Sermon delivered on the 4th Sunday before Lent C, February 6, 2022 at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.
If you prefer to listen to the audio podcast of today’s sermon, usually somewhat different from the text below, click here.
Lectionary texts: Isaiah 6.1-13; Psalm 138; 1 Corinthians 15.1-11; St. Luke 5.1-11.
In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Since this is my first sermon in our new home I will try to make it at least as long as Fathers Sang and Wylie’s were the past two weeks; I know how much you enjoy long sermons from us. Once every three years, provided Easter falls late enough on the calendar, the RCL offers an opportunity to preach on St. Paul’s massive treatise on Christ’s resurrection contained in 1 Cor 15. This year we have that opportunity and so I begin a three part preaching series on Christ’s Death and Resurrection. But already I have a problem because in two weeks our bishop is coming here to consecrate our new home and insists on preaching from different texts for the occasion, bless his pointy little hat. Bishops. Can’t live with ‘em, can’t function without ‘em. Teasing aside, the three part preaching series on 1 Cor 15 I had planned to preach has to be reduced to two parts and next week we will combine the next two epistle lessons and read them as one. Confused? Good! So am I. On the up side this will actually serve us well (at least it will the preacher) because as we shall see, Christ’s Death and Resurrection have to be viewed as two sides of the same saving coin. It is a mistake for Christians to see them as separate events or functions and this morning I want us to focus on Christ’s Death. Why is it essential to our faith to have a robust theology of the cross?
St. Paul tells us right out of the blocks. “…I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Cor 15.3). This is a central NT proclamation and this is where many of us start to get uncomfortable because we don’t like talking about Sin, especially our own. The Church in the West over the last 150 or so years has worked very hard to decouple the cross from human sin but the NT writers will have none of it and so we must look at the problem of Sin if we ever hope to have a theology of the cross that will sustain us even in our darkest hours.
But first some operational definitions. Sin is not so much a collection of misdeeds as it is an active, malevolent force bent on utterly undoing God’s good creation and purposes—living to reflect God’s glory and goodness. Sin enslaves and kills us. It makes us sick and hostile and alienated toward each other and God. And when we are alienated from God and our relationship with him is totally disrupted as only Sin can do, we die because life is only found in God. Sin is emphatically not about making bad choices as many have falsely asserted. Misdeeds and bad choices are more symptoms of the real evil of Sin and any such talk serves only to confuse our thinking about the seriousness of human sin and our bondage to its power. Sin is a universal human affliction, enslaving us as the result of our first ancestors’ Fall. It has so completely enslaved us that we are powerless to break its grip on us, hard as we might try. If you doubt that, how are your new year’s resolutions going, five weeks into the new year? If we can break free from Sin’s power over us on our own, then why are there so many gluttons and drunks and addicts of all kinds and adulterers and dishonest and unhappy people? Yet over and over we return to the filth of our sin, demonstrating its death grip on us. But here’s the thing. Despite being a universal human affliction, Sin is a theological concept so that only those who have an awareness of God can be aware of their sinfulness. We see it all the time from the self-righteousness of the godless who help make up the social media lynch mobs. We see it in the lunacy of sexual or racial identity. We see it in the celebration of unbridled greed and all kinds of hardheartedness. Anyone who does not know or believe in God has no concept of sin because he/she has little to no knowledge of the Holy. This is not to say that these folks are sin-free. They most certainly are not. They simply aren’t aware of their predicament and deadly peril.
We see this notion of sin as a theological concept at work in our OT and gospel lessons this morning. When the prophet and St. Peter become aware that they are standing in the presence of the Holy, they immediately become aware of their own sinfulness, a sinfulness that their enslavement to Sin’s power has produced. It is almost as if this awareness was built into their very being. They knew instinctively that they were standing in the presence of the Holy and their sin stain was made painfully obvious to them as it will be to us when we stand before Christ’s judgment seat, if not sooner. As we saw several weeks ago, this was the whole purpose of the Tabernacle/Temple system—to allow the profane to enter into the Holy’s Presence without it becoming fatal.
