Sermon delivered on Maundy Thursday C, April 14, 2022 at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.

If you prefer to listen to the audio podcast of today’s sermon, click here.

Lectionary texts: Exodus 12.1-14; Psalm 116.1, 10-17; 1 Corinthians 11.23-26; St. John 13.1-17, 31b-35.

The gospel reading we just heard tells a familiar story. If you have been a part of the Church for a while, you know the events that took place on this night long ago, this Thursday night of Holy Week that we have come to know as Maundy Thursday. You know how Jesus washed His disciples’ feet, how He celebrated the first Eucharist with them, how He prayed earnestly in the Garden of Gethsemane and sweat drops of blood, how He was betrayed into the hands of His enemies who would torture Him, mock Him, and kill Him. 

This is an account with which many of us are well acquainted, one that we heard read in its entirety on Palm/Passion Sunday. But tonight, as we focus on John’s record of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet, let’s try to move past the familiarity and look at these events through the eyes of Jesus’ disciples so that we can see the shock and the scandal of what took place in the Upper Room that night.

Later this evening, if you come forward for one of our priests to wash your feet, it will probably feel foreign to you, something you do not experience often. But in Jesus’ day, foot washing was quite common. Because people wore sandals as they walked around dirt roads and filthy city streets, foot washing was a necessary part of personal hygiene. When you went indoors, you washed your feet. People would often have a basin of water at their front door for guests to wash their feet, and “in the home of prominent Jews, a slave was posted at the entrance of the house ready to loosen the sandal straps of those who entered and to wash their feet” (EBD, 390). Foot washing was considered such a menial, demeaning task that it “could not be required of a [Jewish] slave” (HIBD, 592).

This is where the scandal comes into play in our text. In v. 4, Jesus “got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself.” This is the garb of a slave. Jesus takes on the form of servant, and He washes His disciples’ feet (v. 5). We can understand Peter’s objection. We can hear the incredulity in his voice when he asks, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” (v. 6). Jesus was taking the social roles and cultural expectations of his day and turning them completely upside down. He was Rabbi, and these were His disciples, yet He was washing their feet. Remember, John the Baptist had said, “The one who is coming after me, I am not worthy to untie the thong of His sandal” (John 1:27), and yet here was Jesus, lowering Himself to loosen the sandals of other sand to wash their feet.

How could this be? Why would Jesus do this?  We’re not left to guess because Jesus tells us. He humbled Himself to set an example, to illustrate the kind of self-sacrificial love to which He calls His people. In vv. 14-15, Jesus says, “If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.” Similarly in vv. 34-35, Jesus says, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” This is where we get the name “Maundy Thursday”: from the Latin word mandantum, which means “commandment,” for the new commandment Jesus gave to us on that night.

But there is more going on here than serving as a model.  Notice that his passage begins with a long preface in vv. 1-3: Jesus knew His hour had come, He knew He was about to depart the world, He knew He about to go to the Father. And so, He got up from the table, took of his robe, tied a towel around His waist, and wash His disciples’ feet. This was a highly symbolic act, an image that would one day help His disciples understand and interpret what was about to happen. In v. 7, Jesus says, “You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” It would only be later—after Jesus’ death and resurrection—that the disciples would understand the full significance of the foot washing.

We could say Maundy Thursday occurred to help us understand Good Friday. The events of the Upper Room help us comprehend His work on the cross. Like the foot washing episode, Jesus’ crucifixion was a completely unexpected, paradigm-shattering event. At the beginning of Holy Week, Messianic expectations about Jesus had reached a fever pitch. As Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, He was heralded as a conquering King, the Promised One who would rescue Israel from its enemies.  No one would have expected that by that Friday, Jesus would be hanging on a cross, condemned to die between to common criminals. 

And yet this was exactly why Jesus came. Philippians 2:6-8 tells us that because of Jesus’ great love for us, He left the glory of heaven to clothe Himself in human flesh and to take on “the form of a slave . . . He humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross.” (Philippians 2:7-8). And it was precisely through His death that Jesus achieved victory for His people over their enemies—not the Romans, but the greatest enemies humanity has ever faced: sin, death, and the devil. Jesus’ washing of the disciples’ feet helps us to understand how this victory was possible.

The foot washing account points to how Jesus died to set us free from sin. When Peter refuses to allow Jesus to wash his feet, Jesus replies, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me” (v. 8). Jesus’ words point to the sin-sickness of humanity. The curse of sin infects every aspect of the human condition—our actions, our thoughts, and our motives. It distorts the way that we relate to God, to each other, and to creation. Try as we might to live rightly, in our own power, we cannot escape sins clutches. We are in bondage to it.

