the reality is we can't strive for the maturity of others if we ourselves sit in immaturity, right? We can only give to others what we possess in ourselves.

Somebody said that. That's not a quote from me. I just didn't write it down, so I don't know who said it.

Somebody did. We can't give to others what we don't possess ourselves, right? If you're not growing in maturity, you can't have this passion to help others grow. You've got to start with yourself.

I was listening to this parenting book where they named the ways that the parent-child relationship can be harmed or ruptured. There's a lot of ways, by the way. And when I heard those things in this book, my immediate thought was, oh man, I wonder how many of these things I've done to my child, right? It's natural to think that way.

It's actually not helpful to think that way, though. What we need to start with is we need to start with naming our own places of harm, thinking of our own stories. It could be parents, could be teachers, could be friends or relatives.

As you think of those places in your own story, that's where the work begins. And if we can learn to have compassion on the younger self, and instead of calling that younger self needy, or gullible, or weak, or any other curse that had been named over us, whatever it is, that's when we start to see ourselves as God sees us. And at that point, we can have capacity to begin to parent in a way that allows the child to be uniquely themselves.

So when I think about that as an analogy, it's really helpful to think about that for St. Paul. So much of the work of the Christian life is the hard work of noticing where we're not okay. But with hope.

And why do I talk about this so much? Because if you've heard me preach before, you're like, man, you talk about this a lot. But so much of discipleship out there, discipleship material, is aimed at memorizing Bible verses, getting your theology right, knowing your Bible. And I'm really tired of seeing people memorize the Bible, but being super emotionally immature.

I mean, it's the reality of it, right? And so I want you to have good theology. You know, I can give you books. I got a PhD in Syriac.

I want you to do hard work in theology, and I want you to do hard work on your internal life in ordering these things. You can't be a follower of Jesus and maturing in your knowledge of theology and scripture without also doing the hard work of pointing out in yourself, where am I not okay? Where do I want God to heal me? Where do I, where am I broken? So, often when people's hearts are wounded, they ignore it. And they might only listen to positive messages.

And they don't challenge them. They might attend churches that preach simple platitudes. Or they only engage in shallow relationships with people that never call them to change anything.

And it's much harder to admit where we're sad, where we've felt humiliated, where we've held on to contempt for somebody, or even for ourself, where we've been cursed and started to believe it. But remember that Jesus reigns over all. He's in all.

He is through all. He is going to be over all things, right? We taste it now. We taste a bit of the New Age in this present evil age.

He made you. He loves you. He wants you to be reconciled with God and to be part of this new creation work that he has done in the cross and in the resurrection.

And so we can press into what is really hard because that's when things start to get good. And I don't mean good in the sense of temporal niceness. I mean newly created goodness.

The ways that God intended them to be. And that is the authentic and it's the compelling work that shows outsiders what God can do with very ordinary people. And that is a life and a story that's compelling.

Conclusion

So as we think about St. Paul's encouragement from Colossians 1 to these Christians, remember that God has done everything necessary for you and I to grow in Christ, to grow in our knowledge of the love of God. And so we're called to help others grow as well. The things that were against us no longer have a hold on us.

They have no authority over us because of the work of Christ. We are not bound to them. We don't need to be.

And as we walk with Jesus, he is present with us as a friend and he is over all things as Lord. And so the suffering that we go through continues his ministry of making known the mystery of God's plan of drawing people to himself. And we are called together to work tirelessly at this work of maturity in ourselves and in others with the strength that the Holy Spirit provides.

Let me pray for us. Almighty God, whose Son took upon himself the afflictions of your people, regard with your tender compassion those suffering from anxiety, depression, mental illness, and other suffering. Bear their sorrows and their cares.

Supply all their needs. Help them to put their whole trust and confidence in you. And restore them to strength of mind and cheerfulness of spirit through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited by the Author.

Staying on the Path of Knowing God

TranscriptioN

Good morning again, everybody. It is good to see you. Good to be with you. Those of you who are new and visiting, we're glad that you're here as well. I'm the vicar here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church, which is an Anglican term meaning senior pastor of a mission. And so I am glad that you are here.

I hope you'll stay afterwards so we can hang out, have some coffee and snacks together. This Sunday, I'm going to begin a series in the book of Colossians, which our lectionary, our Sunday Bible reading schedule, has us in the book of Colossians from now through August 3rd. So we'll spend some time together in this epistle, this letter that St. Paul has written. 

I hope over the next few weeks in your own time that you spend a little bit of time reading it on your own as well as you get to know this letter. St. Paul wrote this to a group of churches in Colossae. But it's interesting, this group of churches, he personally didn't actually evangelize.

So he was the apostolic overseer for this mission, but he was not the one who did the work of evangelizing these communities. Instead, this work of church planting, evangelizing, setting up governing structures over these churches, was done mainly by his representative Epaphras, who then is going to come back and give Paul a church planting report, basically. And Paul's letter is in response to that church planting report.

Colossae, and go ahead and flip to the next slide, Colossae on this map is part of a larger area called Phrygia Asiana on the western side of, well, Turkey today. And at one point Phrygia had been its own kingdom. And then eventually it becomes part of the kingdom of Pergamum.

And then the king of Pergamum is an ally to the Romans, and he dies in 133 BCE. But he doesn't have any heir, and since he's allied with Rome, he just bequeaths his whole kingdom to the Roman Empire. So about 133, all this area is now under Rome, despite what kingdom it was part of originally.

There's even a reference to this Sephirot in Obadiah. We know that Jews had gone there by the 6th, 5th century BCE. So we know that there are Jews and Gentiles that are inhabiting this city by the time of Jesus, by the time that Paul is there, and by the time that his servant, sorry, not Paul, but Epaphras goes to evangelize the area.

And it seems like sometime after evangelizing this place of Colossae, some false teachers had come in teaching this group some kind of Jewish heresy. It wasn't just, there were lots of streams of Judaism in this day. This particular one they were teaching was more mystical in its character.

From what we can piece together, they were teaching a type of Jewish mysticism that was creating multiple classes of spirituality amongst the church. And so this word is going to come up in the letter. You can write it down, kids, if you've got your little pen and paper.

Ascesis. Ascesis. That's very important. Get that tattooed on your heart, on your arm. Ascesis. So that word is really important in this letter.

In this context, it's creating a class of spiritual elites. That's the problem that they're going to come across. The word ascesis isn't bad.

It just talks about how you train. How do you train for something? And how do you train in the spiritual life? Because presumably there is the possibility of growth in the spiritual life. What are the spiritual rhythms and habits, practices that one takes up for spiritual growth and why? Asceticism is not necessarily bad in and of itself.

We should all cultivate an ascetical theology. Now you all know what that means. So when somebody says, what's ascetical theology? Kids, how would you describe ascesis or ascetical? What do you think? Anybody got an idea? Hmm. 

All right. Adults, you want to help them? In the back. I was going to say giving up a lot of working stuff and concentrating on the spiritual aspect.

Yeah, it can be that. Yep. I was thinking even simpler.

So in the morning, sometimes our son likes to lift weights. That's training, right? Sometimes one goes on a run. This is working out.

This is physical ascesis. So what we're talking about here is spiritual ascesis. How do we train in the spiritual life for growing with God? Yes.

So that is an example of it. But at its base is the idea of how do you train in the spiritual life? And the problem is this group that is coming in has a really rigorous ascetical training program. And it's based on the Jewish law.

 And sometimes it seems like it's rigor for the sake of rigor. And ultimately, here's where it gets in the mystical theology. It sees angels as intermediary levels before you get to God.

And so the point of the ascetic rigor is to surpass the different levels of the angels. This is kind of the error that St. Paul is addressing that has infiltrated the Colossians. We don't know all the specifics of the error, but this is kind of what we can piece together based on the letter itself and based on some other forms of early Jewish mysticism that we know of.

In our passage today, we begin a letter. It's a normal letter in the sense that it is addressed to an actual people. He's not just writing a theological treatise.

And what he begins with, and you can flip the slide back to the normal, yeah, there you go. So, St. Paul begins this letter with gratitude, thanksgiving, thankfulness, for what he hears from his friend Epaphras about this church planting report, how the gospel is taking root and growing in this community. And then he has a prayer for them.

Life for the Colossians is similar to our own, in that the life that we live is filled with all kinds of stumbling blocks, pitfalls, and detours that threaten to take us off course in our journey of following Christ. This is why ascesis training is really important, because all sorts of things threaten our daily life to make us veer off track. So St. Paul's letter is speaking to the Colossians, but actually because it's been gathered into this corpus of Pauline letters, and it's been considered scripture by the church.

It doesn't just speak to the Colossians. It speaks to you and I today. And so this letter, the beginning of it is inviting us into a substantive kind of gratitude as we are growing together in the knowledge of God, the God who loves us, and the God who makes all things new in Christ.

These are going to be major themes in the book. So he thinks of this church with gratitude for what God has done, and he says in his prayers that he always thanks God for God's work in them. He does that because, again, he's heard this church planting report from Epaphras.

I would imagine that Epaphras is telling him not just the impact, but stories of individuals whose lives are being changed in Colossae because of the work of Christ, and the love that they have for one another, and how they're learning to obey Christ together. So Paul's response to that is gratefulness and gratitude. And I can't help but resonate with Paul when I read that, because I think back to five years ago, I didn't know a lot of you, and none of you really knew each other five years ago, right? And this church didn't exist.

And so some of you didn't live in the area yet. So I love taking now and then just a step back, and to kind of bask in the goodness of what God is doing in you individually and corporately. I'd encourage you to take up that practice, because it's so good to see how God has knit together this community and love.

So I resonate very deeply with St. Paul's gratitude in this. There's a joy in the gospel that is a joy in new creation. He says in verse 6, Just as it, meaning the gospel, is bearing fruit and growing in the whole world, so it has been bearing fruit among yourselves from the day you heard it, and truly comprehended the grace of God.

 And now some of these verbs about bearing fruit and multiplying, those are hearkening back to the blessing that God had given man and woman in creation, the increasing, multiplying, filling the earth. The gospel here is about new creation in one sense in the Colossian church, but it's really about what God is doing in the world. It's a new creation type of work.

The gospel brings new creation, and the body of Christ then is to be this outpost of God's kingdom in the world, this outpost of new creation where we see what's broken being restored, where the violence of the empire is condemned by restored peace among the saints, where injustice gets condemned by things being made right, where cruelty is condemned through love, where falsehoods are condemned through truth-telling, and where those who are cast aside are being made truly human again in the body of Christ. And so we should be a people of gratitude for the work of the gospel that we see, both in ourselves and in the people around us in the church. In our prayers of the people, I'll often invite us at some point to offer our prayers, supplications, or thanksgivings.

And I truly mean that. Like, we want to offer our prayers and asks before the Lord, but we also want to give him our thanksgivings, which requires us meditating on things to be thankful for throughout the week. I really want us to do both.

It's a paradigm that we set throughout the week in our daily prayers as well. We ought to name hard realities. We ought to name grief.

And we should grieve the things that are lamentable, but also to give thanks for the glimmers of redemption that we see and the glimmers of resurrection where we find them. Because we follow a Lord who redeems suffering, who liberates our trials from the darkness of just meaningless despair. And I love the way one song says it, where we will hear our anguish stories sung as victory songs of grace.

Right? And I don't want to minimize suffering at all, but instead I want to think of suffering as something to be honored, as the holy place where God is deeply at work bringing about new creation in Christ. So in the first paragraph, St. Paul talks about how the gospel is taking root in them as it is everywhere in the world. And then in the second part of this paragraph, he says that since the day that he has heard of Paffer's church planting report, that's my words. 

They didn't have church planting report language back then. Just in case you're wondering, it's not in the Greek. That's me.

So here's his church planting report and the good news of what's happening there. And he continues to lift up this church in his times of prayer constantly. He prays that they would be filled with a knowledge of God's will and to be made strong by God's glorious power. 

So you have this interweaving of knowledge of God and power of God in the Christian life. And there's this interesting argument in the letter that feels a little circular. I want to see if you can hear it.

When it comes to knowing God, he says, being filled with the knowledge of God's will to lead lives worthy of the Lord, being fruitful in every good work and multiplying in the knowledge of God. So it sounds like what he's saying is that you have to know what pleases God to live out God's desire. And then when you live out God's desire, then you come to know God, which sounds like you got to know God to know God. 

