The Seat of Honor and The Seat of Welcome

TranscriptioN

It's good to see you this morning on this holiday weekend. I'm Father Morgan Reed. I'm the vicar here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church, and I am grateful to be with you here this morning.

One of the books that I read several years ago that had a lasting impact on how I view ministry and think about even the process of starting a church is a book called “The Gospel Comes with a House Key,” and it is all about the nature of hospitality and ministry together. The author of that book shares the story of her conversion to Christianity, where it wasn't a result of preaching or even going to a church, but it was the result of regular invitation to this couple's home for dinner weekly, or at least on a regular basis. The husband did happen to be a pastor, but it was over the course of those dinners that conversations were exchanged, that life was shared together, that trust was built, and because of all that, Jesus became trustworthy. And so, hence the title, “The Gospel Comes with a House Key.”

In today's gospel passage, Jesus is having a midday meal with a Pharisee, a ruler of the Pharisees, and he shares two parables about how humility and hospitality are supposed to be dispositions of the people who are going to follow Jesus as their Lord. It's part of what it looks like to be a citizen of the kingdom of heaven. They're characterized by humility and hospitality. And so, as we look at the nature of those two things—humility and hospitality—let me begin by praying 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.”

In the first parable that we read, Jesus tells this story about somebody who's invited to a banquet, and having somebody's seat in close proximity to the host or the organizer or the special guest is a place of honor. It's a measure of status in the company of all who are gathered. In attempting to put oneself at the seat of honor, someone risks something. You risk the embarrassment of misunderstanding how important you are and being reminded of the social ladder when the host comes and they bring you down some seats in front of everybody, and they make room for those who should rightly be there. Instead, Jesus says it's better to start by choosing the lowest seat, and then when the host recognizes you, they can say, “Oh friend, please don't sit all the way over there; come closer.” And they're invited into the seat of more honor in front of everybody. And on the one hand, it sounds like practical wisdom, and it is, but it's also a parable about the nature of the kingdom of God.

All of our passages have something to do with humility or hospitality this morning. We read one from the book of Ecclesiasticus, which, if you're new to the Anglican tradition, you may not have even heard of that book before. The book of Ecclesiasticus is also called the Wisdom of Ben Sira, and in the Anglican tradition, sometimes in our daily readings and in our Sunday readings, we're encouraged to read these books that are called deuterocanonical books or the Apocrypha. They're part of our readings as we live together and learn about life in the kingdom of God. And they give us wisdom, and they give us wisdom from a really unique perspective. These are Second Temple Jews who are living in the centuries leading up to the New Testament, and so we're given perspective on God's wisdom in those centuries in the Apocrypha.

And it was interesting, in today's passage from Ecclesiasticus, we hear about the nature of pride, and he gives some really tangible examples. He says that sovereignty passes from nation to nation because of injustice, insolence, and a lust for wealth. Also, sort of famously, today's king is tomorrow's corpse, right? And ultimately, this is continuing in the biblical tradition of wisdom as it reminds us that the beginning of human pride is to forsake the Lord.

To abandon the Lord is the beginning of pride. To move from dependence on the Lord to autonomy and to self-reliance is that soil that the seeds of pride are sown into. And I also love that Ben Sirah reminds us that pride and arrogant disregard for other people—those aren't things that were created for people. So when you see people acting in them, it's making them less human, not more human. As image bearers of God, we were created for fellowship with God, to be in the presence of God. If you think back to Genesis, walking in the garden in the cool of the day.

And pride and arrogant disregard for others are foreign to who we are. They don't help us to see ourselves rightly, to see God rightly, or to see creation rightly. They make us less human, not more human. And that's precisely because the nature of pride is to move away from the Creator, to move away from the God who's made us and loves us, and therefore to move away from wisdom. Wisdom begins with the fear and knowledge of the Lord.

It sort of reminds me of a child. This isn't my child; this is a hypothetical child. This reminds me of a child—it might have been even me when I was young—who receives for himself a model airplane. And having never built a model airplane in this child's life, and they can't read, they decide that they want to try and do it themselves. And they say, “I don't need those instructions, I can do it myself.” Now they tear open all the packaging, they start thumbing through all the parts, getting them out of all the places that they're being held, with their labels, the numbers that they are according to the instructions, and they start just gluing everything together according to how they think it ought to be. And then they start putting the decals on, because that makes the plane look really cool, but all the decals are in the wrong place, and what's left is a bunch of pieces that are still in the box.

Now imagine, as that child looks at their plane that they've made, they look back at the box, they get frustrated, because what they've just built looks nothing like what's on the box. And then they go to their parent and they say, “This is broken, it looks nothing like how it's supposed to look. The parent's gonna lovingly say, “Hmm, let me wonder with you for a moment. I think you're right. I wonder how that might have happened. I wonder how those instructions might have been helpful in showing you where all those pieces go to that model airplane, and where the decals go.” And that is the story of what we do over and over again when we give in to pride, which is foreign to us. And this nature of insolence or disregard for others—we say, God, I don't know how things ended up like this. This is not at all how they're supposed to look.

But we've moved from dependence on God, and we've said, I can do this myself. And I'm reminded again of Genesis chapter 3, when God is walking in the garden in the cool of the day, expecting to find fellowship with these image-bearers that he's made. This was their routine, to be in fellowship with one another, in dependence on their Creator. And he comes, and he asks them this question; He says, “Where are you?” The reality is, they've hidden themselves. They know that things are not the way they're supposed to be. They're realizing that they were the reason that it ended up that way. And God invites them in with this question: “Where are you?”

When pride has made a mess of things, God lovingly invites us back with that question over and over again, which is an invitation to ask what we were made for, which is fellowship with God. To forsake the Lord is the beginning of pride, and pride, autonomy, insolence, this blatant disregard for others—those things were not created for human beings. We were created out of love from God, for fellowship, for union with our Creator. And it's in returning to that fellowship over and over again that we learn not only who God is, but what we were made for, and what creation itself was made for. It gives us a right perspective and true wisdom.

One of the things that I've been reading lately is a book called “The Apostolic Fathers,” this collection of writings of people who came right after the Apostles died. So these were—some were the people that the Apostles ordained. Whether or not they were ordained by the Apostles, they were like the second and third generation.

And in the Letter to Diognetus, there's a lot of really interesting political theology in there, so if you want to look it up online, you can read through it. The author in that book touches on this connection between humility, and service, and rightly seeing the world. And he says this: by loving God, you will be an imitator of His goodness. And don't be surprised that a person can become an imitator of God. One can, if God's willing, for happiness is not a matter of lording it over one's neighbors, or desiring to have more than weaker people, or possessing wealth and using force against one's inferiors. No one is able to imitate God in those things.

On the contrary, these things are alien to His greatness. So he's continuing in this biblical tradition of humility—becoming humble, following the Lord, rightly esteeming ourselves in God's sight, taking the posture of serving others. That's going to be the way that the kingdom of God is revealed.

And we learn exaltation in God's kingdom when we learn humble service in God's kingdom. And so, along with this parable about humility, Jesus gives another parable in verse 14 about the nature of hospitality, which is the love of strangers. Hospitality is something that ought to be given in this parable, not exchanged.

There seems to be this problem that Jesus is addressing where people would throw a banquet, and there's sort of this transactional disposition behind it. In this scenario where you're showing hospitality in a very calculated and transactional way, you're expecting something in return. Doesn't this now obligate my guest to throw a banquet on par with what I've just done? Can I invite somebody who's going to return the favor in the future? And you're kind of looking in a calculated way at who you can invite so that you can benefit from them. Who can I invite that's going to return the favor?

Instead, what Jesus says is the one who follows him is the one who gives hospitality without reciprocity. That we give hospitality, we don't exchange it. And I'm struck then by the reading that was read in the book of Hebrews, where it says, let mutual affection continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. And that reference goes back to Genesis chapter 12, where Abraham is welcoming three strangers in, and he gives them shelter, some water, some food, and come to find out that these strangers that he welcomed in happen to be divine messengers who are giving him a message from the Lord for him and for his wife.

One of the keys from this book that I had mentioned earlier, “The Gospel Comes with a House Key,” is that hospitality moves people from being strangers to neighbors, and by God's grace from neighbors to the household of God. Hospitality moves people from being strangers to neighbors, and by God's grace from neighbors to becoming the household of God. And hospitality then, like welcoming the stranger, is a practice that is deeply rooted in the Christian tradition, and it's because of Israel's history, but also because of Israel's history, we find it in the teachings of Jesus. And so it's always been foundational work in the kingdom of God, because we don't know as we welcome people in who we're inviting and what we're going to learn of the kingdom as we invite them into our lives. So we make space for all kinds of people at our tables.