 But Christ came to set us free. Our Old Testament lesson (Exodus 12:1-14) points us to the first Passover. God instructed His people to slaughter a lamb a smear its blood on their doorposts so that their households would be spared from God’s righteous judgment, the plague He sent on all of Egypt, the death of the firstborn son. The lamb acted as a substitute, it died instead of the children of Israel.

It is no coincidence that Jesus’ death took place during the Jewish celebration of Passover; Jesus, God in human flesh, was the spotless “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). Jesus died in the place of sinners, paying the penalty we deserve for our sins so that we might be cleansed of our sin by His blood (1 John 1:7) and set free from our bondage to it. As Paul says in Romans 6:6-7, “We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is freed from sin.”

But sin is not the only enemy Jesus vanquishes on the cross. Through His death and His resurrection, Jesus put death to death. In our epistle lesson, Paul reminds of what took place after the foot washing. As Jesus & His disciples celebrated the Passover, He gave new significance to the elements of the meal, instituting the Lord’s Supper. Jesus said the bread was His body and the wine was “the new covenant in [His] blood” (1 Corinthians 11:24-25). Like the foot washing, the Last Supper pointed to Jesus’ impending death on the cross, that his body would be broke and His blood would be shed.

How shocking it would have been for the promised Warrior-King to undergo what appeared to be such a humiliating defeat? How backward and ridiculous it seems that God Himself, the Creator of all and Giver of Life, should die. But what seems foolish to humankind is the wisdom and power of God. Christ succumbed to death that he might overcome death. As the author of Hebrews put it, “Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, [Jesus] Himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.” (Hebrews 2:14-15).

This brings us to the final enemy that Jesus came to defeat: the devil. At the beginning of the foot washing account, John pulls back the curtain to reveal that there are sinister, cosmic forces at work in the world behind the scenes. It is the devil who has “put it into the heart of Judas” to betray Jesus.  Scripture affirms that Satan and His forces have been at work from the beginning to wreak havoc on God’s good world. It was Satan who tempted Adam and Eve to sin, and from then on he has sought only “to steal and kill and destroy” (John 10:10); he “prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.”

But Jesus came to rescue humanity from demonic oppression, as John affirms in his first epistle: “The Son of God was revealed for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8b). While Jesus’ betrayal, arrest, and crucifixion were the result of a Satanic plot, they were ultimately the means Christ used to render Satan powerless. Through Christ’s death, we are cleansed of our sin, which away Satan’s chief weapons against us: His accusations of guilt. In this way, Colossians 2:15 tells us that through the cross, Jesus “disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it.”

So tonight, as we recount the events of Maundy Thursday, may they point us to the cross of Christ. As our priests wash our feet, may you remember that Christ humbled Himself to the point of death, even death on a cross. As we come to the table, may we remember Christ’s body was broken for us and His blood was shed for us that we might be cleansed of our sins. As we see the altar stripped and meditate on our Lord being betrayed into the hands of sinners, may we remember that He willingly endured the devil’s schemes “to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8b). Tonight, may we behold the love of Christ, the humility of Christ, and the victory of Christ.

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

Sermon delivered on Palm Sunday C, April 10 , 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 50.4-9a; Psalm 31.9-16; Philippians 2.5-11; St. Luke 22.14-23.56.

Today is the Sunday of the Passion, better known as Palm Sunday. For those of you who love to come to church to worship (and who doesn’t?), this is your day because you get two services for the price of one, and all under two hours. For newcomers to the Christian faith—and even for mature Christians like many of you are—today’s liturgy comes as a shock because we start out on a celebratory note with the Liturgy of the Palms where we commemorate our Lord’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem as Israel’s Messiah with all its anticipation and hope, but we end with his Passion and Death. Hope and the utter death of hope, all within a breathtakingly short span of less than a week. Can you relate? What are we to make of this? This is what I want us to look at this morning. 

