Sermon delivered on Trinity Last A, Sunday, October 25, 2020 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 text: Romans 6.1-11.

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. 

Father Wylie was supposed to preach this morning but he called me Friday and left me holding the bag as usual. Something about not feeling like he wanted to preach, that he was too important for St. Augustine’s to be spending any time here. Well, actually he might have been exposed to COVID and so I told him to stay at home but I like my story a lot better than reality. Don’t we all? Today we celebrate another big day in the life of our parish family. We will be baptizing our young friend and beloved in Christ, Izro, into the body of Christ and I want to direct my sermon primarily to him. Of course the rest of you ragamuffins are welcome to soak up the great wisdom I will impart along the way.

Izro, you have made the wisest and best decision of your young life. You have decided to reject what St. Paul called the first Adam—the old man living in you despite your young age—and put on the second Adam, Jesus Christ himself. What does that mean? It means that you have decided you no longer want to be a slave to the power of Sin, that you have chosen life over death and no longer want to live your life in ways that demonstrate you are hostile to God by acting in ways that are contrary to his will for you as his image-bearing creature. Instead, you are declaring that you choose to follow Christ and be where he is because you believe him to be God incarnate, the only true reality and Source of life, and you want to live with God forever, starting right now. In biblical terms we call this repentance: you are turning from a life lived for yourself to a life lived for God. You are choosing to kill off in you all that makes you hostile and alienated from God, or as St. Paul puts it, you are crucifying your sinful nature (a lifelong practice), but you realize you cannot do this in your own power or strength. In choosing to be baptized you are declaring that you realize you must rely on the power of God working in your life in and through the Holy Spirit to help heal your sin sickness so that you can live as a fully human being and that your life orientation will point to something (or more precisely Someone) greater than yourself. You are also declaring that you realize this is a free gift from God despite your unworthiness to receive it, but receive it you will because it pleases God the Father to give it to you out of his great love for you. Hear what St. Paul has to say about all this in Romans 6:

[S]hould we keep on sinning so that God can show us more and more of his wonderful grace? Of course not! Since we have died to sin, how can we continue to live in it? Or have you forgotten that when we were joined with Christ Jesus in baptism, we joined him in his death? For we died and were buried with Christ by baptism. And just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glorious power of the Father, now we also may live new lives.

Since we have been united with him in his death, we will also be raised to life as he was. We know that our old sinful selves were crucified with Christ so that sin might lose its power in our lives. We are no longer slaves to sin. For when we died with Christ we were set free from the power of sin. And since we died with Christ, we know we will also live with him. We are sure of this because Christ was raised from the dead, and he will never die again. Death no longer has any power over him. When he died, he died once to break the power of sin. But now that he lives, he lives for the glory of God. So you also should consider yourselves to be dead to the power of sin and alive to God through Christ Jesus (Romans 6.1-11).

NLT

Now if you are like me and want to please God, you may find the first thing St. Paul says here to be puzzling. He asks rhetorically if we should “keep on sinning so that God can show us more and more of his wonderful grace,” developing an argument he began in Romans 5. Of course not, he roars in reply! We’ve died to sin. How can we keep on living in it?? I confess that’s a head scratcher for me, the power of God at work in me notwithstanding. Perhaps you want to say to him with me, “St. Paul, are you crazy? I still sin. I’m not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. How can you say I’ve died to sin?” To which St. Paul would reply, “It’s not about you Izro, it’s about the power of God at work in you.” That’s the key. The power of God working in you, invisible to our senses but there nonetheless. Your baptism is a visible and tangible sign of that power. That’s why we call it a sacrament: an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible reality.

St. Paul knew very well that being united with Christ does not make one a sinless person. But that is not what St. Paul is talking about. He is echoing what he wrote to the Colossians when he said that “[The Father] has rescued us from the kingdom of darkness and transferred us into the Kingdom of his dear Son, who purchased our freedom [from the power of Sin] and forgave our sins” (Colossians 1.13-14). This is the power of God at work in us to rescue us from sin and death and bring us into the kingdom of his promised new creation that one day will come in full at Christ’s return. God did this for us out of his great love for us. We did nothing to deserve this gift nor can we earn it. In our own right we are utterly broken, unworthy and incapable of living as God’s true image-bearers. This is what the power of Sin has done to us. But God loves us too much to let us go the way of eternal death and so God has acted decisively in Christ to break Sin’s power over us on the cross and transfer us into his new world via Christ’s resurrection. This is what grace looks like and your baptism signals, in part, your acceptance of that grace. We can’t earn God’s grace nor do we deserve a lick of it, but it is ours for the taking because of the power and love of God. What God wants, God gets and nothing, not even the power of Sin or the dark powers, can overcome God’s power made known and available to us through Jesus Christ our Lord. It’s a done deal, even if it may not feel like that to us. 