There was a previous church that I'd worked at. One of the things that we did at that church that was really helpful—for a season we had these weekly dinners, and we would invite our neighbors over to our household. And Ashley and I, back then, we lived in an apartment complex over on Columbia Pike in Arlington. It was a really diverse apartment complex, and so we started inviting our neighbors over. Some we had gotten to know, some we didn't. We met some neighbors who were Ethiopian Orthodox, some who had completely deconstructed from the faith, some who were Christians but going to another church, some who had moved here from Guatemala and they were going to another church. And in fact, I remember as we dinnered, the Guatemalan family had asked if I would come to their church sometime and teach church history, and he would translate it into Spanish for their small group, which I thought was such a cool opportunity as we got to know our neighbors.

All of us ate around the table, and we learned to make conversations and learned to get to know each other from our different vantage points. We eventually moved to Alexandria from there, and then Springfield, and we've met new neighbors. But I think back to that season as something so helpful and paradigmatic for moving forward as I think about how the kingdom of God moves forward. Hospitality opens us up to receiving God's kingdom work in other people, and when we open our tables, we open ourselves up to being surprised by the kingdom work that God's doing in others.

When you look at the website for the church, if you go to the "About Us" page, one of the first core values of our church is hospitality. And there are a lot of ways that we do this. I was even thinking this morning that big three-by-three-foot sign over there and hanging it up in the morning is an act of hospitality because I want people to easily find where they're going, right? We give a lot of thought to: how do people enter the room? What does it feel like? How are people welcomed when they're here by you? These are all really important things on a Sunday morning to show hospitality and welcome people into the congregation. I'm always grateful when we are not on a holiday weekend and we pack out these chairs and someone thinks, I should get more chairs so that other people can sit here. That is an act of hospitality.

So, to commend you all for doing a great job and to encourage you to keep on doing that as we move forward. And then beyond Sundays, there are ways that we want to show hospitality in these formation groups as we welcome people into our homes and eat together. And I'm always encouraged when I hear stories of you all getting together on your own without any prompting from me. I love hearing, “Oh I got coffee with so-and-so and we had a great conversation.” Those are acts of hospitality that welcome in the kingdom in surprising ways that we wouldn't have anticipated had we not taken the risk to get to know somebody. And it can feel a little bit like that.

And we do have to be wise and we have to have appropriate boundaries, of course, but there is a goodness to the risk of welcoming those who are not yet known with generosity and kindness, because that's one of the ways that the love of God is known in community. When you think of your own story, who welcomed you in and how have you experienced the love of God? And that's why I love celebrating house blessings. So to those of you who have just recently moved—I saw some nods like, oh yeah, we got to talk to Morgan about that. I love doing house blessings because it fills our imaginations for the ways that God can use the places that we live, the tables that we eat around, and the backyards that we play in. And so if you've never had a house blessing and you want one, please let me know. I would love to get that on the calendar and we can talk about that.

So humility and hospitality, as we close—these are challenging. They're challenging, but they're worth it. I love how one commentator framed humility and hospitality in this passage. He says, humility and openness to all are two major facets of following Jesus's ethics. For the disciple, service and meeting the needs of others is not an option. It's the appropriate response to Jesus's call to follow him. The church is not to worry about the chair of honor. Rather, it is to make chairs available to those who are looking for a place to sit—even for those who think there are no chairs for them.

Humility is challenging because it requires us to be secure in who God's made us without thinking of ourselves too highly. In other words, it's the constant work of rightly esteeming yourself in God's sight. And it also requires us seeing and loving the image of God in other people when they might be challenging. When there's that one neighbor that you wish wasn't your neighbor. Hospitality can be challenging for several reasons. It requires risk of opening ourselves up to receive other people into our lives. It costs us something to feed people.

I was realizing the other day that if we're gonna have people over, our bathroom door needs to be able to lock. So I had to go to Home Depot and buy a handle and replace it so that we could actually lock our bathroom. It's an act of hospitality. You're welcome the next time you visit. Right? It costs us something. It is risky doing life together when you see the ways that I am—I'm gonna use myself—when I am not a perfect parent, or in the ways that I don't keep my home as clean as I wish it were. And there's some risk of rejection when you invite somebody over or take the initiative to invite someone to coffee or a meal somewhere. That can be really hard. There's a lot that goes into that. But let's continue in mutual love as a community.

Grow in humility and answer God's call to come back when he keeps asking over and over again, “Where are you?” He is inviting us into his life. And because he invites us in, as we respond, we can invite others into that life as well. Learn dependence on him and live out of that deep place of abiding in God's presence. And then continue in hospitality to learn more about the love of God and the work of Christ in you and in others.

Let me pray for us.

“O God, who created all peoples in your image, we thank you for the diversity of races and cultures in this world. Show us your presence in those who differ from us, and enrich our lives with their fellowship, until our knowledge of your love is made perfect in our love for all your children, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited using ChatGPT.

Feast of St. Bartholomew: Greatness and Gospel Witness

TranscriptioN

Good morning again, everybody. It is good to be with you this morning. We had a really fun pool day yesterday. Thank you to those who came and enjoyed time together out in the sunshine and got roasted. It's nice to have a few hot days left of the summer.

I'm Father Morgan Reed. I'm the vicar here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church, and it is great to see those of you who are new and visiting. I'm so glad that you're here this morning. For those of you who have been here a long time, I am also glad to see you, too. So, thank you for being here as we celebrate this feast day of St. Bartholomew together.

I was mentioning to somebody during Ordinary Time, when the church calendar gives us one of the feast days of the apostles, I want to take it. So today we celebrate the feast day of Bartholomew, one of the apostles of Jesus.

This week, I was pondering a little bit on social media influencers and how the culture of influencers allows for this strange phenomenon where people can actually fake it until they make it. You don't have to be an expert; all you have to do is make a cleverly stitched reel and you could be an influencer—just to have the right ingredients. You don't have to be an expert, and you probably will have more influence than somebody who is well-trained and can craft a long essay, something that's a well-constructed argument.

In fact, I saw a show where this woman had built and started a restaurant. She opened it and was using social media to boost her presence, and she was actually marketing herself before having any experience as a celebrity chef. She even had her own line of cookware that she was selling to boost her income and sales. But on the ground, the restaurant that she had started was totally mismanaged. It was dirty, the food was bad, and when people came once, they just never came back.

But she could sort of create a false narrative about the restaurant because she was controlling the social media influence. And so, she was so focused on celebrity and greatness that she never actually did the hard work of learning the process of how to run a restaurant, to work her way up and have to go through that whole process of knowing the business inside and out. And one of the reasons that I wanted to take today to commemorate one of the martyrs of the church is that when we think of St. Bartholomew and other martyrs, it reminds us that following Jesus is not about chasing greatness.

There are a lot of Christians that chase greatness. They try to keep up appearances to garner influence. In fact, there are even now social media categories like “evangelical influencer,” or you've probably seen “Catholic priest influencers.” I'm not against that. It's the waters that we swim in. It's fine. But just to note the pitfalls—that one does not have to be an expert in subject matter to create a lot of influence. And St. Bartholomew's life reminds us that we need to focus on the process of following Jesus rather than amassing greatness or influence. So, as we look at the life of St. Bartholomew, 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.

So today we wear red because St. Bartholomew is one of the martyrs of the church, and the church often wears red on the feast days for its martyrs—those who have witnessed to the life of Christ to the point of shedding their own blood, giving their life to witness about who Jesus is and what he's done. And this is one of those feast days.

And so, in the history of the church's tradition, Bartholomew is actually the same person as Nathanael. Nathanael—we think his whole name would have been in Aramaic Nathanael Bartholomew, which would come into Greek as Nathanael Bartholomew. And so, if you'll remember the story back in John Chapter 1 (we didn’t read it this morning), Nathanael is the guy who, as he's sitting under a fig tree, hears about this guy Jesus, and he says, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” He's that guy.

And I really like the way Eugene Peterson captures this interaction in The Message between Nathanael and Jesus when he encounters him. It says:

When Jesus saw him coming, he said, “Ah, there is an Israelite. There's no false bone in his body.” Speaking of Nathanael.
Nathanael says, “Where did you get that idea? You don't even know me.”

And Jesus answered, “One day, long before Philip called you here, I saw you sitting under the fig tree.”

Nathanael exclaimed, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God, the King of Israel.”

And Jesus said, “You've become a believer simply because I said that I saw you one day sitting under a fig tree? You haven't seen anything yet.”