It sounds really circular, right? Except that in relationships, this actually isn't circular. So we can think about it in human terms. And I think that's a helpful way to think about what this might mean.

Let's take another hypothetical couple, Jerry and Melanie. I don't know anybody by that name. So this isn't a real couple.

But Jerry knows that Melanie likes to have a spacious living room to walk into when she gets home from work. This is her desire that he knows. When his children have left the toys all over the room, then he has the children make sure to pick them up before Melanie gets home. 

He walks in accordance with her desire. Melanie arrives home and feels mental space to sit down, to play with the kids, to talk to them, even to talk to her husband, Jerry. And as a result of walking in her desire and through this conversation, the husband then comes to know his wife more deeply.

So he has to know her to know her more deeply. It's not a perfect example. The opposite is also true.

 If you don't walk in these desires, you miss the opportunity to know this person more deeply. We can think of this in human terms to help us understand what's going on with what he's talking about with our relationship with the Lord. I think it's really helpful when we think about this in terms of the spiritual life and our special word asceticism, how we train.

We're learning the knowledge of God as we begin to learn about God by the things like being in church community, reading scripture in prayer, repentance, fasting, some of these things that Peg had mentioned earlier, doing God's commandments, cultivating stillness so that we learn to seek the presence of God. It's in doing those things that we learn the desires of God. And as we walk in the desires of God, then we begin to learn more of what pleases God.

And as we learn what pleases God and walk in those things, then we begin to bear good fruit, which kind of goes back to what we preached on last week. And then those good fruits are the virtues that we read about in scripture, like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, faithfulness, goodness, gentleness, self-control. And that's not exhaustive, but you get the point.

If you want to reap those things, you have to sow in the desires of God and in the will of God to harvest those virtues. They don't just come regardless of how you live your life. And if somebody then is formed in virtue and in deeper relationship with God, they start to grow in the knowledge of who God is, regardless of life circumstances around them.

It's not behavior modification. We're not setting up like a do good and you'll be better, like God gave you Jesus to be better. That's not what we're saying.

It's not just behavior modification. It's this inner disposition of the stillness of the heart to join in God's divine life of new creation in the midst of a world that's quite disturbing and often is set to throw us off track to not know him and the goodness of his divine life. And so St. Paul prays in verse 11 for them to be strengthened.

So the knowledge and then the strengthening, to be strengthened by his glorious power, which then, again, interweaves and intertwines knowledge and power when it comes to our relationship with God. That's not to say that there is an empty triumphalism that we want to have or just optimism. I don't know if I've said this before, but optimism is not a Christian virtue.

So you keep that one in the back of your hat. It's really important. Instead, growing in our relationship with God is this deep grounding in experientially knowing God's love, who he's called us and made us to be, so that we can't be shaken and uprooted when testing comes through really harmful and difficult people or really harmful and difficult circumstances.

So we've looked at the first two portions of this intro paragraph. Finally, in the last portion, we see this beautiful summary of the basis of the Christian life. God has rescued us from the power of darkness.

And he's transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved son in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. This language of redemption brings us back to the Old Testament, the book of Exodus, where God has rescued a people out of the kingdom of darkness under Pharaoh's leadership, out of slavery to Pharaoh to become a people to live under his rule and reign as king. And the language of redemption is the language of liberation from captivity.

And I find that language so helpful when we talk about salvation. There are different ways that salvation is framed in Scripture. And there's some who probably hyper focus on some legal type of exchange between Jesus's righteousness and our sin on the cross.

It's not untrue, necessarily. It's also definitely not the main thrust of the New Testament. I think people do that out of a longing to be certain about their future destiny.

But, but overemphasizing that doesn't do much for cultivating a life with God right now. It doesn't answer the hard questions of how do I see God's kingdom come in this really difficult situation I'm in right now. Instead, becoming free from our captivity to the kingdom of darkness is one of the main thrusts of the New Testament.

And I find it pastorally way more edifying. And it's here in Colossians. When God began at your baptism, he is continuing to bring to fruition through your life in the church and through your knowledge of him as you grow deeper in that knowledge of him.

And that's an experiential kind of knowledge. As we notice our trigger points, the people that activate us, the strong reactions that we have to people or certain specific circumstances, as we notice our avoidant behaviors and addictions, the places where we feel emotional upheaval, we begin to notice those places where there still might be bondage in some aspect to the kingdom of darkness. And that's where I would really recommend getting a spiritual director or a licensed therapist.

They can be really helpful tour guides as you're navigating the space of where does the bondage exist. It can be really helpful. And so we should write those places down.

And as you do that, begin to pray into those places and ask the Lord where they've come from and how he might free you from those by his spirit. Because that is the very thing God longs to do, to liberate us from those things that we've become enslaved to. In other words, in the church, in Christ, all of us are becoming fully alive.

In Christ, in the church, we're becoming humans fully alive. So the letter to the Colossians is a letter for us. There are so many ways that we're tempted to despair.

There are so many ways that we're tempted to be pulled off track and distracted from our relationship with Jesus. When things around us are really hard, when things didn't turn out as we'd expected. Today's passage is an invitation for us to regularly give thanks to the Lord for the work of the gospel.

Notice the work of the gospel in you and in other people. Make it a habit. Make that part of your ascetical rigor to notice the goodness of the gospel in somebody else and in yourself.

And so this is also an invitation to continue to grow in the knowledge of the grace of God, to be empowered by God when testing comes, because it's going to. And then to do the hard work of naming the places of bondage to the kingdom of darkness, so that Christ can rule and reign over all things and liberate us from the places of captivity. Let's be a people of substantive gratitude as we grow in the knowledge of God, the God who loves us and the God who makes all things new in Christ. 

Let me pray for us. Let your merciful ears, O Lord, be open to the prayers of your humble servants, and that we may receive what we ask. Teach us by your Holy Spirit to ask only those things that are pleasing to you, through Jesus Christ, our Lord, who with you in the same spirit lives and reigns forever and ever. Amen.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited by the Author.

Sow the Goodness you Long to Harvest

TranscriptioN

Well, good morning again. I'm Father Morgan Reed. I'm the vicar here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church. It is good to be with you worshiping our Lord this morning.

Nice to see new and visiting faces among us, which is one of the fun things about summer around here. Today's lectionary reading has us in the end of the Book of Galatians, this epistle that St. Paul wrote to some of the churches in that region. And I wanted to spend some time in the end of Galatians because I think there's some helpful themes for us to meditate on.

Next week we're going to be in St. Paul's letter to the Colossians, which the lectionary has us in all the way until August, so we'll get to spend a good month in the in the Book of Colossians. So the Book of Galatians gives us this glimpse into the hard work of salvation and how it relates to the family of God, this kingdom that God is building in Christ. We can read about the churches in this region if we go back to Acts 13 and 14.

And if you remember, we preached on those passages during Eastertide. So if you go back to May 11th, 18th, and 25th, you can hear some of our sermons where Paul is evangelizing some of the areas that make up this region of Galatia to which he is writing this circulatory letter that's going to be read to all the churches. And this letter, which was written fairly soon right after the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, if you remember, they had this problem arise where they were wondering, well, if somebody, if a Gentile starts to believe in Jesus, do they need to be circumcised? Which is traditionally what pagans would have to do to become Jewish.

And so this is a paradigm shift. And if you remember that council, they decide that, no, in fact, the Gentiles, the pagans, as they come to believe in Jesus, they are made one with the Jews in this family of God, all who are following Jesus as the Messiah. And then what happens after that is St. Peter, who is one of the architects and foundations of that council, seems to be slipping into a little bit of hypocrisy, as he is with very diverse congregations, and seems to favor his time with the circumcised.

So St. Paul, earlier in this letter, says, I confronted him to his face, which is very extreme. And he does the same with Barnabas, we find out, too, because of St. Peter's practice of isolating certain people at table fellowship, making certain people feel like they're second-class Christians, right? And it takes some integrity and some really deep confidence in the call and mission of the gospel to call out not only a pillar of the church, but one of the people who is the architect of this council that made the decision, and to point out his hypocrisy. Now, Peter wasn't the only one doing this.

We find out that actually this was happening in lots of churches, and so St. Peter was actually endemic of a larger problem in these churches in the region of Galatia that Paul had originally evangelized. So he's encouraging these churches to do what he himself does, which is to consider himself something of a spiritual farmer, there to join him in spiritual farming, sowing seeds of the kingdom of God, and then not losing heart. Not losing heart, because it would have been easy to lose heart if the thing in front of you is confronting one of the pillars of the church.

Sometimes things are really hard to do, and it's easy to lose heart. I'm indebted to the late Anglican theologian John Stott for my outline today. The way that he helpfully put all this passage under the theme of spiritual farming and framed this passage in light of sowing and reaping.

And you heard a little bit of the sowing and reaping language again in the gospel today, with the harvest is plenty, but the laborers are few. There is a harvest that we join in with the Apostles as spiritual farmers. So St. Paul says in verse 8 that our thoughts and deeds are the seeds that are to be sown into the field of either the spirit or the flesh.

 Sow thoughts in the Spirit

Verse 8 says, if you sow to the flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh, but if you sow to the spirit, you will reap eternal life from the spirit. And he also says that God won't be mocked. So if you can't sow contempt, corruption, and violence, and then expect to harvest things that are going to please God and to make you more like Jesus, you have to pay attention to what you're sowing, is this point.

Reaping eternal life is not about some future destiny about going to heaven when you die. Reaping eternal life is something qualitative that happens now in the kingdom. It's like when Jesus talks about that I have come and may have life and have it to the full.

He's not talking about some future thing only. He's talking about right now, if you follow Jesus, it might be hard, but there is something qualitatively different about the eternal life that is found in him. And so this is what he's calling them to harvest.

A harvest of eternal life comes when you sow the seeds of goodness, of righteousness in the gospel. It's not a life of ease, but it is a life of goodness and the presence of God. And what does it look like to be spiritual farmers who are sowing in order to reap eternal life? In this context, it means no longer sowing or no longer giving voice or authority to the flesh, the old broken self, the old broken parts of us that are only going to produce a harvest of corruption or violence or brokenness.

If you look back at the history of the church, the saints of old got this. One of my favorite Latin writers is a guy named Saint John Cassian. And John Cassian, he's writing in the late fourth and the early fifth centuries.

He brings the eight thoughts tradition into Latin from Greek, which becomes what we all know as the seven deadly sins tradition. Yes, they're originally eight, and he brings them into Latin into the West. And he says this, it's really important, he says, the pains of disturbances are not always caused in us by other people's faults, but rather by our own.

As we have stored up in ourselves the causes of offense and the seeds of faults, which as soon as a shower of temptation waters our souls, at once burst forth out into shoots and fruits. And so cultivation, harvesting, farming imagery was really common for the early monastic figures as well. There's this beautiful expansion of the idea of farming here.

If we were to look at the wounds of how we were raised, significant deaths of friends or loved ones that we remember, curses that might have been spoken against us, things that we've started to believe, dysfunctional relationships, stories of harm that have been done to us, we begin to discover how over time we've built up a storehouse of causes of offense. And these become the seeds of faults. The showers of temptation that water the soul are things like life transition, job loss, raising a child, an anxious family system, marriage, a new roommate, a move, maybe the sound of someone's voice. 

And what we see sprouting, what we can see what's sprouting is paying attention to what's activating us, what's triggering us, what reactions do we have to what we experience. Pay attention to those things. Those are often the fruits of the ways that we've sown into the soil.

What triggers us, what activates us, notice the reactions that you have to certain external circumstances, and what is the fruit that we see telling us about what's been sown into the soil of our brokenness. For John Cassian, the answer is to name them and then to pluck them out. And that requires this life of prayer and repentance.

So if we're gonna sow well as spiritual farmers, we have to be honest about what's broken, cultivate a life of prayer and inner stillness where the spirit can heal our contempt, our envy, our desire to look so put together and can settle the disturbances of our souls. What we sow is going to grow. What we sow will grow when the waters of temptation come, the waters of testing, and so we have to sow well.

So one counselor that I enjoy listening to has said it this way. He says, “our idolatry grows in the soil of our pain. Our idolatry grows in the soil of our pain.”