But Christ’s death and resurrection were not feelings. They were and are the objective reality. They made known supremely the power of God to intervene in our lives on our behalf to rescue us from ourselves, our foolishness, our folly, and our slavery to the power of Sin and Death. That is why St. Paul tells us to consider or reckon ourselves dead to sin. By this he meant for us to do the math, so to speak. When we do the math, we discover the sum of what is already there. For example, when we count the cash in the register, we learn what was there already. We don’t create a new reality; rather we affirm the existing reality. Christ has died for us and been raised from the dead to proclaim God’s victory over Sin and Death, and when we are united with Christ in a living relationship with him, St. Paul promises here that we too share in Christ’s reality, whether it feels like we do or not. Again, notice nothing is required of us except an informed (or reckoned) faith. We look at the reality of Christ’s death and resurrection and calculate it to be true so that we learn to trust the promise that has not yet been fulfilled is also true. 

How does this happen? St. Paul doesn’t tell us how, only that it does happen beginning with our baptism. When we are baptized we share in Christ’s death and are buried with him so that Sin’s power over us is broken (not to be confused with living a sin-free life, something that is not mortally possible because as St. Paul reminds us in verses 6-7, we are not totally free from sin until death). We have died to sin and can no longer live in it because we have been transferred into a new reality, God’s new world that was inaugurated when God raised Christ from the dead. So in our baptism we begin our new life with Christ (cf. 2 Cor 5.17), flawed as that might look at times. What St. Paul is talking about here is a matter of will. In ch. 8, he will talk about the power and presence of the Spirit in our lives to help us live after the manner of our Lord. Here St. Paul simply tells us that we have been given a great gift in the death and resurrection of Christ and through our relational union with him. Where Christ is, there we will be with him. If this isn’t Good News, I don’t know what is.

So you have died with Christ and are raised with him. You have been delivered from the dark dominion of slavery to the dominion of freedom and life and light, the Father’s kingdom. Now what? Well, for starters it means you no longer need to be afraid. You have peace with God, real peace, a peace that was terribly costly to God, and you also have life that cannot be taken from you. Sure your mortal body will die, but that’s nothing more than a transition until the Lord returns and raises you from the dead and gives you a new body to live in his new world. As a baptized Christian you have no reason to fear death because you believe Christ is the Resurrection and the Life (John 11.25) and you know that where he is, there you will be with him by virtue of your baptism that signals his great love for you and his power to rescue you from Sin and Death! It means you reject living your life in the darkness of sin. It means you reject false realities and are willing to speak out boldly against them. It means you are willing to love even the most unloveable people (and believe me, we are seeing more and more of them every day), starting with yourself. It means you are willing to speak out against injustices of all kinds. It means you have compassion for people, realizing they are without a Good Shepherd who will love and heal them just like he is loving and healing you, and so you are willing to share your baptismal faith with them. There’s more to this reality, but certainly not less. 

Your baptism also means you are welcomed into and agree to become part of the family of God in Christ, hopefully here at St. Augustine’s, because you understand God created you for relationships and that you cannot live out your Christian faith in isolation because that is how the world, the flesh, and the devil conspire to pick Christians off and get them to reject God’s free gift of life won through Christ. The power of God living in you is often made known in and through other people, and just as we rely on family to help us navigate the rough waters of life, so too must you rely on your parish family to help you stay the course. That means you agree to worship with us, study Scripture with us, feed on our Lord’s body and blood each week to have Christ himself nourish you, weep with us, rejoice with us, and everything in between. Your baptism is a tangible reminder that God the Father has claimed you in and through God the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit to make you Christ’s own forever. Like any healthy relationship, Izro, God will never force you to love him and gives you the freedom to choose whom you will serve. Today you declare you are choosing to serve Life and not Death and all that that entails. Congratulations, my brother. I couldn’t be happier for you. Glory to him whose power working in you is infinitely more than you can ask or imagine. Glory to him from generation to generation in the Church, and in Christ Jesus forever and ever.

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. 

Sermon delivered on Trinity 19A, Sunday, October 18, 2020 at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.

There is no audio podcast for today’s sermon.

Lectionary texts: Exodus 33.12-23; Psalm 99; 1 Thessalonians 1.1-10; St. Matthew 22.15-22.