It's a great translation of what's happening in this interaction with Nathanael and Jesus. Nathanael was a straight shooter. No one was wondering what he was thinking. He was also humble enough that when he encountered the truth, he changed his mind about things. Humility, honesty—these are virtues that characterize St. Bartholomew, or Nathanael.

And he had to, along with the other disciples, learn really hard lessons. He's not exempt. He had to learn all the same lessons the other disciples did about humility and about power and the nature of the kingdom of God.

There are two traditions around what happened to Nathanael after the resurrection of Jesus. One has him going to Lycaonia and then Ethiopia with the gospel to preach. The other has him going through Mesopotamia and even into Parthia. And so, in the tradition where he goes through Parthia, he goes with Jude, who's also called Thaddeus. And so Thaddeus and Bartholomew take the gospel to Armenia, which is the first Christian kingdom. It becomes Christian before Constantine accepts Christianity.

And so, even to this day, Bartholomew and Thaddeus are the patron saints of Armenia. The rest of his life was spent following Jesus, witnessing to the power of Jesus in his resurrection. Not because he pursued greatness. Sorry, he was great, but not because he pursued greatness. It was because he pursued Jesus and he helped people see who Jesus is. And they helped people see the world as it is and what it could be. They helped people see themselves for who they are and what God has made them to be as his image bearers. And Bartholomew had to learn the same authority in the gospel passage that we read today as all the other disciples did.

In the gospel passage, Jesus is giving his final charge to the disciples. He's just told them that one of them is going to betray him. And immediately following that paragraph, St. Luke gives us this paragraph, where they're arguing about which one of them is to be regarded as the greatest in the kingdom. And so remember, in their minds, Jesus is going to reign over an earthly kingdom. Something like an empire. It's going to have this universal scope to it. It's going to be counter to the Roman Empire and all other kingdoms of the earth. And of course, you're going to need people to rule over various regions. And so the question in their mind becomes, how do we get a place of a throne in this kingdom? We've been following you. We've given up a lot. Is it going to be worth it? Can we have the authority that you have to rule over a slice of your kingdom? And now these are fishermen. They're tax collectors. These are other people who have no experience at all in governing over any municipality. This is not their career trajectory. But as they're thinking about Jesus and his kingdom, these thoughts of importance, comfort, notoriety—those things are becoming so alluring for them as they're thinking about the kingdom. And that's a really good reminder for us. It's a reminder to follow Jesus and do good work. It's simple. Follow Jesus and do good work. Do hard work. Hard work on yourself. Hard work on thinking about how Jesus is incorporated into your life.

If you're noticed, if you're honored by people, if you have seasons of relative comfort, that's totally fine. Take note of those things. Name them as they are. Give God thanks for them along the way because they're not going to be normal all the time. Watch for subtle shifts in yourself. There are these subtle shifts where honor, comfort, and notoriety move from being byproducts of your life to becoming aspirations or goals.

Watch for those subtle shifts. Dan Allender, in a podcast I had listened to, Dr. Dan Allender, said this little phrase that felt really appropriate here: “The more subtle, the more satanic.” The more subtle, the more satanic. And that really resonates with me. Notice the subtle shifts in our souls. Take notice of those things. That requires us to examine ourselves carefully as we're following Jesus. And to listen to the Holy Spirit in prayer constantly. And then to spend time discerning the movements of our souls as we're listening to the Holy Spirit. In those times of goodness or in times of trial, the goal is always a deeper knowledge of the love of God. The church has called those consolations and desolations—where Jesus is seemingly present, or where Jesus is seemingly absent.

In whatever season you're in, the goal is a deeper knowledge of the love of God. And as we think about the church, our goal is not corporately to, say, reach a region for Jesus, which feels very business-y. You know, “We're going to reach the nation, reach Springfield, reach Franconia.” But it's to see God's kingdom come in us, in our households, and in our neighborhoods. It moves from inside out. How you live your life is intertwined with the ways that we see the kingdom coming on a broader scale.

And there are things I can't control in my life, but what can I control? I can work on my own interior life every day with the Holy Spirit. I can work on showing up when my wife needs me to show up. I can listen to her. I can work on being present for our son, coach a baseball team, be the kind of manager that parents would love for their kids to have. I can control those things. That's something I can work on. It's within the realm of possibility. Trying to reach an area for Jesus is sort of like this product-orientation mindset. It's really out of my control.

So desiring to be great can potentially run the risk of clouding our vision for the opportunities that are right in front of us every single day. If you're a lawyer, defend justice. Write policy that accomplishes the welfare of the people that you're writing the policy for. If you're a teacher, come to class each day looking to help the kids in your class live life in the kingdom of God, to live out their lives as image bearers of God. If you're raising little ones at home, imagine your house as a kind of monastery where you're creating this school for the Lord's service in the everyday, ordinary stuff of raising little ones. There's so much that's out of our control, right? But the stuff of following Jesus we can do intentionally every single day. This is the substance of discipleship. Those are the subversive kingdom tactics that guard our internal life from subtle satanic opposition. And so that means that an influential product or a way of thinking doesn't justify a life of disordered loves.

I don't know if you're familiar with the theologian A.W. Tozer. He was a really well-known theologian, and he tried to adopt a life of rigorous poverty. Problem is, it's almost like he did it without considering the rest of his family, and he had seven kids. And so, when I think about this, his wife—to the point, his wife Ada Cecilia Pfautz—and she and her seven kids were forced to use public transit because he refused to get a car, even though he could. That's one example of many, but there was this disintegration with his study, his writing, and the life of his family. And so when he passed away, his wife remarried a man named Leonard Odom.

And somebody had asked Ada in an interview, “You know, what's it like to be married to Leonard after being married to the great A.W. Tozer?” And her response was, “I have never been happier in my life. Aiden Tozer loved Jesus Christ, but Leonard Odam loves me.” And I don't think Tozer set out to be a terrible husband, but there was this deep disconnect and there was this disorder to his love for Jesus and his family.

Seeking first the kingdom of God means that you have to rightly order your life with Jesus so that others experience the love of God through you, which means you have to experience it for yourself first. And it's really hard to integrate life with Jesus with our everyday chaos. But that is the substance of discipleship—naming things honestly, receiving grace for them.

To desire to be great is going to get in the way of seeing God's kingdom come. And so, seeing Bartholomew is a great example of someone who would carry on in Jesus's example of service, laying down his life for the sheep of God in a well-ordered, integrated way.

St. Paul, in our New Testament reading today—I hope you didn't miss this in First Corinthians—gives us another example of humility in his testimony about being an apostle. The Corinthians, they seem to be following these teachers who are making them feel superior. They're avoiding suffering, and these teachers are promising things like status and comfort, wealth and ease—almost like the Corinthians are little kings. And the impression that we get is these folks now seem to be looking down on St. Paul's ministry because St. Paul seems to be suffering, so they must be doing something right.

And so St. Paul needs to address the fact that they are misguided in their feelings of importance. And so how do you begin to address somebody who is so blinded by their inflated sense of self-grandeur? I'm not always sure how to do that right, but it's interesting to watch Paul here because his letter is just dripping with sarcasm. He essentially—this is my paraphrase—in 1 Corinthians 4:8ff, I would paraphrase it this way:

“Wow, look at how you all are so grown up. You're all doing so well. Man, you really look like you're living life as Jesus wanted you to live. You look like kings as you're reigning with Jesus. You didn't even need my help. Actually, you didn't even need the help of any of the apostles. JK. Honestly, I really wish you were kings. It would have been a lot easier if I could have just had what you have without having to go through all the stuff I went through—you know, like Jesus did.”

Then he drops the mic. This is St. Paul's address of these people who have an inflated sense of ego.

And in Paul's day, it's interesting—there was this practice where, as generals would be victorious in battle, they would come into a city through a victorious procession. Because there's no social media, how do you find out if they won? Well, it's a victory procession, and they're going to take all the spoils from their military exploitations and process them through the town. And they would come in, and at the back of this processional train are the captives of war, the prisoners. And at the end of that ceremony, all of these people who were captured in battle would either be given into slavery or they would be executed as part of the pagan liturgy.

And so Paul, in verse 9, compares himself and the other apostles to those captives who are at the back of the victory procession. They're being sentenced to death, he says, a spectacle to the world, fools for Christ's sake. So St. Paul has endured these afflictions through the power of the Spirit, not because he was seeking influence on a massive scale, not because he was trying to be great, but because the new-creation life in the kingdom of God doesn't come without the trials that are involved in a cruciform life. The way of the apostles is to focus on this substantive work of living humbly with Christ in all of life. It's this close walk and abiding in the presence of God.