What he means is that the things that are unexamined, the wounds that we've got that are unnamed, those become the places where lies start to grow. Often because we're overcompensating for something untrue that we believe about ourselves. For example, let's take a hypothetical person.

 We'll call him Timothy because I don't think anybody in here's named Timothy. So we'll call him Timothy. And Timothy, you know, he's bullied as a child and he comes home and his dad says something terrible to him and horribly dismissive, like, you know, Timothy, you're always getting beaten up.

Why don't you stand up for yourself? Sometimes he comes home and he's really upset. His dad says to him, why do you let kids do that to you? Why are you so weak? I didn't raise a weak boy. Right? Or something similar.

Super passive. You get the point. So Timothy learns that his father won't be there for him when he needs him to be with his sadness.

He's determined to overcome that weakness on his own. And he learns that it's better to rage and to hurt than to risk the embarrassment of coming to his dad and feeling a deep sense of humiliation for wanting someone to bear witness to his pain. So fast-forward 20 years now.

Timothy is married and he's sitting at the table with his wife and two kids. And as they're talking, his wife says to him, Timothy, you helped your son, our son, with his math homework. Thanks for doing that.

But he didn't do very well because you didn't show him the way to do it that his teacher wanted. Because everybody knows division has changed in the last 40 years. And so Timothy is in his feelings at the moment.

He's enraged at this criticism that his wife has given to him about not training his son to do math the correct way. And so he stands up in his rage, he slams the chair into the table, and he walks outside the door slamming it behind him in a silent rage. His rage at the criticism comes from the fact that he can't bear the shame of feeling inadequate before other people.

He hears his dad's words behind the criticism. His body was telling him to rage rather than to risk the shame of admitting that he didn't know this new way of doing math. His reaction is way out of proportion, right? But it's also the bad fruit that stems from these deep-seated lies that were allowed to germinate in the soil of his pain.

So what falsehoods are we allowing to grow in the soil of our pain? Spiritual farmers, like the monks of old, accept this task of naming brokenness accurately. Then as these little seedlings begin to grow, plucking them up through the hard work of honesty and repentance, and then sowing the seeds of the gospel, the good news and beauty of the work of Jesus and his presence back into the soil of our pain, and then watching for the spirit to bear fruit as those waters of temptation water the seed. Because the waters of testing will come, the question is just what seed is being allowed to grow in the soil.

Sow good works into the lives of the community

So the seed refers to good thoughts and deeds that are sown in the spirit. The seed also refers to good works which are sown into the lives of the community, the church community. St. Paul reminds them not to grow weary of doing good.

We can be so tempted to want to give up and to despair when there are no tangible results that we can see. He tells us to work for the good of all, especially for those of the household of faith. Some of the hardest work that is going to tempt you to despair is in the realm of human relationships.

If we make art, or if we do construction, write, build out spreadsheets, work with materials outside of ourselves, we can manipulate it, change it outside of us, you can potentially scrap it, throw it against the wall, right, if that's the material of our labor. The hard work of loving people well is much harder. I remember years ago in my ordination process, we have a group, if you're not familiar with the Anglican ordination process, there's a group called the Examining Chaplains, and once you're at a certain point, they basically walk with you on all the things that you don't know yet that you should know.

So they examine you and help you along the process. So they had asked me a question when I was, this was 2016, so nine years ago. I'm not gonna tell you how old I was, but I was younger.

And they had asked me in this Examining Chaplains meeting to give a five-minute answer to somebody who comes up to me after the service, and we're having coffee, and as they come to me they ask, why is it okay that you would baptize infants? Give me the, and their question was, give me a five-minute reply to somebody over coffee hour comes to you with that question. To love somebody well goes far beyond me handing them a bunch of proof texts from the Bible. That is not loving them well.

But I didn't know that back then, and so my answer was terrible. I don't even know what I said, but I wouldn't have answered it now the way that I answered it then. Now what I would do is if somebody came up to me and I only had five minutes, I'd probably ask a lot more questions than answer.

And I would start with the question, trying to find the question behind the question, so that I can address the thing they're really asking, which is not usually about infant baptism. Maybe they were baptized as an infant. We'll take another hypothetical.

But they never actually believed in Jesus until they were an adult, and the person who shared the gospel with them and mentored them was this godly Baptist pastor who doesn't see infant baptism as valid at all. Let's say that after this person got married and after that pastor officiated the wedding, the pastor shortly thereafter sadly passed away, and this couple, now not necessarily wanting to leave Baptist, but they want a healthy church, they found out from a friend that their friends have been going to an Anglican Church, and they wanted to try one too. And they were surprised to find out that Anglicans baptize babies. 

And knowing that, if I were to ask those kinds of questions to get a little bit of background, I would more likely understand that the question behind the question is, well, can I lose my salvation? Or what is baptism, actually, if there's no public profession of faith from the person being baptized? Approaching other people with curiosity and kindness is the hard work of doing good to one another. It's assuming the best of somebody. I might ask, well, what did you learn about Jesus from your pastor that meant so much to you in your life, and that cared for you so well? How can I honor their story while showing curiosity with a question? And after that, I could address what baptism is, and why we do that with infants, and why they can receive it.

So that's just an example, but think of your relationships, the people that are closest to you, these relationships that you hold on to and steward, your household, the people in your neighborhood. And as you look around your church family, these are people that you are connected with. It can be a struggle to bless others and to seek their good when there's no discernible change in their thoughts or behavior as you walk with them day in and day out. But the encouragement from St. Paul is, don't grow weary in doing good. Keep sowing. Don't stop.

If you're married, then that begins in your closest and most intimate relationship with your spouse. If you have kids, it's true of your kids, do not lose heart. Keep sowing good things.

You can't produce a good harvest if you give up sowing good seed. And so sow into your household, long for God's goodness to rest on each person in your household, even when they're so challenging to get along with. And do the same in the church as you love one another well.

So in the end of this letter to the churches in Galatia, St. Paul has had to address challenges that arose since he left the community. He had evangelized this community. He loves it.

He knows them by name. He has seen stories of transformation, and these people are an encouragement to him. How discouraging to work so hard and to see them start walking away from the very things that he's been teaching them.

After the Jerusalem Council had decided that in Christ Gentiles don't need to receive circumcision to be a full participant in the body of Christ, you see St. Paul working diligently to now tease out those implications for these churches that he loves. You see his struggle with Saints Peter and Barnabas and the Galatian Church itself, which is at risk of itself sowing bad seed. And so he addresses the goodness of sowing good seeds of our thoughts and actions in the realm of the Spirit, and then sowing good deeds into one another in the community of the church without giving up.

And that's all to the end that there would be a good harvest of good fruit. We want to see the harvest that's plentiful and the laborers are few that we read about in the gospel, then we need to sow good seed. We want the good fruit of the Holy Spirit individually and in the church communally.

We want to experience the eternal life of God in the midst of a really challenging life, which are the waters of testing, but we want to reap well and so we have to sow well. So let's be tireless as spiritual farmers who do the hard work of repentance and who do the hard work of blessing others as we carry on in laboring to see God's kingdom come in the fields of this earthly life. Let me pray for us.

Grant Almighty God that the words that we have heard this day with our ears may by your grace be grafted into our hearts, that they may bring forth in us the fruit of a righteous life to the honor and praise of your name, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited by the author.

Proper 7: Seeking God When Nothing is Going Right

TranscriptioN

And good morning again, my friends. It is good to be with you this morning. As I mentioned, if you're new here or visiting, we're so glad you're here. I'm Father Morgan Reed.

I'm the vicar here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church. Last Sunday was Trinity Sunday. In Reverend Susan had a wonderful sermon on the Trinity. You can go back and listen to that. And then next Sunday is going to be the feast day of St. Peter and St. Paul, two pillars of the early church. And we'll have a friend here to preach with us that morning.

Then in the month of July, I'll be finishing up in the first Sunday of July a passage from the gospel. And then we'll spend some time in Colossians, the epistle of St. Paul to the Colossians over the month of July. But today I wanted to do something a little bit different. I wanted to have a psalm reflection, time to reflect on the psalm that we read this morning. We often don't preach on those, but it's interesting. Jesus, in our gospel passage, was with his disciples, and he asks the crowd, he asked them who the crowds say he is, and they start to give him answers. 

And then he says, who do you say that I am? And Peter makes this famous confessional, you are the Christ. And they're expecting an earthly ruler, a kingly Messiah, who's going to rule and reign. And what he does is he tells them to hold on, and don't tell anybody, because he will do that.

But first he has to go to the cross and suffer on behalf of humanity. And he encourages them not to seek power in greatness, because this is the thing that they're tempted to do. If your kingdom is earthly, then certainly we should join in the greatness of this kingdom. 

But what they don't realize is the cross is the way to the kingdom. And so he has this encouragement that feels a little bit mysterious or enigmatic about, take up your cross daily and follow me. And they're sort of teasing out what that could possibly mean, because they don't yet know about the fullness of what the cross is.

And it's true that when we think about abundant life in the kingdom of God, it often shows itself in really hard circumstances. Circumstances where there are difficult trials and challenges, but the kingdom of God will come. And it's often when we look back at those difficult seasons that we realize that there was a cross to bear, that God showed himself faithful, that his presence was there.

And so taking up our cross involves some level of humiliation each day as we learn to follow Jesus. It might look like not seeing the things that we hoped for materialize as we thought they would, apologizing for the wrongs that we've done to others, telling others what is just even when they don't want to hear it, loving God's image in somebody when it's popular to stoke hatred or verbal or physical violence against people, even doing the hard inner work of naming things instead of turning to escapist behaviors and avoiding naming things that are really difficult to name. Ultimately we should seek the experience of the love of God in Christ Jesus more than comfort, more than self-protection, more than self-preservation.

And so Psalm 63 that we read today can be brought into conversation with our gospel texts. Psalm 63 helps us to see what it means a little bit to take up our cross and to follow Jesus. We should seek to seek God's love so to fill us that we come to know the life that Jesus has promised.

We should seek God's love to fill us so that we learn the love of Jesus and come to know that life that Jesus has promised. Now to do this, the things that I want to look at from our psalm passage are our longings, our interior life, and our resolve. Our longings, our interior life, and our resolve.

 Our Longings

So first look at our longings. The psalm is attributed to David. We didn't read the subscription in our reading, but if you were to read this in your English Bible, Psalm 63, there's a little attribution to David when he's in the wilderness of Judah, which this pictures then David as he's escaping from King Saul in the Negev, which is in the southern part of Israel.

It's a dry, hot, arid desert that he finds himself in, and rather than spending his days strategizing on how to foster the contempt that's in his heart, or how to assassinate Saul, what he does is he finds shady spots to hide in, caves, takes out a writing utensil and a scroll, and he makes time to write poetry. He's rightly ordering his interior life. That is the thing that he is spending his time doing.

Rather than allowing contempt to help him strategize a way to seek vengeance, to take vengeance into his own hands, what he does is in the midst of these really troubling circumstances, is he focuses on rightly ordering his interior life and his longings. So he begins with a poem, this poem with this line, God, you are my God. I will search for you. 

I'm thirsting for you. My body is wasting away for you in a dry and in a weary land with no water. How many of you kids this morning enjoy camping or outdoor survival activities? Yeah? Yeah? Who likes to camp or do outdoor survival stuff like build fires and other fun things? Great.

A lot of you. Excellent. Now, I'm gonna ask you a question.

When you get out into the wilderness, what are some of the first things that you should do? What do you think, Kate? Find shelter. That's it. Yep.

Absolutely. What else? Misha? Yep. Build your camp.

Exactly. What else? And make a fire. Excellent.

Yes. What else? Shepherd? Find food and water. And which one of those is more important? Yes. 

I heard it a couple places. Water is more important than food. Absolutely.

So you can make it a long time without food, or at least very little food. You can't make it that long without water. Think about the next three days here.

You will experience thirst. Here, the psalmist is kind of like what Tuesday is gonna feel like, but in the desert, and he is longing in that hot, arid, dry place, and picturing himself being there, looking for a viable source of water. So he's out there, right? He's thinking about water, and what he compares it to is God's presence.

Nothing else matters. The circumstances are so bad, the thing that I want, Lord, is you. And this is the way he pictures his relationship with God.

