Today would have been my dad’s 103rd birthday. The mind boggles. Where has all the time gone???? He’s been dead for almost 22 years and I still miss him every day. Oh, don’t misunderstand. I know where he is and I am not unhappy for him because he is enjoying his well-deserved rest with the Lord as he awaits his new resurrection body. His mortal struggles that weighed him down so badly at the last are over, so no regrets there. Yet I am finding that with the passage of time and my own advancing age, my memories of him are not as many or as vivid as they once were and I am the poorer for it.
Having said that, I still do miss him—a LOT. I miss being around him and enjoying his company (neither one of us were real talkative but we enjoyed being in each other’s presence without having to say much). I miss his gentle humor and his great wisdom. I miss his huge heart and I REALLY miss his leadership of our family (with mom’s help of course 😎 ). I could sure use his sage wisdom these days and I often wonder what he would have thought about the spirit of lawlessness that seems to be enveloping our nation.
John F. Maney during WWII
Still, I remain thankful. God blessed me richly in giving me a father who loved me and served as a great role model for me and the community in which he lived. For that I am thankful and I try to conduct myself in ways that would make him proud. That’s easier said than done, however. Being who he was, my dad set the bar pretty high and I’m not nearly the man he was, much as I’d like to be.
So happy birthday, dad. I love you. You were and remain one of my greatest heroes. Thank you for giving me the greatest gift a son could ever want—you.
An excellent theological writing from Father Mullin. I especially appreciate his thoughts on the significance of Christ’s Presentation at the Temple for us as Christians. The good Father is clearly not ashamed of the gospel and faithful to it. Well done, good and faithful servant. Well done. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand—and be blessed by it if you do have ears to hear.
THERE are two great festivals in the Church’s calendar to lighten this season of darkness and lockdown. We have celebrated Epiphany already. Next comes Candlemas or The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, or, as the Book of Common Prayer also says, The Purification of St Mary the Virgin. The Americans celebrate something called Groundhog Day on February 2 in respect of their quaint belief that if the groundhog casts a shadow on that day, the winter will be prolonged. Which just goes to demonstrate the truth of Chesterton’s saying that when a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing: he believes in anything.
So, what is this ceremony with the baby Jesus and Mary his Mother about? They were of course a Jewish family and, according to the Law of Moses, women who had given birth were obliged to be ritually purified. This is ironic because Mary is the Immaculate Conception and so the only human being – female or male – who needed no purification, ritually or otherwise. Families presenting their offspring made a sacrifice of a lamb, if they were well off; if they were poor a pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons.
When Joseph and Mary and the baby Jesus entered the Temple, there took place a dramatic scene. Simeon, an old man, had been given the gift of prophecy from God. He was devout. The gospel tells us he was waiting for the consolation of Israel. That means the coming of the Messiah, the Christ. God had promised him that he would not see death before the Christ came. As soon as the prophet Simeon recognised Jesus as the Christ, he took him up in his arms. There must have been something strikingly holy about Simeon for Mary to let him hold the child. With the infant Jesus in his arms, Simeon utters those words which we repeat at Evensong as Nunc Dimittis:
‘Lord, now lettest thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: for mine eyes have seen thy salvation which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; a light to lighten the Gentiles and to be the glory of thy people Israel.’
Notice how radical Simeon’s prophecy is. Here they are in the most Holy place in all Israel, the Temple in Jerusalem, devout Jews strictly performing a Jewish rite of passage. And yet Simeon prophesies that the Jewish Messiah, the Christ whom he has just recognised at a few days old, is to be the Light of the Gentiles.
What did Mary and Joseph make of it all? St Luke’s gospel in the Prayer Book version says, And Joseph and his mother marvelled at these things which were spoken of him. That’s putting it mildly. The original Greek word for marvelled is thaumazontes – shocked to the core, overwhelmed by the wonder of it. A thaumaturge was a wonder-worker, someone who worked by spells and enchantment. So, when the gospel says they were thaumazontes it was as if they were enchanted.
Spring is just around the corner in Ohio — according to Buckeye Chuck, anyway.
Northeast Ohio’s weather-predicting groundhog, who goes by the name of Murray, did not see his shadow at an event on Groundhog Day. The animal, which lives at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, is taken to Marion every year on Feb. 2 to make his prediction, looking for his shadow in the likes of Punxsutawney Phil.
The event drew Buckeye Chuck fans out for the morning festivities, held this year at the Marion County Fairgrounds.
Murray’s prediction stands in contrast to the famous Punxsutawney Phil, who predicted six more weeks of winter from his event at Gobbler’s Knob in Pennsylvania.
What’s that crazy rodent know anyway? He’s from Pennsylvania for cryin out loud! Can anything good come out of PA??? ?
Pennsylvania’s “official state meteorologist,” Punxsutawney Phil, saw his shadow Monday morning, predicting six more weeks of winter.
Thousands of people gathered for the 140th celebration of Groundhog Day on Gobbler’s Knob in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to see the famous groundhog emerge from his tree stump.
Meanwhile, AccuWeather’s chief long-range weather expert, meteorologist Paul Pastelok, said the coming week will remain cold, with below average temperatures in the eastern United States.
“We’ve still got some more snow and ice to contend with” in the mid-Atlantic, Ohio River Valley and Northeastern U.S., he said.
The farther out you get the accuracy is not specifically on point all the time, but we can get trends,” Pastelok said about any long-range forecasts.
While Phil made his annual prognostication, the National Centers for Environmental Information remains a skeptic of the animal’s prediction ability. The government agency last year compared Phil’s record with U.S. national temperatures over the prior decade and concluded he was right only 40% of the time.
…Candlemas, a Christian holiday that remembers when Mary presented the Christ child at the Temple in Jerusalem and performed her purification (see below). Candlemas is also called the Festival Day of Candles, in which the parish priest would bless candles for use in the local church for the coming year and would occasionally send some of them home with his parishioners for them to use. It is one of the earliest known feasts to be celebrated by the Church.