The story of Christ’s Passion is straightforward enough and because it is the word of God, I trust its power to speak to you in ways God intends without further exposition from me. Neither do I want to spend much time looking at why the crowds turned on Christ that week. Instead I want us to look at what St. Luke wants us to focus on as we reflect on his Passion narrative. Clearly, St. Luke, with the rest of the evangelists, sees Christ’s Passion and Death as the turning point in history. As we saw last year on Passion Sunday, like the other evangelists, St. Luke is also a sophisticated writer and we see it clearly in his Passion narrative. Where is that, you ask? I’m glad you did so I can proceed with my sermon! Inexplicably the RCL geniuses again omit a key passage from his Palm narrative that we read during the Liturgy of the Palms. St. Luke tells us that after all the acclamation from the crowds, as Christ neared Jerusalem he broke down and wept over her fate. She had failed to recognize that God had visited his people to heal and restore them, not from the hated Romans but from their slavery to the power of Sin and Death. Instead of coming to God’s people as a conquering hero as the crowds expected, the Son of God came to them riding humbly on a donkey and advocating a radical new obedience to God through self-giving love. This explains in part why the crowds turned so viciously on Christ. Whenever deeply-held expectations are violated, we humans tend to react violently and Christ clearly violated their expectations. Here was the Son of God, God-become-human, coming to his stubborn and rebellious people in humility and weakness, at least as the world defines weakness, ready to die for his stubborn and rebellious people so that they could be reconciled to God their Father and made whole again. St. Paul tells us essentially the same thing in his letter to the Romans when he writes that at just the right time, Christ came to die for us sinners to rescue us from God’s just condemnation for our sins, not because God is an angry tyrant, eager to punish us at every turn, but to deal with the problem of Sin and the alienation and death it causes. If God cannot tolerate any form of evil, how can we sinners ever hope to live with him forever? And so God came to us to die for us while we were still his enemies so that we could be reconciled to him forever (Rm 5.6-10). Until Sin’s power was broken, until our sins have been dealt with adequately, we had no hope for living in this mortal life, let alone enjoying eternal life in God’s new world. Here we see St. Luke tell us the same thing in story rather than exposition. Here is God, coming to his people to set them free, and they failed to recognize his coming. We can almost hear him ask, Reader, what in your life prevents you from recognizing God’s visitation to you and yours? This is more than an interesting question. It is a life-or-death question we all must answer and why we know St. Luke saw Christ’s saving Death as the turning point in history. Before his visitation, we were dead people walking and without hope because of our slavery to Sin’s power. But now we are set free from its power over us if only we have the eyes to see God’s coming to us in Christ, i.e., if only we have the eyes of faith to see God in our crucified and risen Savior and Lord. 

St. Luke reinforces this notion of Christ’s Death as the turning point in history in his story of Christ’s arrest. In dark Gethsemane, Christ rebukes his disciples as they prepare to fight to prevent his arrest. He also rebukes his captors for coming for him as they would a common criminal. Why did he do this? Because this was the dark powers’ hour, along with their human minions. Christ had to submit to their evil and perversity in order to break their death-dealing grip on us. Here St. Luke is reminding us that there is more going on than meets our human senses; there is more at stake than the forgiveness of our sins and reconciling us to God our Father, massively important as that is. St. Luke is reminding us that Christ is engaged in a cosmic battle to defeat the invisible forces of Evil that were unleashed when our first human ancestors sinned in the garden. Why God allows evil forces to exert control over us is beyond our knowing and we should leave those questions alone. Instead, in telling the Passion narrative, St. Luke is inviting us to peer into the darkness as best we can with God’s help and see our rescue being accomplished by none other than God himself. Until the powers of Evil are defeated, we have no hope of ever being freed from our slavery to their control. The cross, St. Luke is telling us, is how God set us free from from Evil, Sin, and Death, how God is dealing with all the evil in our lives and his world, how God has changed the course of history. This knowledge is also vitally important to us because when we do not have this knowledge or believe it to be real and true, the dark powers conspire with our hard hearts to prevent us from seeing God’s visitation in the person of Christ; and without recognizing that visitation and giving our lives to Christ, we are without hope and as good as dead. Our freedom from the powers of Evil, Sin, and Death is the result of Christ’s Passion, my beloved, along with being reconciled with God our Father, the only Source of life, and this is why we must focus on the events of this coming Holy Week, reflecting on Christ’s great love for us and our response to that great love.

Many of don’t want to do this, however. The cross is still scandalous to us, an affront to our pride and desire to be our own boss. We don’t want to believe we are helpless to fix our sin-sickness. Others of us don’t want to have to do the hard work of finding our primary identity in Christ necessary to follow him, a process that involves putting to death our evil desires and old ways of thinking, and by following the way of the cross with its call to deny self and follow him in self-giving love so that we can rise with Christ and live with him forever in God’s new world. This, BTW, is how we should talk to those who struggle with their identities and seek to find themselves in death-dealing ways. None of these false ideologies will do because only in Christ do we find health, healing, and life. But we can’t help others find their identity in Christ if we haven’t learned it first for ourselves. Holy Week is a perfect time to start or continue in this process and if your schedule permits it, I exhort you to make Christ’s Death your own this week by attending the full slate of services we offer.