Do we long for God's presence, like a body in a dry desert that is longing desperately for water? But the writer deeply longs to know God, and then what's interesting is he's longing to know God when everything outside is going wrong. When things haven't gone the way that he hoped for, you know, do we long that way for better circumstances, or do we long that way for God's presence? I would imagine that if we were put in the psalmist's shoes, we would spend our time, strategy, and resources figuring out how to get out of the mess, and possibly to take vengeance, but that's sort of a second tier, rather than spending all of our energy seeking the presence of God. But his focus is on rightly ordering his interior life.

Rightly Ordered Interior Life

So after rightly ordering his longings, the psalmist gives us these outward gestures of a rightly ordered interior life. He says, so I gazed at you in the sanctuary to see your power and your glory. There's a famous paradigm in the Psalms that you can think about all of them, some level of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation.

I get that from the late Walter Brueggemann, but it's a really helpful way to think through the Psalms. Is the psalmist in a state of orientation, disorientation, or being reoriented? All three can happen in the same psalm. And there's a reorientation that happens here for the psalmist as he goes into the sanctuary, and he has this encounter with God in the midst of his disorientation, and searching, and longing for water in the desert.

The sanctuary is a really important place. Don't miss this. For Israel, the sanctuary was meant to refigure for people the Garden of God, the Garden of Eden, where people experienced God dwelling with them directly.

And so the sanctuary is the place where you meet God. It creates this place where heaven and earth meet on this earth. And what becomes new in the ministry of Jesus is that he becomes the temple.

Jesus is the place where heaven and earth meet. And then what's even more mysterious and wonderful, as we looked at in the book of Acts, is that ministry continues in Christ's body, which is the church, the body of Christ. So the church becomes the temple, the place where heaven and earth meet, where people come to discover an encounter with God.

So the corporate body of the church, when it gathers, is the location where heaven and earth meet. But also individually, each one of us is a temple of the Holy Spirit where heaven and earth meet. And why is that? It's because the Holy Spirit has been poured out in each one of our hearts.

That's what we celebrated a couple weeks ago at Pentecost, and it's really important. You and I have within us God's presence, the Holy Spirit, the one who can reorient us to what is true, good, and beautiful. And even when things around us are falling apart, he can still reorient us and rightly order our interior world.

So in our Anglican tradition, we have the Book of Common Prayer. It's got in it the daily office, prayer services that you can use throughout the day. That's a really helpful start.

Morning, midday, evening prayer, compline, something short. You can use the family prayer forms of those that are really short. These create a little sanctuary in time.

They're really helpful to sort of reframe and reorient the day. We also need other helpful practices to remind ourselves that we don't need to be subject to the tyranny of the urgent when things have blown up and become in disarray. I find myself rushing from thing to thing to thing, and I think I'm probably a product of the area that I live in, and I imagine that I'm probably not the only one here like this.

You know, find a few moments. It doesn't have to be long to stop and to pray for the Spirit to come and be present. So now I've actually put like a five-minute block between each meeting, so I can just stop and pray and ask, Lord, was there something that I needed to learn from the last thing? Is there something that you want to speak through the next thing? But figuring out for yourself, where are these blocks of time to create little sanctuaries of reorientation in your calendar? Are there Scripture passages that come to mind throughout the day, and are we creating rhythms of reading the Scripture so that we actually are able to draw on those things through the day? The psalmist then follows up his reorientation with several gestures.

He talks about his lips praising God, he blesses God, he lifts up his hands in God's name, the mouth praises God with joyful lips, and in verse 6, and some of you can relate with this, he's awake and he's restless in the middle of the night. And what does he do when he does this? He says he meditates on God in the night watches, which sounds poetic and beautiful, but picture somebody who's restlessly awake in the middle of the night, and how they use that time. He's using that time to meditate on God, and I would imagine the stress of his situation is probably what's keeping him up.

So finally, in verse 7, he sings with joy. All of these things are embodied. There are bodily postures that tell us what his heart is doing and how his heart is oriented, and how important it is to consider your body in your life with Christ.

Your body matters. If you think of David in the wilderness, he's not wasting his time trying to figure out how to draw up a peace treaty with Saul. He's not wasting his time trying to figure out how to assassinate Saul.

He's spending so that he can rightly order the circumstances that he's in. He's accepting those things that he can't change, and then he's taking it in and he's rightly ordering his own interior life. He's writing poetry in the shadows in a really hot day in the desert, and when we feel like our circumstances might have driven us into the wilderness, and we're at an impasse like nothing is going to change, this might just be the invitation that God has for us to draw deeply on that well of prayer where the Holy Spirit is residing, to sit in whatever momentary shade God's providing, and then to start writing some poetry.  Seriously, write some poetry. It's really helpful. Or at the very least, if you don't write poetry, journal.

Or at the very least, can we begin to ask God to reveal our desires that might be keeping us from desiring his presence more than our own surface-level comfort? What is keeping us from experiencing the love of God? So we've seen the psalmist, how he longs for God's presence, his longings, more than life itself. We've seen his outward gestures of the rightly ordered interior life, and finally now the psalm ends with confidence and resolve, even when things are not going well for him. So the psalmist's reorientation, it includes a resolve about people who are causing him harm.

Our Resolve

It's poetic, and what he says is that God will take vengeance on his enemies. He's poetically saying it, but that's the essence of what he's saying. And then in verse 11, there's a different sort of ending here, a different theme. He says, but the king will rejoice in God, talking about himself. All who swear allegiance to him will give praise, for the mouths of those speaking lies will be shut. The mouths of those speaking lies will be shut.

This is his hope, this is his resolve. In some ways it's depersonalized. It's not just that he's personally offended, it's that he's doing the very thing God's called him to do, and what these people are speaking is actually against the will of God.

And so his trust is not in God taking vengeance on his personal hurts, it's God taking vengeance on those things that are truly unjust. And so it's the slander, and if you think about this, what he's saying is God watches over the faithful, and I trust this. And in this final verse, if it gives any indication of the Psalmist circumstances, then it seems like the violence and the assault that he's experiencing is primarily verbal, which is actually harder than physical violence sometimes.

And while his friends slander him and betray him, the Psalmist is resolved to seek the God who watches over his faithful ones. Like the Psalmist, we can trust that God loves us, and that he wants to redeem those curses that people might have spoken over us, and return those things with a blessing. That's really important.

This Psalmist has been cursed by people who were probably close to him, and he's probably wondering if these parts of himself that others have cursed, there might be a back-and-forth about whether these things about him are truly good, whether God has made him this way or not, and so God wants to return these things with a blessing. And I'll give you an example from my own life that I was thinking about this week. In my mid-20s, I was, a coworker told me, you're really obnoxious when you talk

Alright, now, I'm trying not to be triggered even as I say this, right? Now, if I look back, what I think that she was saying was, when you articulate your to-do list out loud, it overwhelms me, and I can't hold that much information in my head, so can you not talk about those things so much, right? Now that I'm 20 years removed almost, I can talk about those things. So, but in that moment, when she said, you're obnoxious when you talk, my body kind of froze, and I noticed that I got this deep feeling of shame, and it was sort of a curse that got spoken over me, like, you are flawed. And, you know, that, and as I look back, there might be other times I can think of, no, there are other times I can think of, where somebody has probably told me, they definitely have told me, hey, get to the point, or why don't you just say what you mean, right? Or even in my writing, it was really hard to write a dissertation, because I, it took me 40 pages to get to the 20 I really meant, and truly, like, I have a lot of words, I know this, I process verbally, and not all of my words are equally important.

So I had to name how people have spoken that curse to me in the past, and then I had to ask God if there is any good in me, right? And I know this sounds extreme, but I think there is. I think there is some good in me there. Knowing that it takes me a while to get to where I'm going, just the knowledge of that has taught me there are certain people that I can bring in as conversation partners at various points, and certain people that I cannot, because they will find it exhausting.

That knowledge is powerful. Also, I love having coffee with you, or having a meal, and not having an agenda. I love seeing where the conversation might go, and not feeling like it needs to go anywhere.

That's actually quite lovely, and so I wonder, for you, as you sit here this morning, are there parts of your life and heart that other people have cursed that were close to you, that God might actually bless? How would searching for God's presence, and rightly ordering our interior world, begin to bless these minds and bodies where other people have spoken curses? We need to build up this resolve of trusting God, and blessing what others have cursed, by seeking God's covenant love for us, so that it becomes more important to us than our own self-protection. So we can leave the vengeance to God as we trust, and as we resolve the trust in this goodness of what God's called us into, and how he's made us to do this thing he's called us to do. So, back to the gospel.

Conclusion

Jesus called his disciples to take up their cross daily, and to follow him. Jesus would be the victorious kingly Messiah that everyone is hoping for, but not without the suffering, and the humiliation, and the pain of the cross. A type of desert where he needed to seek God's presence himself, more than self-preservation.

And while the circumstances that we are in may never fully line up with the things that we hoped for, or for what creates earthly material success and ease, we do know that being in God's presence, and being in God's will, are the ultimate places of rest that our hearts are longing for. So through our psalm today, we have this picture of taking up the cross. The heart of a man who's been exiled into the hot desert wasteland, writing poetry in the shadows, longing for God's presence, being reoriented by an encounter with God, and a resolve to trust God in the face of cursing.

So may we come to know this experience of the love of God so deeply, that we move past self-preservation and hardness of heart, to a desire, and to have our earthly material expectations met, that we really come to know the abundant love and life of Christ. Let me pray for us. Almighty God, you pour out on all who desire it the spirit of grace and supplication.

Would you deliver us when we draw near to you from coldness of heart and wanderings of mind, that with steadfast thoughts and kindled affections, we may worship you in spirit and in truth, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. you

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited by the author.

Pentecost: Called and Equipped for the Work of Jesus

This weekend we celebrated Pentecost! We were outside at Pohick Bay with no sound equipment. This is why the preacher is preaching a bit louder than normal. Please excuse our sound issues.

TranscriptioN

Well, good morning again everybody. It is good to be with you this morning. Happy Pentecost. For those of you who are new or visiting this morning, I'm Father Morgan Reed.

I'm the vicar here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church. This isn't our normal location, so we get to do this once a year and we're thankful to be able to be here in this covered area and that it's not too hot today. This is a really important day in the church calendar.

It reminds us that Jesus Christ reigns as King and that he has equipped us to carry on what he's doing in the world through the power of the Holy Spirit. It's only through the Holy Spirit that the church becomes the church, the people of God, and this day reminds us that we need help to carry on this commission that Jesus Christ gives us. So as we look together at Acts 2 this morning, let me pray for us.

In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Holy Spirit, breath of God and fire of love, we cannot pray without your aid.

Kindle us, in us, the fire of your love and illumine with your light, illumine us with your light, that with a steadfast will and holy thoughts we may approach the Father in spirit and in truth, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who reigns with you and the Father in eternal union. Amen. Well, let's look.

We're gonna look at two things. We're gonna look at the commissioning and how the disciples are equipped to carry on the ministry. So let's look first at the commissioning of the disciples of Jesus.

After Jesus ascended, there's a large group of his disciples that are waiting in a room together and they're praying until the Feast of Pentecost. It's helpful to know a bit about what this feast is. So in this feast in the Old Testament, it's a feast that started with celebrating something out of the harvest, 50 days after Passover.

The farmers would take the sheeps from their crop, from their wheat, and they would offer it to God. In some ways it was a sign of gratitude for what God had provided, but it's also a prayer that the rest of the crop would be successfully brought in that year. And then it took on new meaning as the people of God are delivered from Egypt and they celebrate the Passover together.

And then this feast, if Passover commemorates the event of Yahweh becoming king and delivering his people, 50 days later Pentecost or Shavuot is the festival that celebrates God's giving of the law on Mount Sinai, equipping the people for how to live out life as his people. And according to Jewish tradition, it was 50 days after Passover that Moses had gone up on Mount Sinai to receive the law, which is God's covenant with his people. And that mighty act of God of coming down on Sinai is something called a theophany.

It's a vision of God where God's power and his presence show up very visibly. And so Pentecost then becomes both a praise and thanksgiving as a feast of what God has done to act on our behalf in history, giving his people a way of life. But it's also a prayer that they would carry out his purposes and will as he's called and equipped them to do.

And today's passage that was so beautifully read is no less of a theophany than what happened on Mount Sinai. It reminded me of a couple years ago. Two years ago I was sitting in our house and I heard some giant explosion happen.