Candlemas falls 40 days from the birth of Jesus because that is the day Mary would have completed her purification process as prescribed by the Law, which means that Candlemas always falls on February 2. It is the midpoint between the winter solstice and spring equinox and before there ever was a Groundhog Day (also observed on February 2), tradition held that when Candlemas fell on a sunny day, there was more winter to come. But when it fell on a cloudy, wet, or stormy day, it meant that the worst of winter was over. Check out the two Candlemas poems below and see if you recognize anything familiar in them:
If Candlemas be fair and bright, Come, Winter, have another flight; If Candlemas brings clouds and rain, Go Winter, and come not again. (Anonymous English poem)
If Candlemas day be dry and fair, The half o’ winter to come and mair, If Candlemas day be wet and foul, The half of winter’s gone at Yule. (Anonymous Scottish poem)
For you Christmas junkies out there, tradition also holds that any Christmas decorations not taken down by Twelfth Night (January 5) should be left up until Candlemas and then taken down. Candlemas also officially marks the end of the Christmas and Epiphany seasons, seasons in which the Church celebrates Christ as being the light to the world.
The Fortieth Day after Epiphany [Candlemas, February 14] is observed here with special magnificence, On this day they assemble in the Anastasis [Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem]. Everyone gathers, and things are done with the same solemnity as at the feast of Easter. All the presbyters [priests] preach first, then the bishop, and they interpret the passage from the Gospel about Joseph and Mary taking the Lord to the Temple, and about Simeon and the prophetess Anna, daughter of Phanuel, seeing the Lord, and what they said to him, and about the sacrifice offered by his parents. When all the rest has been done in the proper way, they celebrate the sacrament and have their dismissal.
Spot on and full of humility. For those with ears, especially church leaders and theologians, listen and understand.
The catechism is not enough, theology is not enough, formulas are not enough to explain the Unity and Trinity of God.
We need loving communication, we need the presence of the Spirit.
That is why I do not believe in theologians who do not pray, who are not in humble communication of love with God.
Neither do I believe in the existence of any human power to pass on authentic knowledge of God.
Only God can speak about himself, and only the Holy Spirit, who is love, can communicate this knowledge to us.
When there is a crisis in the Church, it is always here: a crisis of contemplation.
The Church wants to feel able to explain about her spouse even when she has lost sight of him; even when, although she has not been divorced, she no longer knows his embrace, because curiosity has gotten the better of her and she has gone searching for other people and other things.
The revelation of a triune God in the unit of a single nature, the revelation of a divine Holy Spirit present in us, is not on the human level; it does not belong to the realm of reason. It is a personal communication which God alone can give, and the task of giving it belongs to the Holy Spirit, who is the same love which unites the Father and the Son, who is the same love which unites the Father and the Son.
The Holy Spirit is the fullness and the joy of God.
It is so difficult to speak of these things. We have to babble like children, but at least, like children, we can say over and over again, tirelessly, “Spirit of God, reveal yourself to me, your child.”
And we can avoid pretending that knowledge of God could be the fruit of our gray matter.
Then, and only then, shall we be capable of prayer; borne to the frontier of our radical incapacity, which love has made the beatitude of poverty, we shall be able invoke God’s coming to us, “Come, creator Spirit!”
O God, we thank you for all those in whose words and in whose writings your truth has come to us. For the historians, the psalmists, and the prophets, who wrote the Old Testament. For those who wrote the Gospels and the Letters of the New Testament; For all who in every generation have taught and explained and expounded and preached the word of Scripture; We thank you, O God. Grant, O God, that no false teaching may ever have any power to deceive us or to seduce us from the truth. Grant, O God, that we may never listen to any teaching which would encourage us to think sin less serious, vice more attractive, or virtue less important; Grant, O God, that we may never listen to any teaching which would dethrone Jesus Christ from the topmost place; Grant, O God, that we may never listen to any teaching which for its own purposes perverts the truth.
O God, our Father, establish us immovably in the truth. Give us minds which can see at once the difference between the true and the false; Make us able to test everything, and to hold fast to that which is good; Give us such a love of truth, that no false thing may ever be able to lure us from it. So grant that all our lives we may know, and love, and live the truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. —From Prayers for the Christian Year by William Barclay
From the sermon archives. Sermon originally preached on Epiphany 3A, Sunday, January 26, 2020. As always, it will be helpful for you to read the assigned texts for the sermon first by clicking on or tapping the links below. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.
Lectionary texts: Isaiah 9.1-4; Psalm 27.1, 4-12; 1 Corinthians 1.10-18; St. Matthew 4.12-23.
In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
We all know what it is like to live in the darkness. But do we know what it is like to live in Christ’s light in the midst of the world’s darkness? This is what I want us to look at this morning.
Every one of us is afflicted by some form of darkness, whether imposed from the outside or from within. So what forms of darkness do you struggle with? For some it is the darkness of alcoholism or drug addiction. For others it is the darkness of pornography or gambling addiction. For still others it is the darkness of loneliness or alienation or the loss of important relationships and people once held so near and dear. Others live in the darkness of fear: we fear losing what we have, be it family and loved ones, or a culture and country we once loved but see crumbling around us. We fear bankruptcy, sickness, and death. The list is almost endless. For the people of the ancient northern kingdom of Israel it was the darkness of impending foreign invasion with its resulting destruction and displacement from the promised land, a sure sign that God had abandoned them. Many of us who live today have a similar fear of being rejected by God. We look at the good we’ve done but we also see the evil we’ve committed. Every one of us knows we have the capacity to betray ourselves—our highest values and all the good that we hold near and dear—in pursuit of the various idols our disordered hearts seek, even as we know we are capable of showing true sacrificial and noble love for the sake of others. To use the language of Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares, if we have the courage and humility to be honest with ourselves, each of us would be forced to admit that we are both wheat and tare in the field of God’s world.
At its root, the darkness that afflicts us, whether internally or externally, finds its origins in our alienation from God that resulted when our first ancestors rebelled against God in paradise. It makes us afraid and diminishes us as human beings, God’s image-bearing creatures who were designed to reflect God’s goodness and justice and love out into his creation to nurture and sustain it. It makes us sick and causes us to die. It makes us cry out to the Lord in desperation and pain, pleading with God to do something about it, and it makes us wonder if we really matter at all to God. End our alienation from God and the various forms of evil Scripture calls “darkness” must go away. But how to do that since none of us has the power to fully extricate ourselves from the darkness? Reality notwithstanding, we keep on trying and the problem is exacerbated when we try to self-medicate and/or find healing through our pursuit of various idols, just as God’s people Israel did all those centuries ago. We try to drown our sorrows to forget them. Or we pursue the idols of power, identity politics, security, wealth, and prestige to name just a few, thinking if we just make enough money or have the right connections and/or influence we can fix our various problems. We can’t. It’s not in our spiritual DNA as fallen human beings. We still remain alienated from God and each other.