It's the hard work of daily conversion—to watch the movements of our soul and to repent and then to receive God's grace often, daily, maybe multiple times a day—to name things honestly, to turn from the things that are not of the image of God, to look to Jesus to receive his grace. And it's the challenge of noticing others in their grief and struggle, to be able to offer them something of the goodness of the kingdom of God in their image-bearing selves.

So St. Bartholomew and his feast day—this is such a great reminder that if anyone is to be considered great, it's only because they've pointed people to the one who is truly great. The fruit of somebody's life is important, and it also can't be manufactured. So we need to make time to root out the subtle satanic shifts that move us from the grace and love of God in order to note where the Holy Spirit's at work, where he's moving.

The daily life of following Jesus is the witness that our households and our neighborhoods need. And as a church community, if you and I are following daily in that life with Jesus and his abiding presence, our mutual witness of life together is going to produce that substantive work of the kingdom of God together as we help people see what God can do in a community of lives that are being transformed by the gospel of grace and the power of Jesus.

As we close our time, let me pray again this collect for the feast day of St. Bartholomew:

“Almighty and everlasting God, you gave your apostle Bartholomew grace truly to believe and to preach your word. Grant that your church may love what he believed and preach what he taught, 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.

Distill, Divide, Interpret the Signs, and Decide

TranscriptioN

Good morning. I come from a long line of women with green thumbs. I'm not a horticulturist, but I'm more of a piddler, and I enjoy rooting plants. I normally have a puddle of plant clippings that I am rooting on my kitchen counter by my kitchen sink. This summer, I've had several clippings of impatiens that are rooting, and here's what the clippings looked like when I started. And then, here's my puddle of clippings on my kitchen counter.

I look over these clippings each time I wash dishes at the sink, and this week I noticed they weren't really flourishing. But I looked into the containers they were in, and I could see healthy roots growing in them, so I moved on. But Thursday morning, I looked over at my clippings while washing breakfast dishes, and I saw this: there were a lot of leaves missing, and some small things on the counter. You can see down there on the lower half of it, and these had multiplied. Frankly, these droppings on the counter panicked me, so I began looking up the exterminator's phone number.

My husband, Chris, consulted ChatGPT—you know, the newest version of YouTube for all the do-it-yourselfers. ChatGPT suggested that there was a beetle or a caterpillar, and that's a big improvement from what I thought was going on. When I looked closer, this is what I saw. Oh my word—how in the world had this giant caterpillar been right under my nose the past several days? I had washed dishes just inches from it all week long. I had seen these tiny little black things on the counter, and I had just ignored them. As I studied my rootings, I realized there was a lot more damage than I had been willing to see. These sweet, tender plants could die. They didn't look anything like they once had. I wondered how all this had been going on right in front of me, and I had missed the signs.

In our Gospel text today in Luke, we have a really tough passage to interpret. There's a lot of energy in it, and I find that when things are too uncomfortable, or if you push me too hard, sometimes I just let things go right over my head, or I feign ignorance, or I turn the other way. Does anybody here do the same? Or if something is incomprehensible to me—like how a giant caterpillar got inside my house and ate my baby plants—I might tune it out completely. Exhibit A. Can you relate to this, or is it just me?

I find that with Scripture, there are passages like this one that can be both terribly uncomfortable and really incomprehensible. We just don't have the background, the culture, or the understanding of the culture to fully grasp them. So sometimes we let them go over our heads or just move on. Doing this—as understandable as it is—causes us to miss the signs that Jesus is giving us to shape our lives as disciples.

This is a difficult tone in this passage, coming from Jesus, and these are challenging words. But I believe if we face the discomfort, we can dive in, knowing that the Gospel is good, and that the nature of Jesus is good. He always brings light, hope, and goodness. We can make sense of this message and allow it to challenge and encourage us today.

So let me set this up for you. At this point in the Gospel of Luke, we're on the road with Jesus as he is teaching the crowds and his disciples. In previous chapters and verses leading up to this one, he's been teaching important lessons crucial to the life of a disciple. We'll actually learn in the next chapter that he is on his way to Jerusalem, where he will fulfill what he is called to do on the cross in order to secure our salvation. The end of his time on earth is now in sight—distantly in sight—but we are on that road now. So things are getting real.

You know when you don't have a lot of time left with someone you love, you really begin to focus. You hone in, and you tell them the things you need them to know. When Chris and I would leave our kids with a babysitter, he'd be out in the car waiting on me. I'd be running through the list, finishing up the details with the kids and the sitter. I'd be getting more and more focused, and the last things I would say were the things I wanted to be sure they knew: "That one needs a bath. That one needs to do homework. And they all need to be in bed by nine. Thank you, I'm out."

Or, on a more serious note, I can remember one of the last things my father instructed me as he knew his death was imminent. He said, "Cat, when I'm gone, I want you to grieve for me. Grieve a while, and then I want you to get up and move on." He was very stern, very serious, because I'm not sure he believed I would do it. That was 30 years ago this summer, but I did it.

So we find Jesus teaching here—hard, but helpful—about discipleship and life in God's kingdom, the things we really need to know. In this short, pivotal passage, Jesus is clarifying his mission. He's painting a vivid picture of who he is and what he's doing. He distills, he divides, and he gives us the signs to interpret and decide.

In this passage, Jesus teaches the crowds and disciples that he brings a fire of judgment that distills and purifies. It will fully immerse him in suffering, and it will divide even the strongest, most fundamental relationships. He seems, honestly, a bit exasperated—"You hypocrites!" He seems frustrated that people can recognize the patterns the world gives them to plan for their future, as would be true in an agricultural society, but they refuse to interpret the clear signs he is giving about his kingdom at hand—which is, in fact, their real future, their spiritual future.

And maybe the toughest part of this passage is where Jesus says, "Do you think I have come to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division." I had to sit and think about that for a minute. Didn't Isaiah call Jesus "Prince of Peace"? Didn't Jesus promise his disciples to give them peace? Didn't the angels, when announcing Jesus' birth in their proclamation to the shepherds, talk about Jesus bringing peace? You know this: "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men." That's the King James Version we sing every Christmas. (You're welcome that I didn’t sing it for you today.)

But newer translations, like the ESV, actually state: "Glory to God in the highest, and peace among those with whom he is pleased." In other words, this peace will be for those who have decided to follow him. This distinction gives us a clue to today's startling teaching of Jesus.

Jesus’ mission is to distill those who decide to follow him from those who don’t, and this distilling or purifying brings division. The whole package of Jesus is so powerful that making the decision to follow him divides even the most fundamental relationships there are. And in Jesus’ context, and often in our own, that is within our families.

Jesus gives quite a litany here: they’ll be divided—father against son, son against father, mother against daughter, daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law, and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.

It’s interesting to note that part of John the Baptist’s mission, when he came ahead of Jesus, was to turn the hearts of parents to their children. That is God’s desire. He doesn’t want families to be divided. Jesus is not announcing that he’s coming in order to divide us from the people we love. Actually, Jesus is giving his followers straight talk: to follow him will inevitably divide them from those who don’t.

We need to hear this message today. To know and love Jesus is to know and love the truth. Jesus says about himself in John 14, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father but by me.” Jesus, being the truth, brings reconciliation to God, but because some people won’t choose him, it brings division. And division from those you love—especially those closest to you—is painful.

Jesus was preparing his followers, and he’s preparing us, so that we can interpret the signs of the kingdom and follow him wholeheartedly. Only reconciliation with God can bring eternal and lasting peace. Truth can unify, but honestly, in the world today, it more often divides. It distills; it purifies.

Peace is found in God through Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace—but not in the world. Any idea of peace that is created by man apart from God is an unsustainable, fleeting mirage that will dissipate in time. As believers, we pray for peace. We pursue peace on earth because reconciliation with God is our peace. Peace with God overflows our hearts and lives as we abide in Christ, living in union with him, and this peace touches the world.

Any other attempt at peace is missing the fundamental foundation of reconciliation that comes only from God and the work of Jesus. We need to hear this truth today because we are called to be both light and love to our brothers and sisters who do not follow him. We are not to disdain them or be in enmity with them. They are in enmity with him. We are called to love them, to serve them, to pray for them, and hopefully to lead them to him. Even though we’re divided, we are not called to follow them—we are called to follow Christ, even if that divides us.

I recall more times than I care to count having conversations with former members of our church in Charleston who had stopped attending. I would ask, “Is everything okay?” And if they were honest, they would explain that their young adult child—the one we had baptized, discipled, and confirmed—had decided to follow some other teaching rather than Christ. Either the science of atheism, Buddhism, or some new spiritual awakening—something that wasn’t Jesus. And so they were now divided, and they could not stand to be divided. So in order not to be divided from their child, they chose to follow their child and their new teachings rather than the truth of Jesus.