Start by reading and meditating on the Passion narratives on your own this week and then come with our Lord to the Upper Room Thursday night where he will give his disciples a meal as the means to help them understand what his impending passion and death is all about. Watch with him in the garden as he struggles and shrinks from the gigantic task of allowing the powers of Evil to do their worst to him, and the prospect of having to bear the judgment of God for the sins of the entire world, your sins and mine. Our own personal sins can be a terrible burden to us. Try to imagine having to bear the sins of the entire world and looking into the face of the Devil while you do! With that in mind, come and venerate the cross on Good Friday as you ponder and contemplate the presence of God among us in the death of his Son for your sake and the sake of the world. Such contemplation demands silence, desolation, humility, and honest confession that your sins and mine are also responsible for the godforsaken death of our Lord. Was there ever any suffering like our Lord’s (and if you answer yes to this question, there’s a good chance you don’t really understand the magnitude of what happened on Good Friday!)? Grieve with his first followers as they laid his crucified and dead body in the tomb with no expectation of Easter Sunday. Holy Saturday is the time to do just that, culminating with the Easter Vigil and the reading of the story of God’s salvation on Saturday evening and the renewal of our baptismal vows where we are reminded that we are yoked to Christ in his dying and rising and will therefore share in his suffering and glory. It simply won’t do to observe any of this from afar. It’s as unedifying as listening to one of Father Sang’s or Father Wylie’s sermons. Everything has changed because of Christ crucified and raised from the dead. That’s why we call it the Good News of Jesus Christ! We are no longer dead people walking, but rather Christ’s own forever, sealed with his precious blood and confirmed every time we come to the Table to feed on his body and blood. No, if you really love your Lord and have even an inkling as to what great love has effected your salvation and changed the course of history forever, how can you possibly stay away from our Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Vigil services? You will rob Easter Sunday of its great power and joy if you fail to participate in these saving events. And on an even more somber note, if you are unwilling to give Christ your all as you are able, especially this week, you are likely living a lie and a delusion regarding your relationship with Christ and you probably need to take it up with him in prayer. So let none of us be too hasty to celebrate the Pascha next Sunday without first pondering and agonizing and reflecting on the great and astonishing love of God that flows from God’s very heart, a heart that was pierced by a Roman soldier’s spear, a heart through which a saving love was poured out for you and your salvation. To be sure, this isn’t a pretty or fun thing to do or contemplate. But if you commit yourself to walking with Christ this Holy Week it will change you in ways you cannot imagine or envision, and for the good. It will help you recognize God’s visitation to you in Christ and it will change you because it is the Good News of our salvation. May we all observe a blessed Holy Week together as the family of God’s people in Christ here at St. Augustine’s. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever.

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

Sermon delivered on Lent 5C, Sunday, April 3, 2022 at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH. Passiontide begins today.

If you prefer to listen to the audio podcast of today’s sermon, click here.

Lectionary texts: Isaiah 43.16-21; Psalm 126; Philippians 3.4b-14; St. John 12.1-8.

What does it mean for God to “do a new thing”? 

In the days of Isaiah 43, the people were very discouraged and feeling quite unsure about God’s power as they saw the strength of the threatening super- power (nation) that was overwhelming them. Through Isaiah, God spoke a tremendous promise to the people, first reminding them of another time when a brand-new deed of God had been needed.
“Remember that I am the God who drowned Pharaoh’s army after making it possible for my people to walk with dry feet across the parted sea out of slavery. I did something new and marvelous then; I can do something new and marvelous now.”

The prophet Isaiah urges the people to forget the former things and behold the new ways that God is changing and renewing their lives for a greater good. But in order for them to see the new things that God is doing, they must open their eyes and see God. 

As human beings there are so many memories and experiences thwarting our movement into a fresh encounter with God. The windows of our hearts and souls are clouded with memories of the pain, hurt, and betrayal we have experienced over the years. But God wants to change all of that. God says, “Behold, I am doing a new thing. Will you not perceive it? Will you not know it? It springs up right before your very eyes. It is right before you. Can you not see it?” What new thing is God then doing in our lives?

As Christians, we point also to another deliverance, God’s deliverance of humanity from no hope to every hope through the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. God brought forth a new deed by doing something no “proper” god would have done: God became vulnerable to us by exposing to us his great love for us. It was a new thing, unheard of, inconceivable. And it had as its purpose one intent: to show us how to enter personally into new, joyful, freed-up life and relationship with God.