There is only one hope for ending the darkness that afflicts us and it is announced by the prophet Isaiah and realized fully in Jesus Christ, God’s healing light to the world. Despite our ongoing rebellion against God, despite our relentless pursuit of self-help and its accompanying idols, God in his great mercy, love, and wisdom has acted on our behalf to end the root cause of our alienation from him so that we can one day be fully healed and freed from the power of darkness. And how did God do this? God sent his own Son to die for our sins, for the ongoing darkness that our rebellion helps create and sustain. In the cross of Christ we see the wisdom and power of God to save for those who believe in this kind of unheard of power. On the cross, God took the collective darkness of the world, your darkness and mine along with everyone else’s over time and culture, and condemned it in Christ’s body nailed to the tree. Doing so allowed God to condemn the darkness without condemning us. St. Paul puts it this way in his letter to the 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. You have died with Christ, and he has set you free from the spiritual powers of this world (Colossians 2.13-15, 20a, NLT).
Did you catch the breathtaking promise in St. Paul’s bold proclamation? God himself has acted unilaterally on our behalf to end our alienation from him. On the cross God has broken the dark powers’ grip over us. We are no longer enslaved to the darkness because of the blood of the Lamb shed for us. Death is no longer our destiny. In Christ we are set free to be truly human beings.
God used an instrument of shame and human degradation to heal our relationship with him and restore us to himself. God broke the power of darkness in this manner because to fight darkness with darkness is to already be defeated by the darkness and God could not let that happen. Shock and awe along with a final fearsome judgment will come, but not before God gives us time and a real chance to be rescued from his final just condemnation of the darkness that has plagued and corrupted God’s beloved creation and creatures. God did not wait for our approval or for us to ask him to help us in this way. In fact, as St. Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, God acted on our behalf to break the darkness while we were still his enemies (Romans 5.1-11). There is no greater love than this and it shows the depth of God’s love and mercy for us, along with God’s desire for real justice to be executed on all the darkness perpetrated against God and his people. This is why St. Paul was so adamant that God’s people in Christ make the cross our central focus and purpose of living. Without it we are dead men and women walking, alienated from God and utterly without hope. With and through the cross, we are forgiven and reconciled to God the Father with the expectation (hope) of being fully forgiven right now and the complete restoration that accompanies eternal life in the future. This is the power and wisdom of God made known in the cross.
But here’s the thing. While we have been rescued from eternal death and destruction, and while God has broken the enslaving power of darkness on the cross, the powers have not been totally vanquished. They are still quite active. Neither are we fully healed, even though we have been fully reconciled to God the Father through the cross of Christ. Remnants of sin still remain in us. The promise of new heavens and a new earth are yet to be fully realized. We call this living in “the already-not yet.” Christ has won the victory for us and we are no longer God’s enemies and children of hell (the already). But the victory is not yet fully consummated and won’t be fully realized until our Lord’s return (the not yet). This can create some interesting ambiguities in us and our lives, and apparently those ambiguities have been with us from the get-go as our epistle lesson attests.
In the church at Corinth various destructive factions had formed around its leaders that threatened to tear apart the church. Christians there were reverting back to their various idols, in this context striving for the idol of human power to impose their will on their fellow Christians. This idol is often driven by human pride and St. Paul would have none of it. Don’t you know that you are emptying the cross of its power by seeking other idols, he roared? Christ died for your sins and has stripped away your slavery to the darkness. You are rescued and restored to God. It’s a free gift to you won by God himself and given to you in your baptism when the free gift was fully bestowed upon you. When you look at the cross you must see that humility and love must rule your lives, not self-gain or the delusion of self-help. The cross demands that you seek to put to death your darkness (the only darkness you have control over) in the power of the Spirit, not to win the light of your salvation, because it has already been won for you and you are freed from your slavery to sin. You must make the cross the focus and center of your life because it is the only way God can break the power of darkness over you and use you to be his light bearers. One day you will be fully healed and you will not be able to sin any longer because your bodies will be powered by the Spirit, not by your fallen nature. That’s in the future though. Right now, you have to fight the fight against the darkness and sometimes you will lose. But the war’s already been won for you when Christ died for you. Don’t throw away the victory God won for you. Don’t reject God’s great love and mercy for you.
St. Paul would tell us the same thing today and so did Christ in our gospel lesson when he announced that God’s kingdom was at hand, i.e., God’s promised light had finally appeared, but surprisingly in the form of Jesus. The proper response is to repent. But since our thinking about repentance is quite muddled, let us be clear about what repentance is and isn’t. Jesus wasn’t telling us to feel terminally rotten about ourselves. Why would he want us to do that, especially since the kingdom of God with its healing and exorcisms had come near? Repentance doesn’t mean a call to self-condemnation, my beloved, because self-condemnation is categorically different from feeling remorse over our sins and transgressions. Repentance is about changing our way of living and our orientation of life. Instead of focusing inward and making it about us, Christ calls us to focus again on the love and goodness of God made known in him. In other words, repentance is about doing, not feeling. Christ calls us to focus on his life-saving death and resurrection, along with the many signs of power he did in his earthly ministry. Doing so reminds us we need the grace of good sense and humility to acknowledge our utter helplessness to free ourselves from our slavery to the darkness and acknowledge that God through Christ alone has the power to free, to heal, to restore, and to save. Repentance also allows us to live with the ambiguities of the already-not yet, believing the promises of God made known in the Good News of Jesus Christ.
And to further help us live in the already-not yet, we take another cue from our Lord when he called his first disciples. In doing so, Jesus reminds us that discipleship is always to be lived out together as his newly-formed family so that we can love and support each other. In doing so, we are helped to remain confident that the power of darkness is broken over us even as it remains abundantly active in the world. And so we continue to act faithfully, even in the face of multiple ambiguities, knowing that we are rescued and healed and loved and restored by a love that simply is beyond our full comprehension. We believe this because we believe in the power and wisdom of God.
So what does that look like? When we keep the cross as our central focus, we are reminded that each of us has good and evil in us and that Christ died for the ungodly, for all of us. When we take this to heart with the Spirit’s help, it must change how we interact with others. No longer can we hate anyone since Christ died for those we despise and who despise us, and so we must treat them with circumspection and charity. What if Christians in this nation took that mindset into the political arena this year? Instead of posting hateful, shameful things about those with whom we disagree, we greet them with charity and a willingness to openly debate issues rather than lobbing ad hominem attacks on them. Think what would happen if instead of blaming and shaming our enemies, we seek to find real justice and solutions for them, remembering that Christ died for them as he did for us. If the Church would behave this way in the secular world, we are promised that the light of Christ will shine through us to bring God’s healing to bear. What an Epiphany proclamation that would be! As we near the end of this season of Epiphany and prepare for Lent, let us as Christ’s holy people resolve to focus on the power and wisdom of God made known in the cross of Christ by taking up our own cross, denying ourselves, and following him. Only then can we beacons of Christ’s light and not bearers of darkness. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever.