But I can also tell you heartwarming stories of other friends who held on to their belief in Jesus, even when divided from their child. Eventually, their child returned to the faith. I’ve seen it happen with parents as well, both ways.

Romans tells us that it is the kindness of the Lord that leads man to repentance, and it’s true. Jesus’ urgency in this passage is well-founded. He is waking his followers up to interpret the signs right in front of them—that the kingdom is at hand. It’s beginning now, so that they’re prepared for their future with him. He clarifies his mission: he is distilling and dividing, and you must interpret these signs and decide.

He says he came to bring fire to the earth, and he wishes it were already kindled. What’s he talking about—this fire? Then he says he has a baptism with which to be baptized, and he’s constrained until he accomplishes it.

“Fire” is an important word in Scripture. It’s used often pertaining to God and to Jesus. I could write several sermons about it, but I digress. For this passage, in three of the Gospels—Matthew, Luke, and John—John the Baptist announces Jesus, stating that he will baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire. The scholar F.F. Bruce writes that in Greek, the word “fire” can also mean spirit, breath, or wind.

Earlier in Luke, John the Baptist adds to his announcement about Jesus: “His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear the threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” So even though “fire” is sometimes connected to the Holy Spirit, in this passage it indicates distilling, purifying, sifting, and separating.

In John’s words, Jesus’ mission will purify, and it will burn like wildfire, leaving absolutely no one untouched. Jesus longs for that fire to be started. The fire is linked to his baptism.

Now, what is this baptism Jesus is speaking of? We’ve already seen him baptized. This is where the passage feels a bit incomprehensible. Jesus is bringing fire, he’s getting baptized again, and he’s under constraint until it’s completed. What’s going on?

Jesus is using the language of baptism here to express his desire to do the will of God. He received a baptism of repentance at the start of his ministry, though he had no sins to repent of. He willingly chose to identify with humanity, following God’s will that we turn away from our sins and be baptized. But now, he’s going to be immersed in the pit of death—again, identifying with humanity, with you and me, and with the curse of sin we carry. He will take that curse on our behalf, even to death, and destroy it by conquering death.

One scholar notes that baptism here is a metaphor for Jesus facing a period of being uniquely inundated with God’s judgment. In both Matthew and Mark, when James and John ask to sit at his right and left hand, Jesus replies: “Are you able to drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?” In other words: Are you able to share in my suffering and death?

It’s hard language.

So Jesus is telling us he’s bringing fire to the world. He will distill it, even as he suffers for the world, and this will divide even the closest of relationships. At this point, he’s been with them for nearly three years. He’s inaugurated the kingdom of God. For everyone watching—including us—we’ve seen him restore sight to the blind and wholeness to the lame. In that culture, without disability aid, these healings restored people not just physically, but socially and economically. The lepers he healed were no longer ostracized. They could return to families, communities, and worship. He restored far more than bodies; he restored lives.

He delivered people from demons. He raised the dead—a hint of the resurrected life to come. And still, the people missed the signs.

Jesus calls them hypocrites for knowing the signs of the weather but not the signs of the kingdom. They knew the prophecies. They had the Scriptures. Yet they missed the Messiah standing before them.

Jesus is still distilling and dividing, and he calls us today to interpret the signs of his kingdom, already begun, and to decide.

That caterpillar on my kitchen counter had been there awhile. The signs were right in front of me, inches from where I washed dishes, but I ignored them. That creature was tearing through my tender rootings, ready to metamorphosize into new life. I wasn’t paying attention.

When I give my testimony, I share that one of the core lies I believed for most of my life was that I didn’t belong anywhere—not to my family, not to any group of friends. My testimony to the power of knowing and following Jesus is that he defeated that lie. I do belong. I belong to Jesus. And if you have been distilled and divided, and interpreted the signs and decided, you belong with me to Jesus. This is our family.

We are in the family of Jesus. The time is upon us. That is the urgency in this passage, and in Jesus’ tone: to share the good news of the kingdom everywhere we can, especially with those from whom we’re divided. We have the best news in the world.

For that, we can all say: Thanks be to God.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited using ChatGPT.

Enduring Faith

TranscriptioN

It's very good to see you all this fine Sunday. My name is Steven Myles, and I'm a member here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church. For those of you who are new or visiting with us this morning, I'm not the person that you would normally see in this space. Father Morgan Reed, the beloved vicar of our church plant, is on a well-deserved vacation with his family. And in his stead, he asked me to speak this morning and not mess things up too badly. So I have had the opportunity to deliver the homily once before. And if you recall, the last time I was up here, I openly admitted that I am a baby Anglican. It's true. The majority of my life I've spent with Baptist and non-denominational communities of faith.

And so the rhythms of the Anglican Church calendar, the commemoration to the Saints of old, the different holy days, are still relatively novel to me. So bear with me here, the newbie, but for a few moments, I would like to call our attention right at the onset to two things. The Saint which we commemorate on this day and where we are positioned in the church calendar. It's marked to commemorate St. Lawrence. And St. Lawrence was a deacon and martyr of the Catholic Church in Rome around the third century. And so in this very month, this month of August, 1,767 years ago, the Emperor of Rome, Emperor Valerian, made the decree that all bishops, deacons, and priests were to be executed and that the riches of the church were to be put into the coffers of the Roman Empire. And the next day, Pope Sixtus, the Pope, was executed, and Lawrence, the Saint that we're commemorating this day, was ordered to go and collect the riches of the church to surrender them before he would be executed. And Lawrence worked swiftly, and over the course of the next three days he did, he collected the riches of the church and then he distributed them to the poor. And as he stood before the prefect of Rome three days later, he was asked to present the riches of the church. And he pointed to the poor, the indigent, the blind, the crippled, and the one suffering, and he said, "Here are the riches of the church." And then he was executed. It's a powerful testimony.

So that is the Saint, St. Lawrence, that we commemorate on this, the 10th of August. And in regards to the church calendar, there is a period of time after Pentecost and before Advent known as ordinary time. Right? There are no major feasts or holy days. Each week is numbered, and this week we are smack dab in the middle of that stretch. This is the 14th week of ordinary time. And although the time is ordinary, by God's grace we have the opportunity this morning to redeem these moments and to once again focus our minds and our intentions on abiding with God.

So please pray with me. “The grass withers, the flower fades, but Your word, O Lord, will stand forever. Lord, the word that goes out from Your mouth, it shall not return to You empty, but it shall accomplish that which You purpose and shall succeed in the thing for which You sent it. And so, Father, we cling to this truth, and we ask that You would speak to us this morning, and may Your word accomplish that which is needed in each of us. In Christ's name. Amen.”

So before we jump into today's text in Hebrews 11, I want to give you a rough outline of what the next few moments are going to look like. So I will attempt to briefly summarize the book of Hebrews prior to chapter 11. Bold task. And then we will look at Hebrews 11 and the two distinct categories that faithfulness falls into that we encounter in the text. A conquering faith and an enduring faith. And then finally, I'll close with a few words which I hope will encourage us to remain steadfast despite our situation. Now, why do we have to go back and summarize the entire book of Hebrews, you might ask? That's a fair question, okay? But when we get to chapter 11, where our text is today, it's kind of the culmination of this argument that the author has been making for the past ten chapters, okay? This assertion that Jesus Christ is superior to all the other previous ways that God has revealed Himself in the past.

And so this is very similar to other authors of the New Testament who have crafted a very particular message. Under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, these authors would systematically and methodically argue the case for Jesus Christ as the Messiah and the veracity of what He claims. In John's account of witnessing, right? Witnessing firsthand with his eyes the miracles and teaching of Jesus Christ, he states very plainly that his purpose in writing these things is that you may believe, and that by believing you may have life.

In Paul's letter, he declares very explicitly that it was necessary to first preach the Word of God to the—But because they rejected it, the gospel of Jesus Christ is extended to the Gentiles. And so Paul's subsequent letters are intentionally meant to plant and nourish faith in people without an understanding of God's involvement throughout history. So in the same fashion, the author of Hebrews has a very distinct purpose.

He's writing to Jewish believers, as the name of the book implies, right? And so understanding his audience, there's this baseline assumption that the reader is intimately familiar with the Old Testament. He doesn't explain the covenant with Abraham, Mount Sinai, the Torah, the sacrificial system. It's expected that these things are already to be understood.