Finally, sin always produces guilt in terms of breaking God’s law and/or violating the created order. It is not the same as “feeling guilty” nor does that guilt necessarily coincide with personal feelings of guilt which are determined mainly by our own awareness of God and his holiness; the more aware we are of who God is and God’s desire for us, the more our personal sense of guilt will likely be and vice versa. And because we are powerless to break free from our enslavement to Sin’s power, we must understand—and this is critical for our faith—that only God can supply the remedy to Sin to end our guilty status before him because only God is more powerful that Sin’s power. In other words, we must be liberated from Sin’s power by an even greater power, the power of God. And now we are ready to talk about why it is essential for us to have a robust theology of the cross, that it both atones for our sin so we can be healed and reconciled to God our Father and is seen as the sign of Christ’s victory of over the powers of Sin and Death.
Up to this point we have only been talking about bad news and if you are feeling depressed by what we have said that is understandable. The human condition is a depressing situation without the help and mercy of God. We need to look no further than the madness and lunacy that swirls around us and within us in our increasingly unhinged and godless society. But it is to the glory of God that the bad news will not have the final say. The dark powers that have enslaved us to the power of Sin—an impenetrable mystery itself—have already been defeated on Calvary. That is why we call it Good Friday, not Bad Friday! We will never be ready to hear the Good News of Jesus Christ if we do not understand and accept the bad news of the human condition left unaided, hard as that is to hear. It is a terrible thing to live in a cursed world and the gospel is our only real hope and solution for our predicament. The gospel is not a good idea or a good theory. It’s Good News because something happened that changed the world in which we live and if you do not believe that, you have no gospel at all and are much to be pitied. When St. Paul talks about Christ dying for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, he probably has more in mind than just Isaiah 53 and a handful of other OT proof-texts. He is talking about the strange power of God (to us ) at work to free his originally good creation from the corrupting and death-dealing powers of Evil and Sin. Of course consistent with his creative purposes, God chose to do this primarily through human agency, first in his call to Israel and then through Christ, the one faithful Israelite. God did and does this for us because God loves us. That is the essence of the meaning of Christ dying for sin. God could have chosen to utterly destroy us because of our sins. Instead, God chose to become human and die for us to to bear his own wrath on our sins to spare us and reconcile us to himself so that we could be reconnected to our life support system again. St. Paul describes this in various ways throughout his letters. He tells the Romans that despite our universal rebellion against God, God in his grace (undeserved mercy) freely makes us right in his sight through Christ’s Death, freeing us from God’s penalty for our sins. St. Paul also tells us that God did this for us while we were still God’s enemies or sinners (Rom 3.24-25, 5.8-10). He tells the Galatians that Christ gave his life for our sins just as God our Father had planned to rescue us from this evil world in which we live (Gal 1.4). And St. Paul told the Thessalonians that God chose to save us through Christ’s death, choosing not to pour out his anger on us. Christ died for us, so that whether we are dead or alive when he returns, we can live with him forever (1 Thess 5.9-10). Clearly St. Paul and the rest of the NT writers saw Christ’s death as truly sacrificial, atoning for our sins and thus sparing us from God’s terrible but deserved wrath. And this of course is for our own good. How can a loving God ignore the evil and sin and the suffering it produces in his world? How can we ever hope to enjoy life eternal in a world blighted by sin? But by dying for sin to spare us, Christ demonstrated God’s amazing love for us. We see this hope reflected in the following prayer on Christ’s passion by St. Brigit:
O JESUS, unfathomed depth of mercy, call to mind your grievous wounds that penetrated to the marrow of your bones and the depths of your soul. In memory of your piercings, O my Savior, turn the face of your anger from me and hide me in your wounds as wrath and judgment pass over me. Amen.