In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
From the sermon archives. Sermon originally preached on Epiphany 2A, Sunday, January 19, 2020. As always, it will be helpful if you read the assigned texts by clicking on or tapping the links below before you read the sermon. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.
Lectionary texts: Isaiah 49.1-7; Psalm 40.1-11; 1 Corinthians 1.1-9; St. John 1.29-42.
In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
So who is this mysterious servant about which Isaiah speaks in our OT lesson and what does that possibly have to do with us who try to live faithful Christian lives today? This is what I want us to look at this morning.
In today’s OT lesson we encounter the second of the four so-called “Servant Songs” fulfilled in Jesus Christ. We heard the first song last week in Isaiah 42.1-9. So who is the servant in today’s lesson? In v.3 the Lord identifies Israel as the servant only to identify him as an individual God has chosen from birth to rescue Israel from their collective sin-sickness two verses later! To help us make sense of all this, we need to quickly review the unfolding story of salvation contained in the old and new testaments. There we learn that God created his creation and creatures, declaring it all to be good. Scripture makes it crystal clear throughout that creation matters to God. Furthermore, God created humans in his image to run his creation wisely and lovingly on God’s behalf—that’s what it means in part to be God’s image-bearers—but our first ancestors didn’t quite get the latter part of that memo. They wanted to rule God’s world on their own; they weren’t interested in ruling on God’s behalf and we’ve followed their lead ever since. All this got us booted from paradise and resulted in God’s curse on his creation. As St. Paul tells us in Rom 8.18-25, all creation groans under the weight of its slavery to the outside and hostile powers of Evil, Sin, and Death that human sin unleashed as it waits for God’s children—that would be those of us who give our lives to Christ—to be redeemed at Christ’s Second Coming. I don’t have to explain further. We all have groaned many times under the weight of our own sins and folly and from God’s good world gone terribly wrong.
But because God cares for his creation and us and wants to free us from all that oppresses us and weighs us down, especially from the powers of Evil, Sin, and Death, God chose to rescue his good world and us from the clutches of the dark powers. Fittingly God chose to do that through human agency, specifically through his people Israel whom God called and formed through Abraham and his descendants. But Israel was as broken as the people they were sent to help heal; and now we return to our OT lesson. God still chose Israel as the human agents to bring his healing love to broken and hurting people and nations, but Israel had to first be healed before they could fulfill their mission. And so God called his servant to heal Israel and through Israel the world. Of course, we Christians believe Jesus Christ was and is that servant and Israel is now reconstituted around those who follow Christ, both Jew and Gentile. The NT calls this reconstituted Israel the Church but the most important thing for us to remember is that Christ is the servant who will bring healing to Israel and ultimately to the world.
And how will he do that? St. John tells us in our gospel lesson when he tells us that John the Baptizer recognized Christ and declared him to be the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. John knew this because God had told him how to recognize the Messiah or Christ and John proclaimed Jesus to be the Christ to his followers. As it turned out, the Servant would be God himself, God become human to rescue us from our slavery to Sin and the inevitable death that our sins produce. For his contemporaries, John’s declaration that Jesus was the Lamb of God would have had clear Passover implications. Passover, of course, was the main Jewish festival that celebrated God’s rescue of Israel from their slavery in Egypt. Jesus, as St. John and the rest of the NT writers proclaim, will bring about an even more powerful and dramatic release by rescuing his followers from our slavery to Sin and Death and reverse the curse under which the entire creation labors.
But why does this matter? Why do we need to know about the Servant and his songs? Well, besides the obvious—after all, being rescued from an eternal death separated from God forever and the hell that that separation brings is no small gift to us—in Christ the Servant we find our ultimate healing and peace because we know that our sins are forgiven and we can enjoy a real relationship with God the Father won for us by the death of his Son. And with that forgiveness comes real healing and health so that we are made ready to be servants of Christ who engage in the ongoing work of healing and redemption in the power of Spirit. More about that anon.
But we want to protest. That is ridiculous! We don’t feel healed! We still labor with our guilt and doubts and fears, and many of us sure don’t feel forgiven! Nor do we act the part on a consistent basis. Well, my argumentative friends, you are in good company because the promises we read today in our OT lesson were written for a people who would be living in exile, for them the ultimate punishment of God, and it would seem incredible and even arrogant on the part of the prophet to make such promises. How could they as God’s chosen people be God’s light to the nations to bring God’s healing love and relief to them when they were held captive themselves. Ridiculous!
But the promises and faithfulness of God are not to be denied and we would be wise to reconsider our protests because God’s rescue plan looks beyond what is seen and what may seem to be utterly futile to that which is unseen and unexpected as Father Bowser preached so well last Sunday. Never underestimate the power of God to surprise and rescue and restore. After all, we worship Jesus Christ, crucified and raised from the dead to rule forever and ever by the power of God.
Here is where our epistle lesson can help us. In his first letter to the church at Corinth, St. Paul begins by telling the Corinthians that they are God’s saints, NT code for being holy people. Being holy in the NT means that we are called by God to be his servants organized as the one holy, catholic (universal) and apostolic Church to bring his healing love to the world around us. Holiness does not mean we walk around with halos over our heads or that we spend 24/7 reading the Bible and praying (although those activities must be central in our lives if we ever hope to fulfill our mission as God’s servants in Christ). Holiness means we act like Christ to show the world a better way of living. Every time we forgive when forgiveness is unwarranted, every time we work to establish justice for those who have been denied it, every time we work to help the most helpless and needy in the world around us, every time we work for peace and not for rancor, and every time we proclaim in our deeds and speaking that Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, we fulfill the Servant’s role as Christ’s servants. If you are doing these things, however imperfectly you do them, you are being a holy person despite being the losers you are. But here’s the thing. We cannot and will not do any of this on our own power. We do these things in the power of the Spirit. Without the Spirit’s help and presence we are incapable of these behaviors because Sin is so deeply ingrained in us. Neither are we likely to engage in this work if we think we are still under God’s condemnation for our sins and therefore feel alienated from God (those who believe this know who you are) so that we suffer anxiety and live in fear, hard as we try to suppress and deflect it. Even those of us who have accepted God’s forgiveness won for us through the blood of the Lamb want to protest from time to time along with those who haven’t. We do that stuff you just talked about (OK, not real well but we try to make a good effort) but nothing seems to happen. We’re still a hot mess emotionally, spiritually, mentally, and physically (the latter especially if we’re enjoying Geezerdom in all its glory). Sure doesn’t feel like we’re holy or making any kind of difference.