So the book of Hebrews, prior to chapter 11, the author very methodically lays out this four-point argument, okay? To prove that Jesus is the ultimate revelation of God's love and mercy. So the author elevates Jesus above all the other prior revelations from the Old Testament, from the Torah. He's greater than the angels. He's greater than Moses. He's greater than the priestly order. And Jesus is greater than the sacrificial system. Those are the four main points. And then coupled with those four points are four warnings. Because Jesus is greater than the angels, beware of rejecting His message. Because Jesus is greater than Moses, beware of abandoning Him. Because Jesus is—beware. So those are the four points and the counter four warnings.

That's what the first ten chapters have set out to accomplish. Jesus is the ultimate revelation of God's redemption, so you, the reader, do not turn away from the One who fulfills everything that the law and the prophets have directed you towards. And so that's the first point of this homily, right? Everything prior to chapter 11.

Now we get into today's text. Chapter 11 is sometimes often referred to as the Hall of Faith, right? Hall of Fame, Hall of Faith. You guys got it.

So now that we've arrived at the culmination of this argument, right, that he's been making for the last ten chapters, the author has demonstrated now that Jesus is not nullifying their traditions, right? He's not rendering moot everything that they have been brought up in, but rather He is the fulfillment of everything that the Jewish reader would have been taught as a young man in the synagogue. So now in chapter 11, he is encouraging them to continue in this same tradition of faith as those that have gone before. And he provides a litany of examples.

Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. Because even though Jesus is the new revelation, nothing has changed in regards to the prescribed manner in which mankind is restored to a right relationship with God. Throughout all time, the prescribed manner in which man is restored to a right standing with God has remained constant.

We are saved by God's grace through faith. And the very first act of faith mentioned in Hebrews 11 goes all the way back to Abel, right, very early on. Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel.

And so in the Genesis account, it is inferred that God initiated a blood sacrifice the moment Adam and Eve sinned against Him. Genesis tells us that God killed an animal in order to clothe Adam and Eve with the skins of those animals. What is inferred there is a blood sacrifice as an atonement for sin.

So this is an indication to us of why Abel's sacrifice was acceptable and Cain's was not. For the Genesis story in chapter 4 recounts that Abel brought an offering of the firstborn of his flock. It was an animal sacrifice. And Cain brought an offering of the fruit of the ground. The profundity of this interaction between Cain and Abel and God cannot be overstated. Why was Abel's offering accepted and Cain's was not? Why? Is it better to be a shepherd than a farmer? Was his offering more costly than his brother's? Abel had followed the prescribed method that God had given for atonement. He exercised faith and obedience, and he offered a blood sacrifice. Cain, on the other hand, tried to circumvent God's prescribed method and offered the fruit of the ground, or in other words, the fruit of his efforts. Cain's offering was rejected because he tried to approach God through the merit of his good works.

Mankind has always and will always be deceived into believing that they can earn God's favor. This idea of earning something from God is pervasive. And even for the people who have matured in faith, you don't automatically become immune to this line of reasoning. Especially in our Western world, we are taught that the punishment should suit the crime and payment should be commensurate with the level of effort. And so through nature and nurture, we kind of develop a transactional view of relationship. And this is the portion of my message I was most conflicted about.

Because here in chapter 11, we're presented with this list of elders, and they fall into one of these two categories. Either a conquering faith or an enduring faith. But how can we judiciously examine both of these categories without favoring one over the other? Let me try to explain this a little bit better.

Because more than anything, what I want to do is I want to reach for examples like David and Daniel and Samuel, right? And I want to place them here at the forefront of our attention. And I want to be able to point to the amazing things that they accomplished through their lives of faithfulness. Right? They shut the mouths of lions. Literally conquered kingdoms. Administered justice. Obtained the promises. And more than anything, I want to use their examples to encourage you to not lose hope, to persevere, because you all know just as well as I do what is outside in this world.

It is a cold and unjust world in which we travel. And what's more than likely, though, is that our problems and our struggles — they didn't have the decency to stop at the door. Right? But they're right here with us, and the tension is pulling on us. The financial struggles of losing work. The slow slip into a cold marriage. The quiet suffering of a miscarried child. The pain in your body that won't go away. And I don't think that the intention behind highlighting these types of conquering faith stories is meant to be misleading. Right? It's natural.

We love a happy ending, and these stories of conquering elders can certainly strengthen our resolve and spark hope. And so, I don't know — maybe it's just me on this point — but when those are the examples that are predominantly celebrated, predominantly in the spotlight, then I get this idea in my head that maybe that's what a faithful life should look like.
If only my faith were stronger, then maybe I wouldn't be stuck in this situation. And that step is so subtle. Right? It's almost an unconscious progression of logic.

Of course, in our transactional minds, we can kind of make the leap that a faithful life equals a fruitful life — a life that conquers all obstacles. And yet, when we come to the text, we learn that man's economy and God's economy on this point cannot be farther apart. And yet, too often, the former is projected onto the latter, and we end up with this distorted view of God's will. We end up with a muddled and watered-down understanding of the truth. Right? The number of young men and women in our country that are escaping Christianity as soon as they're out of their parents' sight — statistically speaking — is on the rise. And I'm not going to stand here and reduce it down to this one reason — that's too simplistic — but I do believe a contributing factor is this prevalent understanding in the American church that a life of faithfulness to God is a path to comfort, a path away from suffering.

And so, when our next generation of young men and women are faced with the reality of this world and their faith isn't fixing everything, it isn't utilitarian, it's cast aside. And so, too often, these examples of a conquering faith are lifted up, but it can come at the expense of a richer and deeper understanding. And I think, though, Hebrews 11 brings balance to this propensity towards the conquering faith by reminding the reader of tremendous examples of enduring faith.

Abraham would never see the covenant fulfilled. Moses chose to suffer alongside his brothers rather than live comfortably in Egypt. Others were afflicted, many more were mocked and imprisoned, and some were put to death.

And we know that Jesus himself, the author and perfecter of our faith, was betrayed and died alone. And so, the profound truth that Hebrews 11 is instructing us in is that God does not measure faith by the result that it achieves, but by the obedience it maintains. Scripture gives us a glimpse forward to the day where a servant will stand before his God, and the words that he longs to hear are, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.” Faithful, not fruitful. God is the one who produces the fruit, and all that we can do is bear that which he chooses to bestow. Noah labored for a hundred years, toiling in the sun, building an ark, and at the end, eight lives were saved.

Jonah preached to the city of Nineveh, and over a hundred thousand souls repented and were saved. And yet, both of these men were faithful to what God had revealed to them. God recognized both of their faiths, yet the results were wildly disparate.

So even now, God is searching. Right now, he is seeking men and women of true faith. Verse 6 rightly states that without faith, it is impossible to please God. And true faith is not a collection of beliefs; it's not this intellectual pursuit of a perfect theology. True faith ignites action. Abel offered when there was no manual.

Enoch walked when there was no example to follow. Noah built a boat though he had never seen rain. And Abraham ventured out into the unknown without a map.

These men and women were driven by what verse 1 calls an assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen. They did not require the guarantees of safety and security before they went out, and they did not demand God to prove himself before they would believe. They did not require constant validation in order to earn their loyalty.

And so, this path to a restored relationship with God, like I mentioned earlier, has remained constant — that we are saved by God's grace through faith. And we're not called to strictly adhere to a set of rules and regulations. We're not called to sacrifice animals to atone for sin. Right? The time for those revelations is past.

We live in the age now where Jesus Christ has been revealed, and the faith that God will honor is the faith placed in the finished work of Jesus's life, death, and resurrection. And maybe you've heard this before. Maybe it all makes sense. But the one thing you can't wrap your head around is why? Why, though? The last verse in our passage from today, in verse 16, is what I've been holding on to after praying and preparing for this sermon. And it's a small phrase that says, “Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God.” So after the author has gone through this litany of examples of faithful men and women, he adds this small phrase — that God is not ashamed to be called their God.

My prayer is that the same could be said about me. My prayer is that the same will be said about you. There is a love that you simply cannot understand until you experience it. The power of God's love is the only force that I have experienced in my life that has not only changed who I am, but has literally changed the desires — the things that I desire in my heart. You all might not know, but I am keenly aware of the depravity of the things that I used to chase after. And God understands our nature. He knows that we are weak, and so he provides his Spirit to fill and empower us to live in the way that he always intended. This satisfaction of not only being loved unconditionally, but being restored to a true purpose — I think this is why it makes sense. Because otherwise, it looks crazy. Right? To the world, these things look foolish.