And I was praying it wasn't in our house. It wasn't. But then it did shake the house. And I did what any good millennial would do. I got on the internet. I said, Dear Google, what was that explosion near my house? And I found out that it turns out two F-16s had just launched from Andrews Air Force Base near the house to intercept a private plane that had entered and violated U.S. government airspace.

So that explosion that I heard was the sound of those two F-16s breaking the sound barrier over the DMV and causing a sonic boom. And so the mighty rushing wind that we hear about in the Book of Acts seemed to have the same impact on the crowd as the sonic boom in the DMV. But they did not have internet back then.

And so these Jewish pilgrims who had come from all over the place were wondering what had just happened. And so they come to this house where the disciples were praying. And in this Sinai-like theophany, instead of the twelve tribes of Israel, God had commissioned twelve apostles.

Instead of the Mosaic Covenant, the Holy Spirit is poured out on these disciples to shape a community together, doing life together under the rule and reign of Jesus, showing his love to the world. So Pentecost, again, becomes this thanksgiving for God giving us the Holy Spirit. And it's also a prayer that we would live out this life in the Spirit to discover God's kingdom here and now.

We're called to carry on the works of Jesus, and then we're commissioned to do so through the presence and the power of the Holy Spirit, God himself, who is given to us. So that's the commission. Now let's look at the ways that he leads us into new life.

When God had done this miraculous work, some of the crowd had marveled, some were astounded, and then some rationalized it away and they created false narratives about what they just experienced. And that's a paradigm for what would be the case as the apostles continue on their mission. It's still a paradigm today when people are confronted with the good news of Jesus.

So the people recognize they're hearing this news about Jesus in their own language. And some said, these men must be drunk. Because imagine if you speak Parthian and you hear Egyptian, it sounds like gibberish, right? So this is their conclusion. 

This can't be something of God. This has to be these people are drunk. They write off what they can't understand as being from drunkenness, explaining it away with falsehoods, not just because they can't understand it, but because they're unwilling to accept it. So we might get a mighty rushing wind here too. I'm excited for that. Thank God for a covered area.

So Peter stands up to address the crowd and he assures them they haven't even had their morning prayers yet, which means they haven't even eaten yet. There's no way they can be drunk yet with wine. So Peter gives us in this passage an amazing message from the book of Joel, which I know is highest on everyone's reading list.

So he's in the book of Joel and he tells them in the last days God is gonna pour out his Spirit on all flesh. And the Jews of his day are looking for the day of the Lord to come when God would put his King on the throne and where God would reign over his enemies. Peter is functionally saying here that Jesus has ascended, he's become King, and you and I are in the last days right now.

And in these last days we're called to be delivered to the kingdom of God, where the Holy Spirit brings heaven into our earthly reality to begin to taste the redemption now that's ultimately going to come for all things when Jesus comes ultimately to rule and reign and return. And the nations here that are mentioned in the book of Acts are really important. The Roman Emperor back in Peter's day and the Apostles day, he had set himself up as a divine figure.

 And when he brought peace to the Empire, he called it the gospel, he called it the good news of the Roman Empire, but it was a good news that came through violence. This was a shadow of true peace. And it was maintained nationally through violence, through corruption, and through coercion.

So St. Luke is now framing this passage to show the rule and the reign of King Jesus as a counter gospel to the Roman gospel, a true good news against the backdrop of the Roman Empire. Let's just sit and listen to this for a second. This is glorious, isn't it? Just want to name it because I see you looking around.

Thanks be to God. But don't miss this. There's a second century church father reading this passage and he says this, “Christ's name is extended everywhere, believed everywhere, worshipped everywhere, reigning everywhere, adored everywhere, conferred equally everywhere upon all. No king with him finds greater favor, no barbarian lesser joy, no dignities or pedigrees enjoy any distinction of merit. To all he is equal, to all he is king, to all he is judge, to all he is God and Lord.” What he's saying, in other words, is this radical renewal of all kinds of real ordinary people is a testimony to the power of the Lord Jesus Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit.

The kingdom is here and Jesus will reign over all. We see it breaking in now. God hasn't started with the most influential to bring about this kingdom. 

He hasn't started with those who are most outwardly pious and religious or well-off. God's dream team is filled with really ordinary people, misfits and sinners because wherever the Holy Spirit is, as one church father says, “clay becomes gold.” And so you and I, when we were baptized, we were filled with this same Holy Spirit to put God's works on display as he transforms our hearts individually and calls us to witness to the world.

Peter names what's true and then he invites people into these last days with him, you and I. And what this means is that we need to prioritize listening to the Holy Spirit who's been placed in our hearts. The Holy Spirit is the one who calls us to repentance, who comforts us, who invites us into wondering at new creation, and who miraculously transforms the stuff of our earthly life into the stuff of the heavenly reality. And what he can do in bread and wine and water, he can do with our broken family relationships, the responsibilities that weigh really heavy on our hearts, the daily meals we prepare and invite others into our household, the monies that we steward, the things that we hold on to that are broken.

If he can restore creation, he can restore in us what's been broken and what's been ravaged by the fall. And so there's a final exhortation in verse 21. This is for the crowd to trust in Jesus.

Peter says, everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. And he's quoting again from Joel 2 and in this passage he is referring to Jesus. There's a Jewish tradition that whenever you see the name Yahweh, it was interesting to hear Yahweh in Tagalog.

That's how they decided to translate the divine name from Hebrew. Whenever you see that name in Hebrew, in Judaism you read the word Adonai out loud. You don't read Yahweh, it's considered blasphemous.

So even today if you read a Jewish document they'll put G - D for God. It's a way of keeping the holy name holy. And so this comes into Greek speaking Judaism when they did their translation work of the Old Testament.

They translated, they come across the name Yahweh and they would translate it Kyrios, which means Lord. Like if you've ever heard us say Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison, Kyrie Eleison, Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy. The word Kyrios just means Lord, Master.

And it's a generic word, but when the Jews read Joel 2 in Greek, originally they would think this is Yahweh, the God of Israel. That's the object of our faith. And so when Peter quotes it now, there's something new happening.

He intends for people to understand this as a reference to Jesus. Kyrios, Jesus is Lord. This is new and it puts Jesus on the same level as the God of Israel and that's going to be what he's going to prove for the rest of the chapter that we didn't read today.

When Peter's discussing salvation in this text, he's thinking in terms of deliverance from this present evil age and all of its brokenness and sin. He's assuming that Jesus rules over heaven and earth and then trusting in the name of Jesus brings in each of you and me the outpouring of the Holy Spirit to be delivered from this present darkness. And the Holy Spirit then brings heaven to earth in our lives.

He frees us from the powers of sin and death and comforts us in our afflictions and he redeems the suffering that we've gone through because he is working out in our lives what he's also working out cosmically, which is new creation. And that's why later the crowd is going to say, Peter what should we do? And his answer is to be baptized in the name of Christ so that their sins might be forgiven and then they'll receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Today we get to do that.

We get to celebrate this with Andrew and I'm so excited. Today we celebrate this in Andrew's life. The stuff of the world that's been part of his journey is taken away because the Holy Spirit uses water and the prayers of the church to bring heaven into this young man's life.

And he's going to be filled with God's presence and power in the Spirit to live a life that shows the world what God can do through Christ in a very ordinary person that lives under the rule and the reign of King Jesus. And you and I get to renew our baptismal vows with him. And we are reminded that we are a community that God has built and we're reminded of what God has done in us and what God is doing in us and the promise of what he will do in us.

And so we're all being saved. All of us are in process of being delivered. This is why the church is so important. The Spirit fills us as we continue the church's rhythms that we find in the book of Acts, chapter 2 actually, about continuing in the teaching, the breaking of bread, the fellowship, and the prayers. So the Spirit brings heaven to bear on our earthly realities. He creates a community that serves as a witness to the power of Jesus's resurrection. 

The Holy Spirit is in the business of daily theophanies. Sometimes those theophanies are obvious where God really shows up and there is no question. Sometimes they're more subtle, but whether obvious or subtle, today we remember that God has called and equipped us to become the body of Christ together through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Let me pray for us. Almighty God, on this day, through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, you revealed the way of eternal life to every race and nation. Pour out this gift anew that by the preaching of the gospel your salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.

Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.

 Transcribed byTurboScribe.ai. Edited by the author.

Sunday After the Ascension: Lord, Get us Out of this Mess

TranscriptioN

Well, good morning everybody. It is good to see you this morning. I'm the vicar here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church and this is, as I mentioned before, the final Sunday and Eastertide, this long Easter season that we celebrate. Next week we'll get to celebrate Pentecost together and so we'll be wearing red.

It will be a joyous celebration. And on this last Sunday of Easter, in this little 10 days that we often refer to as Ascensiontide, we are reminded of Jesus going and ascending where he rules and reigns and the disciples waiting for the Spirit to come and to empower them for the work that God is calling them to do, which is to carry on the work of Jesus. And so as we think about Ascension, one of the things that we did on Thursday is we celebrated the Feast of Ascension and we were reminded that there are two realms to creation, heaven and earth, that the Scripture describes.

And Jesus is Lord over all. And what he is doing in Ascension is bringing heaven's realm into earth, breaking in. And this is why each day we pray in the Lord's Prayer, Lord may your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.

God's doing this cosmic work of salvation that we're a part of, uniting heaven and earth in new creation. And we see in part now what we look forward to in its fullness when Jesus comes again to restore all things at his second coming. And so today we're still focused on this waiting period, these 10 days, where Jesus has ascended and he is reigning on high and yet hasn't given the Spirit to his disciples to dwell in them, to be his presence as they are to carry on his works.

But what Jesus' Ascension does remind us of, we might be tempted to think that he ascends and so he's absent, but actually the Ascension does not declare his absence, it declares his active presence as he rules and reigns and brings his kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven. And I don't want to take us too far off on a tangent, but I don't know how many of you are aware of this, but in the Bible, in the book of Esther in Hebrew, how many of you were aware that it almost didn't make it into the canon? Okay, a few of you. It almost did not make it into the canon.

That and the book of Ezekiel are two books that almost didn't make it in for different reasons. For those of you who knew why Esther didn't almost make it in, do you know why? Yes, excellent, yes. It never mentions God, never mentions Yahweh whatsoever, explicitly I should say.

So essentially when you read it, it's this narrative about a Judean woman in the Persian period who saves her people through deception, like that's the basic storyline. Now, some have suggested that the name Yahweh in Hebrews, יהוה, those four letters show up as an acrostic pattern at different points in the book, and that might be true. It's debated, but if it is, and even if it's not true, it still highlights something that's very true about the book, which is that the Lord's name may not be mentioned explicitly, but he's far from absent.

He's in their preservation, and to me the book of Esther in that way, as we see God working in the background very actively, this is something like what it feels like to me when we talk about the ascension of Jesus. He's not absent. He's reigning, and his reign moves over our age and into our earthly realm in ways that you could put sort of on this spectrum of overtly miraculous and overtly ordinary.

Still miraculous, but ordinary. Somewhere in there you see the kingdom of God breaking in. You see Jesus's rule and reign as king breaking into our realm, and we can see it in today's passage in the book of Acts, chapter 16.

We see it in the stirring up of hearts. We see it in the disruption of corrupt and demonic systems, and we see it in this surprising deliverance that produces faith in a Gentile, a pagan, and so I want to look at this text together this morning in Acts, chapter 16. If you have your Bible or you have it on your phone, you can open up to Acts, chapter 16, and as we get into it, let me pray for us.

“In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen. Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and redeemer, amen.”

Lydia and the Stirring of the Heart

Well first I want to see how God's kingdom comes in stirred hearts.

Paul is in a missionary journey in this context, a different one than the last one we talked about. This time he's traveling with Paul, Silas, Timothy, possibly Luke himself, and they arrive at Philippi, which is a major Roman colony, a very urban place in northeastern Macedonia today, northeastern Greece, and he does what he normally does, which is to find a local synagogue to preach out of, to share the story about how Jesus ties all of history together for people's deliverance and salvation, but Philippi is so pagan that there are no synagogues in Philippi, so what is he to do? He hears a rumor that there are some people who pray down by, there's a regular place to pray down by the water, and there it's mostly made up of women, and when he's down there, this is before the passage we read today, he encounters a woman named Lydia, and Lydia is a God-fearing Gentile, meaning she was a pagan Gentile that converted to worshiping the God of Israel, so she's a monotheist, and as he encounters her, he ties together the stories of Jesus for her in a way that shows her what God has done for her in the Jewish Messiah. She believes this gospel, and then she is baptized, her and her household, so the gospel comes to a successful businesswoman, a woman who is very well known, well off, and she and her whole household are baptized, so we see the gospel being fruitful, multiplying, and filling the earth in this woman, Lydia.