To these complaints St. Paul would tell us the same thing he told the church at Corinth. Get over yourselves. It ain’t about you. It’s about the power of God working in and through you, a power made available to you by the Lamb of God. Look, I told the Corinthians they were God’s holy people and I wasn’t lying. This is the same bunch I also had to admonish for condoning a man sleeping with his stepmother, squabbling over leadership and turf, believers filing lawsuits against fellow believers, spiritual pride, and abuse of the Lord’s table to name just a few. Talk about a hot mess of a church! It almost rivals you at St. Augie’s! Despite all this St. Paul was bold to declare that they (and we) had every spiritual gift they (and we) needed to be Christ’s servants and assured them (and us) that they were (and we are) his servants. St. Paul understood better than most that the power of God at work is not always obvious and often shows itself in unexpected ways, but it is nonetheless stronger than our folly and fears and sins and shortcomings so that we need not fear or lament when we miss the mark. We are truly beloved by the Father because we have faith in the Lamb of God who takes away our sins so that we can find wholeness and healing and life, despite the travails of living this mortal life in a fallen world. That is why we are to await eagerly for Christ to return to finish his saving work. We don’t bring in the kingdom in full, only Christ can do that, but he calls us to wage war on his behalf by being his humble, faithful servants and embodying his great love for us in our lives. We cannot give what we do not have and that is why our healing that comes from a real sense of sins forgiven, undeserving as we are to receive it, is so critical to our discipleship.
The psalmist also has some useful insights to help us combat our doubts and fears as we live out our faith in the power of the Spirit. He tells us to remember the mighty acts of God in our personal lives and in the lives of God’s people. Do you stop to remember the many times God has answered your desperate prayers and made his presence known to you in the living of your days? Do you read Scripture to recall the new Passover of God won in Christ’s death and resurrection? If you don’t, you help close yourself to Christ’s healing love for you made known in Scripture.
Let me close by giving you a quick example to illustrate how God’s grace works in all this. I am ministering to a woman who is dying of cancer. She is in her forties and has a family who is shell-shocked and angry at this massive injustice that has been inflicted on their beloved mother, wife, and daughter. I have prayed ceaselessly for a mighty act of healing but it did not come and it is utterly heartbreaking to watch. I don’t know why God allows it or why God won’t answer our prayers. Here’s what I do know. Without Christ’s help in and through the power of the Spirit I could not bring myself to even visit her, let alone be her pastor. Whenever I feel overwhelmed and/or despondent, I remember God’s mighty power made known in Christ’s resurrection. I remember that if God can call into existence things that do not exist and give life to the dead, God will surely heal this woman when she enters his glory at her mortal death. And when Christ raises her on the Last Day and welcomes her into the new heavens and earth made possible by his death and resurrection, justice will be fully served. She will have new life, a new body impervious to illness and death, and she will be fully restored to God the Father who loves her and sent his Son to die for her so that she could ultimately live. She will also be restored forever with those whom she loves who died in the power and peace of Christ. Justice will be fully restored and the evil of cancer that resulted in an unjust and wicked death will be vanquished forever. None of this makes the work any easier and we will all grieve her death when it comes. But here’s my point. When I feel inadequate in ministering to her, when I feel helpless that I cannot heal her, when I feel anger at the injustice and evil inflicted on her, when I am weighed down by my own great sin, I remember the power of God and I am strengthened to do the work Christ calls me to do on his behalf. That same power is available to each and every one of you, my beloved. As we walk through our dark valleys and the messiness of our lives and faith, rejoice that we have a God who loves and honors us enough that he has acted decisively in and through his Son on our behalf to restore us to himself so that we can be his people and do the work he calls us to do. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever.
In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
From the sermon archives. Originally preached on Epiphany 2C, Sunday, January 16, 2022. As always, it will be helpful for you to read the assigned texts below by clicking/tapping their respective links. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.
Lectionary texts: Isaiah 62.1-5; Psalm 36.5-10; 1 Corinthians 12.1-11; St. John 2.1-11.
In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
What are we to make of that strange but compelling story about Christ changing water into wine at a wedding in Cana? What might we learn from it as Christians who seek to be faithful disciples of our Lord in a world going increasingly mad? This is what I want us to look at this morning.
We come to our gospel lesson by way of our OT lesson. In it we note the desperation in the prophet’s voice as he resolves to give God no rest until God makes good on his promise to restore his people. In last week’s OT lesson—which Tucker ignored because he’s a Loser and likes to make my preaching job more difficult, but I digress—God himself had promised to end his people’s exile in Babylon and restore them to the promised land (Is 43.1-7). Now here we are, several chapters later in Isaiah, and God had apparently not fulfilled his promise to Israel to end their exile. And we all get what this is about because we too are waiting for God to consummate his promises to us in Jesus Christ. Simply put, between the increasingly insane demands and lies of wokery, the strident language coming from our leaders, and the ever-increasing division, rancor, and lawlessness in this nation, we are flat worn out. Now depending on how we view God—whether we think God is fundamentally for or against us—this waiting can cause us to lose hope and/or stop believing that the promises of God to liberate us and his good creation from the powers of Evil, Sin, and Death are true. Neither is a good choice for us as Christians because then we are effectively calling God a liar. Others of us want to roll up our sleeves and work harder to bring in the Kingdom on earth as in heaven to get things moving in the right direction. Notice carefully that Isaiah did none of these things. Instead, he resolved to persevere in prayer like the persistent widow in Jesus’ parable (Lk 18.1-8).
Why am I spending time with this? Because if we lose hope or stop believing the promises of God or attempt to take matters into our own hands, we will eventually be defeated by the dark powers and/or our own fallen nature. If in the end we do not have a vision of God’s new heavens and earth that is robust enough and extravagant enough to help motivate us to keep our eyes on the prize, our faith will always be in danger of being broken by the next setback or catastrophe that strikes us or the world in which we live. And we all get why this is a problem. Think about that prize in your life on which you set your sights, be it work or school or athletics or love or fame or whatever. It was/is big enough and compelling enough for you to do whatever you had/have to do to achieve it. You probably were/are wiling to endure any setback, persevere against all odds, and sacrifice mightily to achieve your prized goal. We need to strive likewise in our faith journey to help keep it strong and vibrant. As our Lord Jesus was fond of reminding us in many of his parables, if we are content to pursue the lesser things of life, how much more should we pursue the greater things of life, like eternal life in God’s new creation?