Why remain when others have left? Why endure when there's no relief? Why trust if it doesn't make sense? These men and women in the Hall of Faith tasted and saw that God is good. And like Job — Job who lost everything in this world — he lost his wife, he lost his children, he lost his wealth, his occupation, he lost his friends, he lost his health. And when he was stripped of everything, his words were, “Though he slay me, yet I will trust in Him.”

The truth is that these men and women were wholly satisfied in God alone. They did not need the joys of this world. They did not even need the blessings that could come from his hand. He alone was their portion, and God was not ashamed to be called their God.

And so, today, do not be lured into the temptation of putting your life in the scales and deciding that my life is a wreck because my faith is weak. Or don't fall into the trap that because God is remaining silent, He is far from you. Rather, maybe you're closer to the heroes of faith who are called to endure rather than conquer. And so, do not lose faith. Do not be discouraged. For lo, He is with us, and He will not forsake us. Amen.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited using ChatGPT.

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.

Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul: The Kingdom Through Diverse Stories of Faithfulness

TranscriptioN

Good morning. My name is Steve Brooks. I serve as a vocational deacon at Restoration Anglican Church in Arlington, Virginia. As always, Morgan, it's an honor to be invited to serve your congregation.

The last time I was here was before Easter of last year, and for those of you who were here then, you may remember it that I preached on the bread of life, and I brought with me one of my very first homemade bread loaves from a sourdough starter I created for that sermon. Every month, I bake bread from that same starter, and as I work through the bread baking process, I pray for your congregation. With each loaf that I make and that I eat and that I share, I find great peace in it.

So please know that you all are never far away from my heart, or my stomach for that matter. It's really great to be with you again. So let's pray. “Holy Spirit come, bless this congregation and our time here this morning. O Lord, let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight. O Lord, my rock and Redeemer. Amen.”

So today we observe the Feast of St. Peter and Paul, one of the oldest and most important feasts in the Christian liturgical calendar, especially in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. This remembrance on this day of June 29th, it stretches all the way back to the third or fourth century.

In history and tradition tell us that Saints Peter and Paul were martyred in Rome on June 29th. Not necessarily in the same year, but on the same date, sometime between the year 64 and 68 AD, under the brutality of Roman Emperor Nero. It is believed that the early church, early Roman Christians used this feast day to compete with and eventually supplant the pagan celebration surrounding the founding of Rome nearly 1,000 years earlier by brothers Romulus and Remus.

For early Christians, this date, June 29th, would mark the founding of the new Rome, the Christian Rome. Saints Peter and Paul are remembered today for their shared suffering and death for our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Yet their journeys to faith, their backgrounds, their behaviors are vastly different.

It's a miracle that the two men with such differences would come to share a day of remembrance and celebration in the church. Peter was a fisherman. Paul was a tent maker.

Peter was uneducated. Paul was a scholar, a Pharisee. Peter was impulsive, bold, and emotional.

Paul was zealous and driven and eventually patient. Peter was called to follow the living Jesus from the shores of Galilee, and Paul set out to destroy people like Peter until the resurrected Christ met and called him on the road to Damascus. In Acts 22, Luke recorded Paul recounting that mission.

Paul said that I persecuted the Christian movement to the death, building and delivering to prison both men and women. I journeyed toward Damascus to take those who were there and bring them in bonds to Jerusalem to be punished. Paul's journey from Jerusalem to now the oldest city in the world would change all of history.

It would change everything. Paul encountered the risen Christ. He experienced what may be the greatest conversion of all time.

Over the three days following Paul's encounter, he was blinded, he was born again, he was baptized, and completely transformed. His destructive passion was turned into devotion, and his new purpose would ultimately align perfectly with that of the Apostle Peter. These two men of different backgrounds would share a passionate faith and love for Jesus Christ.

Nothing, prison, torture, death, could keep either of them from proclaiming the good news. The Epistle and the Gospel readings this morning, they capture two very specific critical moments in the lives of these two men. The Gospel reading I just read a few minutes ago from John 21, it captures the very beginning, the exact moment that Jesus literally puts his faith in Peter by giving him responsibility to feed his sheep and shepherd the church

It's the beginning of Peter's ministry. When we read it out loud, which I did many times before the sermon, I felt like I was standing among the other disciples listening to a conversation that I wasn't necessarily supposed to hear. It's very personal.

Yet Jesus openly speaks so the others witness the transformational moment in Peter. In the Epistle reading from 2nd Timothy chapter 4, we are witness to the end of Paul's ministry. These are Paul's last known recorded words before he is killed by a murdering emperor.

Paul wrote this letter to ensure the continuity of his ministry, and he is literally handing off the baton over to Timothy. John 21 and 2nd Timothy 4 are two snapshots 30 years apart. One snapshot is of Peter, a man who had no idea what lies ahead for him because of his faith and love for Jesus.

 And another man, Paul, knows his death is imminent, yet he is full of zeal to ensure that the good news of Jesus Christ is shared with the world. So as we dig into these two readings this morning, I'd like you to reflect on the two apostles. Who do you connect with most? What parts of their stories are like yours? And what do you hope for? What do you hope for in your own journey with Jesus Christ? So let's start with Paul's letter to Timothy.

 Prior to his conversion, Paul was a zealous prosecutor of Christians and present at the stoning of Stephen, the first martyr for Christ. After his conversion, he spent three years in Arabia, he returned to Damascus, and later visited Jerusalem for the first time as a convert where he actually met Peter and James. Paul was called to be the apostle to the Gentiles.

He was set apart by the Holy Spirit and sent on three missionary journeys, and it's on his second journey in Asia Minor in Europe where he met Timothy in the city of Lystra. Paul suffered for Christ. He was arrested, imprisoned, beaten, shipwrecked.

All the while, he proclaimed the name of Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. By the time he wrote his second letter to Timothy, Paul was imprisoned in Rome for the second time. He was about 63 years old and facing execution.

So I love reading Paul. I find it so helpful how he gives so much detail in the salutation to whom he's writing, and then when he closes, we see all these people and the connections. In 1st Timothy chapter 1, Paul refers to Timothy as my true son in faith.

This language helps us understand Paul's connection and relationship to Timothy, and it frames the letter so we can read it with context and deeper understanding. 1st Timothy was written about three years before the second letter that we're reading today. And Paul's farewell discourse to the Ephesian elders in Acts chapter 20, it's famous for its comparison to the fell-weary discourse of Moses and Jesus, but these final words in chapter 4 are almost like Paul's last will and testament.

He's facing death, there's a sense of urgency, an unending spirit, and a passion for faith in Jesus. He was determined to leave this world by giving a clear and concise instruction to Timothy, his protege of about ten years, to continue this ministry. So in chapter 4 verse 1, Paul doesn't suggest a mission for Timothy.

In reality, it's a divine charge, a divine mandate directed to Timothy and to all who preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. Paul is imploring Timothy to be ready to preach both in and out of season, which means he should ground people in Scripture under all circumstances, whether they're hungry for it or not. He stresses that Timothy should be ready to preach whether it's convenient or not, and even when it is at great cost to himself.

Paul calls on Timothy to reprove, rebuke, and exhort. In other words, to correct error, call out sin, and encourage and strengthen those to whom he is preaching. The only way to approach this mandate is for Timothy to preach with patience, endurance, and wisdom.

And Paul's telling Timothy, take this baton, don't look back, and run. And it won't be easy. As a good mentor does, Paul was sharing his own experiences, and I'm sure praying that Timothy would get it.

He knew that Timothy needed a strong spiritual background of faith to follow Jesus and preach the good news, no matter the circumstance. In verse 3, Paul says, for the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to soothe their own passions. Paul's warning rings true today. 

Our culture, like that during Paul's time, often chases comfort over conviction. We seek messengers and messages that affirm rather than transform. We trade in truth for convenience. We live in a world dominated and shaped by consumerism, social media, and self-serving ideologies. The idols may have changed shape, but idolatry remains the same. In verse 6, Paul continues, and he says, I'm already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come.

This refers to the Jewish custom of pouring out wine at the base of the altar as part of the ritual sacrifice of the Lamb. Years earlier, Paul wrote to the Philippians about the possibility of his death, describing it the same way, as being poured out like a drink offering. At that point, it was a hypothetical statement.

Now, he writes to Timothy, it's the real deal. His death was imminent, and Timothy knew what he meant. A pastor named Kent Hughes wrote extensively about Paul's letters, and he said this about this section.

He said, it is clear that Paul did not think of himself as about to be executed, but rather as offering himself to God. From the time of his conversion, everything he had was given to God. His wealth, his body, his brilliance, his passion, his position, his reputation, all of his relationships, and his dreams.