Even in pagan Gentile cities where there's not even a synagogue to preach out of, we don't see all the parts of Lydia's life that lead up to this moment, but we do know that in Acts, God had given Paul a dream to go to Macedonia, and so we see Jesus reigning and bringing together the story of salvation in ways that Paul's not aware of, that Lydia is not going to be aware of until it happens, and Lydia reminds me that we often see the kingship of Jesus when we're open to looking for the ways that God is stirring hearts. Sometimes people will call these God moments, right? There's these ways that you couldn't have guessed that God would bring these moments together, but he does, and in the stirring of hearts, we see God's rule and reign. In Lydia's time, paganism was the norm, and especially in Philippi, this city to preserve its welfare, sacrifice to gods and to the emperor who was considered a god.

They were trying to keep the gods happy, to procure the blessing on their city, and so it was tied together. Economic, politics, religion, it's all brought together in a cohesive system, in this religious system that was intertwined, and this is what it meant to be Roman, and so to follow Christ was a Roman identity, and it was a threat to these Roman nationalists who didn't want anybody threatening the safety or the Roman-ness of their colony, and in our context, you know, there's often a veneer of Christianity that we can see in places, or at least if there's not a veneer of Christianity, people are pretty familiar with the story of Christianity. That might be less and less true, but even now, someone at least knows what this term means, generally, but the reality is our neighbors are still bound to the kingdom of darkness.

No matter where we go, our physical neighbors, our co-workers, and in this place where God, where people are still bound to the kingdom of darkness, Jesus is still stirring up hearts to find him, to discover his goodness, and you and I, like the disciples like Paul here, are called to be attentive to what God is doing, when to speak, when to listen, but we should be prepared to listen and then connect somebody's story to the story that God is telling in them and through them when the opportunity is presented to us. So that's Lydia that we encounter. Jesus is stirring hearts, as in Lydia's case.

The Gospel Disrupts Demonic Systems — the Freed Slave Girl

Jesus also disrupts demonic systems, no matter how embedded they become. This is an amazing aspect of the gospel. So they go another time to the place of prayer.

This is what we read this morning. They encounter a female slave. She's not given a name in the story, but they harass Paul and Silas, and he turns at some point, and he commands the demon to come out in the name of Jesus, and if you think about this, what's astounding is you have this Lydia, who is a well-off businesswoman who comes and believes the gospel.

She's a Gentile convert to Judaism and then believes the gospel of Jesus, and now you have a pagan slave girl who's being profited upon, or she's being used for other people's profit by telling the future, but Luke wants us to see that the gospel comes to all, whether it's the well-off, whether it's the poor, whether it's slave, whether it's free. Her society told her that she only had value in as much as she benefited other people, right? She was valueless, but Jesus has an alternate gospel narrative that her life not only matters, she is an image-bearer of the king of the universe, and that is this holy economic deconstruction of the earthly emperor's gospel. This does battle with the good news of the Roman Empire.

The woman had a spirit of divination. She could tell the future, and Paul liberates this woman both from the spirit of divination that was holding her hostage and, as a result, from her masters. The slave girl is now freed to reign with the king of heaven for the first time in her life, and that is stunning, and so first Paul has to recognize that what this girl is doing is not truly her.

She's bound to the kingdom of darkness. Then he has to take the risk to cast this girl's, the demon out in Jesus's name, and why was it risky? I mean, for a couple reasons. One is if he had said something and nothing happened, so that's a risk, but two, it's also a risk because he named something as demonic that was completely normalized in their culture, and it was something that was so normalized that it was expected to support the sustainability of their culture, so her masters are irate.

They tell the municipal authorities, these men are Jews and they're throwing our city into an uproar by advocating for customs that are unlawful for us Romans to accept or to practice, and I also wonder if there was, for these slave masters, a feeling of fear. If people start becoming Christians, then they're going to move away from Caesar as emperor and lord. They're going to move away from faithful citizens.

They're going to move away from what it means to be Roman, since it was Roman law to sacrifice to the emperor, and if these men's livelihoods could be lost, then perhaps other people's livelihoods could be lost too, as now Christians are just coming in and destabilizing the economy of the colony, especially when your commerce is, your commerce surrounds those gods, and so they're accused of a kind of revolution. People would rather be comfortable than free. Some people want to be told that they're okay, even if they're sick, because the process of healing can involve pain, it can involve suffering, and most difficult to swallow, it can admit that, it can, it can involve admitting that we were wrong, and that's really hard, especially when we're talking about religious political systems, and what if, if we think about the gospel here, what if there were a way to live in community in a way that didn't use slave labor, or exploit women, and that honored the image of God in all people, right? On this end of the empire, Roman Empire's collapse, it seems obvious. 

It did not seem obvious to those slave owning Gentile pagans, but this is the power that the gospel brings, a society where the slave is free, that women are honored, that the image of God is honored in all people. This is what the gospel of Jesus offers, but healing can be scary and risky when patterns of acceptable corruption start to calcify and get normalized in the society, and so the kingdom of heaven comes when the calcified patterns of the kingdom of darkness are named, and they're broken up, and they're deconstructed, and Jesus's kingdom comes when individuals are then de-shackled from the lies of the kingdom of darkness. This girl had value as an image bearer of the king, and after the slave woman is free, we see her masters double down on systems that they're bound to, patterns that they've lived into, but Luke's point, which is helpful for us, is that even though they double down on their systems of bondage to the kingdom of darkness, that is not going to stop what God will bring about through the gospel, and that's good news.

So this work of the gospel bearing fruit might be surprising, it might be disappointing at times because it's painful, or there's an admission that we were wrong, but if we prepare our hearts to receive people's reactions, the circumstances that we find ourselves in, with curiosity, kindness, and trust that the Holy Spirit is at work in us, that he's with us, that he's at work through us, then we begin to see the kingdom of God break through into this earthly realm, and the suffering becomes redemptive as the healing begins.

Discerning the Movement of the Kingdom — The Philippian Jailer

And so we've seen Paul and Silas's disposition. They needed to have this disposition of openness, curiosity, and wonder at what God was doing.

They needed this because they're going to then be thrown into prison as a result of these masters and their complaints to the municipal authorities. They're thrown into prison and they're beaten with rods, but then we find them again in Acts 16 praying and singing hymns in the middle of the night, and there's an earthquake that takes place, the whole place is shaken, and all the prison doors are opened. And you have to understand in this culture, people take, the Gentile pagans take things like earthquakes, and they see them as signs of God's disfavor or favor, depending on if it's favorable to them or not. 

There is a divine agent behind these natural disasters, and so this is frightening for the guard because the prison doors are open, and he was responsible for these prisoners. If they had escaped, he would be punished. There's little ears, so I just leave it out, he will be punished.

So Paul stops the guard from making a life-altering decision, and he reassures him that all the prisoners are there and they're accounted for. But God had used the earthquake to get the guard's attention, and the guard brings Paul and Silas out to ask them a question. Our translations make it sound so spiritual.

Sirs, what must I do to be saved? This is a Roman pagan. This is a prison guard. There is no way he's thinking in like Jewish kingdom messianic constructs. 

So other people have translated it differently. I think they're right. Rather than saved, which is a pretty loaded theological term for us, I think what he's saying is, okay you guys, how do I get out of this mess? That's the essence of what saved means here in this passage.

So God has brought him to this point of realizing, I'm in trouble, I need to know how to get out of this, and I am open to hearing whatever you have to say, because you must know something I don't. And so Paul tells him, trust in Jesus and you will be delivered, you and your household. And we have to keep keep in mind what this means.

Trust in Jesus. He's asking him functionally to disavow his allegiance with the Roman Emperor, who is a god, and to realign his allegiance to Jesus as Lord and King. Jesus is Lord, there is no other.

Jesus is King, there is no other. Caesar is not Lord, Caesar is not King. And that night this man puts his faith in Jesus, and he says, you know, no matter what God brings me through, I trust that Jesus is King.

And he and all of his household that night are baptized, which includes his wife, it includes his children, and if his household had slaves, it includes them too. All of them are brought into the body of Christ. God in his kindness then does what Paul says.

He spares the life of this soldier, as the magistrates just decide that Paul and Silas are allowed to leave now. And so they're released, and they go forward to the next thing, and the life of this soldier and his family are forever changed. This is the beginning of the church at Philippi.

A Jewish woman, a freed slave girl, or a Gentile convert to Judaism, a freed slave girl, a Roman soldier. These are the beginnings of what God is doing in creating the body of Christ in Philippi, where he is shown to be Lord and King. So Jesus delivered this person and his family in a surprising way, that Paul and Silas had to live a life to prepare for.

They had to be recognizing this. They had to be careful to keep faithful rhythms of prayer and worship in order to keep a watchful eye and an open ear to what God was doing and to where his kingdom was moving, and they noticed it in the life of this jailer. They could have run for freedom, but they were attentive to what God was doing, and the result was an enduring faith in the Philippian jailer and trust in the kingship of Christ for this man and his whole household.

Imagine how many generations of Christians there are because of this man and his household. So when Jesus ascends, he is not absent. Quite the contrary, he is actively reigning as Lord and King, and we see his rule and reign where heaven and earth are united in the stirring up of hearts, like in the story of Lydia, through the disruption of demonic systems, as in the deliverance of the slave girl, and when people trust in Jesus, as in the life of the Philippian jailer, and all of us are called to sharing in this ministry of sharing in Christ's rule and reign together.

This is the community where Jesus is King and Lord, and people see that in the way that we treat each other, and it requires a life of attentiveness, regular prayer and worship to reframe our everyday moments, our proclivities, our desires, and our loves under the reality of the kingship of Christ. We need what is real to frame what is temporary, and this also involves curiosity about where we see Christ at work. Sometimes his work is subtle in our everyday moments, and sometimes it is glaringly obvious, but in any case, Jesus hasn't abandoned the project of creation.

He's become Lord of all things, and all things will be brought to their fullness in his work of new creation. His ascension is a promise that he will come back again and restore fully what he is doing in part right now. So I want to encourage us not to just think of heaven as a place we go to where when we die, a geographic space, but instead it's something that is breaking into our reality now.

It is taking over in individuals and households and communities in this community, and so we're to prioritize looking for it attentively, so that each day we can actually pray, may your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. Let me pray for us. Almighty God, you sent your son Jesus Christ to reconcile the world to yourself.

We praise and bless you for those whom you have sent in the power of the Spirit to preach the gospel to all nations. We thank you that in all parts of the earth, a community of love has been gathered together by their prayers and labors, and that in every place your servants call upon your name, for the kingdom and the power and the glory are yours forever and ever. Amen.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited by the Author.

Ascension Day: The Reign of Jesus in the Realm of Life

TranscriptioN

Thanks for making time to come and gather on a Thursday night.

This is one of those days where it's often it comes up on us and we're not used to thinking about it, but it is such an important day in the church's calendar. Part of the gospel here is Jesus crucified, risen from the dead, ascended on high, who will come back again. All of this is the gospel, the saving work of God.

And this is actually our first time as a church celebrating it on its actual day. And thank you to Caroline for trying out the incense with us tonight. I was thinking about how joyous it is to talk about Jesus going up in the clouds and then having the clouds of incense just permeating our olfactory imagination.

So thank you. It smells like prayer in here. I'm grateful to you for your help.

And so as I said, this is one of the central days in the church's calendar, in the history of the church. And this feast commemorates not Jesus being absent, but his exaltation as King. That's what the Ascension is all about.

This feast declares that heaven and earth will one day be ultimately one, and that Jesus is Lord over both of these dimensions, heaven and earth, both parts of God's creation. And both of those realms find their overlap in Jesus himself, who is the promise that heaven and earth will ultimately be reunited, restored in this cosmic story of salvation and new creation. And as we look at this book of Acts chapter one, let me pray for us.

In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my Redeemer. 