And now we are ready to turn to our gospel lesson today because it is the prize on which every Christian should set his/her sights, a foretaste of what is in store for us as God’s beloved and redeemed children in Christ. Before we begin, I want to clarify that when I just talked about pursuing a prized goal, I was certainly not suggesting that we are responsible for our salvation. Nothing could be further from the truth as we saw last week when we looked at the grace of baptism. Salvation comes solely from the Lord, but it does require a response—after all, faith is more than a set of convictions, it demands a response—and if we stop believing the promises of salvation in Jesus Christ, we no longer have the ultimate prize to look forward to because without Christ we are no longer God’s redeemed children.
In our gospel lesson, then, we see the first of seven “signs” in St. John’s gospel, seven being the biblical number for completeness. Signs in St. John’s gospel refer to Jesus’ miracles, but they are not just supernatural acts. They are significant acts that point us to something greater. Here we see the astonishing extravagance of God manifested in Christ at this wedding in Cana. The wine has run out, a social catastrophe that could have serious legal consequences for the host, and the mother of our Lord asks him to rectify the situation. Please observe carefully that nothing happened until the servants obeyed Mary’s command to, “Do whatever he tells you” (John 2.5). Remember that. At first our Lord apparently rebuffs his mother’s request (more about that later), but ultimately he delivers a whopper, producing the equivalent of 600-900 bottles of the finest wine!
So what is St. John trying to tell us? Among the many things we could talk about, first we note the theme of the wedding/marriage covenant, a biblical theme that denotes the gracious call of God to his people Israel in the OT and ultimately to all people in and through Jesus Christ. Of course this covenant also describes the intimate relationship between God and his people, a relationship broken by Israel’s sins and ours. No relationship in all creation is more intimate than the relationship between a husband and wife at its best. It is the restoration of this relationship that the prophet sees as the fulfillment of God’s promises for his people in our OT lesson (Isaiah 62.4-5). What could be better news for hurting and broken people who are alienated from God and each other, then and now, than to hear that God loves us as his spouse despite our infidelity? In this wedding/marriage theme we find security, belonging, protection, forgiveness, and healing, among others. And we are encouraged to embrace the love of God for us made manifest in his Son Jesus Christ and to be made new again in our relationship with Christ in and through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Of course, the wedding feast is an integral part of a wedding where we celebrate the newly-formed union of husband and wife because weddings are meant to be public affairs. Scripture celebrates likewise with its various images of the wedding feast or Messianic banquet where God’s people will celebrate their union with their rescuer and savior, the Messiah, whom Christians know to be Jesus of Nazareth. This theme is by no means an exclusive NT theme. Listen to this description of God’s great future banquet from an earlier chapter of Isaiah, a passage that is frequently read at funerals:
In Jerusalem, the Lord of Heaven’s Armies will spread a wonderful feast for all the people of the world. It will be a delicious banquet with clear, well-aged wine and choice meat. There he will remove the cloud of gloom, the shadow of death that hangs over the earth. He will swallow up death forever! The Sovereign Lord will wipe away all tears. He will remove forever all insults and mockery against his land and people. The Lord has spoken! In that day the people will proclaim, “This is our God! We trusted in him, and he saved us! This is the Lord, in whom we trusted. Let us rejoice in the salvation he brings!” (Isaiah 25.6-9, NLT)
We note here the extravagance of God’s grace and generous heart on display like it was when Jesus turned the water into wine. People of the world will gather at God’s banquet to celebrate their liberation from all the darkness of this world and to feast on the finest, well-aged wine and choicest meat, symbols of God’s good creation. None of us deserve an invitation but God invites us anyway. And those who have been given the grace of good sense to accept the invitation will celebrate the end of their exile and enjoy no second-rate food and drink—we are not talking metaphor here—but the finest food and drink from God’s storehouse of grace. St. John is pointing us to the same promise in our gospel lesson this morning, thus he calls Jesus’ action a “sign.” As the psalmist proclaimed in our lesson, God gives us drink from the river of his delights (Ps 36.8)!
Second, we note that in providing this finest wine Jesus tacitly approves things that make life meaningful and pleasant: relationships, sexual fidelity in the context of marriage, community, hospitality, meals, family, and celebration, to name a few. Contra to those who look for every reason to make our relationship with Christ a lifeless, dour, and grim experience, our Lord will have none of that nonsense in this story. When we are redeemed and healed by Christ, we have no reason to be dour and stingy. Christ gives our mortal life meaning and purpose, even as we live in the darkness of a fallen world and our sinful desires. When we love each other and work at developing healthy and wholesome relationships with all kinds of people, especially the people of God, the promise of this story is that we will find abundance and delight in doing so because we obey Christ. Engaging in the above activities is part of living the abundant life our Lord told us he came to bring (Jn 10.10). Nothing else will do it for us. No one other than Christ can give us the joy of love and the delight found in giving generously of our time, talents, and resources for the sake of others. To be sure, there is plenty in this world to make us sad and beat us down. But the hope and promise of having a real and lively relationship with our risen Lord can overcome the darkest darkness because it reminds us that life, wholeness, health, goodness, and abundance are the reality, not scarcity, sickness, alienation, hurt, or death, thanks be to God! Can I hear an Amen??
Last, the foretaste of the Messianic banquet that will be ongoing in God’s new creation reminds us to keep our eyes on Jesus the prize because the ordinary things of this life will be transformed when he returns and made more beautiful and abundant than we can ever imagine, just like the new wine Jesus made. Think about the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen—husbands, this is a good time to turn to your wife and tell her she is that most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen, it’s a good old-creation, anti-doghouse practice—and then try to imagine things more beautiful and abundant than that, i.e., try to imagine the unimaginable. This will give you a clue as to what awaits us in God’s new heavens and earth. I don’t know all that that entails, but I do know that our resurrected bodies will be inexpressibly beautiful and without defect or sickness or any kind of malady. We will drink the finest wines without becoming intoxicated and we won’t desire to become intoxicated because we will be enjoying unbroken communion and fellowship with God the Father and the Lamb. There won’t be an addictive or lonely bone in our new body. The intimacy we enjoy only partly now, we will enjoy in full then. We won’t worry about being unloved or abandoned by God or others because we will be living in the light of God’s presence and the Lamb’s forever! I’m sure my puny imagination does not do justice to God’s new heavens and earth in trying to describe our future life. But one thing is certain, we get a glimpse and foretaste of the extravagant love and generosity of God in this first sign at Cana.