It’s providential that we come to this passage this morning; just a few days before we are called upon to perform an important civic duty and vote.

We talk much about the duties that we are obligated to perform to our government. And it seems to me that, even if we don’t enjoy those duties, most of us recognize their importance and are very careful to keep them. We are careful to vote; and we are careful to respond when called upon to perform jury duty; and we’re careful to pay our taxes. And of course, we’re always grateful for those who rise up for our nation’s defense through the service of the military. We consider these to be among the most important obligations we can fulfill.

But what about our even greater obligations to God? Are we as careful to render to Him the things that we owe to Him as we are to render our obligations to our government? How careful are we to even know what it is that God says we owe Him? And what does it say about us when we are so concerned to carefully perform the duties that a temporal, human government obligates us to, while almost completely ignoring the even greater duties and obligations that the almighty God demands of us?

I believe that this morning’s passage touches on this whole matter. We should, of course, be very careful to perform our duties as citizens of the earthly government in which God has placed. But we should be even more careful to perform the greater duties and obligations we owe to the God of the universe—the God who made us for Himself, and who has absolute and complete Creatorship-rights over us.

To put it another way—a way that I’m sure you’ll recognize—we shouldn’t fail to render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; but we should make even more certain that we render to God the things that are God’s.

That, I believe, is the main point of this morning’s passage. It’s a passage that teaches us many important things; but the main thing I believe it seeks to teach us is that above all other obligations we have in life, we are obliged first to render to God His rights over us.

Here is todays gospel reading

Then the Pharisees went and plotted how they might entangle Him in His talk. And they sent to Him their disciples with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that You are true, and teach the way of God in truth; nor do You care about anyone, for You do not regard the person of men. Tell us, therefore, what do You think? Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” But Jesus perceived their wickedness, and said, “Why do you test Me, you hypocrites? Show Me the tax money.” So they brought Him a denarius. And He said to them, “Whose image and inscription is this?” They said to Him, “Caesar’s.” And He said to them, “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” When they had heard these words, they marveled, and left Him and went their way (Matthew 22:15-22).

I love this gospel for the less-than-noble reason: I love it whenever someone who is arrogant, and malicious, and crafty, gets knocked off their pedestal. I also love this passage for a good reason: it reveals the wisdom and authority of our wonderful Lord Jesus. No one ever made a fool of Him!

But this story isn’t given to us without a very good purpose. If the only lesson that there was to be learned from it was that no one should ever try to trap Jesus, that would certainly be profitable. But I believe there’s more for us to learn than just that.

The first thing we see in this question is that it was motivated by a desire to trap the Lord in His words. Matthew tells us, “Then the Pharisees went and plotted how they might entangle Him in His talk”. The word that Matthew uses—to “entangle”—is one that was used of the way a hunter trapped and ensnared an animal in order to take it captive. The means by which they intended to trap Him was through His own words; and the bate they proposed to use was this question. They had huddled together in order to craft the perfect question that would make it possible for them to bring Him before the authorities and discredit Him before the people—thus getting rid of Him without having to lay a hand on Him themselves.

And so, notice the trap they set for Him. They said, “Tell us, therefore, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?”

Now; you can be sure that this was a question that they had already been wrestling with between themselves. Obviously, the Pharisees would have answered “no”. They had to pay the taxes, of course; otherwise they’d have the Roman soldiers down on their necks. But they deeply resented doing so. It bucked against them; because every time they paid the required tax to the Roman government, it was a vivid reminder that they were not a free people. Here they were—God’s special people; but they were under the thumb of a pagan nation. The Roman tax was a real thorn in their sandals! And yet, the Herodians would have answered “yes” to the same question.

But this question was specially crafted to discredit our Lord before all the people. Think of it; if He said yes—that it was legal to pay taxes to Caesar—then the Pharisees could accused Him before the people, and say that He was not conquering Messiah that they had expected. And if He said no—that it was not legal to pay taxes to Caesar—then the Herodians could immediately reported Him to the Roman governor. What a clever question! What a great trap! If He simply said “yes”, He would lose. And if He simply said “no”, He would still lose!

“Jesus perceived their wickedness . . .” He said, “Why do you test Me, you hypocrites?”

And again; it would be a very bad move to miss the lesson here. We can very easily fool other people about what’s really in our hearts. Notice how Jesus puts the question back to them. He says, “Show Me the tax money”;

And Jesus held it up and asked, “Whose image and inscription is this?”

When they said the obvious—that it had Caesar’s image and inscription, then Jesus simply said, “Render, therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s . . .” It’s his coin. Give it back to him.