Amen. The disciples gather around Jesus, and they ask him in chapter one, the beginning of this chapter, Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel? This is the question on their minds. The expectation is that the Messiah is going to come, that the Messiah is going to conquer the nations that were warring against God and his anointed one.

This is sort of the theme of the Psalms, and that God would establish a throne that would last forever through his servant of the line of David. And that's why the cross had been so surprising, but now Jesus has risen from the dead, and you can imagine, now he's risen from the dead, perhaps their hopes are sparked again, that this might be the time now. Now that we've seen him, now that we've walked with him in his resurrection, maybe now is the time.

When are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel? Is this the time it's going to happen? And Jesus tells them not to worry about the day or the hour. That shouldn't be on the forefront of your thinking and your anxiety, but he instead gives them a call in the meantime. He tells them that the Holy Spirit will come upon them.

They're to wait until that happens, and then they're now going to be Jesus' witnesses in Jerusalem, and then in Judea, which is broader than the area in which is Jerusalem, and then Samaria, just north, and then to the ends of the earth. Everyone else, the Gentiles, but they are waiting. They're in this season of waiting for the Holy Spirit to come on them.

And it reminds me that we're not supposed to waste our time on worrying about when this is finally going to come. When is Jesus going to come back? Reading the newspapers for signs of the times is not a helpful discipline. Instead, we're called in this time of waiting while Jesus is reigning, and we're waiting for him to come again.

The word for that that they use in the Bible and in Catechesis of the Good Shepherd is the parousia, when he comes again to restore all things in their fullness. While we're in this waiting period, we receive this call to bring the message and continue the works of Jesus, who was crucified, resurrected, now he reigns on high. And now one of the things that we're called to do is look for the ways that he reigns right now, because his kingdom isn't just out there, but what the Ascension declares is that his kingdom is come, and will come more fully.

And so we're looking for the ways that his kingdom comes. And it's easy to get hung up on misconceptions about heaven being something out there, something disconnected from our everyday experience, or geographically above us. I can't remember who I was talking with, but there was a Russian atheist, and when he went up into space, he said, you know, I went up into the heavens and God was not there.

And so the reality is that heaven is not geographically located, somewhere out there disconnected. Heaven is another realm or dimension that overlaps with the dimension that we find ourselves in, and Jesus reigns over both realms and dimensions as king over all creation. It's easy to think of it as this repository of souls that's off in the sky, but the way that the Bible describes heaven is that heaven and earth, and we think of that phrase, heaven and earth, as this complete totality of the creation.

And sometimes God's realm breaks into ours. You can think of the Theophanies, the Old Testament, like Mount Sinai, the crossing of the Red Sea, or even something as simple as going into the temple, this thin place where heaven meets earth. And Jesus came in the book of Acts, part of the argument is that he is the temple, he is the place where heaven meets earth.

So if you want to encounter the place, you encounter Jesus, because that's the one who brings these things together. And so when we see Jesus being the temple, we see him stirring people's hearts, healing them physically, some other brokenness restored. These are all the miraculous spaces where we see heaven breaking into our world.

And so I was remembering a time where I felt something like this, where the two realms, there was two realms. And so I used to work when I lived in Chicago as a caterer for a catering company, and I was about 18 or 19, I was in under, no, I was 20, I was an undergraduate, and I was working for this catering company, which brought me into really cool places in Chicago. And one of the interesting places that I got to go was inside the stage of Millennium Park.

And the reason I was there was because there was a girl who was having her 16th birthday party. So this is a realm I'm not used to, where one 16th birthday party is celebrated with private catering inside the stage of Millennium Park. And here I am in this fancy tuxedo, going to this place, serving hors d'oeuvres.

And one of the kids had struck up a conversation with me as I was serving them food, because they don't have some of the same barriers. And the mom comes over and says, please don't talk to the help. I've never felt so out of the realm of where I was at.

I'm wearing a tuxedo, which is not me, and I'm serving food in Millennium Park, which is not me, and here I am, the help, and it's just a weird reality where there is a realm that I was in, which I was not accustomed. That realm was not mine. So it's possible to imagine that God's realm is kind of over here, and it has nothing to do with our realm.

But when we pray the Lord's Prayer multiple times a day, we say, may your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. And so there is something of the kingdom of God breaking into our realm that we get to experience when Christ reigns. So when Jesus becomes king, he rules over both heaven and earth, and when we see heaven break in, it's a promise that earth and heaven will ultimately be one.

Like when you read Paul's passages about all in all, Christ is all in all, these things will ultimately be one, and we taste now what will ultimately be true in the future. And it's not that like God has, Jesus has disappeared in the ascension, and we're left to just fend for ourselves down here, but Jesus again is Lord, and he is active, and our job isn't to just fixate on when he's going to restore all things, but to discover how he's doing it right now through the Spirit that he has given to us. He had to ascend in order to send us the Spirit, who is his presence that empowers us to carry on his works to the ends of the earth, which involves our neighborhoods, those closest to us, wherever we go and work.

So Jesus is taken up in a cloud in their sight, and the Son of Man ascending on a cloud is a reference to Daniel 7 13. Again, at this time there's no New Testament written. Their Bible, the Bible that they were familiar with, was what we would call the Old Testament.

So when Jesus ascends on a cloud, this is the image that's coming to mind, is Daniel 7 13. It's kingship language, that the Messiah has become King. It proclaims that Jesus is exalted, not that he's absent, and that's really important, because sometimes it can feel like he is, but being King is really the opposite of abandoning his project until the end when he's going to come back again, and that's why these messengers, heavenly messengers, say to the disciples, why are you standing here looking at the sky? The disciples had been focused on when Jesus is going to bring a physical kingdom, rather than being enamored with discovering where it is now

They were missing, well I should say it this way, they were called to mission, not to date setting, not to wonder when, but to discover where Jesus's rule and reign is breaking into their lives at this time. And so now they need to get their eyes off the sky to look at what's in front of them. Have you ever been on a road trip with a child, or have you been the child on the road trip? You know, the sense of time is just not the same when you're little, and so when you're on a four-hour car ride, and you're in the first five minutes, and you hear from the back, are we there yet? Are we there yet? Well, no, no, it's been five minutes.

Are we there? It's been two minutes since you asked. No, we're not there. Internally you have this dread about how long this four-hour car ride is going to be, and the way that a child is going to stop asking that question is either if they're sleeping, or if they become enamored with what the things are that they can look at out the window. 

And as they're looking out the window, there's things to look at, they're just enamored with wonder at what they're seeing as they see new landscapes and places. And that helps me personally to understand something of the kingdom mission that the disciples and us are called to. Rather than focusing on the are we there yet? Can you please come back now? Instead, it's a call to notice the kingdom that God is bringing in them, through them, and around them.

The end is secure. Jesus is ascended. He is going to come back again, and he's going to restore all things.

And he reigns now, and in the meantime, before he comes back again, their call is to proclaim the message, and more importantly, to notice where the kingdom is coming in their lives, and in the world, and in the lives of others. And noticing that is actually part of the proclamation. When you can notice it and name it, this is part of the work of the kingdom mission.

So Jesus ascends to reign, and the story of Acts is all about what Jesus continues to do and teach. And this is the story that's continuing and written into the life of the church through the centuries. I was actually thinking about this.

This is the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. This is how, you know, if we look back at the last 1700 years, we are seeing the work of the Holy Spirit writing out this story of the Acts of Jesus in the church. And as you consider your own story, what work has God done in your story to redeem what's broken? And so looking at those things that are broken, and seeing how God has redeemed them, those are miraculous breaking in of the kingdom of God.

Those are the places where heaven and earth get joined together, where you start to see Jesus's rule, and his reign, and his lordship. The point of being saved, when we hear that language, it's often loaded. It's not to go somewhere someday.

That's not usually how the Bible talks about being saved. Again, because heaven's not a geographic place out in the sky. It's to be joined to the new creation work that Christ is doing as he is Lord of all things.

It's seen in the freedom that we have from sin, or that we're experiencing from sin, even for the first time. It's experienced in the changed ways of thinking that we have, the behaviors that change, the breaking of generational trauma, of generational sin, the restoring of broken relationships, broken selves, patterns of speech. All of these things are where heaven breaks in, and we see Jesus's rule and reign as king.

So I want to encourage us to make time for contemplation and stillness, to reimagine how the world has sown in corruption, but how God is going to reap in corruption from that, as the Bible says. There's a passage that I really love from C.S. Lewis in a book called Letters to Malcolm, and he describes memory and reality in this passage, in the new heavens and the new earth. What's the relationship between memory and reality? What happens now in our lives should be framed by the reality of what will be later, and so as he's talking to his imaginary friends in these letters, he says, this is a quote, I can now communicate to you the vanished fields of my boyhood.

They are building estates today, only imperfectly by words. Perhaps the day is coming when I can take you for a walk through them. In other words, the reality of what will be restored is different than his memory, and the memory of what will be restored should reframe what's now broken and what's in need of redemption.

And so again, today we celebrate Jesus as Ascendant. He rules and he reigns as King over all and Lord, and our call is to carry on with the disciples these words in the works of Jesus until he comes again to restore all things ultimately. So we don't need to waste time or effort concerning ourselves with when he comes, but resting in the certainty that he will indeed restore all things, and then we're to engage with him in this work of restoring creation and discovering heaven in the daily earthly experiences that we have.

And that requires us taking time to wonder and notice what God's doing as we serve one another like Christ, and we cultivate incorruptible things from what's been sown in corruption. So make space, like a child in a car ride, to be mesmerized by God's work in your hearts, and in the hearts of others, those who you live with, those who are around you, be mesmerized at the kingdom work that Jesus is doing, because Jesus is Ascended not to abandon the world, but to rule and to reign and to make all things new. Let me pray for us.

O God of peace who has taught us that in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and confidence shall be our strength. By the might of your Spirit lift us, we pray, to your presence, where we may be still and know that you are God, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited by the Author.

Rogationtide: Holy Work in Ordinary Ministers

TranscriptioN

Well, good morning again, everybody. It is good to see you. I forgot to introduce myself earlier. I'm Father Morgan Reed.

I'm the vicar here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church, and if you're new to Anglicanism, that's like a senior pastor of a mission church because we are very much a church in formation. But I am grateful that you're here this day, this Memorial Day weekend, but also this special day in our calendars, the last Sunday of Easter before we get to the ascension of Jesus. And this is called Rogation Sunday, which means tomorrow, Tuesday, and Wednesday are this little season called Rogationtide.

These Rogation Days, we celebrate before the ascension of Jesus into heaven, and the focus is twofold. First, it's on the goodness of God's gifts to us through his creation, and then second, it points us to the ways that our earthly labors are made holy because Jesus made labor holy. And that doesn't mean paid labor.

That means anything that you put your hands to do is made holy. And so I want to look at this passage today from the book of Acts through the frame of Rogation Sunday as we encounter Paul and Barnabas preaching for the first time to a pagan community that had no Jewish background at all in the book of Acts. And I think in this passage, what we see in Paul and Barnabas is an encouragement for us to see the works of our hands as an invitation for us and for others to discover the works of Jesus.

So our works, the things that God has for us to do, are an invitation to help others and ourselves see the work of Jesus. As we look at this passage, I'm going to pray for us, the collect for Rogation Days. Almighty God, whose Son, Jesus Christ, in his earthly life shared our toil and hallowed our labor, be present with your people where they work.

Make those who carry on the industries and commerce of this land responsible to your will, and give us all a right satisfaction in what we do, and a just return for our labor through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen. So in our passage today, we encounter St. Paul, St. Barnabas.

Barnabas seems to be a little older, and they're on their first missionary journey together, traveling, bringing the gospel to the nations. They have just been, we didn't read this passage, they were just pushed out of Iconium, which is a place in southern Turkey, to another place in southern Turkey, two cities named Lystra and Derby, which are two cities in this region called Laconia. And while they're there, there's a man that they encounter who couldn't walk from his birth, and he was listening to Paul teach. 

And Paul, as he's teaching, sees this man, notices him, and he notices about him that he has faith to be healed, whatever that means in the context of a pagan Gentile who has no Jewish background. Paul notices this about this man, and he says to him, stand on your feet, get up. And immediately this man stands on his feet.