Our breathtaking future, of course, is made possible by the final sign in St. John’s gospel. Spectacular as this first sign is, the most powerful sign of Jesus is his death and resurrection, where the dark powers are broken and our slavery to Sin with its attendant sickness and alienation are forever destroyed. When Jesus told his mother that his hour had not yet come, he wasn’t pointing to his death, but later in the gospel this was the hour about which he consistently spoke, the hour that couldn’t happen before its time. Without Christ and his sacrificial death and resurrection, we have no future on which to keep our eyes focused because we would still be living in our sin and death would therefore remain unconquered (it’s no coincidence that St. John tells us this creation of new wine happened on the third day). Without Christ’s death and resurrection we would have no motivation to live in the manner he calls us to live. Thankfully, because of God’s extravagant love for us, we do have a real future and hope to sustain us in the midst of our darkness and sorrow (cf. Jeremiah 29.11). When we obey Christ, we allow ourselves to live life and live it in the abundance of God’s extravagant love and grace first revealed by our Lord at Cana.
So what’s this all mean for us as Christians? First, as St. Paul reminds us in our epistle lesson, we are to celebrate in ongoing and diverse ways the gifts of healing, wholeness, and life given us by God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There is no reason for any Christian to live a joyless life, even in the midst of sorrow. Having a joy that is not contingent on the circumstances of life will go a long way in helping us deal with our sorrows when they come.
Second, we get a taste of the future real deal (new creation) each week when we come to the Table and feast on our Lord. That’s why we serve you fine port wine and bread. It It gives us a taste and preview of Christ’s banquet in the new creation where bitterness is no more. When you take in Jesus at the Eucharist, he should be sweet to your palate and leave you wanting more because of Who he is and what he has done for you. And here’s a little self-check to help you assess your hope in Christ: As you return from the Lord’s Table and/or when you leave worship, would people mistake you for wedding guests or party goers? If not, I challenge you to examine your new creation theology because chances are it is lacking in significant ways.
Last, it means we are to take our relationship with each other seriously and celebrate those relationships, along with our relationship with God, whenever we can. How we treat each other as family members matters to our Lord and it should matter to us. The relationships we enjoy are part of God’s extravagant love for us and we are called to both celebrate them and take them seriously. They help us flourish as God’s human image-bearers!
Let us therefore continue to pray for God’s kingdom to come in full on earth as it is in heaven and for Christ to give us the grace to be obedient to him so that we will never turn his extravagant wine into water on our watch. After all, the only reason we have to celebrate is God’s extravagant and gracious love for us made known supremely in Christ and him crucified. So go celebrate God’s Good News in Christ and make others wonder what is your secret so you can explain it to them. Maybe even invite them to have a glass of the finest wine with you at the wedding feast of which you are a part so that they too can experience the new eschatological joy you do. In doing so you will also find it to be the needed balm for your soul to help you transcend the death-dealing and soul-destroying business as usual of this world that wears us all out. Keep your eyes on the prize who is Jesus and dare to imagine the unimaginable world he promises to usher in, God’s new world that defies and transcends our deepest longings. To Christ be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever.
In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Sermon originally delivered on Epiphany 1C, The Baptism of Christ, Sunday, January 13, 2019. As always, it will be helpful for you to read the assigned texts by clicking/tapping their links before reading the sermon. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand. Please, for the love of God.
In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
As we do each year, we celebrate the baptism of Christ on this first Sunday after the Epiphany. Why do we do that? What’s the big deal about our Lord’s baptism and by extension our own? This is what I want us to look at this morning as we prepare to welcome a new member into Christ’s family here at St. Augustine’s.
In our OT lesson this morning, we find God’s response to his people’s ongoing sin and rebellion. In the previous chapter of Isaiah, as is typical in prophetic oracles, God has warned his people about his coming judgment on their sins. He formed and created them to be his light to a world riddled with sin and darkness. God called his people Israel to be his true image-bearers whom God would use to help restore his good creation and its creatures to their right minds so that God’s goodness and justice and health would reign instead of evil and sickness and death. But God’s people Israel had been just like the nations God called them to help heal. They had worshiped false gods and become like them so that instead of bringing God’s light and justice to a sin-sick world, God’s people brought the darkness and evil of false gods and now they faced God’s terrible wrath and judgment (Isaiah 42.18-25). If you are like me (God forbid), you listen to these judgment oracles and give thanks that we’re not the rotten people God is condemning in them, just like we do when we watch Dr. Phil or any program that showcases the human condition at its worst. We do so because it distracts us and keeps us from looking at ourselves in the mirror, and more importantly it keeps us from looking at ourselves in the light of God’s perfect goodness and righteousness. And we do all this because we are terrified of God’s just judgment on us. We know in our heart of hearts that we are no better than God’s people Israel who suffered the ultimate rejection and disgrace of exile because of their sins. We are no better than they were because the entire human race is held tightly in bondage to the tyranny of that outside and hostile force the Bible calls Sin. Try as we might to make ourselves better (itself a symptom of our sin-sickness), we fail because none of us is stronger than the power of Sin. Don’t believe me? How are those new year’s resolutions coming along? I’m willing to bet that even at this point many of them have already bit the dust or are well on their way to the dustbin.
Returning now to our OT lesson, we see that God has taken his rebellious people to the cosmic woodshed and warned them where their sins will lead, mainly exile and separation from God, the Source of all life. If that’s not enough to make us afraid, I don’t know what will, especially as we contemplate the fire of God’s just judgment that will ultimately make all things right again. This is not exactly Good News, my beloved. In fact, it’s just the opposite because we are all sin-stained. But just when we begin to have feelings of despair without hope, we hear these beautiful and comforting words from God himself, something that is massively important for us as we will see: “But now…” Hear God as he speaks to us: I’ve seen your sins, your folly, and your rebellion, this despite my constant love and faithfulness toward you. I’ve seen it all but I know you are powerless to rescue yourselves from your slavery to Sin and so I am coming to rescue and heal you of your sin-sickness. I formed you as a people and created you to be mine forever. So don’t be afraid because I have redeemed you. I call you by name; you are mine. Imagine that. I, the Creator God of this incomprehensibly vast universe, know you by name and love you, despite your insignificance in the grand scheme of things, despite your sins and rebellion against me. So don’t be afraid because I have the power to break your slavery to Sin, just as I rescued my people Israel from their slavery in Egypt. When you walk through the deep waters of life’s darkness and troubles, you will not be overwhelmed. You will not be afflicted by the fire of my judgment because I am the one who redeems you and will spare you from that judgment. Notice I did not say you won’t have to walk through deep waters or the fire of judgment. I am not promising to remove you from all the darkness of this world and yourselves that afflict you. But I do promise to rescue and redeem you, even if the darkness claims your mortal life. So don’t be afraid. I know you by name. I am with you, you are mine (Isaiah 43.1-2, 5a).