In today’s Gospel lesson, we saw a woman, in John’s version Mary the sister of Lazarus, who anointed Jesus’ feet. She would not have been a prostitute, unlike the woman in the story from the gospel of Luke (Luke 7:36-50), for she was Lazarus’ sister, also the sister of Martha. Martha served Jesus dinner. Let’s put the occasion into context. Jesus had just raised their brother, Lazarus, from the dead. This was an action which caused the Sanhedrin, the ruling body of the Jews, to decide that Jesus must die. “From that day on, they took counsel to put Jesus to death.” (John 11:53) Later, in the same chapter as today’s lesson, Jesus will announce that the hour of his death has come (12:20-36).

Facing death, Jesus, and apparently his close disciple Judas, who would soon betray him, ate at the home of Mary, Martha and Lazarus. Even as they ate, something new was happening, for Mary took a huge step outside of the social convention of her day.

While Martha did her usual part in the kitchen, Mary, never the practical one, anointed Jesus’ feet by letting down her hair and pouring some very high-priced ointment all over them.

According to tradition, nobody anointed feet in those days. “If one had expensive, perfumed oil, other parts of the body were anointed, but not the feet. Feet were not customarily anointed until after death, when a body was being prepared for burial.” This means that Mary was treating Jesus, who had just given life to dead Lazarus, as though he were already dead. And it is suggested that in her action, Mary could not have known that her act of extravagance prepared Jesus for the greatest act of extravagance of all – the Cross.

Judas was appalled at what happened between Mary and Jesus. He was offended by her extravagance, stating that the money she had spent on the oil should have been used in a more appropriate way, to feed the poor. The entire story for today, however, would tell us that God was doing something beyond what WE or any other religious group might define as “appropriate.” doing something New, God was being extravagant as Jesus headed toward Jerusalem to give up his own life so that others could and can live.

The religious folks of Jesus’ day couldn’t see the NEW things God was doing through Jesus, but a woman who seemed not only impractical but without propriety WAS able to see and embrace God’s new ways. Judas, a man who had walked closely with Jesus during his ministry, couldn’t accept what God was doing when it didn’t fit within his definition of what God should do. In John’s Gospel, those who should have seen never do, and the unexpected ones catch on just fine. The final irony in this story: Just as Judas sanctimoniously criticized Mary’s extravagance, he himself ended up being the catalyst for the largest extravagance ever, the pouring out of Jesus’ life. “Do not remember former things or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing…” (Is. 43:18-19)

Does anybody here this morning really think that God is doing something new today? Are we expecting it? Are we looking for it? Do we even want it?

In our Epistle lesson today, Paul outlines a lengthy list of his own accomplishments. He does this often in his letters to the early church, in part as a common way of giving credibility to what he was going to say in line with the rhetorical patterns of the day, and also because he often was up against others who claimed to be the religious authorities on this newly emerging Christianity (see the “Super apostles” in 2 Corinthians). At the beginning of our passage, Paul again lists his resume, and it’s a good one. He talks about his background and heritage, his education, his passion and religious convictions, and his righteous lifestyle. This is the total package.

Paul writes about dismissal of his resume. Eugene Peterson’s The Message interprets verses 7 and 8 like this:

The very credentials these people are waving around as something special, I’m tearing up and throwing out with the trash – along with everything else I used to take credit for. And why? Because of Christ.

God is doing a new thing.

Paul is so compelled, so transformed by the good news of the gospel that he cannot help but leave all that he knew, all that he had worked for and gained, all that he was, behind. It’s important here to note that what he was leaving wasn’t bad. As Fred Craddock reminds us: Paul does not toss away junk to gain Christ; he tosses away that which was of tremendous value to him. Therein lies the extraordinary impact of his testimony and the high commendation of faith in Jesus Christ . . . What Paul is saying is that Christ surpasses everything of worth to me. And let’s the worth go.

God doing a new thing.

Often times in talking about letting go of things in faith, especially during this season of Lent, we talk about giving up the things that are weighing us down– our sins and shortcomings. But here, we are also reminded that sometimes developing our faith involves giving up those things that can be seen as good, but still get in the way of our best relationship with God. 

For Paul, that is what happens when he lets all the other things fall away and instead is simply focuses on knowing Jesus Christ. This knowledge of his Savior is what allows him to remember what truly matters, and more importantly, who matters.  He can only get there by letting go, and pushing forward into the future.

What is it that is getting on your way in having the best relationship with God that you are called to let go?

I hear the words of the prophet Isaiah echoing in the background:
            “Forget about what’s happened; don’t keep going over old history.
Be alert, be present. God is about to do something brand-new. Don’t you see it?