Christ’s Death helps us see clearly the terrible cost of our sin, but it also helps us see equally clearly the love, mercy, and power of God for us his image-bearers.
Not only did Christ’s sacrificial death spare us from suffering permanent death, it also broke sin’s power over us as St. Paul affirms in Colossians:
You were dead because of your sins and because your sinful nature was not yet cut away. Then God made you alive with Christ, for he forgave all our sins. He canceled the record of the charges against us and took it away by nailing it to the cross. In this way, he disarmed the spiritual rulers and authorities. He shamed them publicly by his victory over them on the cross (Col 2.13-15).
Here we are confronted with an enigmatic truth we are called to believe by faith. Christ’s sacrificial death (dying for sin) is the vehicle God used to free us from our sins. St. Paul and the rest of the NT writers never explain how this works, only that it does. And we all know it isn’t quite as simple as that as Romans 7 with its profound introspection and lament over sin indicates (and our own life experience confirms). Many believe this is an autobiographical testimony from St. Paul himself. Whether that’s true, the fact remains Romans 7 is a reality for many, if not most, Christians if we are honest with ourselves. Even though freed from Sin’s power by Christ’s death we all continue to struggle with sin to one extent or another. St. Paul acknowledges this further in Romans 6.7, telling us that no one is finished entirely with sin until we die. It is a testimony to the awful power of sin in our lives, even with Christ’s even more powerful help. Perhaps John Wesley sums it up best when he proclaimed that while sin remains in Christians, it no longer reigns as it did before we believed in Christ. Regardless of our difficulties and struggles with the residual of Sin’s power, we still must take heart and hope because it is the undivided testimony of the NT that Christ’s death on the cross both saved us from utter destruction and freed us forever from Sin’s power, although not completely in this mortal life. What wondrous love is this, my beloved? Is it a wondrous love you possess?
Of course, none of this would be possible if Christ were not raised from the dead. We will speak more about the resurrection next week in part two of this sermon series, but here we note simply that if Christ had not been raised from the dead, he would have died a criminal’s death in utter shame, dishonor, and horror, never to be heard of again, let alone remembered past those who knew him in his mortal life. St. Paul will tell us as much in our epistle lesson next week. The resurrection validated Christ for who he claimed to be: God’s Messiah and Son, who atoned for our sins and freed us from our slavery to Sin’s power. And because he is raised from the dead and rules from God’s throne room (heaven), we can have utter confidence that his cross is what the Church has always proclaimed it to be: an instrument of God’s saving love, grace, mercy, justice, and power.
So what should we do with this information? First, we should use it to put to death all the guilt that we carry with us. If we have confessed our sins and asked God’s forgiveness on them, we can have full confidence that God has forgiven us and we have the cross as tangible evidence if we need reminded of this astonishing love, grace, and mercy. There is no sin from which Christ’s blood cannot cleanse and heal us, God be thanked and praised. Second, Christ’s cross reminds us that sin is universal and all are enslaved to its power save for the blood of Christ shed for us. This exposes lies like CRT that posit only a segment of the population is guilty of sin, whether or not sin language is used. Before we are quick to condemn others, let us first look in the mirror and then kneel at the foot of the cross, seeking the Father’s humility and wisdom before we unleash our own “wisdom” and wrath on others. Last, the cross proclaims the astonishing love of God to us in no uncertain terms. God loves us and cherishes us. We dishonor him when we refuse to do the same, both to ourselves and to others, or when we refuse to accept God’s grace offered unconditionally to us through Christ’s Death. God’s love should always produce glad and grateful hearts in us, full of wonderment as to how God can love us at all given the human condition. The cross is God’s eternal witness to us that nothing in all creation can separate us from his great love made known to us in Jesus Christ our Lord. Let us embrace this love and remain firm in our faith and hope in it, rejoicing always, even in the most difficult of times. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever.
In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.