Were there ever more tender words in all Scripture than these? Were there ever more despair-shattering promises than these? There’s more. The Lord goes on to tell his people, us included because we belong to Christ, that they are precious in his sight, so precious and loved and honored that he will give nations in exchange for their lives, which God did, e.g., when he brought his people Israel out of Egypt and Babylon. But that is so OT. In Jesus Christ, God upped the ante. God demonstrated that he loves us so much that he gave his own dear Son, Jesus Christ, God become human, in exchange for our lives. And now we are ready to look at why Christ’s baptism is so important to us because in it we see the “But now…” God the Father commissions God the Son to begin his costly and life-giving work to rescue us from our slavery to the power of Sin and break its hold over us forever. Not only that, in Christ’s resurrection, God the Father promises to destroy our last and greatest enemy, Death, so that we can live in the hope of eternal life in God’s new creation, the new heavens and earth, in the Father’s direct Presence, just like we did before the Fall. God did all this, as St. Paul reminds us in Romans 5, even while we were still God’s enemies, alienated and hostile toward God. Because of our union with Christ through baptism and faith, we no longer fear God’s condemnation because God himself has borne it in and through his Son’s body (cf. Romans 8.1-4). The “But now…” has arrived.
And let’s be clear about what did and didn’t happen at Christ’s baptism. Our Lord didn’t get adopted at his baptism as good heretics throughout the years have proclaimed. We only need to read St. John’s wondrous prologue (John 1.1-18) to see that that dog don’t hunt. Neither was our Lord baptized to have his own sins forgiven as other geniuses have claimed. Christ was sinless and in his baptism he was commissioned to set us free from our sins by going to the cross and dying a terrible and utterly humiliating death so that we would not have to suffer the ultimate death of God’s final condemnation of our sins, thanks be to God!
Of course the dark powers, whose grip over us our Lord came to destroy, are not going down without a fight. We see it immediately in John the Baptist’s imprisonment that the Lectionary conveniently and unfortunately omits from today’s gospel lesson, and we see it in the continued attack on us as God’s people in Christ. This, combined with our own proclivity to sin, is what makes living the Christian life such a challenge at times. And it can also make us afraid. But the Lord himself tells us to fear not because he is with us and in his Son he has destroyed Sin’s power over us as well as the death it causes. This is more than just lip service, my beloved, because only the Lord has the power to overcome Sin and Death, and in Christ’s death and resurrection God has made good on his promise to us, a promise that we see beginning to unfold in Christ’s baptism. We don’t deserve any of these wondrous promises nor can we ever hope to earn God’s favor on our own. God did this for us out of sheer love, mercy, and grace so that he could restore his creation and creatures to life and health without destroying us. For you see, God created us for life and relationship with him, not destruction.That’s why today is a big deal for us who belong to Christ, and that’s why we celebrate Christ’s baptism every year.
As John the Baptist prophesied, our Lord Jesus has indeed baptized us with the Holy Spirit and with fire, and this separates believers and unbelievers as a winnowing fork separates the chaff from the grain. We have already seen the necessity of God’s good and perfect justice and Christ will execute that justice when he returns in great power and glory. In the meantime, as his baptism signals, Jesus has given his life in exchange for ours so that we no longer need fear God’s judgment, and he blesses us with the Holy Spirit to help us live the fully human image-bearing lives that God calls us to live so that we can reflect God’s goodness and glory to the world according to God’s original creative intention for us. As we’ve also seen, the world will largely reject us (along with the One who has rescued us) when we give our lives to Christ because sadly many people and systems love the darkness more than God’s light—humanity’s slavery to the power of Sin is universal— and this is the awful part of the winnowing process. No Christian should ever take joy or glee in this fact because we are here only by the grace of God, not our own merits. We remember that the darkness runs through each of us. But this opposition should never stop or deter us from proclaiming the saving power of our Lord Jesus and inviting others into a relationship with him that we enjoy. If we really do claim to love others, especially in light of what we know about the coming fire of God’s judgment, how can we do anything but proclaim Christ to them? Neither should it stop or deter us from living as our Lord Jesus lived and lives, hard as that is at times. If you want an example of what that looks like, look no further than how this parish has rallied around Ken and his family as they walked through the deep waters of Tanya’s untimely and tragic death. The powers did their best to destroy her but the promise of resurrection means that the powers ultimately will fail and will be destroyed forever one day as death is swallowed up in life. God’s perfect justice will prevail. This is the Good News of Jesus Christ because it announces God has seen our distress and despite our folly, God has acted decisively on our behalf so that we can live. There is no longer any need to despair once we have turned to the light of Christ in faith, despite the fact that our faith journey is often quite messy and convoluted. Take heart, my beloved. God is greater than our messiness.
This is why our own baptism is so important because it announces our birthright and inheritance in Christ, an inheritance of eternal life despite our mortal death, of health, of healing and wholeness, of reconciliation, of freedom, of redemption, of forgiveness. Those who are baptized are baptized into a death like Christ’s so that we can share in a resurrection like his as well. Our baptism proclaims God’s great love for us and fulfills God’s promise to give us his Holy Spirit so that we can live as truly human beings, free from our slavery to Sin and Death, free from the fear that can so badly oppress us. Our baptism doesn’t promise us a sin-free life. We all know better. What it does promise is that God is good to his word and has acted decisively in Jesus his Son to make us part of the family of the redeemed, and to help us overcome the darkness of this world and life in the power of his Spirit so that we have a real future and hope, a hope based on the love and power of God, who alone has the power to accomplish the impossible, thanks be to God! This is the promise young Eli will enter in a few minutes as he enters the waters of baptism, and it is reason for us to rejoice because we remember our own baptism and celebrate our rescue from the deep waters of Sin and Death and the fire of God’s perfect judgment, along with Eli’s. And that, my beloved, is Good News, the best news of all, now and for all eternity. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever.
In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