Now here’s where most people place the emphasis on this passage—in the first half of the Lord’s answer. I believe it’s absolutely legitimate to see in this the Christian’s duty to fulfill his or her proper obligations to the government under which God has called them to live. The Bible itself clearly teaches us this (Romans 13:1-7,and Peter 2:13-17)

Fulfilling our God-appointed obligations to the government, as good citizens, is a matter of bearing a good witness to our Lord before the world—to say nothing of it being a matter of obedience to our Lord Himself. I am, first, a citizen of My Father’s kingdom; but because I am a citizen of His eternal kingdom first, I am therefore obligated to be a good and faithful citizen of the temporal kingdom in which He has placed me—just as He has commanded me.

But it seems to me that we often put the greatest emphasis on that first part of our Lord’s answer; and fail to give proper attention to the greater issue expressed in the second part of His answer. In fact, the first part of His answer is there in order to serve as the object lesson of the second part of His answer—that we are to render “to God the things that are God’s”.

That second obligation, it seems to me, is what really brought the conviction down on those who were seeking to trap Him with their question. Matthew tells us that, when they heard His answer, “they marveled, and left Him and went their way.”

If they had given to God what first belonged to God, they would not only render to Caesar what was Caesar’s, but they would have also bowed down before the Lord Jesus Christ and pledged their first allegiance to Him.

So the question is: How careful are we to render to God the things that we owe to Him? This is a greater obligation than all others. How are we doing in terms of keeping it? Let me suggest a few ways that, I believe, state those obligations to us. This list is far from exhaustive; but it may be enough to get you thinking. Ask yourself, as I read these passages to you, how you are doing in rendering to God what belongs to God:

For one thing, you owe God honor. In Malachi 1:6, He says,

“A son honors his father, And a servant his master.

If then I am the Father, Where is My honor?

And if I am a Master, Where is My reverence?” (Mal. 1:6).

Or how about outside of the church building—and in the everyday business of life? You owe God a godly daily life. Micah 6:8 says,

With what shall I come before the LORD, And bow myself before the High God?

Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, With calves a year old?

Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, Ten thousand rivers of oil?

Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

He has shown you, O man, what is good; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justly, To love mercy, And to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:6-8).

What about your wealth. Everything that you have is a gift from Him; and you owe Him the rights to the first and best share. In Malachi 3:8-10, He tells the people of Israel;

He has shown you, O man, what is good; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justly, To love mercy, And to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:6-8).

What about your wealth. Everything that you have is a gift from Him; and you owe Him the rights to the first and best share. In Malachi 3:8-10, He tells the people of Israel;

“Will a man rob God?

Yet you have robbed Me!

But you say, ‘In what way have we robbed You?’ In tithes and offerings.

You are cursed with a curse, For you have robbed Me, Even this whole nation.

Bring all the tithes into the storehouse, That there may be food in My house, And try Me now in this,” Says the LORD of hosts, “If I will not open for you the windows of heaven And pour out for you such blessing That there will not be room enough to receive it” (Malachi 3:8-10).

You owe Him your service to His kingdom agenda. When it comes to all of the other concerns of life, Jesus tells us in Matthew 6:33;

But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you (Matthew 6:33).

You owe Him your personal holiness. 1 Thessalonians 4:3 says;

For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you should abstain from sexual immorality (1 Thessalonians 4:3).

He has a right to have you glorify Him with your whole being. 1 Corinthians 6:20 says;

For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s (1 Corinthians 6:20).

He has a right to your body. In Romans 12:1—after Paul’s long description of God’s work in saving us through faith in Christ—it says;

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy , acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service . . .” (Romans 12:1).

He has a right to your first love. In Matthew 22:37-40; Jesus was asked which was the greatest commandment. And He said;

“‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 22:37-40).

He even has the right to expect you to believe on His Son. In John 6:29, Jesus said,

“This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He sent” (John 6:29).

Dear brothers and sisters, it’s our duty to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s. But let’s be even more sure that we do the greater duty—to faithfully render to God what is God’s.

In the name of God the Father the son and the Holy spirit

Sermon delivered on Trinity 18A, Sunday, October 11, 2020 at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.

Father Wylie has been infected by the dreaded I-can’t-produce-a-sermon-transcript bug that has run rampant through the clergy types here at St. Augustine’s (only Fathers Madanu and Maney remain unafflicted). To listen to the audio podcast of his sermon, click here.

Lectionary texts: Exodus 32.1-14; Psalm 106.1-6, 19-23, Philippians 4.1-9; St. Matthew 22.1-14.