Let us pray:
Lord, you know how un-new we are inside, how worn out and worn down, how much we need to be changed by this Lenten season and Holy Week as they show us your heart and then Easter promises Christ’s hope and promise. Touch us now, make our hearts new, and show us how to truly share in Jesus’ Passion and Life. In the name of God, the Father the son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Sermon delivered on Lent 1C, Sunday, March 6, 2022 at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.

Father Wylie gets all whiny when we ask for a written manuscript. Nobody’s got time for a whiny priest, especially during Lent, so click here to listen to the audio podcast of his sermon.

Lectionary texts: Deuteronomy 26.1-11; Psalm 91.1-2, 9-16; Romans 10.8b-13; St. Luke 4.1-13.

Sermon delivered on Ash Wednesday, March 2, 2022 at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.

If you prefer to listen to the audio podcast of tonight’s sermon, usually somewhat different from the text below, click here.

Lectionary texts: Joel 2.1-2, 12-17; Psalm 51; 2 Corinthians 5.20b-6.10; John 8.1-11.

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

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the 40 day season we call Lent. It is a time for self-examination, penitence, self-denial, study, and preparation for Easter. Our Commination Service earlier today reminded us that something is terribly amiss in God’s world and our lives, that without the love, mercy, goodness, justice, and power of God, we remain hopelessly alienated from God and each other because we are all slaves to the power of Sin, that alien and malevolent force that is too strong for any of us to resist on our own power. And if we are not reconciled to God, we are undone forever in ways too terrible for us to imagine. Lent therefore is a time for us to focus not so much on ourselves but on the power of God manifested most clearly in the cross of our Lord Jesus. So tonight I want us to look at the dynamic of grace, forgiveness, and reconciliation that God the Father makes available to all through the work of God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, i.e., the surprising power of God at work. Until we understand this dynamic and what we are up against, we can never hope to observe a holy Lent (and beyond).

If we ever hope to be reconciled to God our Father so that we can live with him forever in the new creation, we must first acknowledge our utter helplessness to fix ourselves so that we are no longer alienated from God. This means that we must first have the wisdom and humility (gifts of God’s grace) to acknowledge the fact that we are all slaves to the power of Sin. Too often we speak of our sins and think of them as misdeeds or acts of wrongdoing, the root cause of our alienation to God. This diminishes the problem of Sin to an absurdly reductionist level. This thinking implies that we can get right with God by simply adjusting our behavior or changing our thinking on certain things or making better choices—the current darling of excuses for our feel-good culture. This is a fatal mistake on our part, however, because it implies that we can fix ourselves and our problems, that if we repent of our bad choices or thinking or behavior, our sin problem with God goes away. But the whole of Scripture makes very clear that there is something vastly more sinister going on. There is something desperately wrong in the world and our lives—the problem of Sin— and we know it in our bones, despite our best efforts to deny it. But left to our own devices, we don’t have the ability to defeat the power of Sin in our lives and we delude ourselves if we think otherwise. Don’t believe me? How about those sins you confess? I bet you never do them again after you confess them, do you? Or how about your resolution to do better in some areas of your life? How is that working out for you? If we are honest with ourselves, try as we may, we must acknowledge that our efforts matter very little when it comes to turning away from our sins. Why? Because we are up against a power that is far greater than us, a power that seeks our destruction and undoing as God’s image-bearers, a power that will ultimately lead to our permanent death. The sins that we focus on are not the root cause of our alienation from God. Rather, just as a fever is a symptom of a larger problem, not the problem itself, our sins reflect our slavery to the power of Sin, again defined as an outside and malevolent force that has enslaved us. We acknowledged this very starkly in our Commination Service this noon when we acknowledged that without the cross of Jesus Christ and his presence in our lives, we are condemned to utter and complete destruction forever. This should both humble us and scare the hell out of us—literally. Until we get our thinking straight on this, we will surely have and live out a half-hearted faith (at best) because we live under the delusion that we can fix ourselves so that we are pleasing to God and set ourselves up for a self-righteousness complex. When we think like this, we inevitably dismiss the cross of Jesus Christ and the life-saving gift God the Father offers us all in and through his Son. But when we understand that Sin is a power we cannot overcome on our own and there is nothing we can do or say that will change our status before God, we are ready to hear the Good News of Jesus Christ, crucified and raised from the dead.