And so Paul and Barnabas are carrying on their labor that God's called them to do in an insignificant town to a person that we never learned his name. He's a crippled person, sort of a, he's probably a figure in their city, everybody kind of knows who he is. But God does something significant in this nameless person in a small town, in the overarching story of the kingdom of God and where it's moving.

It's a paradigm shift, where now Gentiles aren't first Jews before they hear the message of this Messiah Jesus. These Gentiles with no Jewish background whatsoever are hearing about the good news that has taken place in the Messiah. And the healing of this man is significant as a shift in the story where this is going to take place.

And even though Paul and Barnabas in this story, we would call them missionaries, I want to suggest that the work that God's given us to do in our different seasons of life, whether it's paid or unpaid, is equally important, equally as spiritual, and equally ministry. And I brought something for the kids to see, and for the adults, and to smell. You guys can pass around and smell it.

This is great. What what is this, kids? You can say, shout it out. Yes, good, good observation.

This is coffee, and it smells so good. So I'm going to pass this around because I want you to experience some of the joy and the sense of salvation. So that is coffee, and it's not just coffee, though.

It is a way to discover Jesus. That was the answer I was looking for. But it is indeed a way to discover Jesus.

Each time we're in the office, you know, my son, he'll brew a cup of coffee for me, and I love the coffee that he makes, and I hug him with gratitude, and I express my gratitude. And there is something of love in the action of doing this, and the beans make this possible. Every time I drink a cup of it, my hands are freed up to think because I'm a fidgeter, and I can meditate on the good things around me.

Every time I brew a cup, I can make some for somebody else if I brew a whole pot of it. And in those conversations, we discover the workings of God in ourselves, and I discover it in them, and vice versa. And so, yes, it's coffee, and it's so much more.

It is a sacred window into the mysterious workings of God. Now, it's not just true of coffee. It is true of everything that we put our hands to do.

My life just revolves, I actually literally have to make my schedule around how much caffeine I'm going to take in with people, so I have tea meetings with some people, coffee latte meetings, depending, so I have to chart my caffeine intake during the day. But either way, it is a window to the New Jerusalem, as is your labor. And so, you know, the thing is that we often don't think about, and why I love Rogation Sunday to be in our church calendar, is that life isn't broken up into secular versus sacred.

But as C.S. Lewis says in some place, I can't remember, he says, life is actually split up into religious versus irreligious. And so, even for a clergy person, the church, and working in the context of the church, should never be something that causes the neglect of the family, or even neglecting my literal neighbors in my literal neighborhood, because somehow church work is seen more valuable than another one, right? They're just different stewardships, different priorities, but one is not more spiritual or more sacred than another. Everything created is sacred in the kingdom of God, in this world, and so our task is to cultivate what is good, true, and beautiful in the good things that God's made.

So St. Paul might be a trailblazer in this passage, but his end goal in doing all this missionary work is to establish communities, to build up the church, to make little outposts of the kingdom of God that don't rely on him to be there anymore. And that's why, when we read his letters, he says in Ephesians chapter 4, God had granted that some be apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. And anybody know why? Anybody know the last part of that verse? To do what? Building up the church to equip the saints for the work of the ministry. 

You know the work of the ministry is not my job, it's yours. I'm just here to help you do it, right? And so this is a really helpful thing to think about on this Rogation Sundays. The ways that you shape your calendar, the things that you put your hands to do, these are opportunities to show the justice and mercy of God, to honor the image of God in another person, to hear some of the words of God from another person, to recognize brokenness and offer an alternative kingdom counter-narrative to what they're walking through.

And no matter what God's called you to do, this could be paid or unpaid, could be child rearing, could be grandparenting, could be real estate, could be social advocacy, teaching, military service, gardening, woodworking, making meals, or a combination of vocations. One's never truly retired in the kingdom of God, one just changes vocations. And so kids, this applies to you too, as you play, create, discover things, this is the work that God has for you where you discover the kingdom of God through very earthly means.

The earthly means matter, our bodies matter. So the work of Jesus continues through our work, the work of our hands, the thought life, the hearts, the words, these are the means by which people discover the goodness of Jesus in us and through us. And so our work points others to Jesus, it's the first point. 

And second, as you work, make sure to listen. Listen as you're working. When the crowds heard about this thing that Paul and Barnabas had done, they thought that Barnabas had to have been Zeus, the head of the Pantheon, which probably tells you that he's a little bit older than Paul, and Paul is the main speaker, so they think Paul is the chief god Hermes, the messenger god.

This is a common thing, their government systems, their municipalities are built around the religious system, and so to anger the gods will have bad results on your city, and so they want to, they can't believe that the gods would bless their small town with their presence in this miracle, and so not to offend the gods, who were pretty capricious and fragile, kind of like human beings, they wanted to properly thank the deities for their blessings and their presence just showing up, and so they don't want the gods to be offended. And Paul and Barnabas start to hear what's happening, that there's a temple that's dedicated to Zeus, the priest over there says, let's get everybody in the town to make sacrifices, and Paul and Barnabas tear their garments, which is a Jewish sign that blasphemy has occurred. So note, I think it's really important that for them the means are as important as the ends.

It could have been easy to take advantage of the gullibility of this small town, you know, they just got kicked out of somewhere, and so they're probably hurt and tired, they're wondering how this is going to go, they get a little taste of success all of a sudden, and they might think to themselves or be tempted to think, you know, after being kicked out of the last place, this must be a sign of God's favor, let's just ride this wave for a little bit, stay comfortable, eventually we'll get to the truth, we don't need to rock the boat, right? That's letting ends justify the means. But underneath it all, the means are as important as the ends. The goal is pointing people to Jesus, they are process-oriented, everything they do is done to point people to Jesus, not themselves or their own greatness.

Obviously Paul was talented, they thought he was a god, but that's not the point, he wants to point people to Jesus. Because of that, the means are as important as the end. And our labor, the things that we put our hands to, is a way of helping others see Jesus Christ's character and his work.

It's not a means of establishing wealth or comfort or ease or securing power or influence. Power or influence happen, right? That happens to people, and it's a responsibility to steward, it's not something to seek after. Wealth and comfort and ease, similarly, these are never promised to the Christian.

They might happen, but they might not, and they're only going to happen for a time, and they're being taken away, this is not God's sign of disfavor, it's never promised. But Paul and Barnabas, they hear what's going on, they start to put the pieces together of what the townspeople are thinking about the gods, and they've needed to pay attention before they can connect the dots of how their labor and the work of Christ can be given, and how to package that for these people to take what's true and false in their narratives and shepherd them into what is good and right and holy. And what I think is interesting is there is somewhat of a blessing.

So Paul and Barnabas bless the good desire of these people, and they can name some goodness by God's common grace, and then there is a gentle shepherding away from what is not good for them. So they bless what it's good, they shepherd them towards what needs to be redeemed. So our work points others to Jesus, and we need to listen well before we offer the kingdom to people in a way that they can handle.

And finally, words have to accompany our work as we help people sort through what's true and what's false. Paul and Barnabas challenge the crowds, and they say, why are you doing this? And they tell the crowds, we are people, we're more mortals, just like you. And so they start with where the crowd is at.

They recognize their beliefs, they bless the good thing they desire to do, but they say ultimately there's something flawed here, and they challenge them to turn away from worthless things that won't profit them, and turn towards the living God. Now who is this living God? They don't know yet. This is sort of a foreshadowing of Acts 17 with other pagans in a different group, but they don't know who this is yet.

It is very human to want well-being and prosperity, but the faith of the town is misplaced, and so Paul and Barnabas are emphatically, but they are tenderly, starting with what this town knows, to work towards what they don't yet know. Blessing and shepherding. And so now that Paul and Barnabas have earned the right to be heard in their deeds, they use that platform to offer words of truth and hope.

 They tell the crowds about the living God. This is the God who made heaven and earth. In other words, the earth is not deified, the moon is not a god, the Sun is not a god.

This is the God who has made the unseen, the invisible, and the visible. And he tells them for a time God had allowed them to go along in their ignorance, but even in their time of ignorance, God still showed them his goodness, because they were harvesting food. So as they were working with their hands, the labor they were doing was showing them the goodness of God.

God provided for them food, and he filled their hearts with joy. So even the joy that they experienced at a very human level is a gift from God, and those graces are truly common grace, and up to this time they had been misattributing where those came from. So Paul blesses the goodness that they know, and he uses what they know to point them to the God who's given them this thing.

Now, the question can be asked, in Paul's labor here, was he successful? Was he successful? It's your question, what do you guys think? Yes or no? I see some nods, yeah, he was. Well, the next couple of verses mention that the Jews come from Pisidi and Antioch, which we talked about a few weeks ago, and the Jews come from Iconium, where they had just been kicked out. And then they turn the crowds against Paul, and then they stone him, and they drag him out of the city, and everyone thinks he's dead.

That's success. And then the disciples, they come and they surround Paul, presumably to grieve the loss of their friend. Like, it's a tragedy.

And then, by God's power, Paul miraculously gets up. And then him and Barnabas go to the next city of Derbe to keep going. We don't see any of the fruit of Paul's labors here in this chapter.

So while none of us here that I know of have been persecuted to the point of bloodshed, it is the case that doing our work now unto the Lord might risk us being misunderstood, might risk us being cast out, not seeing the fruit of our hard work, even when that work has taken decades. And that's really hard. That can still be successful in the kingdom of God.

The success of Paul's labor wasn't measured in the number of conversions, the number of churches planted, the amount of money raised. It's his faithfulness to point people to Jesus as he follows God in the work that God's called him to do, whatever that is. And so the success comes because God is the one who brings the growth, not St. Paul.

Paul's job is to be faithful with the work God's called him to do. And I find it, and maybe I'm alone in this, but if you're like me, it is so hard to be open-handed and internally okay with the idea that others are going to inherit the labor that we've poured into, right? I want the satisfaction of a job well done. I want people to praise me for the goodness of the thing that I accomplished.

But to be open-handed and to be open to the idea and internally okay with someone else is going to build off what I did, and they're probably going to do it way better than I did. And to like rejoice in that is really hard, especially when things feel unfinished. And yet this is the work of pointing people to Jesus.

It's realizing that every sports team you coach, each moment you have with your kids or your friends, each book or article that you work on and you publish, each team you manage at your work, every document that you work on is probably going to be forgotten in the next hundred years. And if the document's not forgotten or if the acts are forgotten, like they're not going to know you in a hundred years or your contribution to that thing. And so even though that work is going to be forgotten, these are the little labors along the way that are building something like an implicit memory for generations to come that Jesus is good and true and safe and kind.

Try to think of how to explain that. So like as you are working, even though the labor and you and your memory and your name might be forgotten, the ways that you're investing in the people now that God's called you to be around are the little things that generations to come will feel and will know the goodness of Jesus whether or not they attribute it to you. And as the world discovers new ways to distort and confuse God's goodness and love, you and I are cultivating the goodness of the gospel that other people have planted.

We don't know who's sown in us. Maybe we do. But there are people that we don't yet know because there were people who sowed in the people who sowed in us, right? And we are sowing seeds through our labors for generations to come to cultivate.

And so I want to invite us this morning to see all the parts of our lives as sacred. You all are professional ministers. All of you.

Find some things this week that symbolize your work and pray over those things. Bless them in God's name during the days of rogation. I already mentioned coffee.

There are many prayers that happen around coffee. I was thinking for me I've got like a Syriac Bible that symbolizes part of my work. My book of common prayer. Cooking utensils. Ways that I might help people through making a meal or something. And a baseball glove that is part of my season of life right now.

And so what is it for you as you think of the things that sort of symbolize the work that God's called you to at this moment, paid or unpaid, what is that thing you can hold in your hand on rogation tide Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday and say, Lord bless this. Make this a vehicle of your kingdom. May I see the goodness of new creation in this very simple earthly embodied work.

So take time to notice and delight in the work that God's given you to do. Kids, that includes you too. Our work is an invitation to see the work of Jesus.

Point people to Jesus. Help them reimagine their world as holy. And then listen to others and recognize what's true and what's false and help shepherd them to name what is good and the things that are in need of redemption.

I want to pray for us as we close a very short and simple prayer, but to highlight that this is a prayer we pray every Sunday in the Eucharist. So I'm gonna pray it for us now. And now, Father, send us out to do the work you have given us to do.

To love and serve you as faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord. Amen.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited by the Author.