For years, the red blood of his life had been spilling onto the altar. Now, all that remained was his life's breath, and he triumphantly gave that. In verses 7 and 8, it appears that Paul was almost declaring a victory of sorts, as he wrote to Timothy.

But I see it as Paul on his knees in prayer, telling Jesus, I did it. I lived it. I finished what began on the road to Damascus, Lord. I kept your faith in me. I stayed on the course that you laid out for me from the beginning of time. I finished the race.

I finished the race, Lord. I am done, but I'm not defeated. And I will await your return, Lord, to receive not a crown of glory or fame, but of righteousness.

And that crown of righteousness, Paul says here, is not only for himself, but it's for all who follow Jesus and long for his return. Imagine for a moment Timothy reading this letter when he gets it from his spiritual father, probably a little shaken. I know I would be.

It's emotional. It's urgent. It's holy and filled with the divine charge that he must accept. Paul doesn't say, good luck, son. Do the best you can. Hang in there.

He tells him to be faithful, stay sober-minded, endure the sufferings of following Jesus Christ, be steady, be steady, and finish the race like I have. I wonder if he ever got to see Paul again to talk about what he was being asked to do, to share his anxiety maybe, his worry, be affirmed that his faithfulness and love in Jesus would carry him. So let's pivot over for a few minutes over to John, John 21.

It's a different snapshot in time. It's about 35 years before Paul wrote Timothy, and in this moment, before ascending into heaven, Jesus is handing his baton off to Peter. So for lack of a better way to say this, Peter had a very complicated relationship with Jesus.

His walk with Christ has been a lot like mine over the past 44 years, and it may feel like yours too. Each of the four Gospels provide a unique facet of Simon Peter's calling by Jesus. In the Gospel of John, Andrew introduces his brother to Jesus.

Jesus says, you are Simon, son of John. You shall be called Cephas, which means Peter, which means the rock. In Matthew and Mark, we observe the immediacy of Peter's response to follow Jesus, and my favorite is in the Gospel of Luke.

We witness the awe of a miraculous catch of fish only because Peter obeyed Jesus's call to cast that net one last time, and after the fish were brought in, the nets would break apart. Peter, having great humility at that point, says, go away from me, Lord. I am a sinful man, and Jesus says back to him, do not be afraid.

From now on, you will be catching men. This is where Simon, now Peter, began his journey of faith with Jesus, in Jesus. So later in the story, you all know some of these, later in the storm on the Sea of Galilee, in faith, Peter steps out of a boat and walks on water to meet Jesus, and in his doubt, he sinks and is saved by our Lord.

As Peter's faith grows deeper, Jesus asks the question, who do you say that I am? Peter responds, you are the Christ, the Son of the Living God, and Jesus replies to Peter, you are Peter. On this rock, I will build my church. When Jesus predicts his own death later, Peter actually rebukes Jesus, and Jesus in turns rebukes him right back. 

Peter heard the voice of God and saw Moses and Elijah when he witnessed the transfiguration, and he was terrified. The night of the Last Supper, Jesus tells Peter, truly I tell you this very night before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times. In protest, Peter claims, even if I must die with you, I will not deny you.

Just a little later, after his arrest, Jesus was being held in the high priest's home, and Peter, sitting by a small fire in the middle of the courtyard, was confronted three times that he knew Jesus, and three times he denied it, and then the rooster crowed. This blogger, this guy I was reading around on the internet, and I found this blogger, his name is John Van Wagner. He loves Jesus, and he wrote this about this scene.

He says, it was a terrible, horrifying night for Peter. Darkness, cold, flickering flames, distorted shadows on the walls of the courtyard, and then his denials three times. Peter collapsed under the pressure.

His self-reliance and self-confidence were shattered. All his promises, all his boasting, all his efforts to prevent this night from happening were blown away when Peter turned his back on his friend. To make it worse, and better, Jesus turned, singled out Peter, looking straight at him with a look that Peter will probably never forget.

It's as if Jesus was saying, Peter, do you remember what I said? All that I said? Don't forget that I also told you not to let your heart be troubled, to trust in the Father, and to trust in me. Implicit in this command is a promise, I will never leave you or forsake you. We all know how the story continues.

Jesus is crucified, he is buried, and he rose again. And Peter, who abandoned Jesus, is one of the first to see the empty tomb. While he believed Jesus was the Messiah, he misunderstood the mission of the Messiah.

He had the faith in Jesus, but not yet the faith of Jesus. The faith that is the source, the true source of hope. John sets the stage at the beginning of chapter 21.

It was night, seven disciples are fishing from a boat in the Sea of Galilee. It's a few weeks after Jesus was resurrected. They had already experienced the risen Christ two times.

They will again here. Just as day broke, Jesus stood at the shore of the lake, and he had already started a charcoal fire, cooking fish and baking bread. The disciples out on the water saw Jesus on the shore, but didn't know who it was, and he called out to them, cast your net on the right side.

And they did it. They caught a huge number of fish, 153 to be exact. And it was the Apostle John who realized it was Jesus on the shore, and he yells out, it's the Lord! And what did Peter do? He leaps out of the boat, and he swims ashore.

Jesus tells them to bring some of the fish they caught, and Peter, soaking wet, is the one to go back to the boat and haul that net in on his own. And the net was not torn. The unbroken net is a subtlety in the text here.

The net was not torn. Remember his first encounter with Jesus from the fishing boat? Simon Peter was obedient and cast the net, yet he didn't believe, he didn't have the faith of Jesus, and the net broke. This time, the net was not broken.

Something changed. A restoration of true and obedient faith is about to occur. And verse 15 takes us to the early morning quiet on the beach.

Seven disciples and Jesus stand next to a charcoal fire, much like the one Peter sat next two weeks earlier as he denied Christ. And Jesus spoke, calling Peter Simon, a reminder of who he was before he met Jesus, a reminder of his human weakness. Three times he said, Simon, do you love me? Simon, son of John, do you love me? Do you love me? This is a blunt, there is a blunt honesty in the Lord's questioning, but his words are quite affable.

Jesus matched each question with each denial, and Peter must have been confused and shaken that he would give the wrong response. And he answered three times, you know that I love you, Lord. You know that I love you.

You know that I love you. And each time Jesus said, feed my lambs, tend my sheep, feed my sheep. In front of all standing at the fire, Jesus displayed a deep love for the Apostle Peter.

These questions were words of healing, they were words of comfort, they were words of restoration and instruction. Peter's encounter with the risen Christ is a metamorphosis of faith, a transformation. Not only does Peter now have faith in Jesus, but he has the faith of Jesus Christ.

It's not a different kind of faith, but rather that characteristic of faith that Jesus exemplified. It is total and absolute trust and obedience to the Father, relying on him alone and no longer on himself. We witness here the beginning of Peter's new life in Christ.

His call is clear. Peter, the rock, is given authority by Jesus and ordination in its own right to feed and shepherd his flock and to share the gospel. Peter is anointed as the leader of Christ's chosen.

So the juxtaposition and connectedness of these two stories between Paul and Peter, for me it's beautiful. Paul was at the end of the journey, passing the torch so he could continue with Timothy, could continue what had been begun. Peter, on the other hand, was at the beginning of the new beginning.

He was handed a huge responsibility by Christ himself to leave the boat and become a shepherd. Although Jesus hinted during the seaside conversation at the very end, little did Peter know what trials and tribulations lay ahead for him. Little did he know that his life would end on a cross turned upside down in Rome, in the same city and around the same time as Saul of Tarsus.

Little did he know that Saul would become Paul, that they would both die for carrying the faith of Christ in their hearts and minds, sharing the same passion for Christ our Lord. I could have gotten up and given this sermon, which is part of one by St. Augustine. He makes it very simple.

He did a homily for the feast of St. Peter and Paul and he said this, not the whole homily, but they followed the truth, they professed the truth, they died for the truth. They followed, they professed, and they died for Jesus Christ. So our journeys with Christ are likely never going to match that of either of these apostles.

So I asked you, what do you hope for in your own faith and walk with Christ? What does that look like? Whether you're a young child and you're just starting to figure it out, or if you're in your last years, what does it look like to follow Jesus? So let's pray for that. Pray, you don't have to pray it out loud, but I'm going to pray for all of us and we'll pray for that specifically. Oh Lord Heavenly Father, God we give thanks for Peter and Paul, their differences, their love, their passion, and professing around the world of what you did.

Father, pray right now how for all of us, for you to call us into ways that we may have never thought. Ways for us to follow you, God give us some insight into that. Really, really, really, really, really love you Jesus.

God give us some insight, help all of us understand our call to follow you. In the name of Jesus we pray, amen.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited by the vicar.