This calls for us to be sober in our thinking about the power of Sin and see it as God sees it—a force that corrupts and destroys God’s precious image-bearers and good creation. This is why God hates Sin and why we can expect to receive God’s wrath on our sins. God is first and foremost a God of love and if that is true, God must also be a God of justice. God cannot and will not ultimately allow anything or anyone in his creation to continue corrupting it and us. God loves us too much to allow us to be permanent victims of injustice and all the evil that flows from Sin’s power. Since we are powerless to break Sin’s grip on us, and since God is the only person who can free us from our slavery to it, God must intervene to destroy Sin and set things right, the very essence of justice. Otherwise, we would be doomed to be forever in Sin’s grip, catastrophically and permanently separated from God’s eternal love for us and excluded from God’s great heavenly banquet he has prepared for us so that we can enjoy him forever. It means that we would forever be trapped in our worst selves and that violence, greed, selfishness, cruelty, rapacity, suffering, hurt, brokenness, and alienation would continue to rule unchecked in our lives and God’s world. If God really is love, God cannot let this state of affairs go on forever. To be sure, punishment is involved in this making-right process, but the overall thrust of God’s justice is restorative and healing because the heart of God is merciful, kind, generous, and loving. God does not create us to destroy us. What parent looks at his/her newborn baby for the first time with the intent of destroying it? The notion is absurd. If we fallen humans don’t think like this, why would God? Makes no sense!! God created us so that we can enjoy him and rule his world faithfully and wisely on his behalf. 

This knowledge will also help us think clearly about the dynamic of grace, repentance, and forgiveness. As we have seen, because we are helpless to free ourselves from our slavery to the power of Sin, our repentance is not enough to reconcile us to God because we will continue to sin even with repentance. Repent or not, unless our slavery to Sin is broken, we are doomed to continue living in its power. We see this clearly in our OT and gospel lessons tonight. The prophet calls God’s people together to collectively repent of their sin of idolatry, the worship of false gods that inevitably leads to all kinds of sins that will provoke God’s anger and wrath (idolatry is a primary sin because sooner or later we become what we worship). If God’s people turned away from (or repented of) worshiping false gods and turned to the one true God, then there was hope that God might not execute his wrath on his sinful people. Here we are reminded that we dare not presume God’s mercy on us, that God is free to show us wrath or mercy quite independently of what we resolve to do (or not do). In other words, God’s mercy is not contingent on repentance. The prophet believes God will be merciful because God had revealed his character to his people: God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. If God relents on punishing his people for their idolatry, it will be because of who God is, not because God’s people have repented. 

Likewise in our gospel lesson. Notice that our Lord forgave the adulterous woman before calling her to repentance (go and sin no more). In this case God the Son showed mercy before the woman changed her behavior, reflecting the heart and character of his Father. This is God’s grace at work to achieve forgiveness and reconciliation between God and humans. Grace—God’s undeserved blessing, goodness, bounty, mercy, and forgiveness on us—precedes our awareness of sin, not vice-versa. This is because God’s character is eternal, preceding our slavery to Sin. In fact, without God tugging at our heart and mind, we would be unaware that we are alienated from God and stand under God’s just condemnation of our sin. Why? Because as we saw in our preaching series on Christ’s Death and Resurrection, sin is a theological concept. People whose lives are devoid of God have no awareness that their behavior is offensive to God and that they are slaves to Sin’s power. We see it all the time from the Twitter mob and in the extreme rhetoric of self-righteousness that accompanies the sense of warped justice that invariably accompanies human thinking and behavior without the intervention of God. Simply put, if the Holy Spirit is at work in us he will make us aware of our awful unmediated state before God and our own sinfulness, our awareness of his Presence notwithstanding. But here’s the thing. The moment we become aware of our sin captivity, we are already standing in God’s grace, ready to receive God’s healing love, mercy, and forgiveness because of God’s eternal nature! We see this dynamic expressed beautifully in the old favorite hymn, Amazing Grace. John Newton, who wrote the hymn, was a slave trader whose eyes were opened to the wickedness of his sin by God’s grace. He was a wretch who was saved, a man lost but now found, by the grace of God that preceded his evil deeds, a grace that called him to repentance. God’s grace always precedes our repentance because God and God’s character always precede us. God makes us aware of our slavery to Sin and the chasm it creates so that we will turn to him and let him heal and rescue us from our slavery.

And how did/does God do this? In and through the cross of Jesus Christ as St. Paul reminds us in our epistle lesson. As we saw three weeks ago, here is the essence of the Good News of Jesus Christ. God became human to bear his own just punishment on our sin and wickedness so as to spare us from bearing his wrath and eternal condemnation that would lead to our destruction. In the process the power of Sin is broken in us, only partially in this life but fully in the next. How all this works with all of its mysteries, enigmas, ambiguities and the continuing messiness of the human condition, we aren’t told, only that it does. Our knowledge of the power of Sin and our slavery to it makes us realize that we don’t deserve this kindness and mercy. None of us do. But it is ours for the taking if we have the gifts of humility and wisdom to accept God’s invitation to believe it to be true, despite the fact that we cannot fully explain how God accomplished this all in the cross of Christ. But because we believe that Scripture is the word of God, we believe the promise to be true. God’s undeserved mercy, grace, love, and forgiveness lead us to a sense of profound and deep relief and gratitude because we realize we are no longer under God’s just condemnation and there is not a thing we did to deserve it.In other words, deep and sincere repentance, the kind that really matters in helping us learn and prepare to live as truly human beings in God’s promised new world—a world we can only hope to inhabit because of the cross of Jesus Christ—comes in response to our knowledge of God’s grace, not before. This is power of God at work, reconciling us to himself in Christ. Nobody likes to be confronted with their sin and their abject standing before God without God’s intervention in and through Christ. But we cannot hope to be reconciled to God without it.

We see this whole process vividly illustrated in our gospel lesson and we should take our cue from it. Imagine you are the woman who was dragged before Christ. You know your sin because you know God’s law; God has made himself known to you through it. And so you expect the worst, a death sentence for your sin of adultery. You are braced to feel the stones strike your body, slowly and painfully killing you (not unlike our sin does to us over the course of time). And then comes a remarkable surprise. Jesus pronounces you not guilty, despite that fact the he and you both know you are guilty of an awful sin. You have experienced God’s mercy and forgiveness, not because of who you are, but because of who God is. How would you feel? Stunned? Relieved? Profoundly grateful? All of the above and more, no doubt! He tells you to go and sin no more (he calls you to repent of your adultery), but his forgiveness is not contingent on that. Certainly the vast majority of us would be grateful for this reprieve and our gratitude would likely serve as ongoing motivation for leaving the adulterous life. She, like us, would certainly have to recall her sin and the great gift of forgiveness because life, well, gets in our way and distracts us so that we forget. That’s why we recall our sins and God’s mercy shown to us in Christ, not to make us feel bad (although that is really unavoidable on occasion), but to make us remember the love, mercy, grace, and faithfulness of God applied to our wickedness. When the woman remembered Christ’s intervention on her behalf, was she grateful? Did her gratitude help motivate her to repentance? We aren’t told, but our own experience suggests that it can and does, and this is what God desires from us. One more thing before we close. In this story, Christ does not tell us to suspend moral judgment when he challenged those who brought the woman to him. Instead, he was exposing their hypocrisy and evil intent to trap him. In doing so, he was able to show mercy to the woman caught in adultery, calling her to repentance and giving her the motivation we all need to live our lives in imitation of our Lord and Savior, the essence of repentance and faithful living. 

This is what it means to observe a holy Lent and beyond, my beloved. We are called to reflect on the fruit of the dynamic of repentance and forgiveness in our lives—the power of God at work in us. We are called to understand that to be reconciled to God means trusting in the power, mercy, love, and character of God revealed supremely in Jesus Christ and not our own perceived (and often delusional) abilities to make ourselves right with God. It means we see clearly the truth about the human condition and our standing before God without the intervention of Christ. We needn’t fear the truth because the truth always sets us free to love and serve the Lord, thanking him for his love and kindness and justice, and asking his mercy and forgiveness when we miss the mark as we attempt to imitate him in the power of the Spirit as we live out our lives together. May we all observe a holy Lent and sing God’s praises with grateful hearts forever and ever. 

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

Sermon delivered on Transfiguration Sunday C, February 27, 2022 at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.

Father Sang gets all whiny when we ask for a written manuscript—mainly because he doesn’t have one—but we digress. Nobody’s got time for a whiny priest so click here to listen to the audio podcast of his fine sermon.

Lectionary texts: Exodus 34.29-35; Psalm 99; 2 Corinthians 3.12-4.2; St. Luke 9.28b-43.

Sermon delivered on the Feast of Candlemas (transferred), Sunday, January 30, 2022 at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.

Father Wylie gets all whiny in a PhD kinda way when we ask for a written manuscript. Nobody’s got time for a whiny priest with a PhD so click here to listen to the audio podcast of his sermon.

Lectionary texts: Malachi 3.1-5; Psalm 24; Hebrews 2.14-18; St. Luke 2.22-40.

Sermon delivered on Epiphany 3C, Sunday, January 23, 2022 at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.

Father Sang gets all whiny when we ask for a written manuscript. Nobody’s got time for a whiny priest, especially in the new year, so click here to listen to the audio podcast of his sermon.

Lectionary texts: Nehemiah 8.1-3, 5-6, 8-10; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 12.12-31a; St. Luke 4.14-21.